Concept
Symbiotic psychosis
A form of childhood psychosis that Mahler set apart in 1952 from early infantile autism. Where the autistic child seems never to have taken the mother in as a living presence, the symbiotic child clings to a delusion of being fused with her; the breakdown tends to come between the second and fourth year, when growing up faces the child with separateness, and brings panic, the loss of skills already gained and a blurring of the boundaries of the self. Mahler read it as a fixation at, or a regression to, the symbiotic phase, and at a therapeutic nursery founded with Manuel Furer she treated such children together with their mothers.
Development
1952
introduced by Margaret Mahler
In her 1952 paper on child psychosis Mahler set the symbiotic psychoses of early childhood apart from the autistic ones. She later grounded the distinction in the normal autistic and symbiotic phases.
In On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses (1952)
1968
developed by Manuel Furer
Furer was Mahler's collaborator on the 1968 study of infantile psychosis, which grew out of their joint work with psychotic children and their mothers.
In On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Vol. 1: Infantile Psychosis (1968)
Relations
- 1952 introduced by Margaret Mahler
In her 1952 paper on child psychosis Mahler set the symbiotic psychoses of early childhood apart from the autistic ones. She later grounded the distinction in the normal autistic and symbiotic phases.
- 1968 developed by Manuel Furer
Furer was Mahler's collaborator on the 1968 study of infantile psychosis, which grew out of their joint work with psychotic children and their mothers.
- derives from Symbiotic phase
Mahler explained symbiotic psychosis as a fixation at, or regression to, the symbiotic phase, when the child fails to differentiate a self from the mother.
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.
See also
People
References
- On Child Psychosis and Schizophrenia: Autistic and Symbiotic Infantile Psychoses1952Evidence for a relation
- On Human Symbiosis and the Vicissitudes of Individuation, Vol. 1: Infantile Psychosis1968Evidence for a relation