Working with fathers in psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface / Tessa Baradon -- A journey into fatherhood: the art of failing gracefully / Dickon Bevington -- The role of fathers in early child development / Kai von Klitzing -- "The door in the back of my head" : a father's failure to mourn the deaths of his parents / Angela Joyce -- Waking daddy up : restoring a father's place in a borderline personality disorder couple / Alejandra Perez -- When working therapeutically with a baby's father is not possible / Amanda Jones -- Paternal orientations and the art of being a father / Joan Raphael-Leff -- Working with the triad / Tessa Baradon -- The male therapist in parent-infant psychotherapy / Abel Fagin -- The therapist and the father in parent-infant psychotherapy / Yael Segal -- Working with couples as parents and parents as couples / Louise Emanuel -- Can the difficulties of carrying out the paternal function for a toddler be identified from the earliest months of a baby's life? / Marie-Christine Laznik -- Freud on fathers : who cares? / Björn Salomonsson -- Three themes about fathers in pip / Björn Salomonsson, Tessa Baradon and Kai von Klitzing -- And what about mothers? / Tessa Baradon -- References.

Working With Fathers in Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy interfaces theoretical ideas about fatherhood and their incorporation into the clinical practice of psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy. Often, when a family attends parent-infant psychotherapy, issues of the father are eclipsed by attention to the mother, who is usually the identified patient. Until now relatively neglected in the literature, this book attends to both the barriers to psychological work with the father, and to ways in which he can be engaged in a therapeutic process.

In this book, Tessa Baradon brings together some of the most eminent clinicians and academics in the field of parent-infant psychotherapy, in a layered collection of theoretical and clinical contributions. She and her co-discussants, Björn Salomonsson and Kai von Klitzing, conclude with an integration and critique of the themes presented, exploring the ideas of their fellow contributors and expanding on the central themes of the work.

Working With Fathers in Psychoanalytic Parent-Infant Psychotherapy will be of interest to mental health practitioners working with infants, who will learn that each individual and the family as a system can benefit from such an inclusive approach.