ABSTRACT
All over the world, those of us working with very young children and their families are having to perform mental gymnastics, climbing out of our favourite theoretical box in order to integrate concepts from different ®elds. Working with infants means that we need to work quickly, so that valuable developmental time is not lost. This requires us to try new approaches. In addition, a baby and his family present many facets at the same time: the baby himself, his relationship with his mother, his relationship with his father, his relationship with his parents together, the parents' relationship, each parent's mental health and its relationship to the parents' own previous parenting, the way the family functions, and the way the extended family functions, the presence or not of support in the community. This represents many different theories all at the same time. I am going to take two in¯uential concepts from different areas, describe them and their relationship, and then show how they can inform clinical work when the practitioner is aware of the phenomena which the concepts try to describe. The two concepts are containment (Bion, 1959) from the psychoanalytic world and reciprocity (Brazelton et al., 1974) from the child development research community. These two concepts, together with behaviour management from learning theory, comprise the Solihull Approach, a model of working with infants and their families, which is described elsewhere (Douglas, 2004a). These concepts have proved to be helpful both for professionals (Douglas & Ginty, 2001; Whitehead & Douglas, 2005) and for parents (Douglas & Brennan, 2004; Milford et al., 2006). This book provides the space to explore the concepts in more detail, extending both theory and practice.
