Catherine Aitken | Serge Lebovici | Esther Bick | Francis Tustin
We "early interventionists" cannot simply ask babies "What hurts?" or "What seems to be the problem?" Instead we must find out the answers ourselves. We do this by first acknowledging the concerns and worries of parents and then exploring the distress, difficulties and communications of their babies.
Early interventionists act as detectives, following the child's lead to identify the specific roots of their distress, or derailment. From there, together we forge new paths of emotional attunement and understanding to facilitate healthier development.
While early intervention is a straightforward concept, it is not altogether easy, for the simple reason that our development process is so complex and normal development can be easily derailed. As every parent knows, babies cry for many reasons.
Dr Stella Acquarone (see Founder page)
PhD, MBPS, MACP, MLCP, Clinical Psychologist, Adult and Child Psychotherapist and Director of the Parent Infant Clinic and School of Infant Mental Health...See also: Founder, Books Written
MENTORS
"In addition to the infants and parents who have trusted me in their difficult times and taught me so much about infant mental health and the complex workings of the emotions and the mind, I have also trusted, and learned from many great professionals in this field. Without the inspiration, guidance and encouragement of my mentors and colleagues our clinical services and training courses would not have achieved their current high standard, success and integrity".
Catherine Atkin (1923-2006) was a community paediatrician and visionary clinician who supported my projects about working with parents' concerns, about early intervention and about early signs of autism in babies. She acted as a co-therapist for many years, following-up early interventions to see whether they had been effective. She gave me guidance, professional support and encouragement to explore and expand my work with babies and parents “ what was then uncharted territory in infant mental health. Much of her experience as a medical officer, a GP assistant, a school doctor at primarly schools, a NHS paediatrician and the uncrowned Queen of the Church Road Clinic for new mothers has been "baked" into our clinical approach.
Serge Lebovici (1915-2000) is the one of the important figures not only of working with children but of all French psychoanalysis as well. in the early days of our formation, he insisted on a foundation of "integration" and "empathy" in our clinical work. He was one of the first instigators of the psychoanalytic treatment of the children. As a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, all his life he
challenged paediatricians, working with sick children, starting a foundation to help children and encouraging me to incorporate the tools of psychoanalysis into the treatment of mothers and infants and in expanding the parent-infant clinic and training school for professionals. He was particularly interested in and helpful in observing and describing the interactions between mother and baby and baby and family. He worked with babies as young as 20 days, always looking for the
early signs of emotional problems. He told me "The baby is a person, and deserves our respect. We cannot fragment a baby, or think of a baby as a mosaic of different pieces." The reason the Parent Infant Clinic and the School of Infant Mental Health is one organization joined "at the hip" is that Lebovici felt strongly that research and theory into emotions and relationships must not be separated from practice and care.
Esther Bick (1901-1983) was the developer of "infant observation" and as I was in training at the Tavistock, she encouraged us to use her observational method in our training as a way of drawing our attention to an earlier phase in the development of the infant’s inner world and as a way of helping multi-disciplinary teams to better assess children at risk of threatening mental health difficulties. We have integrated direct detailed infant observation as an essential part of the School of Infant Mental Health, helping SIMH trainees learn to be "with" the patient before making interpretations and enabling them to see a narrative in the sequence of events that occur between mother and baby and family. The SIMH was one of the first to apply infant observation to clinical work. She also noticed that skin contact and skin sensations have psychological equivalents -- giving babies the experience of boundaries...both real and "internal"...giving way to experiencing the mouth, the eyes, the hands -- all used to complete a sense of boundary...the nipple in the mouth,a point of light for the eyes, a hard object for the hand, etc...all layered and linked to development. In the PIC, we use sensory integration to enhance psychological integration, ideas commonly associated with Esther Bick.
Frances Tustin (1913-1994) professional life was devoted to the psychoanalytic understanding of the bewildering elemental world of the autistic child. She was an outstanding clinician whose understanding of autistic and psychotic children has illuminated the relationship between autism and psychosis. In the early days of our work with babies and parents, she was eager that our clinicians keep up with the latest findings and techniques of infant psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and developmental psychology. Tustin's concepts are used in our work with learning disabilities and even in our work with adult patients. She knew firsthand the instability brought on by separated parents and later worked with Esther Bick and Bowlby at the Tavistock in forming teaching approaches for professionals...which were incorporated into the School of Infant Mental Health.She devoted herself to the study and treatment of infantile autism and wasinstrumental in looking for early signs of alarm leading to accurate diagnosis.