Intimate Transformations

Babies with their Families

Nancy Bakalar, Hope Cooper, Jaedene Levy, Jeanne Magagna, Nancy Bakalar, Hope Cooper, Jaedene Levy, Jeanne Magagna

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367325145
• eBook ISBN: 9780429915123
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This enriching book describes the value of learning about the development of the human personality through the experience of observing a baby in the context of the family. It is distinctive in the field of infant observation literature, for it shows how the affective learning model augments the learning experience. It also highlights a somewhat neglected area of observational study: the relationship between siblings and its influence on the development of self-esteem of the younger child.

Part I
Observing Babies in Their Families

Chapter One
The origins of self-esteem in infancy

Hope Cooper & Jeanne Magagna

This chapter describes some of the ways in which self-esteem can develop in infancy. Weekly observations of infants in the natural environment of their family are used to explore how precisely this centrally important part of the self—self-esteem—takes shape. It is based on Hope Cooper’s observations of two families with an older sibling, aged between 18 and 19 months old when the new baby was born. In each family the second-born baby was the infant being observed over a period of approximately two years.

The nature of self-esteem

Self-esteem is a somewhat neglected concept in psychoanalytic literature, but in the fine grain of infant observation material, a deeper complexity can be elaborated. Referring to the worth or dignity that one ascribes to oneself, self-esteem implies a sense of integrity, self-respect, the feeling and consciousness of what one is responsible for, what one must do—or may not do—in order to maintain one’s personal dignity. According to psychoanalytic thought, the feeling of personal dignity comes from an unconscious value system that exercises its influence unconsciously (Jacoby, 1996). Likewise, the conscious and unconscious beliefs and evaluations that family members hold about themselves help determine who they are, what they can do, and what they can become. These powerful, largely unconscious influences provide an internal guiding mechanism, steering and nurturing both parents and children through life, governing their interactions with one another.

Positive self-esteem is associated with mental well-being, happiness, adjustment, success, academic achievements, and satisfaction. Low self-esteem can be a causal factor in depression, suicide, anxiety, eating disorders, poor social functioning, school dropout, and risk behaviour (Mann, Hosman, Schaalma, & de Vries, 2004).

Using these observations of siblings interacting within their families, we shall describe how relationships in the family, in both external reality and internal reality, influence a baby’s developing self-esteem. For convenience we use female pronouns for the infant under observation and male pronouns for the older sibling. Unfortunately, because the fathers were generally absent during the time of the observations, this chapter refers primarily to the mother and alludes to her relationship to the role of the father inside her.

A significant factor: the mother’s attitude towards sharing

Because we do not ask questions regarding the family members’ history, we have incomplete stories about each mother’s external family history. What is seen, though, is each mother’s differing attitude towards her siblings sharing her maternal space. We feel that perhaps each mother’s attitude towards her children’s sharing is partially a reflection of the mother’s internalized family relationships. The mother’s internalized relationships with her siblings, parents, and husband have been formed through relationships with these significant others. These internalized relationships have been coloured by the mother’s individual urges and desires towards these significant others, who are then introjected and filled with the mother’s projections and phantasies. Thus the mother’s internalized siblings, parents, and husband are internal objects that differ from her external family members. These internalized siblings and parents form part of the mother’s internal world, which is felt concretely as an inner world of actual objects engaging in relating with each other and with the mother (Hinshelwood, 1989, p. 326).

In a variety of ways, the mother’s internalized family relationships with her husband, parents, and siblings may influence her self-esteem and, in turn, impact on the way in which she shares her love, understanding, and time to give her second-born a growing sense of her place and self-worth within the family. For example, in the first family discussed below there often seems to be a duet existing for the sake of either the mother or the first-born. In this family, the mother’s earlier and very close attachment to her older child, a son, is shown to have a significant impact on her younger child’s difficulty in developing high self-esteem. In contrast to this, in the second family there seems to be a notion of there being a trio that generally includes the second-born, and partially in response to this, the younger child seems to have developed better self-esteem.

Factors affecting self-esteem from preconception onwards

Self-esteem arises from a sense of feeling good or bad about the self in both the psychological and the physical domains. Perhaps one should begin to consider self-esteem at the moment just prior to pregnancy when the parents contemplate the act of intercourse. Is this an intercourse of love or of sensuality alone? Is there an intention for this second baby to be born? What are the wishes for the life of this baby? Given the sex of the first-born, is the second-born to somehow embody maleness or femaleness on the behalf of either parent? In general, does either parent have a preference for either boys or girls? What do the partners feel about the fourth person entering their family and influencing their sense of being a couple? Identifying with the first baby can allow the other partner to tolerate the baby having many intimate moments with the spouse, but what happens to the parents’ identifications when there are two babies sharing the mother’s or father’s space? How does the gender or position of the child influence the emergence of re-enacted rivalry with the parents’ internalized siblings as two babies share the person upon whom both depend and intimately love? Or if the previous sibling was miscarried, aborted, or died in some other way, how is the second baby’s self-esteem impaired by needing to be “another sex” or “a replacement baby” for her parents? The perception of the self, loved for who one is by the parents, forms part of the core of self-esteem.

Co-construction of the baby’s good self-esteem

However, the development of self-esteem is far more complex than this. It is also based on the moment-to-moment psychological and physical interactions from birth onwards between the baby and the older sibling as well as the parents. It is the influence of the older sibling on the baby’s developing self-esteem which needs further elaboration.

In The Interpersonal World of the Infant, Daniel Stern (1985) suggests that the child’s self-esteem is affected by how mother and child are able to attune themselves to each other. The mother’s sensitive, affirming attitude allows the child to feel the mother knows how she, the baby, is doing, and this creates a sense of inner harmony with the mother. It is clear that the baby expects to meet the gleam in mother’s eye. This gives the baby a good sense of self-esteem.

The infant’s experiences with the family become recorded in implicit and preverbal memory and then internalized as primarily unconscious ideas and expectations. They become internal psychic representations. Both the external and the internalized mother and father, as well as the internalized older sibling, have an extremely decisive influence on the baby’s state of being and self-esteem. There are some basic tasks, as it were, that the baby must accomplish very early on. Only if the baby comes to feel secure and confident with the parents and older sibling—and establishes internally a constant-enough experience of parents’ and older sibling’s positive tolerance, understanding, and acceptance—can the infant begin to feel “I am loved, cared for, valued by others the way I am” (Jacoby, 1996, p. 38).

Ideally, the emotional matrix in the family will contain empathy for all the domains of the self: the bodily self, the verbal self, and the psychological and emotional self. This is the foundation for the development of a secure attachment to both the parents and the older sibling and of healthy self-confidence and the construction of high self-esteem. The goodness and strength of this basic internal foundation is in turn influenced by the baby’s feelings of love, gratitude, envy, and jealousy towards the parents and their other children. In other words, there is a co-construction of the baby’s developing self-esteem which emanates from the interaction between the baby and the family members’ internal worlds and their resulting behaviour towards one another. The baby’s love and gratitude for the parents’ and older sibling’s love and loving actions towards her creates good self-esteem.

Co-construction of low self-esteem

But what happens when the mother shares her infant’s joyfully communicated interest while, at the same time, the older sibling is protesting about the baby receiving mother’s love and feeling hostile towards the new infant? And what happens when a parent either does not share her infant’s joyfully communicated interest or it is repetitiously interrupted by the hostile glare of the older sibling? Stern (1985) suggests that the child’s self-esteem is affected by how mother and child are able to attune themselves to each other. We would like to add, on the basis of our observations, that it is not only the mother’s sensitive, affirming attitude that allows the child to feel that the mother knows how she, the baby, is doing and creates a sense of inner harmony with the mother. It is clear that the baby expects to meet “the gleam in mother’s eye” (Kohut, 1971), but also the baby is very attentive to the nature of the gleam in the older sibling’s eye. When a parent does not share her infant’s joyfully communicated interest, her face will seem somewhat strange or alienating to the infant. When the older sibling does not like the infant sharing mother’s communicated interest, the baby is also simultaneously experiencing rejection from the older sibling. Low self-esteem is created through both a basic sense of feeling unloved or unempathically received in the bodily, psychological, and verbal domains and the consequent aggressive feelings that damage the goodness of the internalized parents with whom one identifies.

Shame and self-esteem

The feeling unloved and rejected by either a parent or a sibling, experiencing the interruption of contact between mother and baby by a sibling, or being thrust back onto one’s aloneness are linked with susceptibility to shame (Nathanson, 1987). In relation to this point, Tomkins (1963) has shown examples of shame in infants at age 6 months. Schore (1994) explores the physiological impact of shame and describes a characteristic, observable pattern in infants. He understands shame as a break in attachment that renders the baby “helpless and hopeless”. For example, the second baby can feel psychologically and/or physically abandoned by the parents or the older sibling. The result is a sense of rejection of her feelings, thoughts, and intuitions. Either finding no echo or mirror in the parents or simultaneously feeling the hostility of the older sibling, the second baby will not feel completely understood or valued, and hence low self-esteem will be fostered (Asper, 1993).

Low self-esteem can also perpetuate hopelessness: a sense that whatever one does, feels, says, or wishes will always meet with rejection. Low self-esteem creates the feeling that one can never do the right thing for anyone, nor win their loving approval, and leads to a sense of being devalued and despised. Thus not having felt oneself accepted induces low self-esteem, which is then linked to an inability to accept oneself as one is. In extreme situations of deprivation or maltreatment, there is little introjection of a good reliable internal object. The self is identified with a bad internal object, and low self-esteem ensues. Subsequently a depression evolving into despair occurs that makes it difficult for the child to establish good experiences promoting self-esteem.

The baby’s aggressive feelings influencing low self-esteem

It is, of course, far too simplistic a notion that low self-esteem is based solely on what the environment provides for the infant. While there may have been an insufficiently good experience with the parents, this may not be the whole story. Poor self-esteem may also be influenced by temperamental or genetic features. It can also be influenced by the infant’s capacity to love and to bear frustration. The infant’s own destructivity, depreciation, envious spoiling, or jealous rage of the internalized parents and siblings can damage these internal objects. Identification with these damaged objects is a very significant factor leading to low self-esteem. For example, the anger aroused when the baby realizes she does not “possess” the parents and all that they offer, or could potentially offer, can lead to her unconsciously attacking her internalized constructions of them. This will create a damaged internal object (parental figure) with whom the baby identifies.

Adhesive clinging to the internal persecutor perpetuating low self-esteem

However, the baby does not only identify with a damaged internal object. This damaged internal object forms a harsh, punitive, and cruel superego, which takes an active role in perpetuating the damage to self-esteem. This is accomplished through an internal critic that perceives and treats the self badly through persecutory criticism or constant nagging. Evidence of the harsh superego functioning is clear when a person torments himself repeatedly through using an inner eye that is invariably intolerant, critical, and intensely demeaning. Statements like this depict such an experience: “I am no good. I don’t deserve to have anything. I am unworthy to be loved. This effort is no good. Nothing I do ever works out right.”

Some children, particularly those lacking secure attachments to good parental objects, are inclined to become attached to and adhesively cling to the experience of being bullied by this internal critic (Magagna & Segal, 1998). The internal critic’s attacks on the self increase low self-esteem. The puzzle is, why cling on to the internal critic’s damaging remark? When a child has had unreliable, untrustworthy parental figures or internal objects, it often seems safer for such an insecurely attached child to cling on to the internal critic’s remarks rather than hold on to a more precarious attachment to a good parental figure. For an insecurely attached child, beginning to trust and hope for a better relationship with loved (and loving) people involves reawakening the extreme anxieties and terrors of being a dependent infant with unreliable caregivers. With trying to hope for better relationships comes a constant fear of being hurt and disappointed.

Not only is it anxiety provoking to work towards developing a good internal object, but also repeated attachment to self-criticism provides a way of avoiding thinking and therefore facing guilt and shame about one’s lack of capacity to love, one’s destructiveness, and one’s grief about having damaged a relationship with a loved one. It also is very painful and difficult to work hard to create better possibilities both in the internal world and in external reality.

Attempts to make the internal object suffer

Repeated declarations of low self-esteem may also reflect a cruel desire to make the object suffer by degrading the object and creating pain. Anger with a family member, or internal family figure, “can spread not merely to the image of the other person now, but to everything to do with him, present and past, with the result that the whole memory of him, and the others related to him, is spoiled. The result is a feeling of being no good, of being empty, worthless or dead inside; or worse, feeling rotten and contaminated” (Malan, 1989, p. 155). Through an addictive destructive process producing lower self-esteem, despair can occur.

The body bearing the brunt of pain

When the psychological self can no longer bear the damaged state of the internalized parents and siblings, the body seems to bear the brunt of the infant’s bad emotional experience. The body holds the drama of the damage done to the internal objects, the physical site of this “internal illness”, resulting in terror and misery. In lieu of the psychological self containing the painful emotions of jealousy, anger, terror, and loss, the body becomes the locus of “badness” and “low self-esteem”. This may result in one or more of the following experiences: physical pain or weakness, lack of physical coordination, and/or a sense of being “dirty”, “disgusting”, “ugly”, or “fat”. In extreme situations, there can be a complete shut-down of acknowledgement of what is occurring. At this point, there is an accompanying dissociation that involves lack of awareness of body sensations, lack of awareness of others, and lack of self-awareness (Magagna, 2004).

Siblings’ influence on the development of self-esteem

We now turn to a historical exploration of the significance of this sibling relationship. That siblings form strong attachments to each other is not a new concept. Leichtman (1985) and Piontelli (1989, 1992) have shown that while in the womb twins develop a complex relationship with each other that ranges from being loving and playful to being actively hostile with one another. Piontelli’s studies (1989, 1992) of twins suggest that if there has been a hostile relationship in utero, the twins may continue to reject one another after birth.

Anna Freud and Sophie Dann (1951) also realized the importance of the sibling relationships when they studied orphaned siblings living in a concentration camp during their first years of life and then living together in an English children’s home. Arriving in England at age 3 years, the children behaved like wild animals as they spat at and bit the grown-ups. However, they were extremely sensitive to each other’s feelings; they were generous, kind, and pleased to be with one another, and they could not bear to be separated from each other. It became apparent to Freud and Dann (1951) that the relationship that had developed between the siblings was connected to the relationship that existed between themselves and the adults surrounding them. When they were not attached to protective adults, their aggression was directed to the adults.

It was only when they became dependent upon and attached to the adults that they became physically hurtful to one another, malicious, and less cooperative with one another. Through thi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS
• Introduction
• PART I Observing babies in their families
• PART II Applications of infant observation studies
• PART III The infant observation seminar group
• Concluding remarks
• REFERENCES
• INDEX