ABSTRACT
The treatment approach and concepts were greatly influenced by the ideas of Donald Winnicott, particularly by the concepts of unintegration, integration, and disintegration, and their bearing on the understanding of the developing child. The world of the Mulberry Bush School is peopled by post-toddlers who still display many of the characteristics of feeling, thought, expectation, and reaction, that Winnicott identified as indicators that integration had not been reliably achieved in the infant. The chapter discusses the locative stage, since it represents in developmental terms a notional starting point rather than a stage proper in primitive emotional development. It describes its developmental stage as a counterpart to Winnicott's soma, viewed as both differentiated from, and inextricably linked with, the psyche. Under soma, Winnicott lists all the physical factors which will contribute to the shaping of the emergent self: race, heredity, gender, body, health/disorder, and perinatal circumstances.
