Lecture: Tessa Baradon

Working with fathers in parent infant psychotherapy: Thoughts on triadification (baby/mother/father) and a libidinal group (baby/mother/father/therapist)

Tessa Baradon, Anna Freud Centre

Consultant Infant Mental Health; Programme Director Training in Psychoanalytic PIP;Adjunct Professor University of Witwatersrand 

Parent-infant psychotherapy often focuses on dyadic relationships, and the excluded figure tends to be the father.  This absence in the PIP consulting room of a father who is physically present in the family, can leave a gap in the therapist’s understanding of the capacity for triadification within the parents and their coming together with their new baby as a nuclear family. In this lecture attention will be given to the barriers to, and challenges in, including fathers in the therapy. In particular Teresa will give thought to issues of visceral sexuality that the father’s presence introduces into the room, and the positioning of the therapist as a fourth - bringing into play a systemic reality that has been termed a libidinal group.

Tessa Baradon came from the field of Public Health to child psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. She has worked in the public and private sectors as a child and adolescent therapist and has been responsible for the development, implementation and evaluation of services for parents and infants in the UK and abroad. Her current fields of investigation are a) the understanding of parent infant mental health across cultures and b) multimodal analysis of clinical process. Her recent book ‘Working with fathers in psychoanalytic parent infant psychotherapy’ is published by Routledge.