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no possibility whatever of their having seen adults in sexual intimacy’. This, Anna
Freud argued, ‘would throw doubt on some of our analytic reconstructions of
early witnessing of a primal scene’, and could suggest a more innate, preformed,
instinctual attitude (p. 160).
Clearly inspired by how much psychoanalytic understanding could be learned
from such direct observations of early infancy, Anna Freud worked with colleagues
in Ohio to introduce infant observation for medical students at the Western
Reserve University. After revisions of the curriculum led to all fi rst-year medical
students doing regular observations of a mother and child from pregnancy through
to nursery age, Anna Freud visited the campus in 1952 to give a paper entitled
‘Some remarks on infant observation’ (1953b). In this paper—written explicitly
for a non-psychoanalytic audience—she gave her clearest statement of the values
of psychoanalytically informed infant observation.
In her talk, Anna Freud recognized how disorientating it can be to watch an infant
in the fi rst days and weeks of life, and spoke of the importance of students being
given some ‘guidance’ as to what they are watching and how to see. She describes
very powerfully the young infant’s dependence and need for care, as well as the
powerful states of ‘painful tension’ and relief that govern the young infant’s early
life. She describes the interaction between constitution and environmental factors;
the importance of the attachment to the mother; the various aspects of development,
both cognitive and emotional; and the importance of early infantile sexual activity.
She speaks also of the privilege of watching these earliest stages of development:
To witness this birth of the mind out of the body will be valued by most students as an
impressive experience and one calculated to impart to them for their whole future medical
career a wholesome respect for the strength of the human mind, for the signifi cance and the
complexity of its functioning, and for the close interaction of the mind with the needs and
functions of the human body. (p. 574)
Like other psychoanalysts of her generation, Anna Freud made only passing reference
to the emotional impact of observation on the observer, and did not see the experi-
ence of processing these ‘countertransference’ reactions as the primary value of infant
observation, in the way that many child and adult psychoanalytic trainings, including
the Anna Freud Centre, would do today (see Sternberg, 2005, p. 85). For Anna Freud,
infant observation was primarily a means to understand more about the workings of
the mind at the earliest stages of life, and in particular to gain an appreciation of normal
development against which degrees of clinical disturbance could be assessed.
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7
When she came to write of her ‘Ideal Psychoanalytic Institute’ (Freud, 1966), she therefore included
the direct observation of children in the curriculum, but suggested it should come towards the end
of training, so that it gave the candidate an opportunity to ‘check’ in development what he or she
had learnt from analytic reconstructions in the consulting room. This was not actually the case in
the training of the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic (Anna Freud Centre), where a two-year parent
and infant observation was introduced in 1962, starting during the pre-clinical year. The Hampstead
Training also included the requirement for a toddler and a nursery observation, as Anna Freud felt it
was equally important to have an understanding of normal development at these later stages of early
childhood, e.g. to appreciate the shift from primary to secondary process thinking and the emergence of
the superego.
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As an approach to
research, Anna Freud was a staunch defender of the value
of direct observation of infants, and strongly supported Ernst Kris in the early
1950s, when he set up a longitudinal study of child development at the Yale Child
Studies Center. Her own research at the Hampstead Child-Therapy Clinic included
many such observational studies, including that of blind children and longitudinal
research on the children of the Hampstead War Nurseries and child survivors of the
Holocaust (A. Freud and Dann, 1951). In this respect Anna Freud’s work could be
seen as a precursor of the infant observation research of the ‘baby-watchers’ such as
Stern (1985), Murray (1988) and Brazelton and Tronick (1980).
Conclusion: Observation versus psychoanalysis?
Anna Freud’s positive view of the contribution to psychoanalysis made by the
direct observation of children has been criticized by some, such as Green (2000),
who has seen such a development as a ‘behaviouristic, biologistic, adaptational
and reductionistic psychologization of psychoanalysis, coming from American ego
psychology’ (Steiner, 2000a, p. 6). In particular, Green argues that the Freudian
concept of Nachträglichkeit, or ‘deferred action’, means that no event experienced
by the infant in the ‘here and now’ can be of psychoanalytic signifi cance, because of
the way in which meaning is attributed retrospectively.
Perhaps surprisingly, given Anna Freud’s associations with precisely this
ego-psychological development within psychoanalysis that Green criticizes, she
would probably have been rather sympathetic to his point of view. In her published
papers, Anna Freud acknowledged time and time again the immense advantages
of the analytic setting, in which the processes of transference and interpretation
lead to increasingly deeper levels of material being brought to the surface in a way
that direct observation rarely has access to (1953a, p. 287). Moreover, in the years
after the war, analyses of children such as ‘Martin’, described above, who had been
infants in the War Nurseries, led Anna Freud to appreciate how many aspects of
early infantile experience could not have been appreciated by direct observations,
even of the most careful and psychoanalytic type.
Speaking at the IPA Congress in 1957, Anna Freud looked back at her attitude
expressed a few years earlier, and explained,
When I took part in the Stockbridge Symposium, I came fresh from several years of work
in a children’s institution which offered opportunities for long-term observations of children
on an almost twenty-four hour basis (i.e. the War Nurseries). Naturally, I was impressed by
the additions to our insight, especially with regard to the processes of maturation, which
such an opportunity provides … To the present discussion, on the other hand, I come from
several years’ work in a children’s clinic which gives me the possibility to follow the analytic
treatment of large numbers of children’s cases of all ages and descriptions. I am, therefore,
under the fresh impression of the overwhelming advantage of the analytic method itself over
all other methods of observation and, as analysts tend to be, inclined to look down on all other
ways and means of gaining access to the child’s mind. (pp. 96–7)
Foreshadowing many of the reservations that Green was to voice over 40 years
later, Anna Freud, at the Ernst Kris Memorial Meeting later that year, gave the
example of childhood trauma. Analytic treatment of those who had been victims