Editorial

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I begin this editorial with an obituary

Isca Salzberger Wittenberg, Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist, 4^th March 1924, to 23^rd December, 2023

 

Isca Wittenberg, died aged 100, at the end of December 2023. She was the oldest living child psychotherapist, with a distinguished career as clinician, teacher and supervisor, as well as a writer. She made several excellent contributions to this Journal. In addition to her teaching in the UK, at the Tavistock Clinic and beyond, she taught frequently in Italy, Austria, Germany and Norway, and was invited several times to Australia and to South Africa). She was always interested in infant observation when she began clinical training in the 1950s and was herself a member of one of Mrs Bick’s earliest infant observation seminars. She taught observation students and taught and supervised child psychotherapy trainees for very many years. She was always keenly interested in education, and she became the second organising tutor of the Tavistock course developed by Roland and Martha Harris, then called Counselling Aspects in Education and later re-named Emotional Factors in Teaching and Learning. She worked with the whole group of students for the first part of each evening, introducing them to group dynamics, and, in particular, to their group response to facing new beginnings and endings. She wrote a book linked to the course and published in 1987 with two colleagues, Elsie Osborne, a senior Educational Psychologist, and Gianna Henry (now Gianna Williams), a senior Child and Adolescent Psychotherapist. Thinking about beginnings, and teaching infant observation went very well together; she loved to think about both. She was keenly aware of how students and colleagues avoided thinking about both beginning and ending anything, which she took to be a universal trait to be resisted. Accordingly, she initiated an ‘Endings Event’ for graduating Child Psychotherapists and other Tavistock trainees, having already been involved in the development of the Tavistock Introductory Event for new Tavistock clinical trainees. She gave her paper, ‘Beginnings: the family, the observer and the infant observation group’, at the first Tavistock Infant Observation Conference in 1996. The papers from the Conference were published in a book in 1997 and the Editor, Sue Reid, writes, in its Introduction:

Isca Wittenberg describes the experience of infant observation for the observer, seminar group and seminar leader, making links between the observer’s experience and those of the infant. She vividly describes the intense primitive anxieties aroused by ‘all’ beginnings, the beginning of life for the infant, the beginning of an observation for the observer, and of a new observation group for the seminar leader. She parallels the needs of new infants in their families, if they are to develop and learn about the world around them, with the needs of new observers if they are to learn about the emotional life of the infant.

This chapter clearly elucidates the concept of ‘containment’ as used in psychoanalytic thinking; Wittenberg underlines the essential requirement for the seminar leader to ‘hold’ the anxieties of seminar members if they in turn are to be able to tolerate and ‘contain’ the disturbances evoked in them at infantile levels, through such intimate contact with the primitive anxieties observed in a baby. (Reid, 1997)

Wittenberg was analysed by Wilfried Bion, and much of her thinking made use of his ideas as well as those of Melanie Klein and Esther Bick. She was acutely aware that any new experience, including birth, or beginning new developmental or other stages of life brings deep-seated anxiety, but that facing these anxieties is the road towards mental and emotional growth. She underlined the parallels between the fear and anxiety of starting a baby observation and the much more extreme fears of new parents, and their new-born infant. Bick’s description of the very primitive early anxieties of extremely young babies led Wittenberg to extrapolate that the beginning of any new experience would re-evoke such feelings in all of us. Bick’s awareness of parents’ anxieties led Wittenberg to emphasise what Bick taught; that new observers should take great care not to make new parents more anxious, and that observers needed to be both grateful and diplomatic at such a sensitive time and in the face of having the parents’ generous agreement that they could be present at such a delicate time in the life of the family.

Isca Wittenberg was always alert to the possibility of drawing parallels between new experiences for students or professionals and that of new parents and new babies, and that both needed containment in these highly charged and dramatic situations. She noted that new students were so often worried about how to find a baby to observe, and about whether they would either be acceptable, gain acceptance or be able to manage the task. She emphasised the need to allow plenty of time for new students to talk about starting, or about finding a family and a baby. It seems that in Norway, where she started an infant observation group, she got the staff members to role-play being observers and parents at their first meeting, which became, for a time, the norm at Tavistock introductory meetings as well.

Her work on endings rightly draws attention to similar, extreme anxieties evoked whether ending a course or an infant observation and that there are many parallels with getting older, ending work, and, finally, to facing the end of one’s life. She gave a great deal of thought to endings in two editions of her book, Experiencing Endings and Beginnings: From Birth to Old Age, first published it in 2013, and amended and edited in its second edition in 2022.

Wittenberg was a brilliant teacher, even if the directness of her eye contact or her one raised eyebrow caused alarm to some. She would often talk about feelings and dynamics which others could not or would not articulate, and, in this, she was aware of raising anxiety; her teaching nonetheless was also an inspiration. It seems entirely likely that, having had to flee from Germany with her Jewish family in the 1930s, she found courage and strength which did not leave her, to face frightening and painful situations, both external and internal.

Infant Observation: Volume 26, Issue 1. Spring, 2024

 

In this issue of Infant Observation, which has taken some time to come to fruition, it is a pleasure to have gathered a very wide range of articles. We continue to receive submissions which have emerged from the time of the Covid pandemic. This time we have an article submitted by Valerie Curen, in which she discusses online infant observation at that time. The author is writing about her second observation as a requirement at the start of her adult psychoanalytic training and compares being ‘behind the screen’, as she puts it using an online platform to observe the baby for quite a length of time, with her earlier experience of in-person observation in the family home.

We have also included articles which have used research. The first, from two authors from the Centro Studi Martha Harris in Florence, Fiorenzo Ranieri and Miriam Monticelli, entitled Seeking the origins of psychic and social withdrawal: warning signs in the observations of young children, arose from a research group reviewing infant observations undertaken at the Centro Studi in Florence. The authors hypothesised that early psychic withdrawal, as noticed in their review of selected infant and young child observations, might lead to a psychic retreat or ‘hikikomori’ (the Japanese concept of social withdrawal). The paper differentiates psychic and social withdrawal, in the group discussion of the original observations and those made later when the children were of latency age. Their observers were given permission to return to the family for the purposes of the research. The new observations were discussed in the group, as in any observation seminar discussion and a number of very interesting vignettes are included in which one can clearly see the continuity between the early and later material, in some of the young people. This research seems particularly relevant in the post-Covid world where many children and young people will not readily leave their homes, go to school or interact with other children. The authors make links with some of the states of withdrawal in the children’s parents or caregivers as well, suggesting that some of them might have been left to themselves for too long in a withdrawn state, by parents who also felt isolated and withdrawn themselves. They suggest that this seemed more likely to take place when fathers, many of whom were going out to work, had not intervened sufficiently early in ‘fusional’ mother-baby relationships. In other words, the mother-baby couple required an active a third party to help them be separate without too much anxiety. Ranieri and Monticello go on to suggest that the life of the mind in some of the children had not developed sufficiently, and that subsequent separation was experienced as catastrophic, such that catastrophic fusion could result.

A second paper from the Centro Studi Martha Harris in Florence is written by a group of trainee and qualified child psychotherapists (Scabia et al., 2024) who observed in several different Italian Neonatal Intensive Care Units observing the baby patients with their parents, often standing beside the parent, looking at the tiny babies through the incubator walls. Some of these observations took place during the pandemic when entry to Italian hospitals was highly restricted even to the NICU parents. There is much to think about in the described observations. The original paper was presented and discussed at the conference, Childhood and Adolescence in the contemporary world. Growth Paths and the psychoanalytic clinic, The Tavistock Model. The 30^th Birthday Celebration of the Centro Studi Martha Harris, which took place at Kent State University in Florence, in May 2023.

A third paper which includes a research element focuses on detailed analysis of the young child observation of a little boy, Patrick, starting nursery in Austria. The paper is written by two researchers also trained in psychoanalytic observation at the University of Vienna, Katherine Trunkenpolz and Christin Reisenhofer (2024). The observations describe how Patrick is ‘helped’ by two older children in the Nursery, one of whom is his 5-year-old brother, Simon. Simon’s companion is a peer in the nursery, Anna (5 years). The observational detail which is gathered alongside statistical analysis provides a comprehensive account of Patrick’s entry into the Nursery, his state of mind, and the responses of the older children, sometimes be helpful, but often splitting off and projecting their own infantile anxieties into him leaving them feeling bigger and less anxious and he, more isolated. Later, to the reader’s relief, Patrick begins to find his feet and to find his place, after quite a long time settling in when he was alone and isolated for quite a long time.

On the other side of the world, a paper submitted by a group of Australian psychologists includes research about Young Child Observation and, particularly about observers’ feelings of emotional discomfort. This article describes the introduction of young child observation to a group of trainee psychologists. The authors include a very frank discussion of the researched experience of the trainees, who are given an ‘allocated’ toddler to observe. The students complete a short, 7-week observation and write a self-reflective report of the experience. The reports are analysed by the researchers whose analysis reveals that Managing the Observer Role, Struggling for Belonging and Countertransference emerge as the main themes. The students describe their emotional discomfort which seems to lead, to an enriched personal and professional development in the students. One imagines that their teachers had been particularly sensitive and containing. The authors suggest that young child observation enriches the quality of this psychology training, which uses some psychoanalytic concept in its young child observation module, but in other ways is not at all a psychoanalytic training. The introduction of psychoanalytic seems to have been enriching through a particular focus on ‘emotional discomfort’ possibly or probably a strong identification between the student observers and their observed young children.

I want finally to draw readers’ attention to a beautifully constructed and painful paper written by a South African anthropologist, Fiona Ross, who became an anthropologist-observer of the observers and their observations in an Infant Observation seminar in South Africa. She became, in her words, a ‘second order witness’ to the observers’ significance in the lives of the families where they observed, also raising questions about ‘epistemological conflicts and productive intersections’ (Ross, 2024). The article inevitably includes the heritage left by Apartheid, colonialism, black economic disadvantage and white privilege. The content is balanced and a most thought-provoking and welcome addition to the Journal at a time when questions of diversity, difference and intersectionality have come to the fore within and outside the psychoanalytic frame for young child and infant observation.

Psychoanalytic infant and young child observation, intersectionality and the social matrix is the subject of the coming Tavistock Infant Observation Conference, which takes place in April 2024, and on which we hope to report in the next issue.

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13698036.2024.2353447)