The second issue of 2016 introduces two interesting topics. The first, entitled Works of the Imagination and Early Childhood will become a thread for several issues, and, we hope, will encourage further contributions. Michael Rustin will edit the thread together with Laura Pollard, a former assistant editor, and Michael Rustin has written an editorial article by way of introduction. The development of thinking and of the imagination in early life is an endlessly fascinating subject for those interested in observing babies and young children. The capacity to use the mind requires some freedom from anxiety, and this, in turn, means that babies and young children need repeated experiences of being thought-about and understood by their parents or carers. They are able to begin to internalise these important people in their lives along with their love, thought and care. In a miraculous way, these figures become significant actors on the stage of the children's minds, increasingly enabling a confident sense of self in moments of separation. The sense of feeling held or contained enables well-endowed and secure children to begin to put together thoughts about how things are, using their imagination and their experience. In early life, this conscious level of fantasy life is often very extreme in delightful or frightening ways. As narratives are played with, in all kinds of play, with toys, parents and grandparents, carers and siblings, children begin to feel they can get to grips with understanding the meaning of things and to test ideas in their mind against external reality. Picture books, simple stories, cartoons and films, poems and songs contribute much to the development of the mind, as children use them to make personal narratives of how things are for them. The richness of the capacity to play and to symbolise and to make one’s own changing narratives is central to the pleasure of learning, creativity and intellectual development. We begin this strand with a first paper on the subject, by Sam Zuppardi on children's picture books. (Although Merav Hadary's paper [2015], about a girl whose mother helped her with separation and individuation through the use of children's story about an angry girl, was published in the second issue of this journal last year).
Our second strand is about Work Discussion. We have published papers about this subject throughout the life of the Journal, but the strand is an attempt to focus on it and to encourage more submissions from authors. For those who are unfamiliar with this application of observation, Work Discussion was introduced by Martha Harris at the Tavistock Clinic, first to child psychotherapy trainees seeking experience of work with children, and later, in the 1970s into a course then known as The Observation Course. The observation and description of the student's own thought and action, in the work setting, as part of the description of interaction between the worker and the client, introduces the first person into observation. This is distinct from infant observation itself, where observations are written in the third person; a narrative experienced and described by the observer-narrator. The first person is used in work discussion, and the observer is an active participant with what he said, thought or did included in the written account along with descriptions of the client.
The impact of discussing work in this setting is widely appreciated. It is often experienced as fundamentally changing the way students feel and think about their work's primary task and setting, as well as bringing insight into the way their clients might think and what their behaviour might mean.
A conference in June 2016, in Vienna, hosted by the Universities of Vienna and Klagenfurt, Let's Talk about Work was the first international conference on work discussion. It is described in News and Events in this issue, and will, I hope lead on to publication of articles derived from many of the fascinating presentations. The use of psychoanalytic observation in the context of all kinds of work leads, for many people, to a greater sense of calm and of the ability to continue to work effectively and to think about clients and their states of mind. Thinking about the impact of one person on another in the context of unconscious but powerful projection of strong feelings enables workers such as teachers, nursery workers, social workers and many others to regain or strengthen their sense of purpose and confidence. For example, they may begin to understand that some of their fears of being ineffective, highly anxious or fearful of criticism may not be just their own, they may be shared or entirely derived from those with whom they work. The projections of very young children or highly disturbed children and adults have a powerful effect on self-confidence and the ability to reflect. This is also true in communication between colleagues or between managers or senior professionals and their juniors. This is all the more true when those in leadership roles are under pressure to work efficiently, to present successful outcomes or when there is a lack of supervision space for sharing and reflection on particularly difficult work which is essential in bringing about new insight and maintaining hope. Let's Talk about Work was a shining example of a space where participants could talk about their work, leading, researching and teaching work discussion practice to extremely good effect.
I very much hope that we can continue to publish more papers about work and the use of psychoanalytic observation, and about the ever-increasing range of contexts in which groups talking together about their work is described and researched so that the method can be more widely disseminated. The capacity to observe lies at the heart of this.