Quietly Subversive : The Selected Works of Dilys Daws

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 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.

Dilys Daws was Consultant Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust where she was awarded a Doctorate and a visiting consultant at the baby clinic of the James Wigg Practice, Kentish Town. She was Chair of the Association of Child Psychotherapists, and Founder Chair of the Association for Infant Mental Health-UK. She has had 50 years of clinical and teaching experience, has lectured on child psychotherapy and infant mental health widely in the UK and abroad, and has politically lobbied for it.

Matthew Lumley has studied at the Tavistock and Portman, where he completed his Post-Graduate Diploma in Working with Children, Young People and Families: A Psychoanalytic Observational Approach. He has worked for many years with autistic children in both primary and secondary school settings, and for two years as an assistant psychotherapist in the Tavistock Outreach in Primary Schools programme.