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Chapter Two Part One – Literature review - Page 42
of (and hence may destroy) core aspects and values of the clinical practice of
psychoanalysis. Hollway (2001) in her review of the work of Sandler et al suggests a
way forward, by means of an allied process (that is, one allied to psychoanalysis, the
Tavistock-Bick model of Infant Observation described above). Although this allied
process has psychoanalytic characteristics (Hollway elects to highlight frequency and
regularity, particularly of the observation relationship), it also has scientific
characteristics, in particular the privileging of direct, objective and conscious experience
of an infant (albeit that these are complemented by indirect, subjective and unconscious
perspectives in the related discussion seminar).
My own position in relation to these challenges is that my research is in a tradition that I
would argue is more on Green’s side of the paradigm clash. This is so in relation to the
subject of the investigation, the training method of the seminar, which proceeds by a
psychoanalytic process (not least by accomplishing a form of experience of negative
capability through the role assigned to the presenter in the seminar under study), and
which privileges the study of the infant in the adult patient. This is true in relation to the
nature of the investigatory method and methodology of the study (which together
privilege a psychoanalytic attitude towards the data of the study). This is also the case in
relation to the conceptual framework of the investigatory methodology and its products,
which derive from the use ways of knowing available in clinical psychoanalytic work,
and from the psychoanalytic stance in relation to the data (which neatly mirrors the
capacity the training under study seeks to develop, and the capacity modelled by the
staff in the training in relation to the clinical data brought by the presenter and the
experiential data present in the discussion seminar). The integrating focus of the infant
in the adult is thus present at a series of levels in the research and its subject matter (in
the clinical work that is the subject of the seminar group’s consideration, in the