The Alicia Lieberman Legacy Series

Jane O’Rourke will explore Alicia’s life and the development of her ideas, beginning with her childhood in Paraguay and the experiences that shaped her understanding of human suffering.

We will hear about the people who influenced her thinking, including Mary Ainsworth, Selma Fraiberg and Stanley Greenspan.

Alicia will also speak about losing her young sister in childhood and about the death of her close colleague Patricia Van Horn, co-developer of Child-Parent Psychotherapy, and the unexpected connections she has found between these two experiences of grief.

Two families had a lasting influence on Alicia’s thinking, helping shape her therapeutic approach.

Tanya and Jody: A traumatised mother who loved her two-year-old daughter but struggled to keep her safe, confronted Alicia with the painful limits of what love and psychotherapy could achieve.

Eva and Sean: Expecting their first baby, Eva was terrified she might repeat the violence of her past, raising the question of how frightening impulses can coexist with a parent’s wish to love and protect their child.

(Names and identifying details have been changed.)

Joining Alicia will be Beatrice Beebe and Bessel van der Kolk, who come to early relationships and trauma from different directions. Beatrice will speak from her research on how babies and mothers communicate in the first year, and Bessel from his work on how trauma affects the body and a child’s development.

We will also explore how Alicia’s thinking has developed over her career.

• Beyond attachment security
  Alicia studied with Mary Ainsworth, whose work gave us the original attachment classifications, but her own interest has gone beyond security to infantile aggression, ambivalence, and defenses against unconscious conflicts. She respects the attachment classifications as useful tools for observation and research but wants us to be cautious about their clinical limitations. Where does she think attachment theory needs to develop?
• What the biology tells us
  A 2026 study co-authored by Alicia found lower levels of epigenetic age acceleration among children receiving CPP than in a matched comparison group. What might these biological findings tell us about the effects of psychotherapy, and what questions remain unanswered?
• Across cultures and settings
  What has Alicia learned from her recent work on implementation about applying therapeutic thinking in different cultures and settings?
• Social justice and psychotherapy
  Alicia’s writing increasingly addresses what war, displacement, racism, violence and institutional responses do to families, and how hard it is to acknowledge another person’s suffering when it threatens our own sense of identity. How does this shape the way she works with one child and one parent?

In this Masterclass, Alicia will take us inside Child-Parent Psychotherapy (CPP), the model she developed for working with young children and their parents after trauma. She will take us through the therapeutic work itself with two families, Tanya and Jody, and Eva and Sean, whom she also discusses in the Legacy Interview. Drawing on detailed case material, she will explore how she makes sense of unconscious conflict, works with parental defences and decides what to say, when to intervene and when to wait.

What does a therapist do when a mother loves her two-year-old daughter but cannot keep her safe? What do we do when a woman expecting her first baby is terrified that she might harm her unborn baby?

The two cases raise different clinical questions. With Eva and Sean, we will look at how frightening Eva’s impulses during her first pregnancy were understood and what lay beneath them. With Tanya and two year old Jody, we will examine the difficult judgements clinicians must make when a child’s safety is at stake, including the limits of therapeutic intervention and the responsibilities that extend beyond the consulting room.

The Masterclass will explore:

• How Child-Parent Psychotherapy works: The core clinical ideas behind CPP, including how Alicia formulates what has happened to the child and why fear and anger now show up as they do.
• Treating parent and child together: Working with the relationship as the organizing focus of therapy while helping parents recognise how their own history is re-enacted with the baby, including shame, aggression, ambivalence and negative transference.
• Frightening thoughts and the wish to protect: How to assess risk and understand the meaning of violent thoughts and impulses in pregnancy, and how to recognise protective wishes beneath them.
• When repair is not enough to keep a child safe: The limits of therapy, how clinicians decide when safety must take priority, and the responsibilities that lie beyond the consulting room.
• Listening to children and speaking the unspeakable: Understanding what children communicate through play, behaviour and bodily responses, and how to find words for frightening experiences without overwhelming either child or parent.
• From ghosts to angels: How therapy can help parents and children recognise painful repetitions, draw on experiences of love and protection, and find new ways of relating, even when adversity continues.

Through detailed clinical cases, the Masterclass will help clinicians recognise how trauma appears in young children’s behaviour and relationships, work with parental fear, shame and defences, and find ways to address painful experiences without overwhelming children or parents. Alicia will show how she makes therapeutic decisions in the moment, including when to speak, when to wait and when a child’s safety requires more than therapy alone.