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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 40
a brief synthesis of some of these ideas below. Elements of this include contributions
from the field of infant observation, the importance of the debate between André Green
and Daniel Stern, the contributions of writers on clinical discussion, and the work of
Donald Meltzer.
Infant Observation
One training, research and practice tradition that has a range of parallels with the current
study is that of the Infant Observation training method of Esther Bick (1964) and
subsequent developments of it. Hollway (2004) has played a significant role in these
latter developments which will be elaborated below. I share much of Hollway’s (2004)
argument about the limitations of contemporary research paradigms, even and perhaps
particularly those of qualitative research, in her discussion of the infant observation
model. This is a fundamental part of my own thesis.
Bick developed her method of infant observation, initially in the training of child
psychotherapists at the Tavistock Clinic from 1948, and it was extended to become a
pre-clinical requirement in the training of psychoanalysts at the Institute of
Psychoanalysis from 1960 (Bick, 1964). Hollway (2004) notes the suggestion that this
was partly in order to develop in child psychotherapists and psychoanalysts the capacity
that Bion (1970) came to articulate later as negative capability, introduced on Page 30,
above. Bick’s system is more than a particular type of observation process, not least
because it includes the observer having an ongoing membership of and participation in a
seminar group designed to facilitate a certain kind of discussion of the products of the
observation. Over recent years, the practice discipline of infant observation has grown
to have its own journal, Infant Observation, founded in 1997, and to encompass