psychoanalysis and infancy
Description text for Psychoanalysis and Infancy
This paper describes two events illustrating transference phenomena occurring in a longitudinal research study using laboratory-based video recording and home-based observations to explore social relationships between same-aged babies. One event concerned the mothers’ attachment to the researcher and to the project, with consequent reactions to the project’s ending. The other concerned two mothers’ responses to a video recording of the... more
Probably a course essay on the Theory course in the training as a Child Psychotherapist. Tavistock Centre, 1983.
On an initial reading, Klein’s and Winnicott’s writing about “the sense of loneliness”(Klein, 1963) or “the capacity to be alone”(Winnicott, 1958), it is unclear whether a similar or different stages of development are being referred too. This paper examines these notions and concludes that the “sense of loneliness” and “ the capacity to be alone” refer to different developmental stages in the separation individuation process and arise from... more
Cathy Urwin was at the Cambridge University Child Care and Devlopment Group when she wrote and presented this
This chapter examines the relation between developmental psychology, as a body of knowledge, assumptions and forms of practice, and psychoanalysis, situating it historically starting with the Child Study Movement initiated by Charles Darwin. The differing populations of concern are often split into ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’, but are also based on different assumptions about methodology and scientific truth (interpretive methods and the... more
Setting her critique briefly in the context of traditions of infant research that tend to bypass emotions in accounts of infant cognition and development, resulting in a pervasive split in psychology between emotion and thinking, Urwin introduces psychoanalytic accounts of infancy, especially Melanie Klein and Wilfred Bion, which takes a distinctive approach to the relation between emotion and thought. She aims to demonstrate the... more
This chapter illustrates the potential of surprise through presenting material from a research study aiming to understand how becoming a mother for the first time may affect a woman’s sense of who she is. Exploring countertransference experiences was a necessary prerequisite to understanding the meaning of the mothers’ communications. Their value for research was fourfold. Firstly, processing the group’s emotional reactions prompted... more
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