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Reflecting on the links between the earliest mother‐infant relationship and communication difficulties
Author(s) -
FULFORD DEBORAH,
MALCOMESS KATE
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
international journal of language and communication disorders
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.101
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1460-6984
pISSN - 1368-2822
DOI - 10.1111/j.1460-6984.1995.tb01669.x
Subject(s) - feeling , psychology , perspective (graphical) , psychoanalytic theory , process (computing) , developmental psychology , focus (optics) , psychotherapist , social psychology , cognitive psychology , physics , artificial intelligence , computer science , optics , operating system
The purpose of this paper is to raise questions and open up a discussion about a group of children we are all becoming more familiar with. The children, typically 2–3 years old, present with severe attention difficulties and little apparent communicative intent. There is anecdotal evidence that there is a growing number of them and there is a feeling from many speech and language therapists that they neither have sufficient skills to help these children nor, more importantly, the means to understand them. In our clinical practice as speech and language therapists we have been strongly influenced by psychoanalytic and systemic thinking. We have found it invaluable to use these frameworks to enhance our understanding of communication difficulties in children, and will draw on these in our discussion. The paper explores a process rather than offers a single solution. We suggest an approach which allows for an individual response to each case, in the belief that for each child there is a new discussion to be had. Starting with a description of the symptoms of a child who came to one of our clinics, the paper leads the discussion through the difficult process of thinking about and trying to understand this communication behaviour. The material is examined from the perspective of the child, the mother and the therapist. An attempt is made to illustrate how the process of reflecting on the reasons for the behaviour and on the feelings which that behaviour evokes, changes significantly the focus of what we can offer these clients. In the authors' experience, reflecting on why the child is communicating in the way he does highlights the emotional underpinnings of communication and leads one back to the earliest mother‐infant relationship. Some understanding of this can give us a basis with which to make sense of the child's pattern of communication when he reaches our clinic a few years later. Thus, this paper advances the view that exploring the earliest communication experience of each child is pivotal to effective treatment and needs to be placed at the heart of our thinking. It suggests the need for a significant shift in the therapeutic focus, from content to process and from acting to reflecting. The concomitant shift which would be needed in the support structures for speech and language therapists for this work to be sustained is also acknowledged.