This writing speaks to the times that I stood by a child gazing silently and taken by the poignancy of what they had just said or done whilst also unable to grasp a meaning of it. This moment moves me and immobilises me. I am moved by the child’s meaningfulness in a manner that feels almost concrete, physical and enlivening. Awakened to something fresh and new, how do I begin to make sense of it? How do I stay true to its newness? How do I stay true to it, capture it without deadening it?
In my work with primary school children I watch them playing out their experiences, their agonies and their pleasures yet sometimes more than others their play struck me as significant. What are these moments made of? They arrive with a captivating meaningfulness: closely located in children’s lives yet existentially nuanced. They play in a manner that feels reflective, almost poetic; a turning inwards to take some of the world in and to make sense of it. Perhaps it is this contemplative quality—capacity—of the children that gives these moments some of their distinctive nuancing: they arrive busily embedded in their everydayness and give in to an attentive silence. A pause that asks me to speak to it. How do I speak to it? How am I present in this moment?
The question of meaning intensified in the course of my training in psychoanalytic observation informed by the theoretical tradition of British Objects relations. Psychoanalytic infant observation was first established in 1948 by Esther Bick as part of the Tavistock child psychotherapy training, as a method of directly observing infants and children in their natural environments in order to understand the nature of their mental processes (Bick 1964; Shuttleworth 1997; Urwin and Sternberg 2012). Drawing on Klein’s (1997) discussion of the analytic playroom as a ‘total situation’ encompassing of both the child’s past and present, in my observations I reflect upon the surrounding subjects as external representations of internal unconscious objects and think of her play largely as a symbolic manifestation of her unconscious workings: her surroundings (peers, carers, observer, objects) as representations of her internal objects and her interactions with them as play-outs of her earliest phantasies (Shuttleworth 1997; Price and Cooper 2012). Unconscious feelings and states of mind are powerfully present similar to the therapeutic room where the child’s play is thought to enact the relations of her internal objects in the light of her phantasies, wishes and fears (Rustin 2012, pp. 14–15). Psychoanalytic observation becomes for me an emotional space that looks at the unconscious dynamics in a meaningful relational matrix by means of transference and countertransference. In this context I think of the child’s play as driven by her unconscious workings—or my imaginings of her unconscious workings.
I feel that I have just found a language with which I can meet her inner worlds embedded in her play—what drives her, what she agonises over, what she wishes—and I begin to wonder about her play as a communication of some kind of expansion, a relationship with the world as she takes more of the world in. Becoming part of something larger, the sizes, scopes, angles of her world are changing. I watch her in her play grappling with herself and I look for words to attend to an emerging existentially laden nuancing in her play. How can I think of her play in the light of her growing awareness of her being in the world, being part of something larger and constantly awakening to it as she finds herself in it by means of her everyday encounters, her experiences and her life as it comes to pass? In what language can I speak of this, how do I name and respond to it?
The main criticism of psychoanalytic observation as a research method comes from within psychoanalysis. The method is challenged as lacking the means for meaning to be confirmed: in psychoanalysis, interpretation is worked through by means of the client’s response, something that is not applicable in psychoanalytic observation (Urwin and Sternberg 2012, p. 5). Sensitised and attuned to the child’s very own language, that is, her play, psychoanalytic observation considers meaning by the very entering into the imaginative world of the child as it unfolds in a dynamic relationship informed by transference and countertransference. Staying longer with this relationship, I look into it for the space to think about the observer as an other who errs, misses or wishes and the child as a knower of her experience; that is, to ponder over the blurred boundary between the child and the observer that is present in the act of interpretation and in the subjective and relational nature of meaning making in psychoanalytic observation. When is the blurred boundary between the self and the other meaningful and when does it become unproductive if not potentially dangerous?
This present work comes from my decision to spend more time with children in order to think more about these questions. That is, to explore the existential in their everyday lives and to think how their play is expressive of both, their inner states and their encounters with the world and its existential givens. I understand that the edges of the inner and outer world are not clearly demarcated and that the outer is always seen through the inner whilst the inner is projected in the outer: I cannot but become aware of transience as an existential given through my encounter with another that comes and passes, revealing a sense of self located in a larger outsideness. My purpose is not to make their boundaries clear—how can I separate the inner from the outer? It is not the experience in itself that is psychoanalytic or existential but my thinking and my language that make it so; the meaning that my words ascribe to it or else the side that they light each time. Playing with different words, I make a meaning—then another; I look at one side pretending for a while that the other is not there. Coming from a specific psychoanalytic place, my purpose is to make a space to accommodate such play, this dialogue between a psychoanalytically informed and an existentially grounded thinking of children’s play. By moving between different spaces, I also look to problematise the notion of myself as an expert and to be present with each child as another who is subject to losses, drives and wishes as well as existential givens. This study explores how the existential is present in children’s lives as well as the possibility of an integrative understanding of children’s existential encounters by means of psychoanalytic observation.
My focus is with preschool children’s relationship with the existential as this is played out in their everydayness. Past work on the existential in children has relied on language as the predominant source of knowing. With the present piece, I look at preschool children’s everyday existential encounters drawing on their play, their encounters as well as the relational dynamics in the course of the observations. My interest lies more with the subjective meanings and the affective qualities of children’s relationship with the existential: how is this relationship present in the child’s play and her ordinary doing? Does it come alive in a word, an object, an image, a movement, an encounter? How does it reveal itself in the child’s relationships with others including myself as someone who arrived in search of it? I use psychoanalytic observation as a methodology that focuses on the child’s interior worlds as they unfold in her play and in the relationship with the observer, but by bringing it into this study I inquire into the space that some of the psychoanalytic thinking has for preschool children’s existential encounters and explore the possibility of an integrative approach towards them, by moving between existential-phenomenological and psychoanalytic ideas. This work explores thus the possibility of an integrative understanding of children’s existential encounters by embodying it.
Taking a relational psychoanalytic turn has allowed the space to explore the existential as fluidly located between the child and myself and our interior and exterior worlds. In the course of our time together, we met each other encountering the existential, playing out these encounters in imaginative ways and symbolic languages. The existential did not emerge as a question per se but was embodied in children’s play and in their stories—in the way they were present and in the relationship that we formed together. It emerged elusive as a quality, a shade or a nuance embedded in a movement, a voice or a gaze. Along with the body, time and space emerged implicated in children’s relationship with the existential.
The succeeding chapter of Part I comprises a review of literature on the topic of the existential in children. It starts with an inquiry into its definition before it looks at education and psychotherapy as those relational practices that share an interest in children’s subjective histories and the meanings they make of these. A lack of attention to preschool children’s existential encounters is identified alongside the need of adults’ (practitioners and researchers alike) readiness to engag...