| Description |
If we had to distill all that we have learned from our work of the past 80 years—in all of the traditional and emerging fields related to Infant and Early Childhood mental health—into the single thing that matters most, what would it be? Michael Trout proposes one idea so simple it scarcely seems worthy of great intellectual or clinical consideration, while simultaneously standing as the one thing we cannot live without. Or, perhaps more to the point, it’s the one thing our patients and service users cannot live without: “holding.” In this presentation we will define holding by looking to the prototype of the mother-child relationship: a place which allows mother to experience “…deep empathy with the baby’s predicament”, thus creating a “facilitating environment…in which her infant may be able to be and to grow.” When working with children and their families, we “hold” the culture of the family, the family’s story, multiple levels of need (all at once), the hurt and anger of family members (without retort).
This presentation will track the emergence of the idea in the work of others, from Winnicott to the present; give its practical definition; and offer examples of it from our work with babies, young children and their parents, in the hope that little doubt will be left about its meaning.
|