Ways of Seeing*: 1. Anne Alvarez

It is a great pleasure to welcome everyone here today to this conference on “Ways of Seeing”. We are particularly grateful to Lynn Barnett for coming up from Devon to show these excerpts from her film, thus providing us with an opportunity to compare and contrast our emotions, perceptions, and our conceptual theorizing about what we feel we have seen. Someone once complained, after attending her first Association of Child Pschotherapists Study Weekend, that she had expected there to be a lot more “study”. Well, today I hope she will not be disappointed, and I hope we shall all learn something new, not only about babies and their parents, but about each other's theories. Our four speakers, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Juliet Hopkins, James Astor, and Rose Edgecumbe do represent four different schools of thought, Kleinian, Independent, Jungian, and Contemporary Freudian. Whether they will choose to fit into the moulds we have cast for them is another matter. Let the day decide! The idea for this conference arose from a general wish that the members of this association together with interested others, could have an opportunity to explore their theoretical differences by taking a look at how theory influences perception. My private nightmare in recent weeks is that modern developments in each of the four schools of thought may render us incapable of detecting any differences at all! I am confident, however, that my nightmare will not be realized, and that we shall have a real dialogue and a fruitful one.

For the benefit of those who may not know this, I will just say a word about the practice of infant observation, which, as Margot Waddell has recently indicated, derives from a particular way of seeing. This method of detailed observation of infants and their families, on a once-weekly basis in their own homes, was initiated by Esther Bick at the Tavistock Clinic in 1949. It was begun at the Institute of Psychoanalysis from 1960, and subsequently in other psychotherap