Infant observation through a screen; an online response to the impossibility of in-person observation during the Covid 19 pandemic of 2020–2021 in northern Italy

ABSTRACT

This article is based on observational accounts written after video-observations during the Covid-19 pandemic emergency in northern Italy in 2020–2021. The author tries to show what happened at both sensory and relational levels between observers and infants and between observers and families. Her reflections also consider the observation students’ training experience and a creative response to ensuring attainment of the educational goals of their linked university-validated course. The Covid pandemic forced everyone to readjust and renegotiate some of the basic tenets of infant observation. Physical distance and the lack of in-person contact inevitably changed the ‘proper’ emotional distance as well as the management of silence and abstention (from initiating action or conversation). The article’s intention is to focus on some critical aspects of observing through a screen, which was never Esther Bick’s intention at its introduction. The use of online observation through a screen clearly requires further examination to better understand the novel experience forced on observers as a means of trying to continue baby observation during the pandemic.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychoanalytic infant observation
• video-observation
• screen
• Covid-19 pandemic
• students’ learning
• unconscious fantasy

Acknowledgments

These reflections derive from the infant observation seminars that I held online as seminar leader from March 2020 to January 2021 and are the product of group thinking. I want, therefore, to thank the students of the now third year of the course, Danila Di Pasquale, Serena Galliera, Paola Grimaldi, Silvia Rosati and Francesca Stolfi for their thoughts and also allowing me to use their observations.

I also want to thank Suzanne Maiello for thoughts and suggestions which contributed to the flowering of my reflections in the exchanges we had in preparation for an AIPPI M7 Open Lecture, we gave together on November 28, 2020, “Infant observation in person and in remote. Reflections on the sensory and relational aspects of social distancing”.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 AIPPI Milan is partner of the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and Essex University on a course which is formally titled, Postgraduate Certificate/Diploma MA, Working with children, young people & families: A psychoanalytic observational approach. It is also referred to sometimes as M7 and sometimes as ‘The observation course’ (its non-validated earlier version).

2 All names have been changed to protect confidentiality.

3 My thanks to Simonetta Ravà Tavallini, Young Child Observation teacher, AIPPI, Milan, who coined this term.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrizia Gatti

Patrizia Gatti Member of AIPPI, Associazione Italiana di psicoterapia psicoanalitica per l’infanzia. l’adolescenza e la famiglia (Italian association of psychoanalytical psychotherapy of children, adolescents and families).