Observational research methods

In recent decades there has been much growth in learning and teaching practices that make use of psychoanalytic observational methods. The first of these was “psychoanalytic infant observation”, initially developed as a practice at the Tavistock Clinic by Esther Bick in 1949. A two-year experience of weekly infant observation has been the prerequisite of clinical training in psychoanalytic child and adolescent psychotherapy in Britain since then. ¹ It has also been adopted in a one-year form as part of the training of psychoanalysts in the British Psychoanalytical Society, and in other professional trainings, notably in social work (Le Riche & Tanner, 1998; Tanner, 1999; Trowell & Miles, 1991). “Infant observation” has in fact become an international movement in its own right, with regular conferences organized by two different quasi-federations, one largely Anglophone and the other largely Francophone. The International Journal of Infant Observation is now in its twenty-first year of publication, and several book-length volumes of papers on this field of work have been published (Briggs, 2002; Hingley-Jones, Parkinson, & Allain, 2017; Miller, Rustin, Rustin, & Shuttleworth, 1989; Reid, 1997; Sternberg, 2005; Thomson-Salo, 2014).