The Role of infant Observation in the Training of Students

Some years ago observation during a Well-Baby Clinic session was an option chosen by a minority of students in the first or second year of their training in child analysis. These students would sit in during consultations of selected cases and discuss their impressions at the end of a Clinic session with Dr Stross the paediatrician in charge of the Clinic, and a child psychotherapist, either Mrs I. Freud or myself being present during all sessions. In this way students saw a variety of mother/infant couples and heard different developmental problems discussed. They were expected to read our records and were encouraged, for example, to compare a mother's relationship with a first child, as noted in our files, with her unfolding relationship to a second child seen during the student's attendance with us. In this way the student learned to distinguish, let us say, between normal anxiety in an inexperienced mother and pathological anxiety in an over-anxious mother.

We were never entirely satisfied with this provision for our students as they could only gain an impression of the complexity of the relationship between a mother and her child and were unable to follow a particular infant's development for any length of time.

The next step in our involvement with students' training came about during a period when a group of Clinic staff under Mr W. E. Freud were meeting regularly to draft the Baby Profile (W. E. Freud, 1967 and 1971). One or two students were attached to the group that undertook this work and, following the final draft, one student asked to have the opportunity to test it out on an infant. The student and I constructed two Profiles on a baby who was in regular attendance at the Well-Baby Clinic. To widen the student's knowledge of the child the mother willingly agreed to let her observe Peter at home once a week. These Profiles—one completed on data collected up to the time the child was six months old, the second on data collected between six a