Preface

When Esther Bick introduced her method of infant-mother observation into the training of child psycho-therapists at the inception of the course at the Tavistock Clinic in 1948 no one foresaw the immense impact and influence it was to accrue over the years. Gradually it became the keystone of that training in observation and thought about children as the groundwork upon which therapeutic techniques needed to be founded. It spread to the Institute of Psycho-analysis and then to training systems in France, Italy, Norway, Spain, Australia, and South and North America as the former students of the Tavistock Clinic carried it abroad. The emphasis that Mrs Bick placed on detailed observation and reporting to the discussion group of each student's weekly observations helped to keep interpretive impulses at bay so that the language of observation naturally remained unburdened by jargon, but rather tended towards the poetic.

But restraint in the interpretation of mechanisms and meanings was not intended to restrain intuitive recognition of emotional participation and identificatory processes, in keeping with the growing use of the observation of counter-transference in psycho-analytical technique. A talented display of this method is to be found in Dr Piontelli's accounts of Martin and Jack.

Perhaps even more surprising than the rapid establishment of this method as a training technique was the gradual emergence of its research value. I can well remember, not without some shame, my own early scepticism about Mrs Bick's enthusiasm in this direction. I did not realise how the serial observations would allow for the emergence of patterns which were invisible among the plethora of events in the single observations, especially the earliest ones. But slowly the insights gained from this method began to make compelling links with the data from psycho-analytic therapy with psychotic children. Certainly it played a part in the work reported in Explorations in Autism and in the more rece