Introduction

This book is the outcome of many years of casual observations, followed by training and practising as a psychotherapist, particularly working with the disturbed or malfunctioning relationships between babies and their mothers. Following my hunches about the impact of the early relationship on later psychological functioning, I began to explore the growing body of research on the development of the brain in babies and small children. I then found myself linking this data with the data on psychologically disturbed adults – people suffering from a range of problems, from mild depression to mental and physical psychopathology.