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According to Jacobson, an infant acquires self and object representations with loving or aggressive valences, depending on her experiences of gratification or frustration with the mother. Her term “representation” refers to the experiential impact of both internal and external worlds. She viewed self representations as complex structures including “the unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious intrapsychic representation of the bodily and mental self in the system ego” (Jacobson 1964, p 19). Jacobson formulations contribute a theoretical background for Margaret Mahler’s (1979) research on autistic and symbiotic childhood psychosis, and for the stages of normal and abnormal separation-individuation. Margaret Mahler: Self in Separation-Individuation Theory Mahler provides both direct observational and psychoanalytic data that make it possible to trace the stages Jacobson postulates. Mahler’s original interest in the child’s early development derived from her study of severe pathology in children – autism and symbiotic psychosis – where she noted an extreme inability to form a nurturing relationship with caregivers (Mahler, Ross and DeFries, 1949; Mahler, 1952; Mahler and Gosliner, 1955). This led to the development of a theory of normative child development in which object relations and the self were seen as outgrowths of instinctual vicissitudes (See also separate entry OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES). 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 establishment of a sense of “separation from”, and of “relationship with”, concerns above all the experience of one’s own body and the relationship with the object of primary love. For Mahler, the benchmark of successful development was a movement from embeddedness 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. Complementary but distinct developmental processes, Separation is defined as the child’s emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother; while Individuation consists of those achievements leading to the child’s assumption of his own individual characteristics (Mahler et al, 1975, p.4). At first, Mahler’s theory assumed that the child develops from “normal autism” through a period of symbiosis and the four sequentially unfolding subphases of the Separation- Individuation process – differentiation, practicing, rapprochement, and object constancy (Mahler, Pine and Bergman, 1975). Subsequently realizing that from birth children show signs of increasing awareness of their environment and the objects in it, she later relinquished the concept of the first two months of neonate’s life, initially viewed as the Normal Autistic Phase based on primary narcissism and a stimulus barrier. In her later theorizing, the stimulus barrier becomes a ‘stimulus filter’, a term suggested to her by Blum (Blum, 2004b).
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