Treating Vulnerable Mothers, Infants and Young Children Living in Poverty: Co-Creating a Psychoanalytic Playground in Various Alternative Settings

Abstract

ABSTRACT The families referred to the Anni Bergman Parent Infant Program (ABPIP) Home-Visiting Project often face multiple, overwhelming stressors embedded within the market-oriented system of poverty and exploitation. These stressors compromise the quality of parental care, which in turn negatively impacts the infant’s well-being. These financially vulnerable families are usually in an urgent crisis that needs immediate attention. The author describes the innovative model of this outreach program based on psychoanalytic infant observation that encourages interventions on multiple levels simultaneously. Another unique aspect of the program is its reshaping of the analytic frame. Considering the ever-changing nature of the physical settings, the analyst’s internal setting becomes a vital, anchoring, and facilitating factor of therapeutic change. Through two detailed case examples, the author shows how these outreach analysts place themselves in between external and internal realities, recognizing the interdependent nature of both, while also maintaining a psychoanalytic attitude and frame that is primarily situated within the analyst. The author also reflects on her own precarious status as an international, temporary visa holder in the US and the ways this external reality entered into the playground of therapy that allowed the author to understand and help a child in a deeper, more personal way based on the dyad’s shared preoccupation with the notion of home.