Poetic Encounters in Psychoanalytic Infant Observation
Carolyn Coburn
Australasian Confederation of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapies Conference
‘I am Large, I Contain Multitudes;’ from Walt Whitman Song of Myself
Should we welcome the experience of an infant observer’s artistic, sensory and dream-like associations into the frame of an infant observation more warmly? And do we leave enough space for infants and their families to enter our daydreams and imaginations?
These thoughts arise as I ponder the method of infant observation as an infant observation group seminar leader over the past twenty years. I begin with reflections on the remarkable Mrs Esther Bick and then consider additional frameworks for thinking about the method of infant observation, which has largely remained unchanged since Mrs Bick conceived the practice over 80 years ago.
Next I draw from infant observations to illustrate poetic encounters in psychoanalytic infant observation. To highlight the notion that transformational possibilities sit alongside the mother and her infant through the presence of an infant observer. The infant observer’s presence becomes particularly potent when sensory experiences are invited into the infant observation group process. As I show here, we can enhance and capture relational nuance from the very beginning of an infant observation by approaching the content and evocations of the observation as if the group is reading a poem, listening to a song, or hearing a dream.
In drawing upon these reflections, we can conceptualise the first ‘Song of Myself, Our First Poem,’ as originating in a story, one that begins with the infant imagined by all those who come to discover the poetry of a new life emerging.
What remains vital in Mrs Bick's method of infant observation is her focus on the emotionality of the observer as a means by which to gain a clearer view of the infant as outlined in tributes to Mrs Bick collected in Surviving Space (2018). Mrs Bick’s method of infant observation was pioneering. It enables the observer to potentially develop a ‘particular state of mind’ allowing for closer and more authentic observation.
In his forward to Surviving Space Donald Meltzer, whom Mrs Bick supervised, locates her importance in the field of psychoanalysis, ‘firmly beside Melanie Klein and the best in Freud and Bion:’
Although she had been well trained as a psychologist in scientific method, she had very little use for evidence and linear, logical thought or causality. Her thought was unequivocally intuitive, lateral, and poetic.
Never a theoretician, she was, rather, a naturalist, observing and reporting phenomena and enabling others to see, to receive the vibrations, hear the music, and smell the scent of love and hate in its primitive forms. (2018, pp.vxiii)
Joan Symington also offers an evocative tribute to Mrs Bick:
During the war she worked in a nursery in Manchester. She noted the agitation and disturbed behaviour of the children. She found that if she gave them empty tins and a few pebbles to play with, the children spent the time putting the pebbles into and out of the tins and their behaviour settled down. In other words, she was always well aware of problems of containment and its lack. (2018, pp.105)
In this small, but hugely significant intervention in the lives of the young children, we come to appreciate Mrs Bick’s intuitive knowledge of the centrality of containment in the life of a child.
Mrs Bick’s infant observation group method also brings the stories of other infants and their families to life in the group. In these we can also hear how much each infant observation group process is:
Large, and Contains Multitudes.
When things go well in an infant observation, the observer becomes absorbed in the poignancy of their observed infant’s life within the ordinary day-to-day life of a family. The observation group also gradually develops a collective mind to hold a space for each observer, each infant, and their family: the multidimensional task of the infant observation group process.
When supervising infant observation groups, I often hear group members mention what they call ‘the rules.’ These appear to me almost as uncanny ghostly whispers within the group. Do these whispers compel an observer to conduct an observation in which they believe they must follow ‘rules’ rather than explore the experience they, the infant, the mother, and the family might discover, and create together within the supervisory group process. Perhaps the infant observation group whispers might also parallel the experience of parents who feel compelled to follow the so-called rules of good parenting which obscures their intuition.
Ronald Britton’s book Belief and Imagination draws on Bion’s ideas of what constitutes a sense of reality.
He proposes that a sense of reality comes from our combining data derived from different sensory modalities, such as sight, hearing, touch and so on, to give us common sense. In a similar way, he suggests that a sense of truth comes from our combining different emotional views of the same object. (1998 pp.34)
Britton underlines the centrality and enormous contribution poetry has made to his understanding of the root of inspiration, the imagination, ‘Poetry has, for me, long been more than a pleasure; it is a source of understanding’ (1998 pp.2).
In drawing on these theoretical frameworks and ideas, I wonder how we might create room for the infant observation process to be turned around in our minds. To be seen from different emotional viewpoints, utilizing our poetic and dream senses so we might move closer to a sense of reality and truth about the observation for all participants involved.
To illustrate, I offer a moment when I sensed I was witnessing reality and truth as it emerged for an infant and his family in a video sent to me – much to my delight – by a mother, who had completed an infant observation seminar group with me some years earlier, before her children were born.
The video begins with the mother holding her newborn baby boy, as she introduces him to her toddler daughter for the first time. We see the toddler become transfixed with the baby. The mother waits patiently, for things to unfold. I, too, sit transfixed watching the video and imagine I can see the toddler slowly taking in the new baby with all her artistic senses. It is a breath-holding moment…what will happen next? The toddler finally announces she will sing a song to the baby and she bursts into a beautiful song, created in the moment, which is all about her baby brother. Incredibly, the baby’s face lights up and his mouth and eyes open wide. It looks to me as though the baby is listening intensely, taking in the sight, the smell and the sounds, and slowly joining up all these newfound senses with what he has only previously heard and experienced when he was growing inside his mother. And now, after his birth, and his emergence into the outside, he is delighted to find and connect these senses together with the person now animatedly sitting beside him, his sister, who is singing a song to him, which is all about him.
Perhaps the video captures the experience of pebbles landing safely in containers as sensory links arrive for the baby and for the toddler in both listening to the song, and singing the song. The mother’s warm presence facilitates this, and her containment allows things to unfold gradually for the baby and for the toddler. We witness a playful relationship of togetherness evolving in this moment. When these moments or ‘senses’ are all collected, they form the transformational experience of knowing relational truth. I think we can hear in what’s been captured in the video that transformation is not possible without an available mind: a mother or father, or perhaps a little sister, who might spontaneously burst into a song. Transformation happens when there is a place for the pebbles to safely land.
Christopher Bollas’s 1978 paper ‘The transformational object’ argues our experience of our first relationship lies at the heart of transformation:
I think we can isolate the trace in the adult of the earliest experience of the object: the experience of an object that transforms the subject’s internal and external world. I have called this first object the transformational object, since I want to identify it with the object as process, thus linking the first object with the infant’s experience of it.
The aesthetic space allows for a creative enactment of the search for this transformational object relation. (republished 2011 pp.11)
When we embark on an infant observation we move into a nonverbal world, a pre-symbolic world, where a philosophy of aesthetics and the illusory nature of nuance saturates our experience as an observer. I wonder, could this world be enhanced by shifting our thinking towards poetry and music? Ways in which our words, descriptions, and conceptions of infant observations could be constructed and delivered like poems or songs to the unfolding of an infant’s life, knowing the observation will develop its own rhythm and cadence over time. Neville Symington often described his bemusement in seminars when someone used the phrase ‘clinical material.’ Could we call it poetry?
One of Australia’s other living national treasures, the song writer Paul Kelly (2023) defines poetry simply as ‘intense, memorable speech’. He has introduced poetry to school children with the enticing description:
There's murder, sex, revenge — stuff you can really get stuck into. Good poetry is something that stays with you forever; it becomes like a companion or something that you carry around with you.
Kelly’s interpretation of what constitutes poetry applies to anyone who has experienced the intense work and preoccupation with primitive anxieties involved in a year-long weekly infant observation. The experience of an infant observation lives forever in the mind of the observer. I like to imagine the observer lives on forever in the mind of the infant and their family, perhaps analogous to the memory of the words and music whenever we hear Kelly’s song Leaps and Bounds (1986):
I'm high on the hill
Looking over the bridge
To the M.C.G.
And way up on high
The clock on the silo
Says eleven degrees
I go leaps and bounds
I remember
I remember everything
We’re transported in leaps and bounds, and backwards and forwards in time, whenever we remember that one year of our lives devoted to the task of being an infant observer.
When I bring her work to mind, I imagine Mrs Bick did not specify the type of container in which nursery children could collect their pebbles. Nor did she rule in (or out) the type of pebbles the children collected. She believed the object and process were everything, as Christopher Bollas (1979) underscores in his writings. Perhaps our evidence, our pebbles, can also be collected through our dreams and our poetic sensibilities during an infant observation.
My thoughts about poetry and its relationship to psychoanalysis is also influenced by the Melbourne psychoanalytic psychotherapist and poet Wayne Featherstone, alongside two other colleagues, Allan Shafer, and Anne Jeffs. Together we have been fortunate to savour Wayne’s poetry in our small writing group where our ideas have mingled and coalesced. As Wayne writes in his doctoral theses:
A poem not only transforms the world by rendering it in words but it also creates a world, arguably through the creation of form: that is, by shaping the world in the subject’s image. Concurrently and recursively, the subject is also constituted by those very means. How, then, are we to think about the consequences of this new subject taking shape, whether in a poem or in the consulting room? (Featherstone 2015 pp. 193)
This writing group has helped me think about how poetry and our associated dreaming impact and operate as liminal forces on the threshold of the experience of infant observation group members and on the infants observed and their families. It prompts me to ask the question ‘Who might be dreaming whose dreams?’ In Donald Meltzer’s (1981) paper, ‘The Kleinian expansion of Freud’s metapsychology,’ he writes:
Dreaming could not be viewed merely as a process to maintain sleep; dreams had to be seen as pictures of dream life that were going on all the time, awake or asleep, dream life is a place, a life-space, perhaps the place where meaning was generated.
Thomas Ogden’s thoughts on the analyst’s reverie and daydreams are viewed as vital aspects in what he considers ‘the jointly created unconscious life of the analytic pair—the analytic third’ (2004 pp. 167).
Giuseppe Civitarese and Antonino Ferro discuss the relief we can feel when reading Bion’s idea of ‘the analyst as someone who has to discover the artist in himself and who should not worry about being “non-scientific”.’ They note: ‘But we are artists, Bion suggests, or, at least, we should have the courage to use our skills as artists— after all, don’t we all dream at night and during the day? Don’t we all compose the poetry of the mind?’ (2015 pp. 30)
With these theoretical ideas in mind, I include a gripping encounter from an infant observation that captures a poetic and ‘jointly created unconscious life’ moment. This moment arose out of an observer’s daydreaming. It emerged from a spontaneous suggestion I made some years ago to a group of infant observers after I invited them to try an experiment by dictating and recording their thoughts, experiences, and observations immediately after their infant observation. Instead of the usual method of presenting written process notes in supervision, they could then re-play their recording to the group without editing.
When we heard the first observer’s recording played back we found ourselves listening to a spellbinding encounter. It was as if we were listening to someone in a dream-like free associative state as the images tumbled out ‘live’ from the voice recording. As we listened, it became apparent the observations were uncensored enough to engage the group’s senses and imaginative capacities. I imagined the observer as a beachcomber on the shore collecting items of interest, though not yet sure what to keep, discard or take home for display.
As background to this observation, the baby boy was usually observed in his nursery bundled in beautifully matching outfits with picture-perfect linen and bedding within an orderly and pristine home. After enjoying a cup of tea in a fine gold-rimmed china cup and saucer, delivered by the mother before she left the room, the observer fell into a dreamy dozing reverie beside the sleeping baby in the warm darkness. Sometime later, as the observer struggled to stay awake, he began to imagine a snake had slithered in under the door and into the darkened room. The observer could not shift this image, remove it, or do anything about it. Still, he was curious. What might this apparition of a snake do, and where might it go? The observer knew there was no snake, but yet, there it was. He wondered if he should call out for the mother, and then whether he should tackle the snake to save the baby while risking his own life? Would the mother think the observer had brought the snake into the room and then how could he possibly explain the snake’s presence to the mother because there were no words for this experience?
I was impressed by the observer’s capacity to embrace and follow his thoughts and daydreams as they emerged and slithered around the corridors of his mind and associated reveries, wherever they went. We could hear in the observer’s voice how much he was immersed in exploring the snake image rather than fleeing from it or censoring the images as they emerged. I was also aware the observer was seated next to the sleeping baby, who was no doubt wrestling with his fledgling abilities as Winnicott (1956) describes, to ‘Go on being’. The baby was no longer inside his mother and was now tasked with keeping himself regulated and staying alive on the outside, while asleep, and having to manage the huge demands he now faced in navigating his own psychic and somatic life.
Robert Hinshelwood describes terror as ‘the experience of being attacked with malevolent intent’ (especially from inside, by something malevolent there) (1994, pp.33-34). Listening to the dream-like recording, I speculated with the group about the snake, as an almost otherworldly uncontrollable entity and considered how the observer might be experiencing the infant’s terror as Hinshelwood (1994) imagined. Could the baby sense a snake-like feeling had crept in beside him, was even part of him, inside him, and then coming out of him, and away from him and out of his control? I also wondered if the observer, in a highly attuned state of reverie and deep dream-like associative musings, was dreaming the baby’s somatic experience? Had the baby’s sensory dream elements slid into the observer, or was the observer offering up his capacity to dream for the baby? Was the baby beginning to know he could put his terror inside a containing other? One who could imagine and experience his feelings, and yet stay calmly seated beside him, collecting the fragments of their jointly created unconscious life in the shared space of the darkened nursery.
We can hear how this first observer took a risk by accepting the invitation to record and present their raw, unedited observations in the group. None of us, including the observer, were sure about what we might hear before he pressed the play-button. The safety of the group had been established, and he leaned into it. Then we all tuned in to find out what was there… like a dreamer finding the courage to tell a dream, while not yet fully awake to its meaning.
I had wondered at the start of the observation, how the baby might begin to join up his frightening, messy and unexpected internal sensory world experiences, in the context of the appearance of an unruffled outside world, as these two worlds seemed so juxtaposed. I imagine the observer’s daydreaming capacity in this observation offers us a glimpse into what the experience of a joining, containing skin might feel like for the baby. Perhaps the observer’s daydreaming might have offered a place, a space, where the infant’s psyche and soma could begin their process of meeting up with each other, to start on their uneasy but essential dialogue and lifelong journey of engaging in playful and poetic storytelling together. Might this offer a potent antidote to our snake-like terrors?
Through this we can understand how the infant’s psyche and soma, mind and body, manage to sort out their inter-relationship in infancy, which will then become the basis for an integrated adult life. And along with the possibility of imagining another’s mind and body connection with their own, it forms the lifelong intersubjective equation:
I am Large, I contain Multitudes.
My paper concludes with a brief vignette from Sarah Anderson’s infant observation thesis. In it the observer painstakingly traces a symptom of serious eczema on the infant’s skin as it took hold in the first six months of the observation. This observation left me feeling more intrigued than ever – after supervising both the observation and the thesis – about the extent to which the observer’s ability for reflective thinking can act as a catalyst for the infant and their family’s integrative capacities.
The observation began when the mother responded to a request to participate in an infant observation, knowing the father of her second child would be absent for some time after the baby was born. When she began, the observer recognised the mother and father, little sister, and even the bewildered looking family dog, expressed mixed feelings about the new baby. The observer became aware that all the family members conveyed a sense of being left outside of something. In this context, the symptom of eczema emerged after a family holiday, and then resolved, following this particular observation:
Observation at six months old;
The mother opens the door. She looks dazed and shocked. Her hair is very messy. She's holding the baby wrapped in a towel and the baby has a big shock of hair sticking up. I'm startled too now, and I ask if I have woken her up. The mother says, ‘No, No, I was giving her a bath. Look at her!!’ Mother looks aghast and ashamed. She turns the baby towards me, and I see that the baby's face is blotchy and bright red and inflamed with eczema. And her forehead is scabbed over. The baby looks at me with her big eyes. And she looks quite calm and happy. Her expression seems as if she is entirely unaware of what she looks like, as if nobody has told her. I feel truly shocked. Mother looks stunned. Mother says, ‘I'm sick too! It's been so bad.’ The little sister adds, ‘and I have a sore throat!’ They told me the father is also sick, as the family dog looks on longingly. It was heartbreaking to see the baby’s face covered in sores and there is something poignant about her seemingly oblivious to it. The mother says, ‘My poor baby.’ She sounds apologetic and strokes the baby’s stomach and says, ‘Thank God it's not all over her body. I have to wrap her really tight but then if I wrap her too much it's really hot, so it's really hard to know, ….the holiday was great…But ….!’ The baby had returned after a family holiday, with full blown eczema. (2012 pp. 38-39)
This observation connects us to the genius conception of Mrs Bick’s method. It illustrates how an observer managed to collect the baby, the mother, the sibling, the father, and the family dog’s experiences. To my mind, the observer’s keenly felt observations and presence during the observations were felt deeply by the family, akin to having been gently wrapped ‘not too tightly and not too loosely.’ This offers the family a safe place in the observer’s mind, and we see the parallel sense of ‘in dwelling’ arrive for the infant. Winnicott termed ‘the dwelling of the psyche within the body as a process to be achieved’ (2016 pp.139). The observer absorbed the mother’s horror about what had happened to her baby’s skin, after the holiday break. We hear the family’s sense of being outside of something quelled when the observations resume and the infant’s eczema subsides.
Anderson’s thesis demonstrates how an observer may operate like Mrs Bick’s (1968) conception of a second skin containing function for the mother and the family, one this mother may have known intuitively she needed before her baby was born. The observer’s presence enabled the mother, the baby, and the family to find their way back to feeling safely inside.
At the conclusion of each infant observation, I am often left pondering the question, what might the first year of a baby’s life be like without the presence of an observer and the observation group all holding the infant and their family in mind for a year? Often, we only begin to understand why families might have agreed to an observation towards the end of the observation process. We must reach the end before we know what the story is about. The story also changes because we are there.
Mrs Bick and her genius method of infant observation fill us with gratitude. Our gratitude extends to the infants and their families who help us all to appreciate poetic encounters in infant observation.
References
Anderson, Sarah. Theoretical understandings of the formation and resolution of a symptom in a psychoanalytic infant observation. Monash University Theses, 2012.
Bick, E. (1968). The Experience of the Skin in Early Object-Relations Int. J. Psychoanalysis., (49):484-486
Bollas, Christopher. (1978) The transformational object, in Bollas, Christopher. The Christopher Bollas Reader, Taylor & Francis Group, 2011.
Briggs, Andrew. Surviving Space: Papers on Infant Observation, Taylor & Francis, 2018.
Britton, Ronald. Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis, Taylor & Francis Group, 1998.
Civitarese, Giuseppe, and Antonino Ferro. The Analytic Field and Its Transformations, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.
Featherstone, Wayne. The aesthetic domain of psychoanalysis : psychoanalysis, lyric poetry, and neuropsychoanalysis. University of South Australia. School of Communication, International Studies and Languages. 2015.
Hinshelwood, Robert. Clinical Klein, London, Free Association Books, 1994.
Kelly, Paul. 1986 Leaps and Bounds lyrics © Wb Music Corp., Sony/atv Music Publishing (Australia) Pty Lim, Paul Kelly Music
Meltzer, Donald. Forward in Briggs, Andrew. Surviving Space: Papers on Infant Observation, Taylor & Francis, 2018.
Meltzer, Donald. The Kleinian expansion of Freudian metapsychology. International Journal Of Psychoanalysis 1981;62(Pt 2):177-85.
Ogden, T.H. The Analytic Third: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory and Technique Psychoanalytic Quarterly, LXXIII, 2004.
Symington, Joan. Mrs Bick and infant observation, in Briggs, Andrew. Surviving Space: Papers on Infant Observation, Taylor & Francis, 2018.
Winnicott, D.W. Dwelling of Psyche in Body in Part IV From Instinct Theory to Ego Theory, in The Collected Works of D. W. Winnicott: Volume 11, Human Nature and The Piggle, Lesley Caldwell (ed.) and Helen Taylor Robinson (ed.) Oxford University Press, 2016
Winnicott, D.W. Primary maternal preoccupation (1956) in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers, Routledge, 1975 pp.300-305.
Biography
Carolyn Coburn is a member of the CPPAA and NSWIPP and works in full time private practice as a child, adolescent and adult psychoanalytic psychotherapist. She has a Master’s degree in Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy. Carolyn is a long-standing lecturer and supervisor with Mindful The University of Melbourne’s Child Psychiatry Training Program, Monash University MMHSC in Child Psychotherapy Studies and the Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of Australia. Carolyn has led seminars in infant observation for over twenty years for CPPAA candidates, child psychiatry trainees and ANZSJA candidates. She was a founding and long-standing member of The Royal Children’s Hospital Child Psychotherapy Department in Melbourne and also worked for many years as a supervisor for The Family Mediation Centre and maternal and child health outreach nurses. Carolyn has twice been President of the Child Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Association of Australia.