ABSTRACT
This chapter considers some of the individual’s early experiences of boundary and containment and how these can affect what might be brought years later into the consulting room. The experience of the space between mother and baby will be very different depending on the personalities involved and on who else shares that space. That same child coming into an established family with several siblings, so close there is little space of his own or so distant there is little contact between children, has a very different experience. The oedipal stage of development is one of the more frequently talked about periods of life, both clinically among professionals and in the wider world among writers, film-makers, and the culture at large. Many of the broken relationships of the adult years stem from an unsatisfactory resolution of oedipal conflicts at the age of three or four.
