Quietly Subversive: The Selected Works of Dilys Daws (World Library of Mental Health)

This book gathers together selected papers and book chapters by Dilys Daws, covering her 50 years of pioneering work as a child psychotherapist. It provides those working with parents, infants, and children with a means of learning from Daws’s decades of experience as a psychotherapist and therapeutic consultant, with plentiful case material illustrating her method of working in action. The first two sections of the book focus on her work as a consultant psychotherapist in the baby clinic of a GP practice and her parent-infant work in this context as well as at the Tavistock and Portman Clinic. The third section explores her work with young children, focusing on questions around the therapeutic frame and setting. The fourth section features extended excerpts from her writings for the general public, most particularly aimed at new parents and parents with infants. Finally, the book also contains several short reflective pieces addressing themes to do with parent-infant work, the experience of the therapist, and the social role of psychoanalytic thinking. This book will be of interest to all those working with parents and children, including doctors, health visitors, and social workers, as well as child psychotherapists and child psychoanalysts. Cover 1 Endorsements 2 Half Title 4 Series 5 Title 6 Copyright 7 Table of Contents 10 Foreword 12 Memoir 14 Introduction 18 Acknowledgements 21 PART 1 Therapeutic consultancy: a child psychotherapist in a GP practice 22 1 Standing next to the weighing scales 24 2 A child psychotherapist in the baby clinic of a general practice: standing by the weighing scales 30 years on 33 3 Psychoanalysis and the public service: can they inspire each other? 48 PART 2 Parent-infant psychotherapy and infant mental health 52 4 Parent-infant psychotherapy: the baby in the consulting room 54 5 Brief psychoanalytic therapy for sleep problems 66 6 Feeding problems and relationship difficulties: therapeutic work with parents and infants 86 7 The perils of intimacy: closeness and distance in feeding and weaning 100 PART 3 Child psychotherapy: the frame and the setting 118 8 Consent in child psychotherapy: the conflicts for child patients, parents, and professionals 120 9 Resistance and co-operation: the need for both. A further study of psychotherapy in a Day Unit 130 PART 4 Writing for parents 148 10 The one-year-old and his family 150 11 Love and hate 157 12 Crying babies 162 13 Your baby’s emerging sense of self 179 PART 5 Reflections 194 14 Enlivened or burnt out 196 15 Saying what you mean, or meaning what you say 200 16 Working at the edge: the quiet subversiveness of psychoanalytic thinking 202 17 Error and repair 206 18 Rivalry with fathers 211 A day in the life of . . . Dilys Daws 214 Index 221