Editorial

It is five years since there was last an edition of the journal which focused on work with babies and children under 5 (Vol. 18, No. 2). Since that time there has been an enormous increase in Britain and around the world in work with parents and children in the earliest years. It is important and timely to reflect on this growth and to publish papers which keep us up to date with clinical and theoretical developments, thus informing our practice and giving us the opportunity to generate interest beyond the profession in early intervention.

We open this edition with Dilys Daws’ paper ‘The perils of intimacy: closeness and distance in feeding and weaning’ in which the author, who works in London, discusses early feeding difficulties with reference to the process of weaning as well as the unmet needs of the parents. She draws on baby observation material to illustrate her interesting ideas about the difficulties that parents can have in establishing the appropriate emotional distance between themselves and their baby and discusses the use of the spoon as a transitional object within this process.

In ‘The little alien: links between mind and body in parent-infant psychotherapy’, Maria Theresa Gallo from Italy documents the remarkable progress which was made by an 18-month-old baby originally diagnosed as autistic, when she saw him together with his mother. His pathological defences receded dramatically as Dr Gallo modified ‘classical’ psychoanalytic technique while working within a firmly psychodynamic framework. This enabled this child to travel from ‘outer space’ into relationship with his mother and those around him.

In the past two years we have been fortunate to be able to publish work done in Australia with the parents of premature babies (Vol. 21, No. 1 and Vol. 22, No. 2). In this edition Frances Thomson-Salo and Campbell Paul, who work in Melbourne, Australia, write about ‘Infant-led innovations in a mother-baby therapy group’. This pioneering work, in which for t