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Journeys in parent-infant psychotherapy: musical explorations

This paper proposes that parent-infant psychotherapy is intrinsically musical in structure and process. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, developmental psychology and clinical work in an NHS parent infant mental health service, it explores how musical elements and form are used as a medium through which parent infant dyads negotiate presence, absence, continuity and separation. The paper illustrates how disruptions in this early musical encounter can reveal a parents’ own unresolved infantile experiences may which need addressing in the process of supporting a parent to be more available for intimate contact with their infant. The paper argues that musicality is central to psychoanalytic work with parents and babies as a means of enabling contact with and processing of pre-verbal states in the parent as well as the infant.

Speaker

Sarah Fielding is an amateur musician, child and adolescent psychotherapist and parent-infant psychotherapist based in North West England. She works in the NHS and in private practice.

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