OBJECTIVES: to analyze the features of the interactive psychodynamics of the interaction of mothers with seriously malnourished hospitalized children. METHODS: qualitative research based on psychoanalysis, using semi-structured interviews, observations and video recordings. Content analysis was applied to representative topics. RESULTS: a study was conducted of eight pairs consisting of a biological mother and seriously malnourished child aged between six and 18 months of age hospitaized at the Instituto Materno Infantil Prof. Fernando Figueira-IMIP, in the city of Recife, State Pernambuco, Brazil. Three central topics were identified, illustrating the process of becoming a parent, its importance for interactive psychodynamics, factors that interfere in the formation/rupture of the mother-child bond, its repercussions on the situation of malnutrition and the way it manifests itself in a context of hospitalization. CONCLUSIONS: from the preliminary analysis, the mutual influence of the mother and the child on the construction of the interaction and the complexity of the functional disharmonies is reinforced, suggesting that extreme states of malnutrition may be associated to nutritional privation and/or errors, as well as the experiences of psycho-affective privation or excess. The observation of mother-child interaction at critical moments, such as malnutrition and hospitalization, may help family and health professionals to understand how the illness develops, and suggest the need for integrated health care.
Object attachment; Mother-child; relations; Malnutrition; Child development; Psychoanlysis