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The collection, Infant Observation and Research: Emotional Processes in Everyday Lives, that Cathy and I worked on editing together was published just as she was faced with the diagnosis of cancer (Urwin & Sternberg, 2012). She had felt unwell for the previous few months, but in the time leading up to that I had never heard her complain of anything. Rather she had shouldered all the burdens of editing a book in an enthusiastic and deeply committed way. She was able to see a copy of the book while very weak and knowing she was dying. She declared it ‘rather good’: this remains a source of great pleasure to me.
The book in some way represents the coming together of many of Cathy's professional interests. Cathy had worked for many years as an academic social scientist before training to be a child and adolescent psychotherapist; making links between her past and current working lives enabled her to see the ways in which the practice of infant observation - what we came to call the infant observation methodology - could be used in social science research. Cathy had been involved in a major project in Tower Hamlets in which infant observation was used alongside other methodologies, such as interviewing. In thinking about a wider use of infant observation as a research methodology, we emphasized the value of generalizing from the particular, seeing the impact of the experience on the observer/researcher as an important source of data.
This emphasis was foregrounded again in the ‘Babies-in-Groups Project’ that Cathy carried out with two other researchers, Ben Bradley and Jane Selby. This was within a laboratory setting, but influenced by naturalistic infant observation. As well as demonstrating that it is essential to recognize the infant as a