Location: online via Zoom
Time: 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm (CET)

Prof. Dr. Susanne Hommel (Professor of Psychoanalytic Intervention for Children, Adolescents, and Families, University of Applied Sciences Potsdam)

„There is no such thing as a baby without a mother…“  (D.W. Winnicott, 1960)
– The Importance of “Early Relationships” for Early Intervention

The British paediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott wrote in 1960: “There’s no such thing as a baby. There is a baby and someone.” He went on to explain: “Meaning, of course, that whenever one finds an infant, one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant.”

Today, attachment has become a key concept in virtually every parenting guide, and the prevention of disturbances in attachment development is a central focus of early interventions. Since the overdiagnosis of attachment disorders can have serious consequences for the assessment of a child’s welfare (Granqvist et al., 2017), the differential diagnostic assessment of the developing relationship between infants and their parents is all the more important. This importance has grown further in light of the current stressors affecting young families.

Building on an introduction to psychoanalytic theories of the early parent–infant relationship and its significance for the development of the self, this presentation explores the relevance of psychodynamically informed assessment in cases of disturbances in this early relationship during the first year of life. It draws on the Parent–Infant Relational Assessment Tool (PIRAT) Global Scales (Hommel, 2018, 2022), an observational assessment tool originally developed at the Anna Freud Centre in London and subsequently further developed and validated by the author.

Finally, the clinical significance of assessing relationships during the first year of life will be discussed in the context of preventing attachment disorders, with the aim of initiating interventions as early as possible (Barlow, Bennett, & Midgley, 2013; Sleed, 2013). One example of such an intervention is psychoanalytic parent–infant/parent–toddler psychotherapy (SKEPT).

The colloquium will be held in German.

Please request the Zoom link from pina(at)fh-potsdam.de