Centre for Childhood Studies Seminar

Relational life in childhood occupies a privileged place in developmental science and social policy, yet it remains one of the most difficult domains to truly know. Much of what counts as evidence about childhood experience is shaped by epistemic constraints inherent in third-person observation, standardized measurement, and population-level risk assessment. This talk examines how these constraints shape what relational experience can become within developmental research and how alternative ways of knowing have been backgrounded as the field has increasingly organized itself around putatively observer-independent modes of evidence.

I begin by tracing a broader epistemic shift in developmental science: the progressive flattening of early lived experience into measurable, non-interactive observational proxies. Using the historical emergence of the attachment paradigm as a case study, I show how shifts in investigative practice translated the qualitative variability of parent–child relationships into calculable risk variables abstracted from brief interactional episodes, thereby displacing the psychoanalytic modes of access grounded in extended intersubjective encounters and temporal reconstruction. This historical transformation entailed a flattening of shared intentionality, with relational experience accessed primarily through behavioral indicators and risk distributions rather than through second-person engagement. Attachment interventions, in turn, have increasingly functioned as technologies of normalization, gradually coming to export Western caregiving ideals—such as mutual gaze and emotion verbalization—across diverse cultural settings.

Building on this history, I then argue that psychoanalytic practice remains a vital epistemic resource for understanding early lived experience, particularly the origins of shared intentionality and intersubjectivity. The analytic encounter offers a second-person mode of access to relational experience unavailable through third-person observation alone, providing conceptual tools that clarify which dimensions of experience operational methods necessarily bracket.

Third, I address the limitations of developmental research largely based on WEIRD populations. Drawing on anthropological studies of early socialization, I present ethnographic instances in which parent-child relationships rely primarily on nonverbal communication, with affectively charged normative codes remaining unarticulated and expressed through a range of embodied communicative acts, from subtle gestures and bodily displays to more direct physical interventions. Such systems of intersubjectivity remain radically at variance with the representational practices of developmental science, revealing how shared intentionality is realized through embodied, culturally embedded practices that diverge from the typical Western emphases on mutual gaze and emotion verbalization.

Taken together, psychoanalytic practice and ethnographic engagement emerge as indispensable alternatives to third-person observational regimes, offering vital epistemic resources for understanding early relational life without reducing it to flattened representational proxies. The talk concludes with a call for renewed dialogue between psychoanalysis and anthropology as complementary second-person modes of inquiry for understanding lived experience.

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Host or Publisher Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies