Baby Observation: Emotional Relationships during the First Year of Life

Manuel Pérez-Sánchez has presented a very vivid description of a baby's first year of life. Direct observational material is lent understanding through the combination of his and Esther Bick's thoughts regarding the weekly infant observations. We read how the baby progresses from a state of unintegration in which the anxious baby requires the containing presence of the parents and uses primitive bodily methods of providing protection against anxiety in their absence. We then move to a more comfortable stage in which the baby has introjected the parents as providing a sense of internal security. We see how each step in the baby's development involves a reciprocal change in the parents' relationship to the baby.