Margaret Nickels, PhD
Infant Development Through the Lens of Seeing, Experiencing, and Reflecting
Section II: January 14, 21, 28 & February 4, 11, 18, 2026
ZOOM
Margret Nickels is a PhD licensed psychologist and Faculty of the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis. For many years she was Graduate Faculty at The Erikson Institute in Chicago, where she taught foundational classes in Infant Mental Health as well as Human Development from birth through adulthood. Dr. Nickels was the clinical director of the Erikson Institute Fussy Baby Network, a home visiting program for parents with infants and newborns. Dr. Nickels also founded and led the Erikson Institute Center for Children and Families, which provided assessment and parent-child psychotherapy to families with children between birth and 8 years. Under her leadership, supervision, and training, the Center developed services integrating knowledge from infant mental health, child trauma treatment, child social-emotional and physical development, and psychoanalytic theory and practice. Dr. Nickels also provided child development and child trauma education and training to the Protective Division of the Chicago Juvenile Court, hospital pediatric departments, the Illinois Department of Child and Family services, private and public schools, and parent forums. She developed two national training units for the American Osteopathic Associations on child social-emotional development. Dr. Nickels is in private practice in Chicago providing parent-child, individual and couples therapy.
Title: Infant Development Through the Lens of Seeing, Experiencing, and Reflecting.
Seminar Description: This two-section seminar will allow candidates to vividly conceive the earliest experiences of our human coming into being. Throughout the seminar, we will watch and analyze a set of online documentary videos of three different families and their infants during their infants’ first year of life. The families are from South Africa and have different racial and socio-economic backgrounds. Videos were filmed once a week for 52 weeks. The clips show the infants in their typical interactions with their parents, but also with their siblings, other family members, and other caregivers. This broader domestic setting will allow the participants a more comprehensive look into the complex relational, cultural, and social networks of our earliest environment.
Participants will view video clips before class and take detailed observational notes on the infants’ interactions with environment. In class the clips will be reviewed and discussed among the group. Shared observations and discussions are complemented by select readings on basic concepts of psychoanalytic infant development. Readings will serve to critically evaluate and further integrate the observations and reflections.
The goal of the seminar is to facilitate participants’ psychoanalytic understanding and development primarily on an experiential level. The class will focus on linking objective micro level observations of infants’ behavior and responses from their environment with reflections on each class participant’s subjective, experiential processes.