Learning from infant and young child observation. Enriching development of future psychoanalytic psychotherapists and other professionals

Psychoanalytic Infant Observation, Esther Bick’s wonderful idea, was designed, originally, as readers of this Journal will know, to support the learning and development of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapists and, later of Psychoanalysts, starting with its introduction to the Tavistock Clinic in 1948. Bick, herself a brilliant observer of nonverbal behaviour and its possible meaning, wanted to encourage candidates for training in work with children, adolescents or adults to notice how much is always going on. She wanted them imaginatively to get the feel of another’s experience by quiet, focused ‘looking’. Getting the feel of the baby. In the paper, ‘Notes on Infant Observation,’ which Bick published in 1964 she argues that infant observation is an important preparation for analytic training. She explained how she felt that the observation of babies ‘ ...would help the students to conceive vividly the infantile experience of their child patients, so that when, for example, they started the treatment of a two-and-a-half-year-old child they would get the feel of the baby that he was and from which he is not so far removed’ (1964, 558). Observers were encouraged to recall and write down as much detail of what happened as they could remember. She wanted them to have a sense of what things were like for the baby in that observation and to make links with earlier observations which might or might not recur in subsequent presentations of the same baby and family. She looked for patterns over time and she wanted detail; lots of detail. Seeking meaning in what is noticed, imagined, constructed and repeated. Stephen Groarke in this Journal, (Groarke, 2011) describes the infant observation seminar, where observers take turns to present a detailed observation report as a gathering of ‘ ... an irreducible combination of the seen and the imagined’, where sense is made in a reconstruction worked out between observer, seminar leader and the other observers in the group. More understanding, formulation and reformulation takes place when the observer presents again, and the seminar leader and members continue to work on it. ‘When it works well the method engages the conscious and unconscious understanding of students and trainees... ’ (Groarke, 2011). This preparation for later clinical work sensitises the observers to what is unspoken and enriching as it is noticed, remembered and thought about, consciously, and unconsciously. The process is repeated with four or five weeks’ interval between presentations to the seminar for further discussion. In this way there is a ‘reaching for meaning’ over time in an interface between the observational setting and the classroom, according to Groarke (2011). Paying attention to unnoticed but remembered detail. A number of my colleagues, at the Tavistock, have described the usefulness of introducing short observation exercises to students enrolled on a number psychoanalytically-informed ‘mental health’