Concept
Normal autistic phase
In Mahler's scheme, the first weeks after birth, when the newborn is taken up mostly with sleep and with sensations from inside its own body, and seems hardly to register the mother as something outside itself, as though it lived in a closed system that satisfies its wishes by hallucination. Mahler equated it with Freud's primary narcissism in its most complete form and treated it, with the symbiotic phase, as a forerunner of separation-individuation. Infant research from the 1970s on showed newborns to be far more responsive to their surroundings, which led later writers, and by some accounts Mahler herself, to give the idea up.
- Introduced by
- Margaret Mahler
- Key works
- 2
- Related
- Primary narcissism
introduced by
- Margaret Mahler Mahler's name for the first weeks of life, when the infant is turned toward its own bodily sensations rather than toward the outside world. Later infant research, notably Daniel Stern's, contested the idea.
derives from
- Primary narcissism Mahler framed normal autism in terms of Freud's primary narcissism: a closed, self-sufficient state of hallucinatory wish fulfilment that comes before any relation to an object.