In the last few years, the therapeutic task has changed, following Winnicott’s and above all Bion’s ideas. An increasing number of analysts now consider it to be based on the assumption that human beings develop through intersubjectivity and the capacity to create new meaning from emotional experiences. This natural process becomes particularly difficult when the emotional experiences are fragmented and confused by early trauma.
Some babies have difficulties in their early years, some mothers cannot look after their babies, and some caregivers can only provide very practical care, rather than emotional containment. Babies may have been born in a war zone, or they may suffer from traumas caused by neglect, incest, siblings, disabilities or migration.
How can we recover hope, emotional attunement and a way of being together and growing through understanding and containment?
The development of a new relationship between the therapist, the child and the child’s family may produce a new kind of listening and emotional attunement in the analytic field. Psychotherapists try to strengthen a psychic structure that was previously weak, inoperative or missing. Transformations may happen through the co-construction of new tools for feeling and thinking.
Therapists try to find the way to reach their patient, staying neither too close to, nor too far from where they actually are. Transformation can take place when the condition of unison is created, and this happens in a natural rhythm, through encounters, failures and adjustments. Children – and all human beings – have the incredible ability and potential to continue growing in a society that cares for them.
