Up against the wall

ABSTRACT

This article explores aspects of unexpected behaviour in one- and two-year-olds, lasting only for a few minutes at a time. Infant observation [Bick, E. (1964). Notes on Infant Observation in Psychoanalytic Training. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 45, 558–566] in an adapted form serves as a research tool. The intention is to try to compare a small number of similar observations to try to make sense of a common pattern. The discussion of the findings has a psychoanalytic perspective. The reactions of the children’s peer group and of staff within the nursery context are a particular focus of the paper.

KEYWORDS:

• Infant observation
• nursery
• under 5s
• containment
• holding environment
• non-verbal communication

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank those Early Childhood Education students from many years of the course who have generously agreed to include extracts from their weekly observations in this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on the contributor

Gerd Abrahamsen is Associate Professor Emerita of Early Childhood Studies at the University of Stavanger, Norway. She has a long-standing interest in the well-being of children under 3 in nursery. Inspired by her many visits to Tavistock Centre and her own training in infant observation, she has developed an application of infant observation in a modified version as part of a 30 ECTS course in the Under Threes: Nursery Teaching Qualification, which is part of the first degree programme in Early Childhood Education in the University of Stavanger. She has written three books with a psychoanalytic perspective on issues in nursery practice (1997, 2004 and 2015) as well as many articles and chapters in textbooks exploring the relationships between children and nursery staff.

Notes

1. An application of infant observation in a modified version has for many years been a central part of a 30 ECTS course in Under Threes (Småbarnspedagogikk – Nursery Teaching Qualification Course) in the third and final year of the bachelor’s degree programme in Early Childhood Education at Stavanger University, Norway. The intention of including this observation method as part of the training is to enhance the students’ sensitivity in their future work as nursery teachers and to deepen their awareness of children’s way of seeing their world. The issue of how relationships are developed and sustained between staff and children under three is a core theme.

2. Esther Bick’s (1968) paper ‘The experience of the skin in early object relations’ outlines her understanding of the function of the skin as a primary container, felt by the infant to hold together the parts of the self that have not yet come together. Usually, maternal containment supports the growth of the infant’s psychic skin. In faulty containment, the infant may try to use muscular tension to hold the self together: ‘the second skin – formation’, as a defence against disintegration (see also Rustin, 2009).

3. Personal communication with Professor Dr Wilfried Datler.