Cathy Urwin
Child psychotherapist who shed new light on infant development.
Guardian obituary, June 17, 2012
Cathy Urwin, who has died aged 62 of cancer, was a leading child psychotherapist and developmental psychologist. From 1989 to 2006 she worked at the Emanuel Miller centre, in Tower Hamlets, east London, where she alleviated the difficulties of children and their families, remaining emotionally engaged without losing her calm objectivity. She kept in view the cultural context of parents’ experiences, for example of deprivation and trauma connected to dislocation from their countries of origin, exploring how these could affect their children’s developmental difficulties.
In a research project with Wendy Hollway and Ann Phoenix, starting in 2006, Cathy pioneered the use of the infant observation method in a study of the identity changes that women undergo when they become mothers for the first time. This psychoanalytically informed method complemented the insights derived from interviewing by providing information about unarticulated experience – embodied, emotional, relational and practical – that often goes unremarked but is central as a new baby is brought into existing relationships and ways of doing things, changing them profoundly. This affords an improved understanding of the complex and profound psychological changes involved in first time motherhood.
With Ben Bradley and Jane Selby, Cathy set up a series of experiments, the most recent in 2009, filming babies’ interactions when sitting in buggies, facing each other within toe-touching distance. The resulting footage challenged the idea that babies’ sociability is confined to, and depends on, parents and caretaker adults. It suggests instead that babies in their first year of life, before semantic communication, do relate to their peers and not just in pairs but in groups. It demonstrates that the basis of relationality does not lie simply in adult-infant interaction, which is assumed by most current developmental approaches.
In her work, Cathy brought together infancy research, child psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Concerned at the increasing volume of referrals of preschool children with autistic features to her clinic, she drew on the research of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who emphasised language development as an aspect of a broad process concerned with enabling emotional experience to become thought. In often quite brief interventions, in which she took an active role in children’s play, she helped children and their parents deal with traumatic aspects of the family’s experience. She then wrote jargon-free case analyses in which, as well as respecting the uniqueness of each child’s inner world and outer circumstances, she demonstrated commonalities and showed the usefulness of psychoanalysis in differentiating between kinds of autism.
In 2006, Cathy took up a post at the Tavistock Centre, in London, as consultant child and adolescent psychotherapist and research fellow. She was a committed teacher there, training cohorts of students in the methods of infant observation and supervising research projects. She continued to develop her insights into childhood autism, drawing on her clinical experience to show how psychotherapeutic interventions could support children and their families. In a field where psychoanalytic thinking is sometimes dismissed as irrelevant, Cathy worked tirelessly to demonstrate ways in which children’s individual personalities could flourish and parents could be helped towards a constructive understanding of their child’s experience. For example, bringing together her understanding of language development with cases presenting with autistic features, through active play with young children and discussion with their families, she unearthed traumatic parental experiences which had not been discussed with their children, in an attempt protect them, but which had been transmitted wordlessly to them, impairing their ability to contain anxiety and inhibiting the development of a sense of self and continuity in the children. By bringing together open talk with the parents and games aimed at finding a ‘self’ in the children, she was able to create a rapid improvement in language development and a marked diminution of autistic features. Her aim was always to bring together findings from research with moment-to-moment experience from the clinical consulting room.
The eldest daughter of a Church of England vicar, Prebendary Roger Urwin, and Poppy Urwin, a physiotherapist, Cathy grew up in south-west England. After attending the Maynard school, Exeter, she studied psychology at Bedford College, University of London, and did an MA in developmental psychology at Nottingham University with John and Elizabeth Newson, whose work led to a new emphasis on parents’ contributions to child development, for example through the effect of treating the baby as competent.
Her PhD at Cambridge was on the development of communication and language in blind babies, using naturalistic settings unlike the dominant “scientific” observation methods that aped laboratory settings. During the 1970s, she worked with Professor Jerome Bruner at Oxford University on language acquisition. Having worked for four years as a lecturer in developmental psychology at Warwick University, she won a senior research fellowship at the Childcare and Development Group, Cambridge University, which culminated in a book, edited with J Hood Williams, of the selected papers of Margaret Lowenfeld, the pioneering child psychotherapist who worked with children affected by war trauma.
In 1978 Cathy took part in a critical developmental psychology group organised around the journal Ideology and Consciousness which led to collaboration with four others (Julian Henriques, Wendy Hollway, Couze Venn and Valerie Walkerdine) on the book Changing the Subject: Psychology, Social Regulation and Subjectivity [1984]. Her contribution showed language acquisition not as an innate tendency but, reworking the theories of Jacques Lacan, how it is part of the development of the self, in relationships with others characterized by a typical mixture of conflict, pleasure, desire and power. During the 1980s, supported by the Lowenfeld fellowship and a grant from Cambridge, she trained as a child psychotherapist at the Tavistock Centre. In 2000 she qualified as an adult psychotherapist there. In 2011 she was invited as an international fellow to the Centre for Advanced Study, Norwegian Academy of Sciences. She had recently completed, with Janine Sternberg, an edited volume entitled Infant Observation and Research: Emotional Processes in Everyday Lives.
Cathy went running on a weekly basis and loved to go on walking holidays, where her physical fitness and stamina ensured she could carry on when most would have ground to a halt. She was also a gifted landscape painter. She is survived by her sister, Pauline, her nieces, Kate and Amy, and her nephew, Tom.
Wendy Hollway and Valerie Walkerdine
Catherine Urwin, psychotherapist and researcher, born 13 September 1949; died 2 June 2012