Separating from mother and saying goodbye to the infant observer

ABSTRACT

This paper explores ending an infant observation and considers how we should end two-year infant observations? The authors use extracts from a two-year observation and trace the baby's experiences of separations from birth until the final observation, situating them in the context of the internal and external resources available to help the baby manage the pain associated with loss. Observation material shows how the baby's capacity to play enabled her symbolically to communicate her feelings about the observer's departure and how an otherwise supportive and containing environment seemed to struggle to assist the baby in ‘saying goodbye' during the final observations. Studies on mothers' experiences of ending infant observations are considered in the context of the practice of psychoanalytic infant observation and the idea that the observer is often a positive and reliable figure for the baby and as part of the weekly routine. The paper suggests that planning how to end a two-year infant observation should relate to the child’s internal world and external containment, and that separation and ending the observation can be traumatic in some circumstances.

KEYWORDS:

• Infant observation
• endings
• symbolic play
• trauma

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Holly Dwyer Hall is a qualified Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, trained at IPCPA, BPF, London, for which her Doctoral research is on alliance rupture resolution processes in adolescent psychotherapy. She is a Registered Arts Therapist and an accredited Mentalization Based Therapy Practitioner with Adults, Families and Adolescents and an MBT supervisor and MBT- F Trainer. She set up an Under Five’s Emotional Well Being service in an outer London Children’s Centre and has worked in the NHS in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services (CAMHS) and as part of an Arts Psychotherapies Service providing individual and group Mentalization Based Arts Therapy for adults with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder. She took her MA in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust.

Dr. Jeanne Magagna was formerly Head of Psychotherapy Services at Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist in Ellern Mede Centre for Eating Disorders in London. She trained at the Tavistock Clinic in London as a Child and Adolescent, Family and Adult Psychotherapist. She was vice-president and joint coordinator of training, at the Centro Studi Martha Harris, Florence and she has also taught in Rome, Venice, Naples and many other cities in Italy, as well as in North and South America, Australia. She is currently a teacher on the Tavistock course on suicide and self-harm. She works in private practice, as a child, adult and family psychotherapist and consults, publishes and speaks in London and internationally. Her publications include editing Universals of Psychoanalysis, by Henri Rey, London: Free Association Books, 1994, jointly editing Psychotherapy with Families with Sally Box, Beta Copley, Erika Mosutaki, 1989, she wrote a chapter in Crisis at Adolescence: object relations psychotherapy with the family, edited by Sally Box, is co-editor of Intimate Transformations: Babies with their Families, 2005, editor of The Silent Child: Communication without Words (Karnac, 2012, collaborator in Observacion du Bebes (Observation of Babies) (Mexico City, Mexico: PAIDOS, 2012), editor of Creativity and Psychotic States, by Murray Jackson, (Routledge:2015) and contributor to Bebegi Anlamak (Infant Observation) (Istanbul: Baglam Press: 2016).