ABSTRACT
The capacity to observe is part of our humanity. From the start, babies use their eyes, their ears, touching, holding, smelling, and tasting to explore and to make sense of their environment. But for most individuals, except for the blind, the eyes take the lead because of the complexity and subtlety of the social setting into which babies are born. In 1941, Donald Winnicott wrote his paper on "The Observation of Infants in a Set Situation". In this article, he explains how for the last twenty years he had used as part of his routine clinical assessment exactly how a baby seated on its mother's knee would respond to a bright, shiny spatula on the table in front of it. Infant and young child observation spread rapidly across the psychoanalytic psychotherapy trainings, pointing up the importance of skilled seminar leaders to handle the intense emotional reactions.
