Pleasure as a shared interpersonal experience for healing parent-child bonds. To take a fresh look at developmental psychotherapy

We humans as social beings evolved and constantly develop interacting with others of our species and we weave bonds that are crucial both to our survival and well-being (Gallese et al., 2024). Looking at relationships to heal bonds, through a second-person approach (León et al., 2022; Reddy, 2003) certainly has central value in psychotherapy treatments, where we make the patient aware of the adaptive strategies of individuals to maintain bonds, even whenthey uncover high levels of suffering. Especially in developmental psychotherapy, treatments have often been focused on understanding the symptoms and suffering borne by the child or parent, but what has always been overlooked is a fundamental constitutive element underlying the parent-child relationship and the creation of a sense of us with one another: pleasure as ashared interpersonal experience.The aim of the article is to shed light on the importance of pleasure in parent-child relationships, according to an evolutionary approach (Liotti & Farina, 2011) and on the basis of interpersonal affective neurobiology (Schore, 1994; Hill, 2020), in order to lay a shared foundation for the choice of consistent treatment methods for bonding care, aimed at promoting connection, and well-being. A clinical case will be analyzed according to the model of an integrated attachment-based approach (Lender, 2023), with Theraplay (Norris & Lender, 2020) and developmental dyadic therapy (Hughes, 2009; Hughes & Golding, 2024).

Keywords: ; Affective bonds; pleasure; connection; Theraplay; DDP; IAFT; ADHD

Tiziana Frau, Angelo Maria Inverso, Milena Milani, Dafna Lender, Il piacere come esperienza interpersonale condivisa nella cura dei legami genitori figli. Una nuova visione per la psicoterapia per l’età evolutiva in "QUADERNI DI PSICOTERAPIA COGNITIVA" 55/2024, pp 79-103, DOI: 10.3280/qpc55-2024oa20374