0.4 Neo-freudian perspectives on personality  (Page 18/28)

...What is life about? I do not need to know the answer, but we can agree that it is more nearly about BEING than about sex…Being and feeling real belong essentially to health, and it is only if we can take being for granted that we can get on to the more positive things…the vast majority of people take feeling real for granted, but at what cost? To what extent are they denying a fact, namely, that there could be a danger for them of feeling unreal, of feeling possessed, of feeling they are not themselves, of falling for ever, of having no orientation, of being detached from their bodies, of being annihilated, of being nothing, nowhere? Health is not associated with denial of anything. (pgs. 34-35; Winnicott, 1967/1986)

The Final Development of Individuality: Margaret Mahler and Heinz Kohut

Margaret Mahler (1897-1985), was also a pediatrician before becoming a child analyst, and the early relationship between a child and its mother had a significant impact on her views of developmental ego psychology. At birth, according to Mahler, a child is focused entirely on itself, in a state of primary narcissism known as the normal autistic phase . In agreement with Sigmund Freud, Mahler believed that in the first few weeks of life there is very little cathexis of libido outside of the child itself. She borrowed Freud’s analogy of a bird’s egg to describe this period in which the child has minimal interaction with external stimuli. Through contact with the mother, however, the child slowly becomes aware that it cannot satisfy its needs by itself. As the child becomes dimly aware of the mother’s activities, the child begins to think of itself and its mother as an inseparable system. This intimate connection between child and mother is called normal symbiosis (Kernberg, 2004; Mahler, Pine,&Bergman, 1975; Mitchell&Black, 1995). As important as this stage is for the development of the child, the child still needs to develop a sense of individuality. That process is known as separation-individuation :

We refer to the psychological birth of the individual as the separation-individuation process : the establishment of a sense of separateness from, and relation to, a world of reality, particularly with regard to the experiences of one’s own body and to the principal representative of the world as the infant experiences it, the primary love object . Like any intrapsychic process, this one reverberates throughout the life cycle. It is never finished; it remains always active…(pg. 3; Mahler, Pine,&Bergman, 1975)

Separation-individuation, therefore, refers to the two main tasks that a young child must accomplish in order to grow up. First, they must separate from their mother (including the psychological understanding that they and their mother are two separate beings), and then they must fully develop their individuality. According to Mahler, this process involves a series of four subphases: differentiation, practicing, rapprochement , and consolidation . The earliest subphase, differentiation, is signaled by the child’s increasing alertness around the age of 4 to 5 months. Following a “hatching process”, the child directs much of its attention outward, but this alternates with the child often turning back to the mother as its point of orientation. Transitional objects, as described by Winnicott, are also important during this period. As the child becomes old enough to start crawling, it moves out into the world and begins practicing its ability to interact with the environment. The practicing subphase enters full force as the child begins to walk, and an important aspect of this is a full, physical understanding of the child’s separateness from its mother. Accordingly, its interests can now spill over into the many toys and other objects the child discovers in the world (Kernberg, 2004; Mahler, Pine,&Bergman, 1975; Mitchell&Black, 1995).