You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
As was made clear in Jane O’ Rourke’s 2020 interview with Dilys Daws, on the website ‘Mind in Mind’, it is not an exaggeration to say that Daws’ contribution to the field of child mental health and child psychotherapy, over nearly six decades, has been immense. In particular, her role in the development of the field of infant mental health has been pioneering and fundamental.
In her own clinical training and subsequent teaching at the Tavistock Clinic, she was directly influenced by such significant psychoanalytic figures as Donald Winnicott and Esther Bick. There, in 1985, together with colleagues including Juliet Hopkins and Lisa Miller, she helped establish the first infant mental health workshop in the UK. This milieu of pivotal psychotherapeutic discoveries and clinical thinking, together with her work with babies and their parents over four decades at the James Wigg GP Practice in Kentish Town, are part of the foundations on which Daws has established such important developments as the Association for Infant Mental Health UK. These accomplishments form the basis of her influence as a clinical teacher and supervisor for a wide range of professionals concerned with parent-infant relationships. Each of her books has had significant success and recognition, with Finding your Way with your Baby (2015) winning the 2016 British Medical Association Book Award in Popular Medicine.
I first began reading this remarkable and important work when I was kindly given a copy of the second edition of ‘Through the Night’ (1993) by Dilys Daws herself, when I was finishing my training at the Tavistock Clinic, where she had been an inspiring supervisor. I later went on to work in the field of parent-infant work myself, in the North East of England, with Daws’ invaluable support and advice. ‘Through the night’ has continued to be a rich source of information and inspiration for me, and I have consulted and referred to it ever since.
This third edition of the book, published 31 years af