Introduction

THE SEMINAR on Mental Health and Infant Development held at Chichester from July 19th to August 10th, 1952, was, at that time, the first of its kind in which a number of people of different professional disciplines and from many countries were gathered together to study a specific aspect of the mental health field. In planning it, there were few precedents on which to proceed, but in fact, the Seminar was highly structured and had been built up in a series of inter-disciplinary, international discussions over a period of about two years. It took the form of a three weeks' residential training course in which fifty-one persons from thirty different countries were brought together, with a teaching staff of sixteen resident and seven visiting members, to learn about some of the phenomena of family life in the first two years of a baby.