Reviews

Infant observation at the heart of training

Janine Sternberg

London: Karnac, 2005

267 pp., £22.50

A CAMHS colleague recently asked: ‘So what exactly is the point of baby observation?’ As everything is under scrutiny these days, it seemed a pertinent question. To agree, as many child psychotherapists might, with Janine Sternberg's statement that ‘the experience of infant observation was a life-changing one for me’, does not necessarily confer it with unquestionable validity. The query challenged my assumptions and set me thinking about the subject. The arrival of Janine Sternberg's book a few days later was fortuitous.

Baby observation has been the foundation of child psychotherapy training since 1948 when Esther Bick initiated the idea of weekly observations of a baby with its mother in its own home. She famously wrote about the aims of observation in her 1964 paper ‘Notes on infant observation in psycho-analytic training’. Here she suggested that baby observation had many functions. For example, it helped students to understand baby development; it highlighted the importance of non-verbal communication; cast light on the emergence of family dynamics within the domestic setting; and prepared students for the task of conceiving of the early experiences of their school-age patients. Nevertheless, not all psychoanalytic thinkers and practitioners have embraced the idea of baby observation with enthusiasm (André Green for one). Sternberg points out that it is important to make a distinction between naturalistic baby observation and infant research, which also focuses on observation, but where the emphasis is on what can be directly seen and noted by an observer, and that the two are sometimes confused. She writes: ‘It is my contention that naturalistic infant observation uses both that which can be seen and that which can only be deduced or inferred, largely through awareness of the observer's countertransference, to enhance the practitioner's clinical skills’ (p. 9).

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