Parenthood and parental functions as a result of the experience of parallel psychotherapy with children and parents

Abstract

The concept of parenthood as defined in classical theory and later theorizations is discussed. Parenthood is defined as a transformative process, activated by the idea of having a child and by interaction with the child, through which a constellation of affective and psychic capacities is developed, promoting growth and psychic change and evolving over time. Parental functions, rather than being learnable skills, are considered as mind functions linked to character traits that cannot be split from the personality as a whole and are, as such, susceptible to improvement through psychotherapeutic work. The author illustrates this with a model of psychotherapies and parallel analyses of parents and children tested and elaborated in public and private practice, showing its therapeutic and cognitive advantages. The central thesis of the paper is that whatever the approach and working method with the parents, the therapeutic space offered encourages certain processes that are vital for the structuring of the self and the psychic growth of the child: creation of a space for the representation and emotional investment of the child; improvement in the parental functions; and identification with the therapist as a new or reactivated developmental object. Two clinical cases illustrate the parallel evolution of therapeutic relationships and of the parent‐child relationship.

Keywords:

• parental functions
• parent–child relationship
• parallel psychotherapy
• pathological collusion
• symbolization
• supervision

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank D. Cataldi and M. Ricci for sharing with me their therapeutic experiences.

Notes

Furhnam E. Parenthood as a developmental phase. Paper presented at the first scientific meeting of the Association for Child Psychoanalysis, Topeka, KS (Spring), 1966.

Novick J, Kelly Novick K. Parent work in analysis: children, adolescents and adults, part one: the evaluation phase. Paper presented at the Fall Meeting of the A.P.A, New York, 1998.

Palacio Espasa F. La place de la conflictualité depressive dans le psychotherapies psychanalytiques d'enfants et d'adolescents. Paper presented at the Third European Conference on Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy, Rome, October 1999.

This controversy is fuelled by the need of most child analysts to show that they are carrying out psychoanalysis and not “ a watered‐down version of therapy” (Novick & Kelly Novick, 2002, personal communication).

 In 1995, during an APA meeting on “working with parents”, the following comments were expressed on this topic (Novick & Novick): it interferes with transference and the course of the analytic process; it precipitates countertransference reactions that could compromise the analyst's ability to be analytically neutral and remain focused on the child's internal life; it presses the analyst to be an arbitrator of family disputes, a lawyer of parental desires, a spokekesperson of parental requests, and in some cases the parents’ therapist instead of the child's; frequent contact with the parents makes it difficult to maintain confidentiality, and so the child is deprived of a safe arena, a neutral territory that permits the analytic process to emerge.

 These are the criticisms I faced in 1988 when I presented at the Centro Romano di Psicoanalisi a first paper on collusive aspects of the mother‐child relationship in narcissistic personality disorders, presenting the case of a mother and son who underwent parallel therapy, and again in 1991, when I presented another work on a research project carried out through the parallel analysis of mothers and their children in three cases of infantile psychosis.

As regards my professional training, the shift in interest from the disturbed child to the disturbed parent and the extension of the study from the intrapsychic world of the child and the mother to the mother‐child relationship preceded my own in‐depth study of psychoanalytic theories that value the relational aspect of the psychoanalytic experience and the importance of the real traits of the analyst and his/her involvement in the analytic relationship. The increasing attention dedicated to the patient's observations and communications on the analyst and to the distortions that the latter can, consciously or unconsciously, introduce, with traumatic effects on the relationship, seems to me to be in line with my research on the reciprocal influence of the psychic life of the parent and child.