Melanie Klein and infant observation

Abstract

The author (the late Susan Sherwin-White) uses evidence of Melanie Klein’s interest in babies and young children in unpublished notes in the archive as well as her publications. Klein uses her observations to infer what happens in children’s minds and their internal worlds. She used her findings alongside her analyses of children to develop her ‘theoretical conclusions’ about psychic development from the earliest weeks of life. Her revolutionary developments of psychoanalytic theory have been wrongly attributed to her dominant interest in internal life and the character of babies and children without very much attention to external reality. This ground-breaking paper makes it clear that Klein was extremely interested in what could be seen and felt by close observation of their behaviour and play; she repeatedly emphasized the importance of consistent, loving care in healthy development. The author’s meticulous research gives a fascinating and enlightening account of Klein’s interest in the links she perceived between the way children were treated and their happiness, ability to trust and to develop well. This posthumous paper is a wonderful addition to our knowledge of Klein’s understanding of primitive mental states and of the significance of the contribution of both external and internal factors to healthy development.

Keywords:

• Melanie Klein
• early infancy
• direct observation
• external life
• mental development
• attachment
• happiness

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Erratum

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Susan Sherwin-White died in 2016. She had two successful careers, the first as an academic ancient historian with many publications, including (with A. Kuhrt) From Samarkand to Sardis: A New Approach to the Seleucid Empire (London: Duckworth, 1993). In the mid-80s, she began to train as a child and adolescent psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. She had recently retired from her role as Lead Child Psychotherapist in West London Mental Health Trust. Sherwin-White held significant roles in the UK Association of Child Psychotherapists, as Chair and, later, Chair of its Ethic Committee. She taught psychoanalytic theory for many years for the Tavistock Clinic Psychoanalytic Observational Studies course and had published a number of clinical papers on child and adolescent issues. In 2014, she co-edited, with Debbie Hindle, Sibling Matters: A Psychoanalytic, Developmental and Systemic Approach to which she also contributed chapters on Freud and Klein. Her final book, Melanie Klein, Revisited: Pioneer and Revolutionary in the Psychoanalysis of Young Children, is published by Karnac in May 2017. (Sherwin-White, 2017). She had intended that her paper on Klein and Infant Observation (edited for publication in this issue by Trudy Klauber) would be published in Infant Observation.

Notes

1 In this series, Merrill Middlemore, author of The nursing couple published in (1941, cited the work of the Austrian psychologist, Charlotte Buhler (1931), and her series of infant observations (1936a, pp. 57–58).

2 It is notable that in the interview with Daniel Pick (2001, p. 6), Segal was asked about Klein’s view on the use of infant observation, and recognized Klein’s own use of observations and her interest and enthusiasm for Bick’s research on baby observation. However, she also said that Klein became,

 … very suspicious of analytical theories like those of Meltzer and Bick based on observation. She had to admit that we don’t know what goes on in a baby’s mind, only the ‘infantile aspect’ of the adult or child in an analytical situation. It may confirm or disprove things but you cannot base analytical theories only on observations of behaviour.

Segal was, of course, speaking nearly 50 years after Klein wrote (1952b), and some 40 years after her death (1950). What she says does not fit well either with Klein’s writing, or use of observations; and Klein had openly acknowledged in 1944 (see above) that a baby cannot tell us what he is feeling. Furthermore, Bick’s theoretical publications, beginning in the 1960s (see Briggs, 2002, pp. 27–59), followed Klein’s death, as did those of Meltzer. Segal’s words may indeed reflect her own views, rather than those of Klein.