THE COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH IN
EARLY INTERVENTION

Holistic Early Intervention: basic concepts

In early intervention (EI), certain basic assumptions are indispensable in considering this subject:

• Life is characterized by two essential features:
it develops, and it takes place in a context

• Based on other definitions (Wernicke 1990, Cirigliano 1995), we define  Early Intervention as a collection of educational and therapeutic approaches which in early-aged individuals, with a possible present or future abnormal development, to intentionally encourage the development of certain potentialities and abilities which could be faced with obstacles for their opportune manifestation.

• Every human being is a unique functional system that can be understood in many dimensions, i.e. the physical-molecular, biological, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions.

• The human being interacts with his environment at many levels in depth: primary needs, basic feelings, thoughts and behavior. The deepest levels define and limit the more superficial. At very early ages, the developing thought still cannot exercise its controlling function on behavior, which is directly controlled at the emotional level. This is also the case in front of a great present emotional intensity or when the present development or a sufficient capacity of thought are absent.

• The phenomena that take place in the human being are not simply classifiable, for example, as biological, emotional, or cognitive. It is the observer who, while employing the means of situational diagnosis he or she has got, fragments reality and cuts out phenomena to let them fit into his or her particular observation. As a consequence, it is not correct to say “this depression is biological and this other one is psychological,” as simultaneously they will inevitably be both.

• The human being interacts at the same time from all his or her depth levels. Every communication is simultaneously of primary needs, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. It is the recipient who decides to fragment the message in his own consciousness, and to label it for example as emotional or cognitive. It can become the facile daily proof of formulating any phrase, even the most simple, and at once putting it into any possible magnifying glass.

• The dimensions and levels of depth in communication that we have mentioned are not always conscious to the professional, since he is, too, a human being, or they not always correspond to the professional’s explicit professional will. However, all plains and levels always are present (in the child, in his or her families, and in the professional), and the interaction among all of them always takes place, consciously or not, wanting it or not. Therefore, professionals in any discipline cannot shelter themselves within the boundaries of their professional fields in order to argue that “they do not do” nor are they rooted in this or that aspect. At the most, they could specialize in one aspect (the bonding, motor functions, etc.), but always without recognizing that they are only emphasizing a part of the whole that the other is made of. In our formulation, those professionals that insist in working only from the perspective of a unique professional field, without giving attention to the other aspects of the unconscious or non-voluntary interaction, do harm by omission.

• This requires the training of every EI professional in numerous areas, for example, training in the development of functional systems in the phases of normal development, those pathologies in the primary phases of development corresponding to diverse nosographies, in psychodynamics and psychopathology of the family and of the mother-child bond; techniques of psycho-educational counseling for parents; techniques of body and bonding approaches to use in children and parents; etc.

• Since life begins with conception, we should work in EI from that very moment.  Birth is an additional event, although obviously of great importance, in the sequence of vital phenomena.

• It is the interplay of stimuli that brings about the fusion of the zygote, which enables life.

• Stimulus is everything that produces a movement or, which is essentially the same, a communication: Also stimuli can be read fragmentally as an atomic-molecular (re)configuration, a biological (re)action, an emotion, a thought, or a spiritual (re)union.