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goes from sensations to perceptions and feelings and symbols, and finally, to thoughts. The transitional object is the first observable step in early symbolization, a base for the development of secondary process thinking. On the basis of these longitudinal studies Gaddini has been able to show how the quality of the mother-infant interaction allows the development of the bodily self. The self, in fact, is the first organization of the individual just born, while he tries to adapt to the new homeostasis. The infant works at its formation in the very first months. In the organization of the self there is the contribution from the mother touching her baby, and, in so doing, delimiting the infant’s physical boundaries and from the innate contribution of the baby. The baby’s self originates through the converging of these two contributions. The wholeness of these peripheral sensations of skin-to-skin contact and of his body’s impact in space are what matters for the infant to build his sense of Self. The functioning of the body (the various organs’ function) is the language of the body; this body language, on its way to becoming mental (somehow), is the language of the self. Gaddini states that “Every time we refer to the self we find ourselves immediately dealing with a mental activity which in some way is related to (has to do with) the body … We see among the functions of the self, the control of organic reactions of the body”. (Gaddini 1977, p.264) Mental activity arises from body experience and helps the child to master disintegration anxieties and fears and his fantasy helps him to save him from disintegration. Anne Alvarez Trained in Canada, USA, and Great Britain, Alvarez is a member of numerous Child Psychoanalytic Societies and academia in both North America and Europe. A child and adolescent analyst in a post-Kleinian tradition, whose views have been informed by her extensive study and clinical work with autistic and otherwise developmentally impacted children, Alvarez theorizes “it is almost impossible to think of the self except in relation to objects” (Bach, Mayes, Alvarez, Fonagy, 2000, p. 11). She names three factors that compel her to attend to the issue of selfhood. “The first is work with autistic and deprived children, where a self may be barely visible or almost nonexistent. Sometimes this is because the object is all too dominant, and at other times it occurs where the object hardly exists either, in which case the child can seem barely human. The second is the study of the neonate, and the third is the study of extremely early levels of infantile functioning in children with severe developmental delays” (ibid, p. 12). Studying the self and its earliest origins, she broadens the Kleinian notion of anxieties about self, dominating the schizoid-paranoid position, and argues (Alvarez 1992, 1999) that the needs, in addition to anxieties of people functioning at the level of the paranoid-schizoid position deserve more attention than they have received. With the self and objects and their respective parts intermingled, the issue of where the self ends and the internal objects begin has important clinical and technical implications.
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