Esther Bick

Psychoanalyst born in Galicia, who studied psychology in Vienna and settled in Britain in 1938, where she worked in the Kleinian tradition. At the Tavistock Clinic she founded the method of psychoanalytic infant observation, in which trainees observe a baby with its family weekly over a long period, and made it part of the training of child psychotherapists. In 'The experience of the skin in early object-relations' (1968) she described the skin as the infant's first experience of being held together, and the 'second skin' of muscular tension or ceaseless activity with which an infant who lacks such containment holds itself together.