Infant observation, psychoanalysis and difference: reflections on the 2024 Tavistock Infant Observation Conference

This article offers reflections on the Infant Observation Teachers Conference held at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust in April 2024, whose title was Infant Observation, Psychoanalysis and Difference. It considers reasons why the mainstream psychoanalytic tradition, at least in the writings of Freud, Klein, Winnicott Bion gave little attention to differences of race and ethnicity, and instead believed that psychoanalysis had a universal human application. The paper acknowledges the relevance of social differences to contemporary psychoanalysis and infant observation and proposes several ways in which these can be addressed. It argues that there is a need to retain the distinctive focus of psychoanalytic infant observation and to avoid this being eclipsed by sociologically-defined perspectives.