Infant Observation

Infant Observation, in the form developed at the Tavistock Clinic by Esther Bick in the 1940s and refined in subsequent decades, is one of the most effective experiential educations available to a clinician. It is not an academic exercise in developmental psychology; it is a disciplined, weekly encounter with the emotional life of a baby in the presence of its primary caregiver, over a sustained period of time, and with a small seminar group in which the raw experience is discussed and thought about.

Each participant in the programme makes a weekly one-hour observation of the same baby, in the same family, from early infancy through the second birthday. The observer takes no notes during the observation; detailed written observations are produced from memory afterwards and presented to the seminar in rotation. The role of the observer is to pay attention, to resist the urge to help or to interpret, and to become a disciplined receiver of the full emotional atmosphere of mother-and-baby life.

What participants encounter, often with considerable surprise, is the sheer intensity of primitive emotional states — the annihilation anxieties that Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion described, the primitive defences against unbearable experience, the delicate work of the containing parent, the moments when containment fails and what happens then. The observer lives through these experiences not as a theoretical matter but as an immediate emotional reality, and the seminar group becomes an indispensable container for what would otherwise be overwhelming material.

The clinical payoff is substantial. Participants report that they recognise in adult patients the same primitive states they met for the first time in the infant observation; that they become more tolerant of silence, confusion and not-knowing in their own clinical work; and that they develop a vocabulary for affective experience that they did not previously have. The programme is widely considered an ideal preparation for any long-term psychoanalytic training.

The programme runs for two years. Seminars are held in person weekly, in groups of four to six, led by an experienced Council-appointed seminar leader. Participants submit an extended observational account at the end of each year. The IPAS Certificate in Infant Observation is awarded on completion.