Parent-Infant Psychotherapy

Parent-infant psychotherapy, also called psychodynamic therapy with infants and parents (PTIP), aims to relieve emotional disturbances within a parent, an infant, or their interaction, for example postnatal depression and anxiety, infant distress with breastfeeding and sleep, and attachment disorders. It rests on attachment theory and psychoanalysis; Sigmund Freud suggested his method could be modified for children, and child analysis was introduced in the 1920s by Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Hermine Hug-von Hellmuth, though Klein, who speculated on infantile experience to understand her patients' disorders, did not herself practice parent-infant psychotherapy. The pediatrician and analyst Donald Winnicott, who did not practice it either, focused instead on the mother-baby interplay in his own theorizing and his brief parent-child consultations.