Baby Observation

I’ll admit, I was struck by a seminar my Italian colleagues gave on direct baby observation, and by the experience they’d already built up back in the 1990s.

Melanie Klein was the first analyst to establish a technique of child psychoanalysis, and it’s thanks to her theories that the idea of observing a child from the earliest stages of development took shape. As a method, Baby Observation was born in England in 1948 at the Tavistock Clinic in London, and after several years of experimentation, it was introduced as a training course by the British Psychoanalytical Institute in 1964, thanks to the child analyst Esther Bick, a student of Melanie Klein’s.

Baby Observation is a training process that lets a clinician come into contact with the development of the psyche from birth itself. Immersing themselves in deep contact with the newborn’s preverbal world, observed within their relationship to their surroundings, and living through an emotional experience useful for handling the primitive, infantile states of mind that analysts encounter not only in children but in adult patients too, the observer gains extraordinarily valuable knowledge — first-hand. This unparalleled experience develops the observer’s capacity to stay in a state of emotional listening, attentive to every message arriving through different registers and channels, and lets them immerse themselves in the transmodal structure of the earliest communications — becoming, in every sense, a receptor for what lives in that environment, finding themselves identified with the baby, feeling what the baby feels.

Baby observation has its own setting too: it takes place once a week, for one hour, at an appointed day and time, for two years. It’s best to start as early as possible, right after mother and baby leave the hospital. During that hour, the observer stays in contact with the family context. Their task is to remain in the observational field without intervening in the interaction between mother and baby. During the sessions, the observer takes no notes at all, so as not to interrupt the observation or “fall out” of the moment. Everything — observations, thoughts, ideas — is written down afterward and later discussed in a group, with a supervisor.

It really is an extraordinary experience for anyone working in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic therapy.