Discussed from a psychoanalytic perspective are areas of special difficulty in the phases of a three-year training observation of an infant and his family under the supervision of a 79-year-old child psychoanalyst and teacher. Specific attention is given to the child in relation to his family, the role of the observer in containing mother/infant anxieties, and the role of the tutor and seminar members in helping the observer. The first part of the paper reports observations of a baby and his parents in order to make a clear differentiation between (1) the baby attaching himself to the mother in a way that permits introjective experiences to take place, and (2) baby "holding himself together" out of distress. The second part of the paper describes transformations of the identities of all those involved in the observation/seminar, the baby and his family from the infant's eighth to sixteenth month, and the toddler's adjustment to a catastrophic change: the birth of a sibling. Throughout, the paper attempts to highlight some of the central preoccupations associated with early infantile anxieties, in particular the infant's fear of disintegration and loss of identity. (RH)