You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Most mothers of a new-born baby would say there is a little person in there. Systematic observation of that little person with their mother developed in the last century to become a rigorous method and training tool (Gesell, 1940; Middlemore, 1941; Shirley, 1933). Initially, this occurred in connection with the child psychotherapy training at the Tavistock Clinic in the 1940s, when Esther Bick standardised a method of weekly observation of baby and mother in the home setting. This was intended purely for training purposes, and as such it was adopted by the British Psychoanalytic Society as well as the Tavistock Clinic Child Psychotherapy training (Bick, 1964). However, Bick later moved towards a research application of the method (Bick, 1968).
This book is edited by Cathy Urwin, who sadly died in 2012, the year of publication, and Janine Sternberg. It includes 16 short papers that show the interesting convergence of training experience with research opportunity. No mother-infant couple is the same as any other, so that every single couple offers the possibility of new understanding. In effect two new people emerge from the mother-infant couple, each in their own way. Observation over one or two years (or more) shows how each couple accomplishes that feat.
Could this type of observation be the most human of all forms of research? As Wendy Hollway remarks in her Foreword: ‘Writers in the tradition seem to share a jargon-free writing style’, and in a way what else would one expect of the inspirational moments they record. But apart from this, the method is not an objective process; it is an intuitive one. As Wilfred Bion once said of anxiety, you cannot see it, or smell it or touch it, you can only know intuitively that someone is anxious. This method is comparable to the clinical method of psychoanalysis itself in using that empathic awareness; and this is why the method is such a good training exercise. Moreover, infant observation develops an awareness of the empathic