From being a student to becoming an infant observation young seminar leader with nursery teachers*

ABSTRACT This paper describes a newly qualified child psychotherapist’s first experience of teaching, using an application of Esther Bick’s infant observation method, with nursery school teachers observing in their own workplace. The seminar leader describes learning form the experience of running the seminar with supervisory support. The teacher group’s increasing ability to observe the young children and the ‘child in their mind’ is linked with developments in the new teacher’s thinking about the task of teaching and the importance of noting her own emotional reaction. She is also acutely aware of her own recent learning as an observer herself. The teaching involves listening with feeling and encouraging the observers to develop by presenting their observations for reflection, encouraging more detail and reflection as time goes by. The new seminar leader’s anxiety about emulating her own observation teachers, and her growing understanding of the powerful forces of unconscious projection which can be utilised to understand more of the young child’s experience, enhances the observer- teachers’ capacity to notice and reflect on what they see.