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Early Parenting and Prevention of Disorder: Psychoanalytic Research at Interdisciplinary Frontiers

Editor : Robert N. Emde, Editor : Marianne Leuzinger-Bohleber

Reviews and Endorsements

‘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