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Psychosis, depression, personality and the mother-infant relationship

Psychosis, depression, personality and the mother-infant relationship

The quality of the mother infant relationship is of critical importance in perinatal psychiatry. We aim to ensure that the infant has a good attachment relationship with the mother, but this can be interfered with by the mother’s mental illness. Working in perinatal psychiatry allows one to see the mother and infant interaction across a broad range of psychiatric disorders. Our observations of what is going on, allow us to make some hypothesis about how a mother interacts with her baby.

Specific issues have been identified among women with schizophrenia; cognitive deficits in schizophrenia that compromise parenting capacity, deficits in social cognition, especially theory of mind that interfere with parenting and the positive and negative symptoms that have a profound impact on the mother-infant interaction. Depression has been considered to be a factor contributing to attachment difficulties in the infant. Two studies will be reported on that suggest personality style (Borderline Personality Disorder and Interpersonal sensitivity) may be of more relevance in attachment than depression.

Conference: Westmead
Areas of Interest / Categories: Westmead Meetings 2015

Westmead Meetings 2015

Ethics: Confidentiality, Privacy, and what constitutes a medical record

Finding Common Ground: a proposed clinical and research collaboration between clinical psychology and psychiatry in WSLHD

Behind closed doors: what is going on? Somatic Countertransference and the Conversational Model of Psychotherapy

This presentation draws upon Karen’s treatise in the Master of Science in Medicine (Psychotherapy) degree at the University of Sydney. The heart of this presentation is a clinical vignette involving a patient with borderline personality disorder who was treated by the Conversational Model of psychotherapy (CM) in the Westmead Psychotherapy Program for Complex Traumatic Disorders. An excerpt from a clinical transcript, and patient drawings, will be examined in light of the common ground between patient and therapist. Specifically, shared unconscious traumatic memories will be discussed through the lenses of somatic countertransference (SCT) and clinical material.

Network Based Therapy approach to promoting coping

Couples Therapy - Finding Common Ground

The Conversational Model with its focus on affect, trauma and the minute particulars is well-suited to bridging the communications gap between people that find themselves alienated and at odds with each other. This paper will give a brief overview of the conversational model and offer a perspective on couples therapy from this vantage point. It suggests that subtle misinterpretations and misunderstandings of the other's communications are rooted in each owns traumatic past that may be preverbal and inaccessible to reflective awareness.

The Spiralling Self: growth in conversation

"It is language which created humans, rather than human’s language.” While self is first experienced in relation to another, the emergence of a mature self occurs in relation to a multiplicity of others in embodied communicative relationships to an individual. While "free association" is often thought of as psychoanalytic technique, it is argued that the primary form of free association is relational, and inter-subjective. In modern democratic societies the range of associative possibilities for the investment of individual lives leads to an enormous range of "forms of life". The developmental form involves a spiral of growth embedded in communicative exchange, and person-environment interaction. In humans, physiological homeostasis is a dynamic process that includes, at its highest level, shared understanding, contributing to the embedding of self in the physicality of the body. Such growth is impeded by traumatic experience that has its basis in the inter-subjective field.

The Spiralling Self: growth in conversation

"It is language which created humans, rather than human’s language.” While self is first experienced in relation to another, the emergence of a mature self occurs in relation to a multiplicity of others in embodied communicative relationships to an individual. While "free association" is often thought of as psychoanalytic technique, it is argued that the primary form of free association is relational, and inter-subjective. In modern democratic societies the range of associative possibilities for the investment of individual lives leads to an enormous range of "forms of life". The developmental form involves a spiral of growth embedded in communicative exchange, and person-environment interaction. In humans, physiological homeostasis is a dynamic process that includes, at its highest level, shared understanding, contributing to the embedding of self in the physicality of the body. Such growth is impeded by traumatic experience that has its basis in the inter-subjective field.

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