ABSTRACT
When the Child and Family Department of the Tavistock Clinic set up an Under-Fives' Counselling Service offering up to five sessions to parents of children under the age of 5 years, Isca Wittenberg was keen to participate. Wittenberg particularly wanted to work with parents of infants. The arrival of a baby is a disturbing as well as wondrous event. Because of the intimate, interactive relationship between parent and baby, any upset in one is easily communicated to the other and can quickly develop into a vicious cycle of mounting distress. Psychoanalysis as well as research in developmental psychology has shown that the foundations of mental-emotional health are laid in infancy. To offer understanding to parents burdened or unable to manage the disturbing feelings aroused by their young baby seemed to the author therefore of quite particular importance, a piece of preventative mental health work of the first order.
