Therapeutic Pre-School Groups*

Clinical intervention is usually not one of Primary Prevention as defined by Emanuel Miller a few years ago. However, an attempt of this kind is being made in England at Woolwich by Dr. David Morris, Paediatrician, and Mrs. Gordon, Psychotherapist, in one aspect of their work in which they link up with the Obstetrician. The next best undertaking is secondary prevention at an early stage; and a number of psychiatrists and psychotherapists have been, and are, seeing mothers with infants with disturbed behaviour individually. But the number of workers so involved seems comparatively small.

There are also very few reports in the literature about therapeutic group work at the toddler stage. The most relevant publications are to be found in the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child: “The Treatment of the Under-Five by way of his Mother”, Erna Furman, 1957; discussed by others at the American Association of Child Analysis, 1966, and taken up again by Augusta Alpert, 1967. Dr. Alpert discusses indications and contraindications for therapeutic intervention, in what she calls the “pre-nursery” via the mother. The physical set-up for this work at the Child Development Centre, New York, seems to be somewhat similar to ours, but the method, although regrettably not described in detail, seems to be somewhat different (as a large team seems involved there).

At the Wessex Unit (Southern England) we run small nursery groups for children aged 2-5 years, attending with their mothers. In our set-up this method of joint inter-active groups was first conceived by Dr. Christopher Haffner, Medical Director of the Unit, and first put into practice by him as early as 1958! (His own publication on the subject being overdue, but was quoted by Rogers, 1965.) Each group consists of three to four mothers, attending with their toddlers once- or twice-weekly for one and a half hours.

The physical facilities are a large tiled room (non-slip tiles) with floor heating and a small pool with bath-t