Infant Observation 2

• Credit value: 60 credits at Level 7

This module builds on the work of infant observation in Year 1, with infant observation seminars continuing throughout your second year. 

You usually end your observations at the spring half-term, thus ensuring a minimum observational record of the infant’s first 15 months of life. The remaining seminars focus on reviewing the material from the observations and developing your infant observation papers for submission in the summer. 

The final study day, at the end of the academic year, provides support for writing your infant observation paper. You will be given the opportunity to consider and use more advanced theoretical concepts in psychoanalytic theory, or in Jungian analytic theory, and to relate these theories and epistemological questions to your experiences of parent-infant observation. 

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

• demonstrate the further development of observational skills
• reflect on the experience of infant observation including the role of participant observer
• record in greater detail your observations both of the observed setting and of the responses evoked in them
• integrate observations and theoretical understanding and structure these into a final infant observation paper
• reflect on and apply psychoanalytic or Jungian analytic thinking to the issues raised in interpersonal interactions including the impact of conscious and unconscious processes on the generation and selection of, and attribution of meaning to, observational material.