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processes and ‘representability’ of the not-yet-represented enactments (see the separate entries ENACTMENT, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, SELF, THE UNCONSCIOUS).
VI. Bb. Self and Object Representations in Daniel Stern’s Psychoanalytic Research of Infant Development Daniel Stern’s (1985) developmental model updates and integrates Mahler’s classical developmental conceptualization of Separation-Individuation, with those of Attachment, Intersubjectivity and Self perspectives. At around two months, the infant’s organization of sensory experience enables her to have integrated episodic memories. This in turn facilitates the infant’s ability 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 her own enduring 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 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, facilitating the development of 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 the others. However, with proper attunement by the primary attachment figure, the infant becomes aware that this gap can be bridged through intersubjective experiences, such as sharing affect while developing the sense of the subjective Self. Around 15 months, the infant develops the capacity for symbolic representation and language, and becomes capable of creating complex mental representations of experiences, facilitating intersubjectivity and shifting the 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, e.g., the domain of emergent relatedness, the domain of core relatedness, etc. The senses of self and domains of relatedness continue to grow and to coexist throughout life. VI. Bc. Example of Contemporary Integration (and Reformulation) of Developmental Studies 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 psychoanalytic framework of Harold Blum (2004), who highlighted mainly the multidimensional differentiation processes as a precondition for emergence of intrapsychic self and object representation.
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