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FOR ABOUT twenty years I have been watching infants in my clinic at the Paddington Green Children's Hospital, and in a large number of cases I have recorded in minute detail the way infants behave in a given situation which is easily staged within the ordinary clinic routine. I hope gradually to gather together and present the many matters of practical and theoretical interest that can be gleaned from such work, but in this paper I wish to confine myself to describing the set situation and indicating the extent to which it can be used as an instrument of research. Incidentally I cite the case of an infant of seven months who developed and emerged out of an attack of asthma while under observation, a matter of considerable interest in psychosomatics.
I want, as far as possible, to describe the setting of the observations, and what it is that has become so familiar to me: that which I call the ‘Set Situation’, the situation into which every baby comes who is brought to my clinic for consultation.
In my clinic, mothers and their children wait in the passage outside the fairly large room in which I work, and the exit of one mother and child is the signal for the entrance of another. A large room is chosen because so much can be seen and done in the time that it takes the mother and her child to reach me from the door at the opposite end of the room. By the time the mother has reached me I have made a contact with her and probably with the child by my facial expression, and I have had a chance to remember the case if it is not a new patient.
If it is an infant, I ask the mother to sit opposite me with the angle of the table coming between me and her. She sits down with the baby on her knee. As a routine, I place a right-angled shining tongue-depressor at the edge