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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, dominated by sensations, which constitutes the core of the Self, associated with a relatively undifferentiated auto-sensuality. She describes that at this stage, the child’s body and its sensations lay the foundations for the constitution of a bodily self, the basis for the subsequent development of identity. In this phase the objects of external reality, including the mother, are incorporated in the form of sensation-objects belonging to the body, precursors of the next relationship of the newborn with not-me objects, experienced as separate from the body to which the child must adapt. Tustin also stresses that the child must have first developed a sense of self that is distinct and separate from others in order to be able to develop social awareness of others. The way in which the newborn develops this type of awareness is essential for the acquisition of the sense of individual identity. The sensuality of the newborn in the state of normal primary autism is combined with the adaptability of the mother coming from her maternal preoccupation and protecting her child from the experiences of the “non-self”, in a sort of “post-natal womb”. Tustin theorizes an auto-sensual construct to describe the way the child experiences the mother
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