Mothering without a home: attachment representations and behaviours of homeless mothers and children

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWMothering without a home: attachment representations and behaviours of homeless mothers and children, by Ann G. Smolen with Alexandra Harrison, Lanham, MD, Jason Aronson, 2013, 217 pp., £44.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7657-1004-8. This book opens with powerfully moving accounts of psychoanalytic psychotherapy with homeless children and their mothers in inner city America. It develops into a rich and scholarly work whose contribution is relatively unique -the homeless are seldom deemed suitable patients for psychotherapy and homeless mothers are particularly vulnerable to being written off as too 'hard-toreach' for research and treatment. Smolen researches and describes the growth of attachment and mentalization in mothers and children who are engaged in therapy and group work. Along the way, she details the development of her own therapeutic technique and theoretical models as she takes psychoanalytically informed work outside its usual habitat. Ann Smolen is a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalyst at the Psychoanalytic Centre of Philadelphia, USA. The first part of the book (Chapters 1-3) describes therapy in a homelessness hostel undertaken at the start of Smolen's psychoanalytic career. The next chapters (4 -8) take as their basis a research project on the effects of therapeutic interventions, which Smolen conducted at the same shelter several years later. The book's six appendices detail the research tests of attachments, well-being and cognitive functioning. The data are analysed and discussed from both an attachment and psychodynamic perspective and Harvard Psychoanalyst, Alexandra Harrison provides a concluding commentary on the research findings (Chapter 9). A generous collection of references, from largely American sources, makes the book particularly interesting for the reader more familiar with UK traditions of thought on child development.Mothering and the 'un-housed' mind