Current Problems of Mother-Child Observation in America

Anna Freud (1965) traced a historical profile of the relationships between psychoanalysts and direct observation of children; relationships which have at the same time been inevitable but never very easy. This new field of research, opened in the last twenty years, belongs to that pre-verbal area which is not yet symbolic and related to the environment, in which according to Anna Freud “direct observation is becoming alternative with respect to analytical exploration”.

This has led some schools of infant research to adopt a polemically non-psychoanalytic position. On the contrary, Daniel Stern's interest in developing a comparison should be considered as a defense of the traditional psychoanalytic presence in this field. As he sees it, observing the skill the child has can only help define the bonds of a child's subjective experience; but if our attention is focused on the latter, observation does not eliminate the need to proceed by inference, and once again we need knowledge derived from clinical work (D. Stern, 1985).

The great blossoming of experimental programs regarding mother-child interaction has peculiar characteristics at the moment. It may only partially be seen as a development of earlier efforts of psychoanalytic