University of Valencia

Academic, scientific or professional interest: From the first weeks of its intrauterine existence, the baby will be watched over, measured, ecographied, and subject to tests in some cases; its birth will be programmed based on technical and ethical criteria by its parents, but also by different personnel of the social and health field: psychologists, social workers, doctors, geneticists... and it is expected that the baby borns healthy and develops to its full capabilities. But this is not always the case. In some cases it will stay for long periods at the hospital and make it possible so that its staying does not affect the baby psychically too seriously. Parents will need to be helped to overcome their helplessness and be guided through in order to the child to develop to its full capabilities. On the other hand, although the child is apparently healthy at the moment of birth, it can suffer quite son a psychopathology in its development: ¿how to recognise disharmonious interactions between mother and child? ¿When a depression in the infant should be diagnosed or how the premonitory signs of autism can be detected? ¿What psychotherapeutic support can we offer to the families affected by an early pathology? ¿How to recognise the mental suffering linked to the development of asthma or an irritable bowel syndrome? ¿What do the cries or sleep disorders mean? ¿What psychotherapeutic interventions are possible in order to treat early anorexia in the infant? ¿Are some infants more sensitive than others? ¿It is possible to identify families at risk? The field of study of this new science that is psychopathology of the infant and the child, from the moment of gestation, is vast and begins to be deciphered from a great variety of ways of bio-psycho-social research: human sciences, epidemiological, clinical and basic research. Research field that must be confronted and developed from a thorough ethical reflection, linked to the right of any child to become a teenager and a healthy adult, without lack of emotions or intelligence. Higher objective that is difficult to get to without caring for the mental life of the infant and its parents from the moment of its birth. The study of a complex perinatology benefits all the other stages of life. This Master’s Degree proposes the study of the field of perinatal and child psychology and psychopathology in its health, theoretical and scientific aspects, in a multidisciplinary context with specialists fitting in psychical and somatic , to contribute to the renewal of the diagnostic, nosologic and therapeutic approximations.