Early interaction, internalisation and attachment; the contributions of psychoanalytic infant observation.

Psychoanalytic infant observation, as developed in the Tavistock Clinic, London, UK, is a distinctive methodology, based on naturalistic observation in the home. It focuses particularly on the qualities of mental and emotional development in the mother –infant relationship and on the infant’s internalisation of experiences in relationships with the family. Making use of detailed descriptive observational accounts and the application of relevant aspects of psychoanalytic theory, this methodology was developed for training clinicians; however it has the potential to provide understanding of relationships in early infancy that supplements other approaches to knowledge in this area. This approach involves closely observed elucidation of early parent-infant relatedness and the subsequent development of infants internalisations.

This symposium contrasts three approaches to applying infant observation as a method of researching infancy. The first paper presents QUALITATIVE research involving a non-clinical but vulnerable group of 6 mothers and babies from diverse ethnic backgrounds, observed for one year. It focuses on areas where intense anxiety, due to traumatic, intergenerational or other factors, identifiably affected contact between mother and baby, leading the babies to take responsibility for managing anxiety themselves and to develop idiosyncratic behavioural patterns interfering with negotiating intimacy and distance. The relative resolution or persistence of these difficulties demonstrated at 1 year is discussed.

The second paper, also based on research of a small cohort of 5 vulnerable mothers-infants, observed for two years, discusses methods used to generate grounded theoretical categories to facilitate comparisons of emotionality in the mother-infant relationships, characterised by intense anxieties and limited containment. Through systematic qualitative tracking of patterns of relatedness within each observation and across the group, continuities are identified which illustrate how mothers and infants continue to relate to and negotiate these anxieties during the second year.

The third paper discusses an empirical application of concepts generated from infant observation, through developing a rating scale from the grounded categories described in the second paper, and applying this to a set situation of mother-infant interactions at 6 months. The study aimed to assess, firstly, whether this rating scale would be reliable and secondly (a) the link between maternal adult attachment representation, attachment processes in the parental couple and maternal containment and (b) in longitudinal study the relationship between the qualities of relatedness at 6 months and later attachment patterns in infants. Discussion of the findings includes the good initial reliability of the scale and the meaning of significant correlations between the scale and various measures of attachment.