YOUNG CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS YOUNG CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS Perspectives from Psychoanalytic Infant Observation Gertraud Diem-Wille Translated by Benjamin Mcquade Originally published in Germany as Das Kleinkind und Seine Eltern: Perspektiven Psychoanalytischer Babybeobachtung © 2009 W. Kohlhammer GmbH Stuttgart. First published in English in 2014 by Karnac Books Ltd 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT Copyright © 2014 by Gertraud Diem-Wille Translated from the German by Benjamin Mcquade. The translation was prepared with financial support from the Austrian Science Fund ( ). The right of Gertraud Diem-Wille to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with §§ 77 and 78 of the Copyright Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. for this book is available from the British Library ISBN-13: 978-1-78049-143-1 Typeset by V Publishing Solutions Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain www.karnacbooks.com To my grandchildren Samira, Karim, and Olivia CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix ABOUT THE AUTHOR xi PREFACE xiii Margaret Rustin FOREWORD xvii FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION xix INTRODUCTION xxi CHAPTER ONE Understanding psychological development 1 CHAPTER TWO The first year of life 63 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER THREE The second year of life 191 CHAPTER FOUR The third year of life 247 CHAPTER FIVE Outlook and perspectives: mastering early childhood 305 REFERENCES 319 INDEX 333 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The poem by Peter Rühmkorf, “Es lohnt sich nicht” (“It’s not worth it”) is taken from Peter Rühmkorf, Gedichte—Werke 1, edited by Bernd Rauschenbach, copyright © 2000 Random House GmbH, Reinbek, and the poem by Ernst Jandl is taken from Ernst Jandl, poetische Werke, edited by Klaus Silewski, published 1997 by Luchterhand Literaturverlag, Munich, Germany, part of theRandom House GmbH publishing group, and both are reprinted by kind permission of the publisher. The two images by Emi Pikler are taken from Laßt mir Zeit by Emmi Pikler (2001), Munich: Richard Pflaum Verlag, and are reproduced by kind permission of the publisher. ix ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gertraud Diem-Wille is professor of psychoanalysis in education at the University of Klagenfurt. She is a training analyst for children, adoles- cents, and adults of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society and the Inter- national Psychoanalytical Association (IPA). She has pioneered and supported the training in psychoanalytic observational approaches to training in the psychoanalytic and educational fields. She is the Organ- izing and Scientific Tutor of the PG MA in Psychoanalytic Observa- tional Studies at the University of Klagenfurt. She is the author of The Early Years of Life: Psychoanalytical Development Theory According to Freud, Klein, and Bion (Karnac). xi PREFACE Margaret Rustin This book is an original meditation on the momentous tasks (for child and parents) and long-term significance of the first three years of a child’s life. Gertraud Diem-Wille is a psychoanalyst with a long-held passion for investigating the processes of psychological development in babies and young children and their family relationships. She has adopted an approach to her subject which aims to interest parents, teachers, and a wider readership in thinking at depth about children’s growth in body and mind, their physical, emotional, cognitive, and social development. She writes in a clear and accessible way, and she has a distinctive personal voice. While there is a great deal of wise experience behind a volume of this sort, it is by no means a handbook of advice on how to bring up a child. Indeed, it contrasts greatly with the numerous publications now available which convey the sense that there is a right way to parent chil- dren that the expert author can prescribe. Instead, Diem-Wille wishes to open the minds of her readers to the richness of everyday experience, to encourage their curiosity about the complexity and individuality of each family context and of each young child. She uses three types of material—observational, clinical, and theoretical—to expound her ideas. To help her readers to understand xiii xiv PREFACE and appreciate development across time, she uses three children as case studies in the path from babyhood to the third birthday. Two of these are children studied with the methods of longitudinal infant observa- tion and a follow-up research study she conducted. Her research built on already completed detailed observations from the first two years of life and includes data from her interviews with the original observers as well as the records of their observations, interviews with the children’s parents, and some later observations of her own. These multiple per- spectives proved very fertile. Alongside this, her third case study based on clinical data is of a child in analysis. The three children come alive in the text as we follow their stories in detailed vignettes. This clinical and observational material is then related to the theories of early development current in psychoanalysis and in more traditional academic research. There is both controversy and convergence among these theoretical discoveries. Starting from the vivid descriptions of par- ticular children across time we are led into a vigorous critical account of these theories and the debates they gave rise to in the twentieth century. Diem-Wille is very well versed in the psychoanalytic literature—Freud, Anna Freud, Mahler, Klein, Winnicott, Bion—and also in those strands of child development research which have some affinity with psychoa- nalysis. Her account of Bowlby’s attachment theory is outstandingly clear, and she outlines both its great strength and important limitations. What she stresses in her review of the field is her conviction that psy- choanalytic infant observation is a neglected resource in linking the insights of paradigms often presented as in opposition to each other. She draws in the expanding infant observation literature to show, for example, how fruitful it can be in exploring links between the internal and external and in investigating intergenerational patterns of person- ality and relationship. Actual babies and their families turn out to be rather different and even more interesting than the babies encountered in laboratory experiments. Dien-Wille’s wide experience as clinician, researcher, and ordinary human being are all in evidence. She makes frequent use of everyday observations of young children’s behaviour and of the representations of childhood in books and nursery rhymes: Winnie the Pooh, for exam- ple, turns out to provide memorable instances of the young child’s way of seeing the world. The sympathy with which she writes of how hard it can be to grow up, and how hard the task of being a parent can sometimes be, conveys PREFACE xv the warmth and depth of her conviction that psychoanalytic discoveries presented in this way are an enormous resource for everyone interested in the early years. She writes from a base of very disciplined work as psychoanalyst and observer, but in this book she steps out of these specialised roles to communicate what she has learnt to a very much wider public, and she succeeds very well in doing so. FOREWORD In this book I focus on the intertwining between the development of a child’s psyche and its parents’ behaviour. These complex patterns of interdependency are approached on a number of levels. Starting from a psychoanalytic tradition, concrete cases are used to demonstrate emo- tional development, with examples of real children observed in the framework of a two-year infant observation programme in London or from psychotherapy. By the same token, several significant theories on early development are discussed critically. My thanks are due to all those who assisted me in gathering theoreti- cal and clinical experiences from psychoanalysis. My psychoanalytic trainer, Dr Lambert Bolterauer helped me to understand and discover order in my life from a new perspective—whereby integrating these painful experiences, new perspectives, and insights was not always easy. My teachers and professors in the Viennese Society for Psychoanalysis succeeded, through their active efforts in rebuilding the society—which was reduced to three members after the forced emigration of almost all psychoanalysts in 1938—in bringing it back to life, and to newly estab- lish psychoanalytic training and psychoanalytical discourse. Through my one-and-a-half year research stay at the Tavistock Clinic in London in the 1990s and my participation in the activities of the xvii xviii FOREWORD Institute of Psychoanalysis there, I became acquainted with valuable developments in Kleinian thinking as well as attendant technical prac- tices of which I had previously not been adequately aware. I want to express my thanks to Betty Joseph, who supported me with her supervision of my work as a child psychoanalyst over the course of many years. Elisabeth Bott Spillius enabled me and a group of psychoanalysts to participate in a postgraduate clinical seminar in Vienna for several years. For a number of years, Michael Feldman has led a European clinical group of psychoanalysts that provided valu- able insights and inspiration for me, as participant, in my work with patients. In particular, it was Margaret Rustin at the Tavistock Clinic who pro- vided support for my research activities in “Infant Observation Follow- Up Studies”, by meeting with me every week and reflecting on the data collected from the observed families. Isca Wittenberg and Anne Alvarez made it possible for me and a group of psychoanalysts in London and Vienna to train as psychoanalytical infant observation teachers. In the “Under Five Counselling Service”, I received valuable inspiration and ideas from Dilys Daws and Lisa Miller.