Infant observation in Britain: a Tavistock approach

Abstract

The author draws attention to something distinctive in the psychoanalytic ‘air’ from the early 1960s onwards: the strong emphasis upon the very early psychological, emotional and cognitive view of infants and young children. She focuses on the work of two analysts in particular, Esther Bick and Wilfred Bion, and the comparable, though differently expressed, centrality of the observational method in their work. Each explored not only the pathological picture but also the nature and integrative function of psychic containment in earliest mental life. Each also shared a preoccupation with what constituted a psychoanalytic attitude and with the process of becoming a psychoanalyst and, in Bick's case, a child analyst or psychotherapist. The author provides an historical background to the idea of observation, followed by an account, with detailed examples, of the nature of infant observation and the observational method as taught and practised at the Tavistock Clinic, London since the late 1940s, and subsequently in many other training institutions. Here the themes of Bick and Bion are constantly interrelated such that the prototype or model for the creation of emotional meaning and thought can be appreciated and learning from experience can take place.

Keywords:

• observation
• psychoanalytic attitude
• training
• early years
• emotional and cognitive development
• containment
• psychoanalytic and attachment theory
• E. Bick
• W.R. Bion
• C. Darwin

Notes

This paper was first published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2006, 87, 1103–20 and is republished here by kind permission of Wiley-Blackwell.

1. This ‘joining up’ proved to be much more significant than could have been registered at the time. For it established the complex interweaving of Bowlby's scientifically based ethological studies (influence by Lorenz and Tinbergen, and realised in the work of Ainsworth and Main) with the psychoanalytic ideas of early development which were emerging at the same time. This cross-fertilisation between extra- and interpersonal observational theories and research methods remains a source of ongoing debate amongst attachment theorists and psychoanalysts- some of the differences being over language and emphasis, others more substantive (see Fonagy, 2001).

2. I have drawn on this same fragment of observation in Waddell (2003, pp. 22–23).