A qualitative exploration of who the infant is in the mothers’ mind.

Objective: This study is the first qualitative research analysing mothers’ thoughts and feelings of themselves, their infant and their developing parent-infant relationship prior to receiving a brief psychoanalytically informed under-fives treatment. It explores maternal representations from mothers’ narratives asking the question: Who is the infant in the mothers’ mind? Method: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with six mothers whose infant had been referred to an under-fives service. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and the transcripts were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: The qualitative analysis of these narrative accounts generated eleven super-ordinate themes. These clustered into four areas: mother’s descriptions of their infant, descriptions of problems in themselves as a mother, problems in their infant and problems in the developing parent-infant relationship. Conclusions: There were coherent, rich, balanced representations involving mental representations of emotions and intentions in all six mothers. They all conveyed viewing their infant as a unique, growing person with a separate mind and at times separate feelings. They each showed a marked capacity for maternal reflectiveness incorporating mentalization. There were high levels of worry in all six narratives.