CONCEPTIONS AND ABORTIONS: THE VALUE OF STRUCTURE IN INFANT OBSERVATION

Back to Page Authors: Aanchal Bhatnagar

---

Keywords: psychoanalysis, infant observation, attachment theory, trauma

---

Abstract: Infant Observation is a popular mode of understanding psychoanalytic processes- both developmentally and contextually. However, lesser imagined is the impact this method, a hovering stranger and the familial and cultural conception of the stranger can have onto the infant’s psyche. Almost in a state of abject, one refuses to see the violence the ‘observer’ brings as they enter the world of the infant, and then leave. By examining the rhythm of the method, the dissociative parts of the observer and the decomposing recognition of otherness, the paper tries to ask, “who is this stranger to the infant”. The attempt is to locate where this unanticipated process of infant observation fit into the infant’s world or does it? It marks how one learns to negotiate with unexplained presence and sudden absences; how the infant begins to form affect around concepts such as gaze, conflict, anxiety and perhaps, how the process demands a mutual dissociation. In trying to highlight the intrinsic violence, denial, and confusion in the process of infant observation, the attempt of the paper is to de-objectify the infant and de-clutter the process.

---