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This book details the unfolding development over their first two years of five infants, four of whom were considered potentially ‘at risk’. Briggs uses the technique of infant observation pioneered by Bick but he attempts to bring an additional quantifiable aspect by rating and tabulating his descriptions.
The accounts are painfully poignant. We read of Hashmat, the ninth child born into a Bengali family where his mother is pregnant again by the time he is 3 months old; of Michael, unexpected and unwanted, a ‘punishment’, born to a single mother of two, whose own mother had died when she was 3. We read of Hesther, the second child of a mother whose infant brother had died a cot death, the father out of work and preoccupied with the death of his father; and of Samantha, the second child of a family recently arrived in the UK and lacking support, and preoccupied with the worrying quasi-autistic withdrawal of their elder son.
With the degree of deprivation of the families he observes, Briggs suffers even more than usual the painful tension between detachment and intervention (which might help mother and baby but, in doing so, will affect what he hopes to observe). So he intervenes when one-year-old Hashmat and his elder brothers lean dangerously out of the tower block window. Michael's mother simply stuffs her baby in Briggs' arms and leaves the house; he writes interestingly of his own countertransference feelings such as an impulse to throw the unwanted Michael across the room. Irritatingly he often presents his own conclusion followed only then by his evidence for it, rather than allowing the reader to have their own thoughts about the material.
It is a short book (at under 300 pages including many tables) and Briggs could have made fuller use of his wealth of data. The five observations allow for a comparison of the differing developments of the babies in response to their particular family circumstances, providing evidence for what is common and what is distin