Selma Fraiberg and colleagues’ seminal article, “Ghosts in the Nursery,” brought our attention to the infant-parent relationship and the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Since the publication of the article in 1975, infant observations and empirical studies have continued to elucidate the developmental consequences of the parent-child relationship and implications for adult treatment. In Part II of this conference, we will have the opportunity to learn more about these issues from two renowned scholars, Beatrice Beebe, PhD and Arietta Slade, PhD. Both of them have researched, theorized, and written about these topics over the course of their distinguished careers.

In her presentation, How Can We See What We Don’t See: Face-to-Face Communication in Infant Research and Adult Treatment, Dr. Beebe asserts that face-to-face communication is essential to intimacy across the life-span. In infancy, face-to-face communication predicts social and cognitive development. Subtle nonverbal behavior during face-to-face communication is rapidly moving, multi-modal, and too fast to fully capture with the naked eye – in both adult-adult and infant-adult interaction. Because it is so rapid, much of our nonverbal communication is largely out of awareness – but it has tremendous communicative power.

Dr. Slade will present The Relational Foundations of Reflection: Enhancing Attachment and Reflective Parenting. She describes a framework for clinical work that grew out of her decades of work directing Minding the Baby, an interdisciplinary home visiting program. The program is aimed at enhancing attachment and mentalizing in parents with histories of complex trauma, adversity, and extreme stress. A history of severely disrupted attachments poses unique challenges to mentalizing and thus to parenting, insofar as threat and dysregulation preclude intimacy and attunement.

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