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This book will be of interest to those child psychotherapists, infant mental health practitioners and other professionals who work therapeutically with parents, infants and toddlers. Babies should be seen as ‘a person in their own right’ (p. 11). This is the core belief and professional ethos in this book. The editors have gathered contributions from their team and colleagues in the Royal Children’s Hospital Infant Mental Health Programme (IMHP) in Melbourne, Australia to elaborate on the theme of ‘baby as subject’.
The babies who are seen by these clinicians, no matter how small or sick, are kept in the forefront of the clinician’s mind, spoken directly to and treated as the ‘subject’. Facilitating an authentic, live therapeutic encounter is what unites the clinicians’ approaches and work. The different voices, traditions, modalities and settings of more than a dozen multi-disciplinary professionals have made their unique contributions to this book. Many of the authors and practitioners have trained and worked in this method as it has been developed in the RCH IMHP and have taken this model out to their settings such as in GP practices and community clinics. The culture, diversity and size of Australia are also touched on and contextualise the work outlined here.
Therapeutic thought and work is richly detailed in many chapters of careful, moving, sometimes sad and yet finally hopeful encounters. This pioneering multi-disciplinary team work model and approach deserves to be more widely read and disseminated. It will still be considered innovative in many community or CAMHS settings where babies are often not thought about in this close, attentive way. It is even more striking that this model and approach has been possible in a busy paediatric hospital, where the physical–medical needs of sick infants are, by necessity, of the highest priority.
Frances Salo introduces the method by explaining how the therapist will attempt to provide the baby with psychological holding