Two Papers on Work in a Baby Clinic: (I) Standing Next to the Weighing Scales*

I have been working for several years in the Baby Clinic of a General Practice in a Health Centre. One day weekly there are baby clinics, morning and afternoon, each taken by two of the G.P.s and the four Health Visitors attached to the Practice. A Nurse attends to give immunisations. I now go weekly to the morning clinics. I have contact with the other doctors in the practice and at times work closely with the practice's Social Worker who is a qualified psychotherapist.

I originally started to work at this Baby Clinic with a thesis that many mothers of new babies may have difficulties arising from their own personalities and from previous relationships, which become reflected in their dealings with the baby, or in disturbed behaviour of some kind in the baby. Mothers who had had no serious difficulties at other periods of their lives might have been thrown off balance by the experience of pregnancy, childbirth, and caring for a very new baby. I hoped that brief psychotherapeutic work of a combined interpretative and supportive nature could relieve some of these problems. Work could be directly with the mother, or mother and father, or by supporting the doctor or health visitor already involved with the family. The majority of babies are routinely brought for clinic visits by their mothers and I believe thisinfluences the nature of my referrals. I see more mothers and babies together than mothers and fathers and babies. Usually this seems an appropriate way of working; at other times it may be symptomatic of a marital or family problem**. In the several years I have worked in the Baby clinic I have felt my ambition to carry out short-term pieces of work has been justified.

The issues that have arisen over these years are of two main kinds. One is the nature of the clinical work undertaken. (Much of this presents as sleep problems and I give an account of this work in the companion paper which follows.) The second is the process of being a consultant to an institution