ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 explores forms of psychoanalysis that reinstall developmentalism. This problem demands careful scrutiny, so as not to undo critical projects. Here, Child as method prompts attention to tropes and figurations of child and childhood (whether present or, significantly, absent) so enabling review of how they appear (or fail to appear) within various psychoanalytical models. The status of infant observation and its complex relationships with infancy research is discussed as a key arena for (re)formulation of developmentalist ideas, through which dominant normative assumptions, especially concerning culture, gender and race, also come to be played out. Even though references to child and childhood and development are surprisingly few within psychoanalytic accounts, the analysis highlights a proliferation of modes of child that are appealed to, including not only biographical and chronological children but also metaphorical and retrospectively constructed children. However, even as some developmentalist claims have come to be modified, developmentalism is identified as remaining present in some psychoanalytic accounts; only now the unit of development has shifted from child to adult, albeit adult as metaphorical child within institutions of psychoanalytic training. Child as method therefore invites a critical evaluation of the ethico-politics and configured temporalities in both psychoanalytic explanation and practice.
