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.
Development
Undated
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.
In On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Vol. 1: Infantile Psychosis (1968);The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (1975)
Relations
- 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.
Works
- 1968
On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Vol. 1: Infantile Psychosis
Margaret Mahler's monograph, written in collaboration with Manuel Furer and published in 1968 as the first of a planned two-volume study, gathers her work on psychotic children into a single theory of early development and its failures. It first sets out the concepts of symbiosis and separation-individuation: the infant passes from an early, objectless phase of normal autism into a symbiotic dual unity with the mother, out of which a separate self gradually emerges. On this basis it presents the symbiosis theory of infantile psychosis, which reads the psychoses of early childhood as derailments of that sequence, and distinguishes autistic from symbiotic forms. Later chapters take up diagnosis, clinical case material and recurrent patterns of mother–child interaction, and describe the treatment Mahler and Furer developed in New York, in which the mother takes part in the child's sessions. The book draws on non-analytic developmental research such as Piaget's and Werner's, ends with a summary of the theory, and has a bibliography of more than four hundred items.
- 1975
The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation
The book by Margaret Mahler, Fred Pine and Anni Bergman, published in 1975, is the first full theoretical account of normal separation-individuation. It grew out of the authors' observational research on mothers and young children in New York. It starts from the claim that the biological birth of a human infant and its psychological birth do not coincide. Biological birth is a single visible event; psychological birth is a slow inner process that unfolds over the first three years. Separation is the child's emergence from a symbiotic fusion with the mother. Individuation is the child's taking on of characteristics of its own. After an introduction and a history of the research setting, the book describes the forerunners of the process, normal autism and symbiosis. It then takes up the four subphases one by one: differentiation and the development of the body image; practicing; rapprochement; and the consolidation of individuality together with the beginnings of emotional object constancy. A further part follows five children, Bruce, Donna, Wendy, Teddy and Sam, through the subphases. Reflections follow on variations within the subphases, on the development of separation anxiety, basic mood and early identity, on core identity and the boundaries of the self, and on the significance of the rapprochement crisis. A final section sets out the research method: what data were collected, the reasoning behind the study and the strategies used to analyse the observations as systematic clinical research.
See also
People
References
- On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Vol. 1: Infantile Psychosis1968Evidence for a relation
- The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation1975Evidence for a relation