The Joys and Sorrows of Teaching infant observation at the university level. The Implementation of psychoanalytic observation in teachers' further education

In this paper we describe our experience in introducing psychoanalytic observational studies in a post-graduate university MA course in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies at the Institute for Research and Further Education in Vienna. The course ran from October 2003 to 2006, with 25 participants. This new application of psychoanalysis in the field of education aims at helping teachers to increase their educational and psychological competence. Central to the learning outcome is the study of how relationships are formed in the context of learning and teaching. Successful participants will increase their capacity to recognize and deal with the social aspects of teaching relationships, as well as learning to recognize and handle transference phenomena within work situations. We describe our own experiences teaching this course as well as coping with the particular challenges emerging from the fact that most of our participants had little or no experience of personal psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. The experiences in the observational seminars, work discussion and application groups are discussed. The students’ feedback on their learning experience is also examined. Finally, we describe a forthcoming research project studying the ‘personality development and learning experiences’ of our students, granted by the IPA Research Advisory Board. In order to do this we will compare this postgraduate university course with a two-years experience of teaching infant observation to teachers in training at the University of Vienna between 1997 and 2000.