ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author describes family and parental psychotherapy when a child has difficulty with both speaking and eating. The development of symbolic functioning, the development of language, and the capacity for play are all influenced by the way in which the child's caregivers, usually the parents, respond to the child's needs. Obviously the young child's way of interacting with the parents influences the arousal of tender feelings in them, and elicits their benign and attentive care-giving responses. The presence of loss was very powerful: The parents' early experiences of losing the first baby through a miscarriage and suddenly losing the pregnant trainee psychologist, accompanied at the same time by the author two week break, had stirred up hostility to the therapists. The concave containment phase is marked by more parent-child interactions which promote the child's development of symbolic functioning, the capacity to think and to speak about his experiences.
