ABSTRACT
Infant observation seminars were introduced at the Tavistock Clinic, London, in 1948 when the course in Child Psychotherapy began; in 1960 they were added to the curriculum of the London Institute of Psycho-Analysis, as their help to students in developing a psychoanalytical model of the mind was established. Melanie Klein had written in her paper, "On Observing the Behaviour of Young Infants": The new-born infant suffers from persecutory anxiety aroused by the process of birth and by the loss of the intra-uterine situation. From the first feeding experience onwards, losing and regaining the loved object become an essential part of infantile life. This chapter discusses separation anxiety and the conflict when identification with an infant's oedipal desires results in separating the parents and generates guilt. One can also imagine the modified thoughts—Bion's alpha elements—moving in the opposite direction—from the analytic mind/breast to the mind of the mother and finally returned to the mind of the baby.
