Katherine Bain

University of the Witwatersrand | wits · Department of Psychology

Parenting has been found to be highly contextually and culturally determined and there have been calls to research parenting within culture as it is lived. Due to changing social and economic factors, middle-class South African mothers face unique challenges in relation to the navigation of culture and class in child-rearing. Foregrounding the comp...

Multiple studies have noted the impacts on student mental health of the COVID-19 pandemic, associated national lockdowns and emergency remote teaching. In light of COVID-19 shifting from pandemic to endemic status, this study investigates the developmental and mental health consequences of the pandemic for a group of South African undergraduate stu...

Premature birth is implicated in the potential derailment of parent-infant relationships. Using a comparative case study methodology, this paper offers an exploration of developing and disrupted intersubjectivity in two mother-premature infant dyads in the context of a neonatal high care ward in a South African public hospital. Maternal narratives...

Recent studies have identified a history of anxiety as playing a crucial role in the development of trauma responses in mothers of premature neonates. This paper explores this link in more depth, examining how previous relational experience appears to influence mothers' experiences of premature birth and their infants in the context of a neonatal h...

Culturally-embedded and embodied understandings of interaction, transmitted intergenerationally, and often non-consciously through sensory and affective memory, are notoriously difficult to access. Such information is often contained in implicit memory and is not readily available for narrative explanation. Alternative methodologies that can access...

National strategies to manage COVID-19, including lockdown, have caused significant disruption to student learning and to the ways that students engage with staff and peers. The transition to online learning, alongside common anxieties associated with the disease itself, was likely to have affected student mental health. This study explored psychol...

There is evidence that sensitive responsiveness is manifested differently in varying cultural contexts. This exploratory study examines a sample of 50 South African mothers in the context of a socioeconomically deprived Township, and investigates differences between the Ainsworth sensitivity scale (that does not specify particular manifestations of...

Objective: Mental health professionals frequently classify children’s attachment style using a combination of the parent/caregiver interview, an interview with the child, the interviewer’s clinical impressions, and at times, the child’s responses to projective tests not aimed at eliciting attachment specific information. However, no studies have be...

Psychodynamic psychotherapists through their vocational training, and especially through developmental and psychoanalytic theories, are exposed to intense discursive and theoretical models of ideal motherhood and child development that they use to inform their therapeutic practice. In this article, nine psychodynamic psychotherapist-mothers are int...

Despite clear evidence that infant mental health intervention is imperative, mental health services for infants and their caregivers worldwide remain under-prioritised, under-funded, and inaccessible to most populations. South Africa is no exception. This article proposes some potential explanations for this, exploring both practical constraints an...

The recent call for the scale-up of evidence-based early childhood development interventions, in lower and middle-income countries and for minority groups in high-income countries, has seen numerous suggestions to train greater numbers of lay mental health workers to fulfill these functions. While studies have found that concepts from developed cou...

This article is part of a project investigating the interfacing of clinically and research‐generated knowledge in the field of infant mental health (IMH) with local cultural models of child care and development. The article explores the experiences and challenges reported by psychology‐trained supervisors in supervision with local, lay, trained hom...

Recent scholarly insights show that nonverbal and subtle forms of sensitive responsiveness are more applicable to describing and assessing non-Western parent–infant interactions than the more extraverted Western varieties of responsiveness. This paper examines whether the original Ainsworth scale (that does not specify particular manifestations of...

Much research details the psychological risks to individuals exposed as children to intimate partner violence (IPV). However, resilience has been a neglected area of study within this population. This article details adaptive responses in six participants exposed to IPV in childhood. Adult attachment interviews (AAI) and follow-up semi-structured i...

Objective: This paper examines maternal knowledge regarding perinatal and infant mental health amongst mothers in Alexandra township, Johannesburg. The applicability and utility of these Western-derived concepts in a low socio-economic South African setting is examined. Method: A concurrent mixed methods approach was used. Descriptive statistical a...

The question of interfacing research and clinically generated knowledge in the field of infant mental health (IMH) with local cultural knowledge and belief systems has provoked extended discussion in recent years. This article explores convergences and divergences between current research-based, relational IMH mental health models and "community" k...

Early parent–infant home visiting interventions have been found to be effective in both developed and developing countries. However, there is a need to build an evidence base for these interventions in the South African context, to inform local early childhood development policy. The Ububele Mother-Baby Home Visiting Programme in Alexandra, Johanne...

The New Beginnings program was developed at the Anna Freud Centre and originally piloted in Her Majesty Prisons in the United Kingdom. This study aimed to explore the use of this manualized parent-infant psychotherapy group model in an African setting with high-risk mother-infant dyads, and describes the implementation and investigation of this 12-...

This paper explores the relationship between a Winnicottian holding environment and the beginnings of Bowlby's attachment within the context of a Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) ward. KMC entails the strapping of premature infants to their mothers' chests to facilitate temperature regulation, breast feeding, and better bonding between mothers and their...

Thesis (MA(Clinical Psychology))--University of Pretoria, 2004. Includes bibliographical references. Adobe Acrobat Reader needed to open files.