The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant

Symbiosis and Individuation

Margaret S. Mahler

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429921919
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

'The biological birth of the human infant and the psychological birth of the individual are not coincident in time. The former is a dramatic, observable, and well-circumscribed event; the latter a slowly unfolding intra psychic process.'Thus begins this highly acclaimed book in which the author and her collaborators break new ground in developmental psychology and present the first complete theoretical statement of the author's observations on the normal separation-individuation process. Separation and individuation are presented in this major work as two complementary developments. Separation is described as the child's emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother, while individuation consists of those achievements making the child's assumption of his own individual characteristics. Each of the sub-phases of separation-individuation is described in detail, supported by a wealth of clinical observations which trace the tasks confronting the infant and his mother as he progresses towards achieving his own individuality.

Part I
Separation-Individuation in Perspective

CHAPTER 1
Overview

THE biological birth of the human infant and the psychological birth of the individual are not coincident in time. The former is a dramatic, observable, and well-circumscribed event; the latter a slowly unfolding intrapsychic process.

For the more or less normal adult, the experience of himself as both fully "in," and fully separate from, the "world out there" is taken for granted as a given of life. Consciousness of self and absorption without awareness of self are two polarities between which he moves with varying ease and with varying degrees of alternation or simultaneity. But this, too, is the result of a slowly unfolding process.

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; new phases of the life cycle see new derivatives of the earliest processes still at work. But the principal psychological achievements of this process take place in the period from about the fourth or fifth month to the thirtieth or thirty-sixth month, a period we refer to as the separation-individuation phase.

The normal separation-individuation process, following upon a developmentally normal symbiotic period, involves the child's achievement of separate functioning in the presence of, and with the emotional availability of the mother (Mahler, 1963); the child is continually confronted with minimal threats of object loss (which every step of the maturational process seems to entail). In contrast to situations of traumatic separation, however, this normal separation-individuation process takes place in the setting of a developmental readiness for, and pleasure in, independent functioning.

Separation and individuation are conceived of as two complementary developments: separation consists of the child's emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother (Mahler, 1952), and individuation consists of those achievements marking the child's assumption of his own individual characteristics. These are intertwined, but not identical, developmental processes; they may proceed divergently, with a developmental lag or precocity in one or the other. Thus, premature locomotor development, enabling a child to separate physically from the mother, may lead to premature awareness of separateness before internal regulatory mechanisms (cf. Schur, 1966), a component of individuation, provide the means to cope with this awareness. Contrariwise, an omnipresent infantilizing mother who interferes with the child's innate striving for individuation, usually with the autonomous locomotor function of his ego, may retard the development of the child's full awareness of self-other differentiation, despite the progressive or even precocious development of his cognitive, perceptual, and affective functions.

From the observable and inferred beginnings of the infant's primitive cognitive-affective state, with unawareness of self-other differentiation, a major organization of intrapsychic and behavioral life develops around issues of separation and individuation, an organization that we recognize by terming the subsequent period the separation-individuation phase. In Part II we will describe the steps in this process (the subphases), beginning with the earliest signs of differentiation, proceeding through the period of the infant's absorption in his own autonomous functioning to the near exclusion of mother, then through the all-important period of rapprochement in which the child, precisely because of his more clearly perceived state of separateness from mother, is prompted to redirect his main attention back to mother, and finally to a feeling of a primitive sense of self, of entity and individual identity, and to steps toward constancy of the libidinal object and of the self.

We wish to emphasize our focus on early childhood. We do not mean to imply, as is sometimes loosely done, that every new separation or step toward a revised or expanded feeling of self at any age is part of the separation-individuation process. That would seem to us to dilute the concept and erroneously to direct it away from that early intrapsychic achievement of a sense of separateness that we see as its core. An old, partially unresolved sense of self-identity and of body boundaries, or old conflicts over separation and separateness, can be reactivated (or can remain peripherally or even centrally active) at any and all stages of life; but it is the original infantile process, not the new eliciting events or situations, to which we shall address ourselves.

In terms of its place in the larger body of psychoanalytic theory, we consider our work to bear especially on two main issues: adaptation and object relationship.

Adaptation

It was rather late in the developmental history of psychoanalysis that Hartmann (1939) began to bring a perspective on adaptation into psychoanalytic theory. Perhaps that is because, in the clinical psychoanalysis of adults, so much seems to stem from within the patient—from his longstanding character traits and dominating fantasies. But in work with infants and children, adaptation impresses itself forcibly on the observer. From the beginning the child molds and unfolds in the matrix of the mother-infant dual unit. Whatever adaptations the mother may make to the child, and whether she is sensitive and empathic or not, it is our strong conviction that the child's fresh and pliable adaptive capacity, and his need for adaptation (in order to gain satisfaction), is far greater than that of the mother, whose personality, with all its patterns of character and defense, is firmly and often rigidly set (Mahler, 1963). The infant takes shape in harmony and counterpoint to the mother's ways and style —whether she herself provides a healthy or a pathological object for such adaptation. Metapsychologically, the focus of the dynamic point of view —the conflict between impulse and defense—is far less important in the earliest months of life than it will come to be later on, when structuralization of the personality will render intra- and intersystemic conflicts of paramount importance. Tension, traumatic anxiety, biological hunger, ego apparatus, and homeostasis are near-biological concepts that are relevant in the earliest months and are the precursors, respectively, of anxiety with psychic content, signal anxiety, oral or other drives, ego functions, and internal regulatory mechanisms (defense and character traits). The adaptive point of view is most relevant in early infancy—the infant being born into the very crest of the adaptational demands upon him. Fortunately, these demands are met by the infant's ability, in the pliability and unformedness of his personality, to be shaped by, and to shape himself to, his environment. The child's facility for conforming to the shape of his environment is already present in early infancy.

Object Relationship

We feel that our contribution has a special place in the psychoanalytic study of the history of object relationship. Early psychoanalytic writings showed that the development of object relationship was dependent upon the drives (Freud, 1905; Abraham, 1921, 1924; Fenichel, 1945). Concepts such as narcissism (primary and secondary), ambivalence, sadomasochism, oral or anal character, and the oedipal triangle relate simultaneously to problems of drive and of object relationship (cf. also Mahler, 1960). Our contribution should be seen as supplemental to this in showing the growth of object relationship from narcissism in parallel with the early life history of the ego, set in the context of concurrent libidinal development. The cognitive-affective achievement of an awareness of separateness as a precondition of true object relationship, the role of the ego apparatuses (for example, motility, memory, perception) and of more complex ego functions (such as reality testing) in fostering such awareness are at the center of our work. We try to show how object relationship develops from infantile symbiotic or primary narcissism and alters parallel with the achievement of separation and individuation, and how, in turn, ego functioning and secondary narcissism grow in the matrix of the narcissistic and, later, the object relationship to mother.

In terms of its relationship to clinical psyehopathological phenomena, we consider our work to bear on what Anna Freud (1965b) has called developmental disturbances, which the developmental flux of energy (E. Kris, 1955) may even out during later development, or which, in certain instances, may be precursors of infantile neurosis or middle range pathology. In rare cases, in which the subphase development was severely disordered or unsuccessful, we found, as did others such as Frijling-Schreuder (1969), Kernberg (1967), and G, and R. Blanck (1974), that borderline phenomena or borderline states, and even psychosis, may result.

This volume, in contradistinction to the volume on infantile psychosis (Mahler 1968b), deals predominantly with average development and makes contributions to the understanding of, at most, middle-range pathology.

In the study of infantile psychoses, both in the predominantly autistic (Kanner. 1949) and in the predominantly symbiotic syndromes (Mahler, 1952; cf, also Mahler, Furer, and Settlage, 1959), children were observed who seemed either unable to enter or ever to leave the delusional twilight state of a mother-infant symbiotic common orbit (Mahler and Furer, 1960; cf. Mahler, 1968ft). These are children who may never show responsivity to, or the capacity of adapting to, stimuli emanating from the mothering person, that is to say, children who cannot utilize a "mothering principle" (Mahler and Furer, 1966). Or, on the other hand, they may show panic at any perception of actual separateness. Even the exercise of autonomous functions (for example, motility or speech) may be renounced or distorted to preserve the delusion of the unconditionally omnipotent symbiotic unity (cf. Ferenczi, 1913)

In either event, these children are deficient in the capacity to use the mother as a beacon of orientation in the world of reality (Mahler, 19686). The result is that the infant personality fails to organize itself around the relationship to the mother as an external love object. The ego apparatuses, which usually grow in the matrix of the "ordinary devoted" mothering relationship (see Winnicott, 1962) fail to thrive; or, in Glover's terms (1956), the ego nuclei do not integrate, but secondarily fall apart. The child with predominantly autistic defenses seems to treat the "mother in the flesh" (Bowlby, Robertson, and Rosenbluth, 1952) as nonexistent; only if his autistic shell is threatened by penetration from human intrusion does he react with rage and/or panic. On the other hand, the child with a predominantly symbiotic organization seems to treat the mother as if she were part of the self, that is, as not separate from the self but rather fused with it (Mahler, 1968b). These latter children are unable to integrate an image of mother as a distinct and whole external object; instead, they maintain the split between the good and the bad part-objects and alternate between wanting to incorporate the good or expel the bad. In consequence of one or the other of these solutions, adaptation to the outside world (most specifically represented in a developing object relationship to mother [or father]) and individuation leading to the child's unique personality do not unfold evenly from an early stage onward. Thus, essential human characteristics get blunted and distorted in their rudimentary stage or fall apart later on.

The study of the normal symbiotic period, and of normal separation and individuation, helps make the developmental failures of psychotic children more comprehensible.

Some Definitions

We have found, in discussions and presentations over the years, that three of our basic concepts are misunderstood often enough to warrant clarification. First, we use the term separation or separateness to refer to the intrapsychic achievement of a sense of separateness from mother and, through that, from the world at large. (This very sense of separateness is what the psychotic child is unable to achieve.) This sense of separateness gradually leads to clear intrapsychic representations of the self as distinguished from the representations of the object world (Jacobson, 1964). Naturally, in the normal course of developmental events, real physical separations (routine or otherwise) from mother are important contributors to the child's sense of being a separate person-—but it is the sense of being a separate individual, and not the fact of being physically separated from someone, that we will be discussing. (Indeed, in certain aberrant conditions, the physical fact of separation can lead to ever more panic-stricken disavowal of the fact of separateness and to the delusion of symbiotic union.)

Second, we use the term symbiosis (Mahler and Furer, 1966), similarly, to refer to an intrapsychic rather than a behavioral condition; it is thus an inferred state. We do not refer, for example, to clinging behavior, but rather to a feature of primitive cognitive-affective life wherein the differentiation between self and mother has not taken place, or where regression to that self-object undifferentiated state (which characterized the symbiotic phase) has occurred. Indeed this does not necessarily require the physical presence of the mother, but it may be based on primitive images of oneness and/or scotomatization or disavowal of contradictory perceptions (see also Mahler, 1960).

Third, Mahler (1958a and b) has earlier referred to infantile autism and symbiotic psychosis as two extreme disturbances of identity. We use the term identity to refer to the earliest awareness of a sense of being, of entity—a feeling that includes in part, we believe, a cathexis of the body with libidinal energy. It is not a sense of who I am but that I am; as such, this is the earliest step in the process of the unfolding of individuality.

Symbiotic Psychosis and Normal Separation-Individuation: A Review

Historically, the senior author's observations of normal development and of the mother-infant dyad gradually led to the study of pathological phenomena, including child psychosis. Of course, the turn from problems of normal development was never complete. Although the immediate predecessor of the current work was the study of symbiotic psychosis of early childhood, we would, at this time, like to show the ways in which that study led naturally to our reconsideration of normal development.

On the Hypothesis of a Normal Separation-Individuation Phase

In our previous research on the natural history of symbiotic child psychosis (with Furer), we reached rock bottom when we tried to understand why those child patients were unable to develop beyond a (distorted) symbiotic phase, why they even had to reach back into bizarre life-maintaining mechanisms of a secondary autistic nature (Mahler and Furer, 1960; Mahler, 19686). To understand this, we felt we had to know more about the steps that lead to normal individuation and, in particular, more about coenesthetic, preverbal, and early boundary-forming experiences which prevail in the first two years of life.

We began to ask various questions. What was the ordinary way" of becoming a separate individual that these psychotic children could not achieve? What was the "hatching process" like in the normal infant? How could we understand in detail the ways in which the mother—as catalyst, activator, or organizer—contributed to these processes? How did the vast majority of infants manage to achieve the second, seemingly very gradual, psychic birth experience which, beginning during the symbiotic phase, gives way to the events of the separation-individuation process? And what, by contrast, were the genetic and structural features that prevented the prepsychotic child from achieving this second birth experience, this hatching from the symbiotic mother-infant "common boundary"?

By 1955 (Mahler and Gosliner), we began to be able to articulate a conception of a normal separation-individuation phase.

Let us, for the sake of brevity, call [this] period ... the separation-individuation phase of personality development. It is our contention that this separation-individuation phase is a crucial one in regard to the ego and the development of object relationships. It is also our contention that the characteristic fear of this period is separation anxiety. This separation anxiety is not synonymous with the fear of annihilation through abandonment. It is an anxiety which is less abruptly overwhelming than the anxiety of the previous phase. It is, however, more complex, and later we hope to elaborate on this complexity. For we need to study the strong impetus which drives toward separation,¹ coupled with the fear of separation, if we hope to understand the severe psychopathology of childhood which ever so often begins or reveals itself insidiously or acutely from the second part of the second year onward.

This separation-individuation phase is a kind of second birth experience which one of us described as "a hatching from the symbiotic mother-child common membrane." This hatching is just as inevitable as is biological birth (Mahler and Gosliner, 1955, p. 196).

Furthermore:

For purposes of understanding our points, we propose focusing on the position of defense of the eighteen- to thirty-six-month infant, to defend his own evolving, enjoyable, and jealously guarded self-image from infringement by mother and other important figures. This is a clinically important and conspicuous phenomenon during the separation-individuation phase. As Anna Freud [1951b)] has pointed out, at the age of two and three a quasinormal negativistic phase of the toddler can be observed. It is the accompanying behavioral reaction marking the process of disengagement from the mother-child symbiosis. The less satisfactory or the more parasitic the symbiotic phase has been, the more prominent and exaggerated will be this negativistic reaction. The fear of reengulfment threatens a recently and barely started individual differentiation which must be defended. Beyond the fifteen- to eighteen-month mark, the primary stage of unity and identity with mother ceases to be constructive for the evolution of an ego and an object w...