ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance of beginnings in relation to working as a dance movement psychotherapist (DMP) with learning disabled clients. It examines the nature of 'beginnings' for the learning disabled infant, illustrating that experience with one mother's story as she faces the news that her child has Down's syndrome. The chapter also explores how individual subjective experience of parents can bring into focus the uncomfortable and mixed feelings that confront us as we face learning disability as a lived reality. The initial shock at the loss of the imagined child sends a parent into a process of grieving in coming to terms with a child's learning disability, as a medical diagnosis and as an immediate lived experience. Through an analysis of that individual experience in relation to relevant literature, the chapter identifies issues that can help to think about the implications for the transference when working as a DMP with learning disabled clients.
