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Around two months, the infant’s organization of sensory experience reaches a point where s/he is able to sufficiently organize experience to have integrated episodic memories. This enables a higher level of sophistication organizing future experiences, as the infant is able to discern discrete invariant objects from cross-modal sensory stimuli and to use these to arrive at generalizations about what he/she can expect in the future from his/her environment. In this process, the infant also becomes aware of its own features (“self-invariants”), which give the child its sense of core Self as an entity distinct from objects in its environment. The infant also develops generalized representations of its interactions with its primary caregiver during this time, a concept related to and informed by attachment theory. An important role of the caregiver during this time is to assist the infant in regulating his affects. Eventually, if all goes well, the infant will internalize these experiences with the primary attachment figure, making it possible for him to help himself in the self regulation of affects. Around seven months, the infant begins to be aware that his thoughts and experiences are distinct from those of other people, that there is a gap between his subjective reality and that of other people. However, with proper attunement by the primary attachment figure, the infant also becomes aware that this gap can be bridged through intersubjective experiences, such as sharing affect and focus of attention, while developing the sense of the subjective Self. A lack of such attunement, as could happen, for example, if the mother suffers from depression, can deprive the infant of sufficient intersubjective experiences, leaving the infant unable to connect to other people in any meaningful way, which Stern believes may underlie narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Around 15 months, the infant develops the capacity for symbolic representation and language, and becomes capable of creating complex abstract mental representations of experiences, facilitating intersubjectivity but shifting the child’s focus towards those things that can be represented and communicated in language. This process allows the development of the verbal Self. Each sense of self corresponds to a different domain of interpersonal experience: the domain of emergent relatedness, the domain of core relatedness, and so on. The senses of self and domains of relatedness are not successive phases or stages, which replace or subsume one another. They continue to grow and to coexist throughout life. Mahler’s and Stern’s findings were contemporaneously integrated with later developmental research (Stern 1985; Pine, 1986; Bergman, 1999; Gergely, 2000; Fonagy, 2000) in the synthetic inclusive contemporary Freudian perspective in the work of Harold Blum, who highlighted mainly the multidimensional differentiation processes as a precondition for emergence of intrapsychic self and object representation. Further clinical and theoretical integration followed in the following conceptualizations of self in the psychoanalysis of children and adolescents.
VI. Dc. The Self in the Psychoanalysis of Children Frances Tustin (1981), in her study of the primitive stages of development, takes up the concept of a normal autistic phase in early childhood that defines a body-focused state,
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