ABSTRACT
The connections between the methods of Young Child Observation, and indeed Infant Observation, and the clinical practice of child analysis and child psychotherapy are subtle and complex. The approach to the close observation of infants and young children from a psychoanalytic perspective of interest in unconscious mental and emotional life, and to the phenomena of transference and countertransference that give crucial access to this, was pioneered in the first instance by psychoanalysts such as Freud with Little Hans, Anna Freud, Susan Isaacs, Melanie Klein, and Donald Winnicott, as an aspect of their close attention to their child patients. Observation is particularly central and indispensable to clinical practice in the psychoanalytic treatment of children, through the method which Klein first described as “play therapy” and which has subsequently become central to the practice of psychoanalytic child psychotherapy.
