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ABSTRACT
This paper uses Freud’s idea of evenly suspended attention, as applied through Bick’s method of infant observation, to demonstrate a technique crucial to the work of the parent-infant clinician. Cultivating an evenly suspended state of attention is shown to be an indispensable technique for the clinician’s mind at work, especially for the parent infant clinician, whose external setting is unpredictable and challenging. Without a fixed external setting, a portable frame is required: the internal setting established by combining psychoanalytic theory with this specific kind of free-floating attention. This claim will be illustrated by an observer’s use of attentiveness in a daycare setting. The observer gathered the experience of a four-month-old infant in psychic peril. Lacking his caregiver’s attention, the infant was object-absent. The observer’s sensitive, absorbing stance was pivotal: not only to finding meaning and containing the primitive anxieties of an infant in trouble, but also – critically – to enabling the development of the infant’s sense of self by building a mental bridge to an unavailable caregiver, who could be reached and ultimately found a place in her mind for him.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Talia Hatzor
Talia Hatzor, Ph.D. is a psychologist and psychoanalyst, as well as a child and Parent-Infant psychotherapist. She is the co-director of the Psychoanalytic Parent Infant Psychotherapy (PIP) Training Program of Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Additionally, she is a teacher of Bick’s method of Infant Observation as part of the Columbia PIP program, and is a Training Analyst at the Contemporary Freudian Society.