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VI. D. The Self in Psychoanalysis of Children and Adolescents While many contributions of the North American and European authors are explicitly or implicitly developmental, in Europe in particular, psychoanalyses of children and adolescents, directly building on some aspects of research and theories of Margaret Mahler and Daniel Stern, are frequently thought of as a special category providing further elaboration of the theories of the Self. Reciprocally, the clinical theory and clinical work of child and adolescent analysts provide further impetus for the overall evolution of the concept, inspiring further empirical studies and interdisciplinary research, which may be relevant to clinical conceptualizations applicable to all age categories. VI. Da. Background in Infant Studies of North America and Europe René Spitz’s studies (1945, 1965, 1972) of long-term maternal separation on institutionalized infants was greatly influential on Mahler’s theory of separation-individuation. Importantly, he was also the first one to stress the vital importance of affectionate ‘holding’ of the infant by caregivers, which promotes rich tactile affective nonverbal communication between the infants and their caregivers. This tradition continued with Mahler (Mahler, Pine, Bergman, 1975), within the Ego Psychology/Structural theory framework, and, with the infant research on self- and interactive regulation of Beebe (Beebe and Lachmann 2002; Beebe 2004a,b), and with the Boston Change Process Study Group (Stern, Sander, Nahum et al., 1998), within the Self and Relational theories framework. Following Bowlby (1969) in England, Ainsworth (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters and Wall, 1978) in the USA developed contemporary attachment theory, where the attachment is defined as an affective bond between the infant and a caregiver (Blum 2004) and as the behavioral correspondence of internalized object relations under the influence of the early mother-infant relationship (Diamond and Blatt, 2007). The above and comparable studies in the field of infant research and attachment in Europe (D. N. Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 2001; Fonagy, Gergely, Jurist & Target, 2002; Ammaniti & Trentini, 2009; Cortina & Liotti, 2010) consistently support the view of personality organized in terms of ‘self-with-other’, where the interaction between two subjects is the necessary condition for psychic development as well as for psychological cure (See also separate entries OBJECT RELATIONS THEORIES and INTERSUBJECTIVITY). Developmental neuroscientists have suggested that there may be a ‘virtual other’ in the brain whose outlines get filled in with experience (Bråten, 2011). Mirror Neuron Systems (Gallese, Eagle and Migone, 2007) are thought to be a possible element in such innately given ‘interpersonality’. Neuro-analytic studies of right brain structures and activities implicated in the unconscious processes of the ‘implicit self’ of Allan Schore (2011) are also relevant in this regard.
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