ABSTRACT
The capacity to notice what is happening in and around the client is among the first set of skills that a trainee school based psychotherapy practitioner develops in the initial stages of training, and these skills are developed and honed throughout a career. The therapist needs to be imaginatively capacious, that is, develop an ability to hold many different observed elements in mind. The capacity for observation involves seeing events, for instance play activities, or hearing things, such as being able to listen carefully to noise or the intonation of the spoken word as it resonates with emotion is an essential part of empathy and understanding. Finally, the practitioner needs to be able to engage through their sense of smell, or notice changes in temperature or atmosphere as these physical elements combine with the other events of an observation. Taken together, we describe all of these aspects of observation under the rubric of “noticing”. This chapter looks at how the skills of noticing are developed and refined during the training of new practitioners, especially through the process of infant and child observations. Furthermore, observation being an essential ingredient of training, the field of infant and child observation has slowly extended its role in terms of research, not only as a useful 20tool for corroborating known developmental theories such as attachment patterns, but also as a means to generating new hypotheses about child development (Miller, Rustin, Rustin, & Shuttleworth, 1989; Rustin, 1994). Although the anchor for the enquiry is the established technique of mother–infant psychoanalytic observation pioneered by Esther Bick (1964), it is argued in this chapter that the original observation methodology needs to be adapted and extended to be better fitted to the plural and complex demands that face counsellors and psychotherapists working in schools.
