‘Linking emotion and thinking in infant development.’
‘Linking emotion and thinking in infant development.’
Urwin, C. (1989) ‘Linking emotion and thinking in infant development.’ Chapter 11 in A. Slater and G.Brenmer, (eds.) Infant Development, pp. 273 - 300. Hove and London: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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 possibilities for productive dialogue between developmental psychology and psychoanalysis, pointing out how experimental developmental research is consistent with Klein’s account of the depressive position, although the latter, importantly ‘is premised not on a determining cognitive structure but on an emotional shift … as the infant experiences ambivalence for the first time’ (p280). Two case examples from child psychotherapy, replete with illustrations from drawings, provide theoretical illumination and also illustrate working in the transference and how transformative the therapist’s use of countertransference experiences is in establishing helpful communications with these children: receiving the full weight of the children’s projections and acknowledging the anxieties in a form that the children could comprehend before they could begin to take them on board as part of themselves’ (p.298).