Young Children and their Parents Perspectives from
Psychoanalytic Infant Observation, 1st Edition
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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
ACKNOWL EDGEMENTS
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 P R E FA C E
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
P R E FA C E 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.
