Early Parenting and Prevention of Disorder

Robert Newcomb Emde, MD, is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, University of Colorado School of Medicine, and currently consults at the Centers for American Indian and Native Alaskan Health at the Colorado School of Public Health. As an early childhood researcher and psychoanalyst, he was a member of the US committee that wrote the guidelines for Early Head Start and was a leader in its seventeen-site national RCT that initiated that program. He is a Past President of the Society for Research in Child Development, and serves as Honorary President of the World Association for Infant Mental Health, as well as on the Board of Directors of Zero To Three: The National Center for Infants, Toddlers and Families. Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber is a training analyst in the German Psychoanalytical Association, former Chair of the Research Subcommittees for Conceptual Research, and a member of the Swiss Psychoanalytical Society. She is Vice Chair of the Research Board of the International Psychoanalytical Association, Full Professor for Psychoanalysis at the University of Kassel, and head Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute, Frankfurt/Main. Her main research fields include epistemology and methods of clinical and empirical research in psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary discourse with embodied cognitive science, educational sciences, and modern German literature.

'Few books could be more central to this series than an up-to-date review of psychoanalytically informed developmental research and intervention studies in early development, both systematic and clinical. The editors were lucky in being able to bring together some of the most committed and respected contributors to this important field. The particular perspective from which this volume emerges takes parenting as its central theme. It is an intriguing facet of modern biology that the clearer we become about the importance of genetic influences on development, the more we are forced to recognise the central role that the early years - particularly early years scaffolded by a caregiver - play in the creation of the human mind.Early Parenting Research and the Prevention of Disorder will become a classic of prevention science. It is a science with great promise, which has yet to deliver the kind of results that we know it has the potential to. Psychoanalytic understanding of infancy and early childhood has led the way to creating understanding of the human brain as necessarily developing in the context of important social relationships. These relationships - the ones between the child and the parent, as well as the ones between children - provide the material for the emergence of the human mind, which the brain has the potential to create. It is obvious, then, that influencing these relationships can serve either to optimise the achievement of this potential, or to undermine it in critical ways, leading to suboptimal outcomes. It is the aim of this book to orient us towards how we can work more effectively to minimise risk and maximise wellbeing, and the book succeeds wonderfully in achieving its aim.'- Peter Fonagy, from the Foreword

• Preface -- Foreword and Acknowledgements -- Perspectives -- The prevention sciences of early development and challenging opportunities for psychoanalysis -- “Out-reaching psychoanalysis”: a contribution to early prevention for “children-at-risk”? -- Minds shaped through relationships: the emerging neurobiology of parenting -- Early Prevention Programmes -- Fraiberg in Paris—early prevention through a mental health programme for vulnerable families: preliminary findings and what we have learned in conducting the French CAPEDP study -- Understanding how traumatised mothers process their toddlers’ affective communication under stress: towards preventive intervention for families at high risk for intergenerational violence -- The triadic perspective for parenting and early child development: from research to prevention and therapy -- Transition to parenthood: studies of intersubjectivity in mothers and fathers -- The First Steps: a culture-sensitive preventive developmental guidance for immigrant parents and infants -- The evolution of an early parenting education programme, its follow-up, and its implications -- German perspectives on Henri Parens’ pioneering work in Philadelphia: the development of attachment-based parenting programmes -- Interdisciplinary Research in Frankfurt -- Individual Development and Adaptive Education of Children at Risk: objectives and agenda of a transdisciplinary research centre -- History and concept development of psychoanalytically based prevention projects in preschool institutions of the city of Frankfurt: conducted by the Sigmund-Freud-Institut and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy -- Early prevention in day-care centres with children at risk—the EVA research project -- First Steps: an integration project for infants with an immigrant background—conceptualisation and first impressions -- Cognitive stimulation and parental sensitivity in toddlers’ homes: how do children and parents interact and how effective are trainings for parents? -- Just wait and don’t upset yourself: when children are exposed to poverty in their daily lives -- Clinical Applications -- Through symptoms to subjects: the family physician and the psychologist together in primary care -- From nameless dread to bearable fear: the psychoanalytic treatment of a twenty-two-month-old child -- A preventive attachment intervention with adolescent mothers: elaboration of the intervention