Back to Table of Contents
VI. Db. Mahler and Stern: Integration of Research and Theory Margaret Mahler
An émigré from her native Vienna to New York, where she lived and worked most of her adult life, Margaret Mahler’s influence is felt acutely across both continents, North America as much as Europe. Her theory of Separation and Individuation developed out of her extensive work and studies of children with severe pathologies of autism and ‘symbiotic psychosis’. Directly relevant to child analytic work her is her notion of symbiotic origins of human existence, with the Self emerging through complementary processes of separation and individuation, which structure the internalized representations of the Self, distinct from the internal representations of objects. The phases and sub-phases of Separation-Individuation process include pre- separational Autism and Symbiosis, and Separation-Individuation proper with sub-phases of Differentiation/’Hatching’; Practicing, Rapprochement, and ‘On the way to Object Constancy’. (For specification, see chapter IV.B. of this entry above) Daniel N. Stern A North American trained analyst, active in both North America and Europe, Stern (1985) has elaborated a model of the development of the Self by integrating the insights of the infant research with psychoanalytic theory. At birth, the infant experiences the world as a barrage of seemingly unrelated sensory stimuli, which s/he gradually learns to “yoke” together using cues such as the “hedonic tone” (emotional quality), and temporal and intensity patterns shared between stimuli. This process of integrating and organizing experience, called the emergent sense of Self, continues until about two months. It serves as the basis for the child’s ability to learn and create. 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
784
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online