Getting in touch. Helping parents and new-born babies to connect in the NICU

ABSTRACT

About 15 million premature babies are born every year; more than a million preterm babies die, while among those who survive many may have disabilities. The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) becomes a meeting place between life and death. The preterm birth brings with it painful experiences which arouse feelings of guilt, fear of death and the need to mourn the idealised baby. The risk of serious consequences on the mother-child and father-child relationship and on the new-born's psychological and emotional development is a real danger which requires interventions. This paper uses illustrations from work with premature babies and their parents, to describe their dramatic experiences in NICU and the support work offered them, following a psychoanalytic observational model. In this model, active listening to the parents' experiences, as well as observing their baby with them, enables the workers to help the parents who have become parents much earlier than anticipated or wished-for. The workers listen, take in what they see and hear and hope slowly to transform the painful experiences of parents and baby. The work often begins with workers sand parents sharing observation of the new-born. The workers have all observed babies following the teaching of Esther Bick.

KEYWORDS:

• Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
• infant observation
• Esther Bick
• parents of pre-term babies
• impact of COVID pandemic on the NICU

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the parents in the NICUs and the supervisors who worked with the group of observers to discuss and share the experience of observation and work with parents and their premature new-borns.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aurora Scabia

Aurora Scabia is a Clinical Psychologist in her fourth year of training at the Centro Studi Martha Harris, Florence. She also works as a research fellow at the University of Pisa and IRCCS Stella Maris Hospital, doing clinical work and supervised research in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of Santa Chiara Hospital in Pisa.

Lisa Dioli

Lisa Dioli is a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist trained at the Centro Studi Martha Harris in Bologna. From November 2021 to 2022, Lisa Dioli worked as a project fellow at the Santa Maria alle Scotte Hospital in Siena.

Eleonora Testa

Eleonora Testa is a Clinical Psychologist and Child Psychotherapist in her fourth year of training at the Centro Studi Martha Harris in Florence. She works in private practice and has an internship at the Meyer Children's Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit in Florence.

Elena Coletti

Elena Coletti is a Clinical Psychologist and a Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist in training at the Centro Studi Martha Harris, In Florence. She has also worked as a volunteer Psychologist at the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit of the Santa Maria della Misericordia Hospital, Perugia, Italy