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One of the most daunting aspects of undertaking a psychoanalytic psychotherapy training can be the prospect of the ‘infant observation’ component. I remember wondering what it was exactly that I was meant to be ‘observing’ and why. As the mother of three children, I was more than aware of the judgment placed on mothers and how just about everybody had an opinion on what constituted a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mother. I was concerned that somehow this judgment process had been formalised through an ‘infant observation’, whereby the unconscious worlds of the mother and infant would be determined by the observer in order to diagnose the infant as ‘secure’ or ‘insecure’ through the lens of attachment theory.
Those initial tensions stayed with me throughout my infant observation as I observed the mother and baby (and sometimes father) who kindly allowed me to visit them every week for 2 years. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have shared this time with the family in those precious, vulnerable early months and years, especially as the family I got to know was from a different culture to mine. In addition, for the initial stage of the baby's life, I was often not just with the Mother and baby but in a group with several other mothers and their babies. The mothers would fill the air with laughter and curiosity as they watched their babies (who ranged in age from 3 months to 2 years old) interact with each other. It would be a moment of respite from the sometimes hard work of reverie that required them to try and disentangle their own feelings from those of their babies and make sense of what the babies needed.
It is exactly this interaction between babies that Bradley, Selby and Stapleton so joyously celebrate in their new book, ‘Babies in Groups: Expanding Imaginations’. This extremely accessible book is based on decades of research in infant development, culminating in a fascinating and rigorous research project observing babies being together without adults, initially in tri