Introduction to Mothers, Infants, and Young Children of September 11, 2001: A Primary Prevention Project

Abstract

The Project for Mothers, Infants, and Young Children of September 11, 2001, is described in this issue. This group of articles represents 10 years of involvement of a group of eight core therapists, working originally with approximately 40 families who suffered the loss of husbands and fathers on September 11, 2001. We focused our efforts on the families of women who were pregnant and widowed in the disaster, or of women who were widowed with an infant born in the previous year. These therapists are Beatrice Beebe, Phyllis Cohen, Anni Bergman, Sally Moskowitz, K. Mark Sossin, Rita Reiswig, Suzi Tortora, and Donna Demetri Friedman. This highly trained group of therapists specializes in adult, child, mother-infant, and family treatment, as well as in nonverbal communication. Two of Dr. Beebe's former students, Dr. Sara Markese and Adrianne Lange, were intimately involved in running the Project and contributed two key articles. We also invited Dr. Andrea Remez to co-author and Dr. Susan Coates to discuss one of the mother-child treatments, and we invited Dr. Marsha Kaitz of Hebrew University, Israel to discuss the project. The demands of the crisis led us to expand our psychoanalytic training, fostering new approaches to meeting the needs of these families. We sought out these families, offering support groups for mothers and their infants and young children in the mothers' own neighborhoods, and bringing the families to mother-child filming sessions at Columbia University, New York State Psychiatric Institute, courtesy of Dr. Joseph Jaffe. In 2011, marking the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy, our Project continues to provide free services for these mothers who lost their husbands, for their infants who are now approximately 10 years old, and for the siblings of these children.