“I thought I should be sensitive, accessible and alive, in order to enable the baby to wake up and to start moving something inside that will bring up her potentials and start to BE.”

 

Description: Harvey Schwartz welcomes Hamutal Raz Shiloach clinical psychologist and a training and supervising psychoanalyst at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Society. She is a founder and director of the Multicultural Center for Parent-Infant Psychotherapy in Yafo, Israel, which will be the focus for our conversation today. She teaches widely in Israel. This is not surprising because after listening to today’s episode you will hear a master clinician describing her involvement with a very challenging situation with a mother and a young daughter. They are an affectively frozen mother and a frozen daughter, and Hamutal brings not only deep emotional connection to the work with this couple but also deeply thought out cognitive thinking about it as well. It isn’t often that you ́ll find the two combined. There are clinicians who feel very strongly about the work and there are those who think very deeply about the work. It is special when you find someone who does both.

 

Key takeaways:

[3:27] The challenges of running a multicultural daycare center.

[6:13] Full day program for children at risk who are taken care by welfare authorities.

[7:20] The language and cultural challenge.

[9:02] The particularities about the mother-baby early bond in the African cultural.

[11:46] The presence over the word.

[14:10] Kinds of problems seen at the daycare center.

[15:59] Working with the Arab population in Israel with Arab clinicians.

[17:40] Clinical example.

[30:20] The psychoanalytic intervention through listening and actions.

[33:13] The importance of body language and primitive features in the work with babies.

[33:45] Hamutal Raz Shiloach talks about her career journey and how she started working in this project.

 

 

Mentioned in this episode:

IPA Off the Couch www.ipaoffthecouch.org

 

Recommended Readings:

Interview Bibliography

 

Dalley, T.  (2010) Containment of trauma: Working in the community. In: T. Baradon (Eds.), Relational Trauma in Infancy. London: Routlege.

 

Fraiberg, S. (1982)  Pathological Defenses in Infancy. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 51:612-635.

 

Salomonsson, B. (2007) 'Talk to me Baby, Tell me What's the Matter Now'  Semiotic and Developmental Perspectives on Communication in Psychoanalytic Infant Treatment. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 88(1):127-146.

 

Stern, D. (1995) The Motherhood Constellation, London: Karnac.

 

Winnicott, D. W. (1969) The Mother-Infant Experience of Mutuality. In: C . Winnicott., R. Shepherd & M. Davis (Eds.) Psychanalytic Exploration. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.