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My work in the community is carried out following the model of the Tavistock Clinic and its proposed Work Discussion groups that were developed during the 70s by Martha Harris based upon an applications of Esther Bick’s Infant Observation Method for use in institutional areas.
The objective to articulate and apply the methodology of infant observation in daycare and educational settings helps diverse professionals who are not connected with psychoanalysis approach an understanding of the unconscious processes involved in all tasks performed with young children, adolescents and families. To this end, we implemented Special Time, introduced by Gianna Williams (1999), for educators working in an institution in Puebla, Mexico, called JUCONI. JUCONI, “Junto con los niños,” is dedicated to assisting boys, girls and adolescents living in the street whose ages range from 7 to 18. Their life stories are plagued with abandonment, abuse and violence.
The framing of Special Time involves a 50-minute weekly meeting between the child and the same educator in a room equipped for this purpose for a period of one year. It is space for expression and free play for the child and includes the availability of a personal game box. Educators are asked to listen and to pay full attention to the child so as to become mentally available to contain the anxieties and phantasies of the child.
Subsequently, in a second instance, or in a second space one could say, we work with the group of professionals who have contact with the child in the institution, focusing upon the observation material written and contributed by the educator who is in charge of Special Time. This group work then examines the child’s activities in relation to the educator, which is to say, it examines the transferential processes that took place. In this way, we detect separation and loss anxieties, and try to understand the child’s experience with regard to the primary objects in his/her internal world, their phantasies, anx