Infants in Danger: A Conversation with Infant Psychologist
Alicia Lieberman

By Jeff Miller

Alicia Lieberman

Most adults can recall a moment when they’ve been afraid. Danger, or the presumption of danger, jacks up both our senses and our stress hormones and lingers in our memory.

It was once assumed that infants lacked similar sensory awareness. Not true, says Alicia Lieberman, PhD, a UCSF professor of psychiatry, who has spent her career trying to prevent and undo the emotional damage inflicted on very young children stuck in violence-prone homes.

Left untreated, this damage thwarts development, stunts IQs and spawns anxiety that can last a lifetime. This is to say nothing of the damage to social harmony and community life or the impact on productivity and crime rates, all of which we pay for in one way or another.

Lieberman has not stood on the sidelines simply decrying this state of affairs. She has instead designed interventions that mend and cement the healthy and loving relationships between mothers and their young, troubled children. Moreover, in a follow-up study, she has found that the relationship-based interventions she designed had lasting, positive effects.

No wonder then that she was asked to speak about her work and her findings to the Dalai Lama and 8,000 other guests at a recent meeting in Seattle. To those who take the long view, it is clear that the seeds of compassion – and the experience of violence – begin in the womb. Lieberman has codified that balance. And maybe if we listen really hard, she can teach us all how to behave.

Hear the conversation.

(Podcast transcript available in approximately two weeks)