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For Mahler, the benchmark of successful development was not the establishment of genital primacy following a successful oedipal resolution but rather a developmental movement from embededness within a symbiotic mother-child relationship to the achievement of a stable individual identity within a world of predictable and realistically perceived others. This process was termed “Separation-Individuation” or the “Psychological Birth” of the child. Separation and Individuation are complementary but distinct developmental processes. Separation is defined as the child’s emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother; Individuation consists of those achievements leading to the child’s assumption of his own individual characteristics (Mahler et al, 1975, p.4). Although Mahler’s organizing principles were based on the relationships between self and objects, with an emphasis on the transactional aspects of growth and development, they were derived from classical drive theory. The child, in Mahler’s view, was less someone struggling with conflictual drive demands than one who must continually reconcile a longing for independent, autonomous existence, with an equally powerful urge to plunge back into the symbiotic fusion from which she had emerged. Development evolved over time with regard to the timing and characteristics of specific subphases. At first, Mahler’s theory assumed that the child develops from “normal autism” through a period of symbiosis and then to four sequentially unfolding subphases of the Separation-Individuation process. (Mahler, Pine and Bergman, 1975). She later importantly relinquished the concept of the first two months of neonate’s life Normal Autistic Phase based on primary narcissism and a stimulus barrier, realizing that from birth children show signs of ongoing awareness of their environment and the objects in it, and the stimulus barrier is rather a ‘stimulus filter’, term suggested to her by Blum (Blum, 2004b). From the second month – the Symbiotic Phase - the infant was supposedly only dimly aware of objects and is in a state of “delusional-somato-psychic” fusion (Mahler et al, 1975, p.45). This was considered to be a positive state of relatedness which occurred in an intrapsychic context with an absence of boundaries between self and other (Fonagy, 2001). During this phase affect mirroring is regarded as critically important. The attuned mother establishes and maintains an appropriate affectomotor dialogue with the infant through eye- contact, facial expression, touch, holding, etc., contributing to the infant’s integration of affect modulation and regulation (Blum, 2004). The Separation-Individuation Phase, 4-5 months to 18 months consists of several subphases. The first is what Mahler refers to as “Hatching” where the child begins to differentiate the representation of the self from the mother/other (Mahler et al., 1975) by moving from the tendency to mold herself to her mother’s body to a preference for more active, self-determined exploration. “More than any other psychoanalytic theorist, Mahler recognized the importance of walking, a maturational achievement that ushers in the Practicing Subphase of separation individuation” (Blum, 2004b, p.542). During this second subphase the child practices locomotion to increase physical separation from the mother and to literally continue the differentiation process. This is the period during which Mahler situates the actual
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