Concept
Separation-individuation
Margaret Mahler's name for the slow inner process, running from about the fourth or fifth month of life into the third year, by which an infant emerges from a felt oneness with the mother into the sense of being a separate person with a self of its own. Separation is the child's growing awareness of being apart from the mother; individuation is the growth of the capacities, such as walking, speech and memory, through which the child takes on a character of its own. Mahler divided the process into four overlapping subphases (differentiation, practicing, rapprochement, and the way toward object constancy) and called its outcome the 'psychological birth' of the infant, which, unlike biological birth, unfolds over years.
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- Introduced by
- Margaret Mahler
- Key works
- 2
developed by
- Anni Bergman 1975 Bergman took part in the Masters Children's Center observations from 1959 and co-authored the 1975 book that set out the separation-individuation theory.
- Fred Pine 1975 As co-author of The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant (1975), Pine helped systematise the separation-individuation theory from the observational data.
introduced by
- Margaret Mahler Mahler formulated the theory from observing ordinary mothers and infants in New York, distinguishing the child's psychological birth from its biological birth. She set it out in papers from the late 1950s and 1960s and fully in the 1975 book with Pine and Bergman.