Three Years of Infant Observation with Mrs. Bick

Some years ago Mrs. Harris* contacted me to lead an infant observation seminar for social workers. Although I had observed one infant before, I felt inadequately equipped for the task and so I asked Mrs. Bick for supervision of my observation of a young baby. For those of you who do not know of Mrs. Bick, she was an adult and child psychoanalyst, born in Poland. Some fifty years ago she did a Phd. on infant development with Charlotte Bühler in Vienna. In order to study some twins, she was required to use a stop-watch to count the number of social reponses the twins made towards each other. At this time she decided that to understand the development of the human personality, without being dictated to by all the current theories of personality development, she should study the ordinary life of a baby in his family environment. In 1948, when she began teaching at the Tavistock Clinic, at the request of Dr. John Bowlby, she initiated the training method of having psychotherapy trainees visit a family and observe the development of an infant from birth to two years.

I began the observations of the infant and his family when Mrs. Bick was 79. This was her last formal teaching experience. Mrs. Bick had written three articles on the importance of-infant observation and she was intensely interested in pursuing the contribution of infant observation to psychoanalytic work. She was also very well-known by former students as having extremely exacting standards for the observations. Mrs. Bick was eager to have every little detail of the observation, in order that she could experience with Proustian clarity the relationship between the baby and his family. I was aware that she was facing the end of her life as the baby began his. It seemed to me that her own in-touchness with the anxieties of dying enabled her to bring alive with utmost sensitivity the baby's fears of dissolution. Mrs. Bick had such an enthusiasm for infant observation that somehow my individual superv