The status of developmental curriculum in North American psychoanalysis

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Notes

1. As Waddell (2006) notes: Infant observation ... “has little to do with theories or axioms of infant developmental research, nor with philosophical models. It is not to do with ‘learning about’ infants. It is to do, rather with whether in Keat’s [1818] phrase, the axioms ‘are proved upon our pulses’ (Gittings, 1987, p. 93). It is to do with resisting the blocking of observation by preconception; with garnering the details of the emotional impact on the self as a guide to the potential meaning for the baby, while also being able to remain constantly open to new developments and possibilities” (p. 1112).

2. Most proponents of this tradition of infant observation see it as serving a primarily experiential purpose from which the analyst‐in‐training gains the following capacities (abridged from Sternberg, 2005, pp. 120–1): an analytic attitude with absence of narcissism, the ability to bear humbling experience, to open oneself to the experience of shock, to tolerate anxiety and uncertainty, to wait for meaning to emerge, to gain knowledge of theory, listening and skill in communicating, and so on.

3. There are definitely exceptions, but again these are primarily institutes not under the aegis of the American Psychoanalytic Association, such as the Psychoanalytic Center of California and the Freudian Society, and therefore not the focus of this paper. The Western New England Institute, influenced by the closely affiliated Yale Child Study Center where Donald Cohen’s dual investment in psychodynamics and psychobiology spawned the innovative field of psychodynamic developmental psychopathology (Fonagy and Target, 2003) is more closely allied with Anna Freud’s tradition, as reflected in the current international liaison.

4. This conclusion is based on a perusal of development curriculum in US institutes compiled by the Committee on Child and Adolescent Analysis of the American Psychoanalytic Association.

5. A distinction is here again in order, because I am not now referring to the impact of the experience of infant observation on the evolution of the psychoanalytic clinician, as described by Waddell, Sternberg, Rustin and others. I believe this is a different order of ‘application’ than is the extrapolation of research findings about mothers and infants directly into the analytic relationship.

6. i.e. “the assumption of common humanity of the interpreter and the person to be understood” (Strenger, 1991, p. 59) which is the “fundamental methodological characterization of all the disciplines which try to interpret human behavior, verbal and nonverbal, provided they do so in terms of reasons” (p. 60).

7. This has the unfortunate effect, in my experience, of leading some of the more iconoclastic ‘postmodern’ students to throw out developmental ideas early in their training.

8. Ferro (1999) illustrates my point beautifully by referencing “the famous cartoon that shows Snow White’s witch with the poisoned apple in her hand, in front of a doorway in which Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf are standing; she is told ‘Sorry, madam, you’ve got the wrong fairy‐tale.’ This indicates that narrative inconsistency imposes a limitation on the drift into possible worlds. As Baranger et al. point out, as ‘analysts we cannot propose to anyone any history that is not his own’” (pp. 12–13).