JOURNAL OF SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE, VOL. 13, NO.

2, 1999

Links between infant observation and

1
re ective social work practice
STEPHEN BRIGGS

Summary This article explores the contribution made by infant observation procedures to social
work. It initially reviews three areas in which this contribution has been made: social work training;
understanding human interaction in areas of social work concern (such as parent child interaction,
child abuse and protection); and practice in speci c areas of social policy. This article then takes the
examination further to argue that the method of infant observation has a key contribution to make
to the underlying methods, attitudes and performance of social workers. This is explored through a
study of the links between infant observation and the two concepts of `the re ective practitioner and
`social space. These contributions to effective social work practice are in opposition to currently
dominant legalistic, procedural and competency-driven paradigms.

Introduction
Over the past decade there has emerged a literature which focuses on the application of infant
observation to social work practice, theory and training. The method of infant observation,
in which a baby is observed weekly, for one hour, in the family home for two years, was
developed initially for child psychotherapists by Esther Bick (Bick, 1964, 1986). In this article
I shall discuss how the method has been shown to have relevance to social work, and in particular how it has a relationship with re ective practice. I shall aim to show how infant observation has a particularly valuable role to play in contemporary social work as it struggles to reassert the important dimensions of thinking, ambiguity, uncertainty into professional practice.
Infant observation appears to have been used in three distinct ways to illuminate particular
practice, theory and training issues.
Firstly, ideas about the application of infant observation to social work concentrated on its
value to training social workers, and how it may be introduced into the curriculum of social
work courses (Trowell & Miles, 1991; Briggs, 1992; Wilson, 1992; LeRiche & Tanner,
1998). These discussions usually included a shortening of the rather monumental observational programme as it was initially conceived as taking place over two years. Alongside
considerations of duration were ideas in which the basic method could be applied to subjects
other than infants. Thus there have been discussions about observations focusing on
young children (Trowell & Miles, 1991) disabled children (Bridge, 1999), elderly people
(Mackenzie Smith, 1994) and institutional observation (Miles, 1999).
Correspondence to: Stephen Briggs, Adolescent Department, Tavistock Clinic, 120 Belsize Lane, London,
NW3 5BA.
ISSN 0265-0533 print/ISSN 1465-3885 online/99/020147 10

1999 GAPS

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Secondly, there developed a literature in which a participant-observational perspective was

taken to explore how infant observation may be used to discover the social world in areas of
social work concern; such as infants at risk (Briggs, 1997a), cross-cultural relationships
(Briggs, 1997b; Ellis, 1997), the process of ending relationships (Nursten, 1997).
Thirdly, there has emerged a literature concentrating on the application of observation to
practice experience. In this mode of writing about infant observation, observational approaches are taken by practitioners in role in order to address ways in which practitioners may
implement particular aspects of social policy. Thus Johns (1995) discusses work in a child protection context, Trowell (1999) the application of observation to assessments for court, and
Hindle and Easton (1999) assess the role of observation in supervised contact. Briggs (1995b)
assesses the way infant observation facilitates understanding of the clinical presentation of
eating-disordered adolescents, and risk assessment of families with young children (1995a).
Mack (1999) and Bridge (1999) emphasise that observation has an underpinning role in work
under Section 17 of the Children Act (1989) with vulnerable and disabled children.
The emergence of this third genre re ections on the use of infant observation in direct
professional practice suggests a complete cycle is in operation; students learn observation in
training and then this is applied to post-training professional practice. The examples referred
to above demonstrate that infant observation has a crucial part to play in the process of
professional work, and in the processes of thinking about and conceptualising this work.
Infant observation is seen here to provide the practitioner with the methodological capacity
to make sense of new or challenging aspects of the implementation of social policy. This
suggests that infant observation may have a potential for in uencing social work practice that
is greater than has so far been suggested.2 It is important therefore to consider some of the
features of infant observation that are being seen as increasingly useful to practice, and to
understand how these factors operate in order to enable the method to be applied more
widely. A discussion of this nature has to some extent already begun. Infant observation has
been linked with re ective practice (Tanner, 1999), and Briggs and Canham (1999) suggest
that the method of infant observation has a contribution to make to the task of reclaiming
social space (Hetherington et al., 1997). In making these links between infant observation and
re ective practice and reclaiming social space, the argument has been made that infant
observation has features and qualities which connect it with wider contemporary thinking and
concern, and that these ideas are in opposition to the dominant legalistic, procedural and
competency-driven paradigm for practice and training. I shall discuss both these connections.
Both re ective practice and social space are concepts which need some de nition and
elaboration in order to locate the central focus of my argument
Infant observation and the re ective practitioner
Re ective practice has become a rather loosely used term; it is de ned both by the work done
to develop the term e.g. by Schon (1983) and others and by the fact that it stands in
opposition to the mode of social work which is dominated by a legalistic, procedural
framework and sub-professional competence training framework (see for example Yelloly &
Henkel, 1995). Thus re ective social work practice has an identity which is de ned both
positively and negatively.
In its positive de nition, re ective practice includes the idea that the practitioner will
thoughtfully develop a stance in which s/he will re ect on her/his own practice, during
engagement in the process of practice and afterwards. Schon calls this re ection-in-action
and re ection-on-action respectively. A beginning practitioner will expect to depend greatly
on re ection-on-action, whilst the experienced practitioner will additionally be able to re ect

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during practice encounters. The capacity to re ect in action depends on what Casement
(1985) called an `internal supervisor and enables the practitioner to constantly adjust to
changing situations and new information.
Karen Tanner (1999), in an important paper, links re ective practice to Bion s (1962) idea
of reverie. There is a family resemblance she says, between these two, in that the re ective
practitioner needs to be receptive to and inwardly processing of information including
emotional information gained during practice encounters. Tanner demonstrates that there
are connections between re ective practice and infant observation at a number of levels. There
is an epistemological similarity between Bion s ideas about reverie and Schon s approach to
learning. In both, learning from experience is valued and there is a transformational possibility
through the processing of raw data to develop thoughts which in turn guide actions. At a practice level, experiences of observation undertaken by social work students have a generalising
effect through internalisation of the learning and through the development of an underpinning re ective capacity. Making use of Pietroni s (1998) term, `circuit breaker Tanner
suggests that this re ective capacity developed from observational experience has the capacity
to enable practitioners to keep the needs of clients in mind despite pressure from institutionally defensive structures and pressures to act in a driven rather than a thoughtful way.
Infant observation and social space
In her integration of observation and re ective practice, Tanner asserts that the bene t of an
internal re ective capacity has the potential for producing responses which are authentic
(1999, p. 30) rather than defensive social work practice. In that this suggests the potential for
a three-dimensional and thoughtful response to institutional, procedural pressures, the idea
comes close to that of reclaiming social space. Hetherington et al. (1997) emphasise the place
of professional judgement in a thoughtful `space . The social space is one in which the
professional is permitted and empowered to work in a climate in which psychological and
social factors are taken into account and then considered in a problem-solving activity. As the
social space is one in which the professional exercises judgement, it is a concept which is
based on the restoration of professional competence. As Cooper suggested (for example, in
Hetherington, 1998), the professional working within the social space is a master of law,
rather than being mastered by it; action is based on thought. Crucial to this concept is the
tension between the welfarist concern for those in need and the judicial requirement to
monitor and intervene when there are assessments of risk. In the social space, the exercise of
balance between `care and `control takes place in a legitimised social space. Briggs and
Canham (1999) suggest that infant observation has the capacity to develop the re ective skills
necessary for working in the social space, and that by taking an observational approach to
professional practice situations, the social worker equips himself or herself to work in this
way. In particular they discuss Johns (1995) work with a child protection case as illustrating
this process in action. Faced with a case with large number of referrals, a long history of
dif culties and a large professional network involved in the case, Johns was able to make
sense of the case through connecting the inner lack of protectedness in the mother with the
concerns in the legal domain about risk. Then she makes a similar connection between these
factors and the qualities in the relationship with herself. These formulations grow from her
taking an observational stance with the family, and making detailed observations of the way
they relate to each other and to her. In a similar vein, other writers suggest that an
observational approach enables engagement with speci c areas of social policy in a meaningful and purposeful way.
In the social space there is the capacity to consider uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity and

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multiple meaning. It is derived from the idea probably best linked with Bion s (1967) theory
of thinking of the development of mental space through reverie and thinking about
emotional experiences, deployed in a social eld. It also has a `family resemblance to
Britton s (1989, 1998) idea of the `third position or `triangular space , especially in the sense
that it functions through the bringing together of intellectual (legal, social policy, theoretical
understanding) with emotions and emotional experiences and permits a connectiveness
between these two arenas. I shall develop this connection later in the discussion.
It appears to me that `social space is a larger category (or `container ) than re ective
practice, and includes re ective practice within the task of addressing issues of (psycho)social
concern. It is inclusive also of recent developments in social policy, paying attention to legal
requirements. In this way, the notion of `re ective practice can be thought of as a constituent
part of the concept of `social space , and to be consistent with the kind of operation reverie,
thinking, connecting thought and feeling that are essential to both ideas.
Following the connections made between infant observation and re ective practice and
social space, it is important now to consider in more detail ways in which infant observation
can contribute to the development of a conception of social work which is re ective and
integrates `care and `control . Though the relationship between infant observation and
practice are complex, for the purposes of this discussion I shall concentrate on two features,
namely, reverie and role re exivity.
Reverie
First, it is important to state that infant observation on the Tavistock model as it is now
called (Reid, 1997) means rather more than `observation . Hollis in her classic work (1964)
commented that the social worker should rst open her eyes to see, then close her eyes to
think. Both these processes are essential to the concept of `observation (and of course
indicate that `re ective practice is not a new idea!). The twin processes of seeing then
thinking encapsulates a re ective process, and this is developed in the infant observation
approach. `Seeing is developed through the observer s activities of observing and then
recording in detail an account which is not theoretical but descriptive, including the attempt
to describe emotional experiences. Thinking takes place in the seminar discussion which
follows observation, in which the content of the observational report is discussed both in
terms of the emotional meaning of the observation and ways in which theoretical formulations may be tentatively applied.
The process of `seeing and thinking is also conceptualised as a process of emotional
attentiveness where the observer mirrors the mother s reverie for her infant. Bion s idea of
reverie (1962) is that it consists of a state of mind in the other (or caregiver) in which she
allows the baby s experiences to enter her mind, so that she can think about and gather a
sense of the meaning of these infantile communications. These are then used to formulate,
consciously and unconsciously, responses to the infant s communications and needs.
This is why I think that infant observation provides the most distinctive form of learning.
The seminar group performs the same function of reverie for the observer. The observer
therefore gains a model of providing and receiving attentiveness. This may be experienced as
bene cial, bene cent or somewhat persecutory, depending on the circumstances, the quality
of interactions and the emotionality under discussion and observation.
Role re exivity
In thinking about these issues I have in mind the kind of learning that takes place on the
Tavistock/University of East London MA in Advanced Social Work and other Tavistock

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social work courses. There are two central modes of learning re ective practice; these are
work discussion and observation. For both of these, the process involves the combination of
observation and seminar discussion, that is, seeing and thinking. For both, learning concentrates on a number of interrelated learning objectives, including:

thinking about the emotional impact of the observation on the observer or work on the
worker

developing the capacity to take in, observe in detail, in which emotionality is alive and
part of the observational process

becoming able to separate observing and theorising, and thus becoming actively involved
in a process of `seeing and `thinking

becoming used to the idea that sequences of behaviour and interaction can make sense
and have emotional, intrapsychic and interpersonal meaning

using consecutive or repeated observations to form tentative hypotheses about the

qualities of relationships, rather than jumping to premature xed conclusions; seeing
therefore the capacity for development and change within the patterns of relating that are
observed
thinking about observations within a matrix of internal, interpersonal and external
factors; relating, for example, issues of difference to the pattern of relationship; thinking
about relationships in terms of power and authority.
There is one major difference between observation and work discussion, and that is the role
of the observer. In work discussion the role is the professional role; in observation it is that
of the trainee/observer without this professional role. In general terms there is an expectation
of progression from observation to direct work, in which the opportunity to observe without
having professional responsibility prepares the way for taking up professional roles with a
child or in a family situation (see Youell, 1999). However, in practice, this often works the
other way round; that workers come to observation after considerable experience of professional practice.
The re ective value of without-professional-role experience.
The experience of teaching infant observation to social workers is that there is a general and
pervasive reluctance to drop the professional role. At the start of an observation a social
worker is often inclined to be `truthful and tell the family that he/she is a social worker. It
is dif cult to persuade this experienced worker but new infant observer that this is not a good
idea, and not really recommended. Social workers who are beginning infant observation do,
as a rule, insist on staying in role. This is partly due to anxiety stirred up by the newness of
the observational experience, but also because I think they are anxious about being asked to
step out of role. In this sense, the `competence -developed social workers, the non-re ective
practitioners becomes symbolically equated (Segal, 1957) with the professional role they
carry, and their perceptions of this role. Social workers attempting to undertake infant
observation become unable to take up as an `opportunity what observation provides, namely
the opportunity for thinking about meaning separate from professional role activity. Not
being in professional role, John Simmonds suggests, provides the learning opportunity to
think about the combination of physical, emotional and social events that give meaning to
human affairs (1998, p. 93).
Yet this experience can be a powerful underpinning of professional practice, even though
the learning involved may be exacting emotionally and mentally. To illustrate this, I wish to
give an example of a student, a particularly sensitive and committed student, developing a

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sense of social and emotional meaning through the experience of not being in role. The
observation that she undertook was of a Nigerian family, and she observed the second baby
in this family. Cross-cultural observations are beginning to have a powerful impact on the
understanding of antidiscriminatory practice. Tanner (1999) discusses the development of
sensitivity to issues of difference in the re ective accounts produced by students on the
Goldsmiths College Diploma in Social Work programme. In this observation, on a post-qualifying training, the MA in Advanced Social Work at the Tavistock Clinic, the student, an
experienced and quali ed practitioner, is very aware from the beginning of the sense of
exposure she has in her role of observer. She writes:
I started the observation with a variety of feelings: a sense of privilege (not to say
relief) that I had found a family willing to be observed; and a vivid awareness of my
own whiteness as well as social /class differences with this black family with neither
my professional role nor the basis of an established friendship to draw on. There was
a question for me about how free the mother might have been to make objections
about the observation. My feelings about this external context played a part in my
reluctance to attribute meaning to what I observed in the early observations. My
reports of the rst observations re ect this tentativeness as well as my sense of being
an outsider and not therefore `quali ed to name feelings. I felt this most palpably
on occasions when mother kept me waiting at the door or left me to see my own way
out.
The description in this account of the impact of difference, especially in the inhibition of
the observer to engage her own capacities to make sense of emotional experiences, echoes the
way Lennox Thomas (1992) discusses how consciousness of difference prevents empathic
communication in psychotherapy. With the aid of the thinking that took place in the seminar
group, this observer was able to see how depressed and troubled this mother was. She (the
observer) was able to respond appropriately in the observer role, listening to the mother with
friendly receptivity and trying within herself to process the experience. At one point the
observations seemed to be coming to a premature end as the mother was not at home at the
time the observations had been agreed. The observer felt very rejected, but unable to take
hold in herself of an appropriate authority to think about what may be happening. When the
mother `forgot to be present for observations the student records how the seminar group
helped her think about how to respond. When the student could maintain a sense of the
importance of the observations (for her) she was able to write to the mother and the
observations continued.
Later, towards the end of the series of observations when the baby was 11 months, the
observer recorded this:
Mother came in with food. She gave me a plateful. There was no question of
whether I wanted it or not. She had a plate of the same food too. It was delicious
but I felt as though I was being stuffed and the effect numbed me. She told me that
the children ate earlier and I wondered how she tted that in. Mother said that
Maria [the baby] was trying to walk unaided and that she would not drink. She
added that Maria would de nitely not take water, but would sometimes take juice
and was all right about milk.
The observer comments:
Placing a dish of food unannounced in front of me seemed to signal that I was now
recognised as someone who might be able to take in, digest and appreciate

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something from her. My experience of being force fed may be linked with the
problem mother reports of Maria not drinking. The ending of the observation is
dif cult. Mother resorts to being asleep in the bedroom where she seems to be
spending long periods of time. I do not get to see her to say goodbye. Maria leaks
all over the place with diarrhoea and comes to me for the rst time with arms raised
to be lifted up. I hold her and nd myself both moved and disturbed.
The observer has moved into the family and encounters an emotionally powerful situation,
in which she is involved. The focus on ending which appears unbearable for the mother,
illustrates the problem of relationship-based work; it is painful and exacting, and the observer
must leave these observations with a sense of worry and concern about this family.
The absence of professional role observing without the `shelter of professional role leads
initially to anxiety about difference and later to exposure to complicated relationships.

Reverie plus role re exivity

The problem for the observer in the examples I have given is that the locus of pain shifts from
being solely with the family to being with the family and observer. Beginning from a
standpoint of domination by an awareness of difference, empathic interactions and transactions which rely on similarity or identi cation are inhibited. Meaning making is not possible
without this `triangular space . In `Subjectivity, objectivity, triangular space , Britton describes the features of triangular space. He writes:
If the link between the parents perceived in love and hate can be tolerated in the
child s mind it provides the child with a prototype for an object relationship of a
third kind in which he or she is a witness and not a participant. A third position then
comes into existence from which object relationships can be observed. Given this we
can also envisage being observed. This provides us with a capacity for seeing
ourselves in interaction with others and for entertaining another point of view whilst
retaining our own for observing ourselves while being ourselves. I call the mental
freedom provided by this process triangular space.
Here, I am put in mind of a recent consultative experience with teams of social workers,
which demonstrated to me that the problem for social workers was not of recognising
difference this was always to the fore and at times strongly described, but, rather, of facing
the painfulness that comes from identi cation. For example, one worker told me that when
she recently had a baby, she found that the client she had just been discussing, and whom she
found very dif cult and intrusive, was also on the maternity ward. This does seem an
objectively dif cult situation, but other workers in the team began to speak of clients (usually
parents) they would never be like, and clients whose actions felt completely `foreign a word
which was used in these discussions to the workers views of themselves and others. These
workers were unable to feel they could intervene effectively in their cases because the absence
of a sense of similarity meant that the ways in which they worked and the objectives they
formulated repeated the problem the clients had that their own families lacked or were
inhibited in understanding towards them. The social workers did not have the means to offer
reverie, because they needed to keep at a distance, ideas that they and their clients might be
similar. The fact that, in the example of the worker who was having a baby, they were both
mothers at the same time only serves to increase a sense of irony about similarity. Social
workers operating within a legalistic paradigm what Parton calls the legal gaze (Parton,

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1998) cannot offer reverie. The containment provided is ` at or at times `convex rather
than `concave (receptive).
An attentive observer, willing to take in and try to understand, through reverie, the
emotional meaning in parent infant relationships soon begins to feel a pressure to ful l
particular expectations. The more deprived and disturbed the family situation, the stronger
is this pressure. However it is also experienced in families where functioning is `normal
(inverted commas) but which is driven by the anxieties occasioned by development and
developmental processes. In my observations out of professional role I found that even the
application of attention had a powerful and multidimensional impact on families where
attention for infant development was at a premium, through parental preoccupations of all
kinds. These experiences can be thought of as processes of transference and countertransference, but, over time, the observer develops speci c roles within observed families. These
include emotional support for mothers and fathers (befriending, visiting, listening); babysitting; playgroup leader, assistant or auxiliary parent. I have shown elsewhere (Briggs, 1997a)
that the observer ful ls functions for infants, for example with regard to the infant s
developmental struggles with absence and separation, and with developing symbolism.
Although some of these roles acquire sophistication through the application of psychoanalytic theories of absence, separation, symbolism, reverie and containing, they also have in
common roles which are considered to be low status. These are part and parcel of social
work the kinds of role that are attributed to workers by families in need, but which become
subsumed under the anxious responsibilities of making decisions. In fact these are often
parcelled out to other professions.
The dichotomy of `participant and `observer becomes integrated in the responses of the
observer based on the observer s capacity for mental space. In the example of the student s
observation the observer clearly participates takes food, holds the baby, writes a letter,
participates in conversation with the mother etc. These `activities are based on thinking, and
t the situation rather than being prescribed.
In professional practice (i.e. in role), role re exivity means noticing a particular way of
relating that is expected and is appropriate, alongside the procedural/legalistic requirements.
Thus, in what I still feel is the best example of this genre Karen Johns (1995) holds in her
mind the anxieties of child protection concerns, `does baby observation in order to see all the
family members and their patterns of relating, and notes that she is invited to take up some
active roles with children. This she thinks of as `auxiliary parenting using the term I
developed from infant observations. In her mind was then a dialogue between the requirements of her role (primary task) and the relationships developing with the parent and her
children, from which the latter began to inform the former with, eventually, signi cant
bene cial results. More written accounts of this kind of work are needed.
Conclusion
In summary I have suggested that infant observation has a signi cant part to play in the
development of re ective practice. I believe that the arena for this development may be a
contribution to the development of `social space , which is de ned as a triangular relationship
in which intellect and emotion are in conjunction with each other, and decision-making
responsibility has to be considered alongside and informed by the understanding that
emanates from detailed observation, undertaken with reverie.
I have explored in particular the idea that observation provides a basis for the development
and application of `mental space in the observer s reverie. I suggest that this in turn leads to
the development of role re exivity, and that the kinds or categories of roles that develop

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155

from an observational perspective can develop a dialogue with the more legalistic, decisionmaking roles the social worker carries. Through this process, triangular (social) space is
created, and links between care and control are restored.

Acknowledgement
I am grateful to Sally Martin of the MA in Advanced Social Work for her assistance.

Note
1

An earlier version of this article was presented as the GAPS annual lecture, June 1999.
The contributions by Trowell, Hindle and Easton, Bridge and Mack come from a volume of the International
Journal of Infant Observation (and its applications) which I had the privilege of co-editing with Hamish Canham
(Briggs & Canham, 1999). This gathering of articles, and the discussions at a subsequent conference Seeing
and Thinking , held at the Tavistock Clinic in January 1999 play a signi cant role in persuading me that the
infant observation method has signi cant potential for developing social work practice, perhaps over and
beyond current common assumptions.
2

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