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“psychological birth” of the child. With upright locomotion, the child’s horizons expand and the child becomes excited as the “world becomes his oyster”. In Greenacre’s (1957) phrase, it is the height of his “love affair with the world”. It is, as Mahler conceptualizes it, the height of both (secondary) narcissism and object love (Mahler et al., 1975). At this time, as well, the child reaches “the peak of his ‘magical omnipotence’ derived from his sense of sharing his mother’s magical powers” (Fonagy, 2001, p.66). The Rapprochement subphase from 15-18 to 24 months brings with it an awareness of separateness, separation anxiety and an increased need to be with the mother (Mahler et al, 1975). The child who was becoming increasingly independent now begins to realize she is a very small fish in a very large sea which brings with it a loss of the ideal sense of self and the reappearance of a kind of separation anxiety. For the child, there is the dawning realization that the mother is actually a separate person who may not always be available to her. This brings about the “Rapprochement Crisis”, lasting from approximately 18 to 24 months. According to Mahler, the attitude of the child is affectively ambivalent swinging between a need for clinging onto the mother and a powerful need for separateness. This is the period during which splitting is at its height (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983). It is also the period during which there are rapidly evolving autonomous ego functions most notably highlighted by rapid gains in language and by the appearance of reality testing. Gender differences and gender identity are coming into awareness, interacting with the differentiation process. During Rapprochement, the waning of infantile omnipotence is compensated for by selective identifications with the competent, tolerant, affectionate mother (Blum, 2004b). Mahler emphasized the attainment of Object Constancy (based on the tolerance of ambivalence) and Self Constancy as the final subphase of Separation-Individuation. This occurs in the third year of life and is a major developmental milestone. The two principal tasks of this period are the development of a stable concept of the self and a stable concept of the other, and are organized around the co-participants in all the child’s object relationships (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983). As a result of these developments, the child can now maintain a sense of her own individuality, as well as a sense of the other as an internal, positively cathected presence. She can function separately in the absence of the mother/other, attaining the capacity to more fully understand the separate experience of self and mother, her separate mind and the other’s interests and intentions. As the toddler has now internalized her mother’s benevolence and regulatory functions, she can now more easily tolerate separations, frustrations, and disappointments, and has more ability for autonomy, individuation, separateness and independence. Mahler was able to create an interface between classical drive theory and the developmental theory of object relations by using the concept of symbiosis to refer to both a relationship in reality and to a libidinally determined internal fantasy (Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983). Mahler’s use of Hartmann’s concepts of an average expectable environment (Hartmann, 1927 [1964) and of adaptation (Hartmann, 1939) “moved the drive model in a direction which implicitly granted relation with other a much more central explanatory role…” Greenberg and Mitchell, 1983, p.282). In order to specify the ‘average expectable environment’ Mahler
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