‘She doesn't want to look at me’ – Mother–infant observation as a bridge between clinical practice and research

Abstract

Developing a research project on the interaction between babies and their depressed mothers in a mother–infant psychiatric ward, I sought to find a good instrument with both clinical relevance and reliability as a research tool. The emotional availability scales, based on a video-taped free play observation, offered an opportunity to carry out observation from a therapeutic, containing position and to take a look at the parent–infant interaction in a research-minded way. Although participation in the research study involved just one single observation, I was struck by the impact the study had on the participating mothers. I found that their thinking developed in three separate stages. First, mothers were unsure of what it meant to play with their children as parents; second, they were doubtful about whether they wanted to watch themselves playing; and finally, they began questioning whether they could become a ‘partner in play’ to their babies. I was struck by how profound maternal feelings and thoughts are very ‘easy to reach’, even after only a single observation within a research frame, and I would like to stress the importance of the ‘dramatization’ of experience in early parent–infant play.

Keywords:

• Emotional availability scales
• maternal depression
• video-taped observation

Notes

¹The project is developed at the Centre for Child Psychotherapy of the University of Leuven, in cooperation with the Mother–infant Unit of Bethaniënhuis, Zoersel (by Antwerp), Belgium.

Paths of growth: from the eyes to the mind was the title of the 7th International Infant Observation Conference, held in Florence in April 2004 where the material of this article was presented as a paper.