TRANSLATING NATURE: DEVELOPING ESTHER BICK'S METHOD FOR FINDING WORDS TO DESCRIBE WHAT IS SEEN AND EXPERIENCED IN INFANT OBSERVATION AND CLINICAL WORK

TRANSLATING NATURE: DEVELOPING ESTHER BICK’SMETHOD FOR FINDING WORDS TO DESCRIBE WHAT IS

SEEN AND EXPERIENCED IN INFANT OBSERVATION ANDCLINICAL WORK

Andrew Briggs

abstract Mindful of the importance of word usage for accurate verbal or writtendescription the paper aims to develop Esther Bick’s caution about the use of wordsin infant observation and clinical work. It is suggested that this caution was part ofBick’s process of creating a state of mind akin to negative capability, allowing for theaccurate perception of experience and its subsequent translation into words. Fromthis point the paper suggests that the task of translation for clinicians and observersbenefits from a detailed consideration of the technical writings of certain poets whohave explored the problem of translating experience and ideas into words. Overallthe paper attempts to draw clinicians’ attention to the sensual quality of observation,and thus similarly to the words used to translate what is seen and experienced.

Key words: Esther Bick, infant observation, naturgeist, negative capability, poets,reverie, sensations, translation, words

Introduction

This paper seeks to contribute to the developing discussion around the useof words in observational and clinical work. Very briefly, this discussionranges from the mechanical construction of words as symbols conveyingemotional experiences and thoughts, to the effect of selected words and theirfunction once the speaker or writer has thus made them public. Thesecontributors, for example, Cantle (2000), Meltzer (1984), Rustin (1988), Rey(1986), Scott (1998), and Sternberg (2004), point to the importance of wordselection in the process of conveying what is observed or otherwise experi-enced. The main focus of the current paper is word selection and its central-ity in Esther Bick’s view of infant observation. Bick was very concernedabout the use of words and saw their selection as vital to the clear translationof what one sees and thinks.The paper attempts to develop her thinking andsuggests that it leads us to poetry, from where we can learn further about theprocess of word selection. Psychoanalytic thinkers have long recognized thatpoets’ insights, and the processes they employ to achieve them, can be used

andrew briggs is a full-time child psychotherapist in the NHS with an honorarysenior lectureship at the University of Kent. His interests include: the applicationof infant observation in clinical, research, and training, ways of working with difficultto reach patients, and the relationship between word use and experience. Addressfor correspondence: CAMHS, Unit 1, Twisleton Court, Dartford, Kent DA1 2EN.[email: [email protected]]

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© The authorJournal compilation © 2008 BAP and Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road,

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to illuminate clinical and metatheoretical issues (see, for example, Britton1998; Canham 2003; Harris Williams 2005; Waddell 2003). Here the aim is toexplore how Bick, like many poets, had insights that help us accuratelytranslate the essence, the nature, of the observed into words for a reader orlistener.

Poesy, Poetry and Observation

The poet Coleridge said, ‘The artist must imitate that which is within thething, that which is active through form and figure . . . the naturgeist, or spiritof nature’ (Coleridge 1818). Coleridge saw imitation as a process, via eithermusic, painting or writing, through which replication is made. It is clear fromthis sentence that Coleridge saw the artist’s ability to imitate as having thepurpose of replicating the essence within what he observed – the naturgeist.In this, one might say, the artist’s task is to translate nature into symbols thatenable his audience to see what he saw before beginning this task of con-veying it. The apprehension of nature, the task prior to imitating it, wassomething that taxed the minds of several of Coleridge’s contemporaries.For example, the literary critic Hazlitt and the poet Keats advocated that oneneeds to be in a particular state of mind, free of the ability and need to makesense of what one receives when observing. Hazlitt (1805) wrote of the needto be disinterested in the past and future of what is observed, as part ofgaining a state of imaginative sympathy. As is well known, Keats (1817)developed this state through his concept of negative capability. Elsewhere Ihave argued (Briggs 2002) that, through her two papers ‘Child analysistoday’ (Bick 1962) and ‘Notes on infant observation (Bick 1964) (hereafterthe 1962 and 1964 papers), Bick developed a method of observation thatallows the observer to observe the spirit of nature, the naturgeist, in this stateof mind. There the aim was confined to thinking about how one receivesobservations into one’s mind, and not how these are then represented in themind and translated into media that allow our observations to be seen byother people. Bick’s students report1 that she was extremely focused on theiruse of words to describe observed episodes. Her responses resulted fromdeeply reaching inside herself for the right words.This process of translatingher thoughts into words was informed by her serious concern to use theexact word to convey them accurately. She often said her suspicion of wordswas based on their slipperiness as carriers of a plethora of meaning. Thissuspicion led to her caution and, effectively, to placing the use of wordscentrally to observation as an enterprise. Examples of translating her ownobserved’s naturgeist into words demonstrate the acute accuracy of hermethod in her own hands. She wrote of Mrs S’s feeling that separation wasto ‘fall into the quicksand of bottomless dead-end’ and that for anotherpatient separation was ‘lacerating’. Her child patient Mary was ‘spilling out’.Perhaps more memorably, she wrote, ‘When the baby is born he is in the

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position of an astronaut who has been shot out into outer space without aspacesuit.’2 Baby, born, outer space, shot out, without a spacesuit. All thesewords have been carefully chosen and put together to convey the naturgeistof the newborn’s experience.Through her words we can experience what sheobserved of the beginning of life’s incredible closeness to an immeasurablycold death, the baby’s terror in the face of powerful forces over which he hasno control, the helplessness, and the raw unprotectedness.

Bick, Keats and Negative Capability

In terms of volume Keats said very little about negative capability. A some-what enigmatic concept to describe and practise, the few words he wrotehave proved essential for those trying to develop this state of mind forthemselves.

Uncertainty

Perhaps a starting point for understanding what Keats meant is hiscomment, ‘Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced’ (Keats 1819). Hisuse of the words ‘real’ and ‘experienced’ are important for understandingwhat he had earlier termed ‘negative capability’ – ‘that is when a man iscapable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritablereaching after fact and reason’ (Keats 1817). Real may mean that which isexperienced for itself, free from any preconception by the observer. In hisshort poem ‘In Drear-nighted December’, Keats (1817) expressed his shockand pained awareness of the gulf between unconscious nature and sufferingman. The crisis had provoked in him a longing to escape, for annihilationand, as he says in this poem, ‘the feel of not to feel it’. The ideal of ‘negativecapability’ offered a means of facing the problem squarely: an unforcedopenness to the full range of experience, to pain as well as pleasure. One ofKeats’s biographers, Stephen Coote, argues that the term ‘negative’ gainsexplanation from Keats’s studying chemistry as a medical student. Herenegative implies ‘a sympathetic receptive intensity’. As Coote writes, Keatssaw the ‘negative capability’ of the true poet being:

. . . like an electrical negative: passive but, in its receptive power, quite the equalof the positive current. (Coote 1995, p. 115)

Thus the term receptivity describes an active mental space that is free of thereceiver’s own explanations about what they are receiving. Indeed, the wishto explain, the ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’, is actively held off,kept at bay.

Negative Capability and Observation

With Keats’s negative capability we have the core idea about psychoanalyticobservation that Freud (1912, 1923) later discussed as ‘evenly suspended

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attention’, and Bion (1967) as observing without memory and desire.3

Indeed, one of the central motives for Keats was the need to create theconditions for observing what comes into the mind. To do this required themind, or a space in it, to be decontaminated from preoccupations and pre-conceptions in order for, as Coote described, the passively negative recep-tive current to become an active one.According to her supervisees, Bick wasexcellent at helping them see their preconceptions. In this, along with theprocedures of her method, she facilitated their development of negativecapability, because she saw preconceptions getting in the way of a highlytuned capacity to observe, or experience, something for what it really is. Thedevelopment of this capacity is the raison d’être of Bick’s observationalmethod, its achievement being the purpose of the instructive comments thatappear in the 1962 and 1964 papers.The following passage from Bick clearlyshows the imperative of having no preconceptions if one is to observeintensely:

One may have to sit with children for a long time completely in the dark aboutwhat is going on, until something suddenly comes up from the depth thatilluminates it . . . (Bick 1962, p. 632)

The experience is like carefully watching for a pattern to make itself knownto the observer. In waiting, without preconceptions, the observer’s owndepths become important. This is made clear by her comment about under-standing something that has emerged from the dark:

It imposes on the child analyst a greater dependence on his unconscious toprovide him with clues to the meaning of the child’s play and non-verbalcommunications. (Bick 1962, p. 632)

Bick recognized that an unquestioning dependence on the unconsciouswas fraught with serious difficulties.These included what she termed internal‘stresses’ on the observer’s capacity to see situations clearly, and in the 1962paper she examined how the intensity of the child’s negative and positivetransference arouse unconscious anxieties in the psychotherapist. In the1964 paper she continues the discussion about training and the problem ofstresses which she considers ‘interferes with’ the observer’s capacity forfree-floating attention, and prevents him observing the emotional needs ofthe mother and baby. This discussion, movingly illustrated by material fromtwo observations (K and Charles), brings into focus not only the role of theobserver but also that of the seminar group. The latter’s role is to help‘uncover some of the projections into him that are operating and whichintensify his own internal conflicts’.The emphasis here seems to be on ‘whichintensify’. As in the 1962 paper, she recognizes the importance of beingaware of projections as communicative. The danger of such projections hereis that they can obstruct the observer’s ability to ‘resist being drawn intoroles involving intense infantile transference and therefore countertransfer-

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ence’ (Bick 1964). Here one can see she understood one important functionof projective identification to be as a form of primitive communication,4 andfundamental to understanding the observer’s countertransference. Further,that, until they are seen as this, they have the potential to cloud the vision ofthe observer, possibly leading to a breaking of the role. Thus Bick is sayingthat, in being seen as a potential recipient for the observed’s projections, anobserver has an effect on the observed and the observed setting, and that thisneeds to be taken into account as part of understanding the observed.5

Observer and Observed

This taking into account has not only an importance in thinking about thematerial one sees, but in thinking about the effect of the way it is generatedon how we begin to understand it. Some years after his aphorism that theartist must convey the naturgeist, Coleridge seemed to be casting doubt onthis ever being fully possible, when he said, ‘The chameleon darkens in theshade of him who bends over to ascertain its colours’ (Coleridge 1839, p. 80).Here he is drawing attention to what he saw as the inevitable and unavoid-able distortion in observation. That is, the act of observation alters theobserved such that it can never be observed for what it actually is, as toobserve it requires an observer whose act of observation immediatelychanges the observed. Hence, we can never know something for what itactually is on its own, so we can never purely convey its naturgeist. I thinkBick’s emphasis on understanding projections as communications by theobserved goes some way towards understanding the effect of the observeron the observed. In this way a filter can be achieved that allows for thediscernment of the naturgeist within the observed, as it can be seen boththrough the effect of being observed and in its own right. In this state ofmind, negative capability, the observer has the potential to take accountof the effect of himself and the observed on one another, and of the act ofobservation on the observed.

From this brief outline one can see that Bick’s method requires theobserver to bear uncertainty until a pattern or idea about the phenomenaobserved emerges. It is not one in which the observer is required to strive forideas. Ideas should be allowed to come to mind. We also see her openness todiscovery. Bick did not see infant observation as an activity where observa-tion and invention, and discovery and invention, are undifferentiated –rather, as an activity where true discovery and invention are only possible onthe basis of actual observation.This means both internal and external obser-vation by the observer. This is fundamental to her method. Further, as herstudents remember, without this basic focus she felt anything thought aboutwould be no more than guesswork, ingenuity, a false cleverness and trickylinguistics. The passage about being completely in the dark so obviouslyconveys her belief in discovery, letting the patterns in emotional life revealthemselves, rather than seek the causes for what is observed. I think Bick


thought of her method as similar to the observation of nature. We sit andwatch something unfold for itself, recording what we see but not assuming adirection or sequence until it is revealed to us by the content of our obser-vation. This seems to be the approach she took in her observation of babies,allowing their behaviour to show her what it meant. Negative capability iscentral to this approach. This state of mind continued from observation tothe translation into words of what she observed.

Negative Capability and the Use of Words

In essence negative capability is an approach to allowing the realization ofwhat is being observed to make itself known in the mind of the thinker. Thisis the basis of Bion’s concept of reverie. In a state of reverie the analyst,mother or other thinker, waits for a pattern to emerge in order to realize theresponse they need to make to their patient or child. For a mother this maybe a gesture, expression, action or something said. For an analyst it is morelikely to be something said. The point here is that both mothers and analyststranslate what they receive into something in their own minds (an image,sensation or thought) before finding a gesture that indicates they havereceived the communication, translated it and can do something accuratelyin response to the demand or request in the communication.

Negative Capability and Reverie

Bion referred to this process of translation as transformation. The baby’sanxiety about being hungry is expressed through cries at a certain pitch. Onhearing these the mother recognizes the type of cry for what it is, andtransforms this anxiety through translating the cries into a thought in hermind that leads to providing a feed. The more finely tuned this process oftranslation is, the more accurately needs are met.

Bick’s method enables us to achieve perception in observation that isfinely tuned and accurate. It also allows us to both create finely honed ideasabout what we perceive, and draw the appropriate word into mind to trans-late these ideas into a medium conveying them to other people. Her studentsmention how she would let words come to her mind that she thought fittedthe idea she wanted to convey. Sometimes she would be frustrated becausethe first word to mind was not one she saw fitting, so she would remove itfrom her thinking in order to clear the space for another to enter. It is mostunfortunate that she did not write about her method for selecting and usingwords as it was so obviously central to her overall methodology. One can tellfrom her students’ descriptions that it appears she was in a state of reveriewhen practising this method. Looking at negative capability as reverie allowsus to examine the process of translation in this state of mind. Further,to consider what we observe has effects on us other than images or othermental representations. Often we are simply left with feelings, some of which

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are felt as bodily sensations. This imposes an imperative to remain in nega-tive capability in order to translate such observations into thoughts, and theninto words.

Reverie and Translation

In his book Reverie and Interpretation Thomas Ogden argues for the need todevelop a use of language that is adequate to the task of capturing theexperience of ‘what it feels like’ for the analyst to be with the patient (Ogden1999, p. 230). He is interested to create an effect in language through the useof language. Ogden discusses reverie in an interesting way and we get a veryclear picture of the difficult task that he sets for language. Language isrequired not only to accurately convey the ideas emergent from reverie, butalso to be used on the basis of being dependent upon meaning being con-stantly in the process of being discovered and not ultimately known. As hesays:

. . . language must embody in itself that there is no still point of meaning.Meaning is continuously in the process of becoming something new and in sodoing, is continually undoing itself (undercutting its own claims to certainty).(Ogden 1999, p. 218)

This demand that language convey what it is like to be with the patient,and that meaning is always in the process of becoming known, is linked to hisunderstanding of reverie which is similar to Bick’s view of observation.Arriving at an idea about what it is like to be with the patient comes throughreverie. However, reveries, Ogden says, are difficult to make use of because,unlike one’s dreams, they are unframed by the boundary of sleep and beingawake. Reverie ‘seamlessly melts into other psychic states. It does not havea clearly delineated point of departure or point of termination separatingit, for example, from more focused secondary process thought that mayprecede or follow it’ (Ogden 1999, p. 160). In order to properly use states ofreverie one has to tolerate this lack of defined boundaries around them andthe consequent feeling of, as he says, ‘being adrift’. It is only when the feelingof being adrift ends that one can begin to recognize that the state of reveriehas come to an end. It is then that one can attempt to make sense of whatone has experienced in one’s mind. Retrospectively, one then recognizes thata ‘current’ has taken one somewhere and whether this somewhere is of anyvalue then becomes clearer, because the journey has stopped.Whether one’sexperiences of reverie on their own, or as a cluster, have any meaning issomething one has to allow to emerge at their termination. This, I suggest,is negative capability, and what we see in Ogden is a way of carefully usingwords to describe the experience of being in this state, and highlighting itsfiner tuning. He suggests, and clearly borrowing the term from W.B. Yeats’spoem ‘The Second Coming’ (Yeats 1921), that we need to ‘slouch’ towards


meaning rather than arrive at it. Along this route reveries must be allowedto ‘accrue meaning without (our) feeling pressured to make immediate useof them’ (Ogden 1999, p. 161).

Ogden’s description of his own states of reverie is at times graphic andencompasses a variety of phenomena including verbal narratives, and whatGaddini (1982) described as ‘phantasies of the body’. One of Gaddini’sinterests is the way in which severe early trauma can lead to a mentaldefence against living in the body, so as to avoid feeling bodily sensationsincluding psychic pain that might be felt there. This defence is thus anattempt to disconnect the mind from the body. Sensations from the body thatget through this defence threaten to so overwhelm the individual that hissanity may be in jeopardy. The aim in treatment is to understand thesesensations as conveyors of meaning and, as such, are approached as phan-tasies given somatic form.That Ogden’s concept is similar can be seen in theexample of his stomach muscles tensing when he hears the rapid footsteps ofhis approaching patient. When leading her into the consulting room henotices that she has noticed fragments of paper on the consulting room floor,and that she was looking at them in a way that she took them inside her. Hewrites that he felt ‘in a very concrete way that those bits of paper were partof me that were being taken hostage’. These fantasies were felt, he says, as‘physical sensations’.These were themselves communications to himself thatwere not represented through the verbal medium as narratives.6

One can see how this openness to the range of ways the mind communi-cates with itself about what it is experiencing increases the potential forunderstanding what is going on between patient and analyst, analyst andhimself, observer and observed and observer and himself. If one remembersFreud’s insistence that the ego is a bodily felt entity, then one has to payattention to ‘physical sensations’ as communications comparable to movingor static pictures, dreams or day-dreams, words or sentences, and othersymbols or images that come to mind in states of reverie. The meaningsconveyed by these media may or may not be easy for the thinker to under-stand, but must surely be easier for the individual experiencing them thansomeone (if this were possible) listening or looking in on them. Whilst theyare idiosyncratic to the thinker experiencing them, conveyed with care theycan enable another person to either see the same meaning in them as thethinker, or derive another meaning. The problem is, how do they becometranslated so that they can be accurately described and understood outsidethe mind of the thinker?

In accepting her Oscar for best actress, Holly Hunter, who played AdaMcGrath in the film The Piano, said that her achievement was only possiblebecause of Michael Nyman, the composer of the sound-track.Ada McGrath,the central character, was mute. Hunter understood how to play the part, itsmeaning and the personality of Ada, through listening to Nyman’s sound-track (which was composed during the making, rather than on completion,

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of the film).This is an interesting comment on reverie and translation.Hunter had difficulty thinking about how to play the part. The music for thefilm, composed as an expression of the composer’s understanding of theoverall and individual narratives, conveyed to her what her part was about.She was able to translate this from the music that was itself a translation ofideas in the mind of the composer. Meaning was conveyed to her through thephysical sensation and mental representation of music, a process that did notuse words.

Child analysts and psychotherapists, like poets, rely on their use of wordsto understand and convey what they understand of meaning at any givenmoment. Ogden is a psychoanalyst who has himself taken courses on writingpoetry and uses the thinking of poets to understand how to use words. Ashe says, ‘Language is not simply a package in which communications arewrapped, but the medium in which experience is brought to life in theprocess of being spoken or written’ (Ogden 1999, p. 201). Ogden’s pointdescribes exactly Bick’s use of words to bring the experience of the newbornto life on the page as we read.

Words and Translation

If one thinks of a poem as the writer’s attempt to convey what he has seen,to paraphrase Henry James, to create in the moment of its expressionsomething of what it is to be like as a human ‘under certain circumstances’(James 1881, p. 7), and then leave the work to be understood by the reader,we see the reader’s task as finding the meaning it has for him as he reads.Language has been used by the writer to capture something and, if thereader wants to verbally express what he sees in the poem, he needs toattend to the task of using language precisely. What I have outlined here isvery similar to the writing up of an observation and its reading in aseminar group. The emphasis is on the precise use of language for thereader and the listener who responds. However, how do we use languageprecisely in these circumstances? What is it we are trying to convey, listento or for, respond to and have responded to? In trying to convey the expe-rience of the observation, at that moment we were with the family, are wetrying to use language that conveys this rather like a video film would, orare we using words to convey the feeling and experience in such a waythat the experience of hearing or reading them alone conveys feeling andexperience, without the need for additional verbal or written description?7

I suggest that, when we really want help in understanding our experienceof being in observational or clinical settings, we use words to cover allthese functions. They are complicated functions and, to convey the accu-rate picture necessary for accurate help, our use of words needs to beprecise. The problem of translating perceptions and impressions into wordshas long preoccupied poets. The essays and prose of the Russian poet OsipMandelstam are particularly helpful.


Poets and Words

Mandelstam imagines the concept in the poet’s mind being squeezed out byhim in a form of words. Hence the concept envelops the form. If the mindcontains no idea, the form of words coming out will be valueless, ‘if thesponge is dry, nothing will come out of it’. This is part of the process ofwriting an experience. The other part is how a particular word finds itself asthe one squeezed out through this process. Mandelstam refers to words as‘flesh and blood’, ‘heroic’ and as a ‘psyche’. He sees them as living things witha life of their own. Whilst they do designate objects they should not beequated with the object – ‘Is the thing really the master of the word?’(Mandelstam 1920, p. 115; see Mandelstam 1979). Further, he says that theword ‘freely chooses for its dwelling place, as it were, some objective signifi-cance, material thing, or beloved body. And the word wanders freely aroundthe thing, like the soul around an abandoned but not forgotten body’ (Man-delstam 1920, p. 115). Perhaps the best way of understanding what Mandel-stam means by words being like flesh and blood, alive, and wandering freelyaround a body, can be seen in how he used words in Stone, one of his greatestpoems.

Translation and Poetry

Mandelstam saw himself not as a creator but as a builder – ‘the voice ofmatter sounds, like articulate speech. One can only respond to this summonswith architecture’. His choice of words was precise and based on how he sawhis job as a poet. ‘Stone’ refers to an ordinary stone that can be picked upanywhere, like one a mason can build with. The stone is the basic buildingmaterial, just as the word is the basic building material for a poem. Abuilding is made out of stone; a poem is made out of words (not out of ideasor its subject matter). A stone is placed to participate in creating a structurewhere only emptiness had been. Mandelstam says, ‘To build is to contendwith the void’. A word ‘thirsts to participate in a poem, for the poem is amode of existence, a challenge to the void of silence and nothingness’.Takingthis together with his imagery of the sponge, then one can see that he thinksof words as thirsting to be connected with an idea in order to be squeezedout of the poet’s mind. For me a very clear example of what he means herecan be found in the first verse of Stone (Mandelstam 1908):

The careful muffled soundOf fruit breaking loose from a treeIn the middle of the continual singingOf deep forest silence

First reading Stone some 30 years ago my attention was drawn to my ownexperience of being in forests. I recalled the consistent noise of silence, andthought about the soft sound of the fruit loosening, breaking loose notsuddenly snapping, but breaking loose. These are carefully chosen words by

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Mandelstam, appearing to assume a sense of natural time in the reader orlistener that can be seen more clearly once the memory is recalled. Mandel-stam’s starting point on writing verse is words needing to be used to enablethe reappearance of what they describe to be understood when the reap-pearance occurs for the reader or listener.8 As he says:

When in the stillness of the night a lover gets tangled up in tender names andsuddenly remembers that all this already was: the words and the hair and therooster crowing outside his window, exactly as it had been in Ovid’s Tristia, theprofound joy of recurrence seizes him. (Mandelstam 1920, p. 116)

The need is to listen more keenly for the sound is muffled, and something sosmall is happening so slowly. With prior experience of being in forests,reading of the fruit breaking loose brought a recurrence to my mind ofnature’s time and listening to the noise perceptible in silence. Hence, Man-delstam’s words not only remind me of this sense of time – they accentuateit. This time is not the industrial time one has been conditioned by, throughthe particular pacing of modern life within the 24-hour clock, but an elon-gated sense of time stretched past the pre-industrial experience gained frombeing conditioned by days getting lighter or darker, within which to performrural activities set by the change of the seasons.

During subsequent visits to forests I have often found myself feelingcongruent with the feeling conveyed in the verse of being somewhere still,silent but lively, and with its own sound that needs deliberate apprehensionin order to be heard – of being in a timeless place, with its own activitieswrapped in its silence. Two points arise from this.

The Reader in Mind

The first concerns Mandelstam’s use of words. He is using them to conveysomething essential and vivid to the reader that is over and above the wordsthemselves. He used them like stones to build something more than a col-lection of stones – a piece of verbal or written architecture out of nothing-ness that has been conveyed to a reader. They found a home in my mindbecause they translated an experience I had already had, and went further toallow me to appreciate a new experience, the one the author wanted toconvey. Mandelstam’s poetry is very good at translating his experiences andgiving access to them for his reader, because he was very clear that the poetshould keep in mind that he is trying to attract the attention and understand-ing of a remote reader. He put this vividly saying, ‘Speaking to someone wellknown we can only say what is well known . . . But to exchange signals withMars . . . there is a worthy task for a lyric poet’. The imagined reader has tobe someone not sharing the poet’s own time, place, and ideas. Mandelstamsees this reader as ‘unknown but definite’.Approaching the task of writing inhis way keeps the poet on his mettle. The second point derives from this.


When we write up our observations, who do we have in mind as the readeror listener? The obvious answer is the seminar group and/or the leader. If so,what do we think we are trying to convey to them? Is it always that we writeup exactly what we see and experience in a way that conveys it warts and all,or do we edit what we write? If so, is our editorship one that is very good atforgetting some of what took place, enhancing other things at the expense ofa more limited description of others? When we try to find words do we holdour minds fully open, or do we allow ourselves to find ones that conveythings simply as we want to edit them? We may want to attract the attentionof our readers (perhaps as they are or perhaps as we imagine them to be),but do we do this with ideas that they are known to us, or is there a way ofnot allowing the known-ness of the seminar experience to influence ourwriting?

The idea of finding words to create something out of nothingness is one atthe heart of Bick’s method; of striving to use the precise words to describewhat she watched emerging out of the depths. Nothingness here refers to theopen mind one has to understanding observations and finding words toconvey them, and to the moment when one finds oneself exploring newfrontiers of one’s own understanding.This is fundamental to the discipline ofpsychoanalytic observation itself as, for example, there are always new thingsto be discovered about separation and loss, and the way infants and childrenexperience and convey their experiences to observers and clinicians.

Words and Exploring Frontiers

Bick’s two papers on the skin show how her interest in the trauma of earlyseparation experiences, especially the temporary or permanent loss of themother (emotionally, mentally or physically), developed into a very deepand graphic understanding of the pain and the infant’s desperate attempts atprotection from the experiential consequences of such pain. In order for herto make her discoveries at the frontier of what was then known about suchseparation and loss, she needed to spend a great deal of time in the depths,and then in finding the right words to translate what she had seen in order toinform her listeners and readers. Nowadays we are familiar with being ableto observe and understand the experience and function of secondary skinformation in our patients, because of her vivid descriptions, and because ourobservational skills are based upon those she introduced to the training ofchild psychotherapists. The field of interest in separation and loss nowincludes an interest in autistic, borderline and psychotic children, forexample. Observations have revealed very difficult to understand phenom-ena, some of which are received and experienced in the minds of observersin the way that Ogden describes as physical sensations. Some are revealed asdifficult to account for thoughts – like feeling the light has gone in the roomwhen it remains on, or that baby appears to be choking when that is clearly

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not the case. When Ogden uses words to convey to us what his physicalsensations were, we understand something of his patient’s relationship tohim. Words allowed him to show us how he explored the frontier betweenknowing something about his patient, and finding out something newthrough what he was left with as physical sensations.

The problem for infant observation in this respect is that so often one doesnot get similarly available clues about what is going on. Ogden’s patientlooked at the pieces of paper on the floor in a certain way. Often we look atbabies and feel very uncomfortable because we don’t know how to begindescribing, let alone explaining, our physical feelings. Sometimes they mightbe dismissed from our minds because we feel they do not relate to observingthe baby. However, the more we are able to find words to describe thephysical sensations we are left with, the greater our opportunity for under-standing more of the baby’s experience. Even when we describe feelings weare left with, if we do not do so with an eye to the use of words, we limit ourfrontier of understanding. The following example from my work leading aninfant observation seminar some years ago illustrates this.

Words and Sensations

A student once described feeling a burning sensation inside when observinga very passive and quiet child. Careful thinking about his description led himto refine it as feeling burnt up inside. Further exploration allowed him to, ashe said, ‘admit’ feeling the sensation of smelling smouldering undergrowth.Thinking further, there was a sense of isolation with this burning and smellof undergrowth on fire. To summarize the first three write-ups, the child wasvery underdeveloped in terms of emotional, mental and physical growth.Observation of the child in the context of his family revealed that he wasoverlooked in favour of an older child and that this had been going on sincehe was born. Not long into the observation this young child, aged 4, hadattempted to set a fire. That this was not surprising to the observer waslargely due to his having not dismissed his feeling of being burnt up insideand of staying with the words ‘smouldering undergrowth’, as these led him tounderstand that this passive underdeveloped child was smouldering throughbeing enraged by his parents’ favouring his older sibling.

In the following we see an example of Ogden’s ‘physical sensations’. Astudent found it very difficult to develop words to describe in more detailwhat she observed and had left her feeling as if she had indigestion. Shesaid:

Jake (the baby) was vigorously shaking the side of the pen. The noise of therattling sides filled the room. There was nothing else to hear.

I advised her to read the American poet Robert Frost’s description of howhis poems always started as a lump in the throat that searched for an idea,


which then demanded the search for adequate words to describe the feeling.Frost was talking about the arrival in words, or translation into words, of afelt, sensual, experience.

Frost was fascinated and interested in the use of words as spoken in themouth to convey meaning. He called this ‘the living sounds of speech’(Frost 1915, p. 687; Poirier & Richardson 1995). He therefore advocatedthat his poems should always be read aloud because they are comprised ofsounds of words ‘strung together’ into sentences which in turn have theirown sounds. He called these ‘sentence sounds’ (Frost 1915, p. 675). Hence,these sounds are best heard with the actual ear and not the metaphoricone in use when only reading in silence. Further, through this, they can befelt as shapes in one’s mouth and sensations in one’s body. Frost also advo-cated that one should spend a long time with his poems, getting a feel forthem and thus a better understanding of them. I think Frost’s desire for hiswords to be felt as sensations in the listener’s body is extremely evocative,and effectively stresses the importance of using words graphically. Thelogic and motive for his method for understanding what he had observedand translated, to read the words and sentences aloud, are similar to thoseof the observation seminar. In the case of my student, I hoped that, byunderstanding a process of discovering ideas evolving from the feeling ofindigestion, she would be able then to find words for these ideas. The ideas,I hoped, would be more accurate memories of what she had observed andhad hidden themselves as a feeling of indigestion in her body. In the eventshe returned to the seminar saying that she had recalled the distress of thebaby, and how the mother’s being overwhelmed by the recent loss of herpartner had given rise to a tense atmosphere that she felt was being‘pushed into me. Like something hard and metal being rammed into some-thing without an opening. Me without an opening’. This graphic descrip-tion of a forced entry of someone else’s feelings enabled the group to helpher recall and describe in detail the signs of the baby’s distress, and howthis 10 month-old was desperate for someone to receive the communica-tion of a gamut of feeling that he could not digest and had no availablehelp in digesting.

Conclusion

In this paper I have tried to think about the state of negative capability notonly enabling the observation but also the description of the nature. I havesuggested that Bick was in such a state when making observations andfinding words to convey them. She was also in this state to find words toconvey her thoughts about her students’ presentations. The importance offinding the right words is thus central to conveying the naturgeist. Ogden’sthoughts about this state of mind, and what it is receptive to, help develop

ANDREW BRIGGS 87

an understanding of observations appearing as bodily phenomena. Thistaxes our reverie and capacity to use words, presenting an exciting chal-lenge. This challenge draws into focus the work of poets. Here Frost andMandelstam were used as examples. The latter is more apparently com-patible with Bick’s method as he wrote of the need to approach words asthings to convey the apprehension of the internal structure of phenomena,and not the finding of causal links between them. In seeing the word exist-ing to find a thought to describe, he is akin to Bion’s ideas on reverie,transformation and the emergence of thoughts. Approaching words in thisway enables the naturgeist observed to be more truthfully conveyed. Thisis also true of the help we can receive from Frost, whose insistence that hispoems be read aloud, in order to be experienced in the body, is a way ofconveying his bodily felt observations prior to translation into words. Simi-larly, Bick’s use of words is also a method for the process of discovery.However, she did not leave us with developed thinking about her use ofthem, and hence we need to go elsewhere, via Ogden to certain poets, tobegin to understand the way in which attention to the use of words canenhance our understanding of the sensory and sensual activity calledobservation and what we observe.

Notes

1. References to Bick’s students are to their comments made to me during inter-views with them as part of an oral history project I undertook for the Association ofChild Psychotherapists between 2000 and 2002.

2. All quotations here are from her posthumously published paper, ‘Further consid-erations on the function of the skin in early object relations’ (Bick 1986; reprinted inBriggs 2002). This paper builds upon her earlier seminal paper (Bick 1968).

3. Incidentally, although one can see that he was leading towards it through hisearlier writings, Bion did not write about ‘negative capability’ until 1970. Prior to thishis most explicit comment came in a note written in 1969 and posthumously pub-lished in Cogitations (Bion 1992).

4. As Bion (1959) had already described.

5. The issue of the effect of the observer upon the observed and thus the nature ofthe material generated was one foci of a symposium convened by the Associationof Child Psychotherapists in 1989. Papers were subsequently published in an issue ofthe Journal of Child Psychotherapy that year.

6. As an aside, one wonders why Ogden did not remove these pieces of paper beforethe arrival of his patient.

7. These and other questions have been raised and briefly examined by JanineSternberg (2004). Many have also been illustrated and discussed in a special issue ofthe International Journal of Infant Observation and Its Applications entitled ‘The useof video in infant observation’ in 2006 (Briggs 2006).

8. Seamus Heaney has discussed his own use of words and its similarity withMandelstam’s.Also, for an invaluable discussion of Heaney’s poetry in the context ofdeveloping meaning in clinical and supervisory work, see Canham (2003).


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TRANSLATING NATURE: DEVELOPING ESTHER BICK'S METHOD FOR FINDING WORDS TO DESCRIBE WHAT IS SEEN AND EXPERIENCED IN INFANT OBSERVATION AND CLINICAL WORK