Children from infants to individuals

Press, 16 February 1980, Page 17

Children from infants to individuals

Oneness and Separateness: From Infant to Individual. By Louise J. Kaplan, Cape, 1979. 288 pp. $18.50. (Reviewed by Ralf Unger) Dr Kaplan, of the City University of New York, has occupied much of her professional life in observation of infant and parent behaviour. From this she has developed concepts of binding and breaking away in the first years of development, based on the theories of Dr Margaret Mahler and others, which try to explain the development of unique individuality in the of specific family members and cultural groups. Her major contribution is that she is able to translate such laboratory observations not only to the larger screen of a broad psychoanalytic theory, but also so that such described behaviour can be understood by an ordinary parent observing his or her own infant. As the child separates from the state of oneness with his mother, he continues to have an inner experience of a mothering presence which orients him in the world. A child who traverses this symbiotic phase normally is able to build up an experience of the “inner mother” and move towards personal independence and separate identity. The symbiotic, grossly disturbed child has a constant conflict continuing between oneness and separateness which periodically reaches breaking point and he then regresses even further in his development to the stage that precedes oneness, cutting himself off from other humans. We all maintain .this longing for the primary bliss of oneness and the author states that in this is the essence of religion, poetry and the ecstasies of perfect love. A person whose deepest fear is that someone will discover the vulnerable child beneath his magnificent cloak of grandiosity cannot stand imperfection in his adoring ones. In the infant, by the age of four months, the passive dialogue of moulding bodies is supplemented by the active rhythms of mother-infant The mother answers the infant’s gurgles and coos by intuitively matching the pitch and tone

of his sounds and soon the two of them are “speaking” simultaneously. The toddler at the beginning of his second year taking his first upright walking away step has a “love affair with the world” which the child imagines mirrors all the spectacular things his mother’s face did when if reappeared for simultaneous conversations and “peek-a-boo” games. The poef and the artist reconcile the perfect harmonies of the rhythms and shapes of daily existence, just as the child’s love affair is a true act of creation. The more a mother has got to know her baby in the first four weeks of his life, the easier it will be for her to help her baby feel safe as the physical “stimulus barrier” with the world, which protects the baby in the first few weeks, dwindles away. At the time she gives birth her psychological need for the baby is already as intense as the baby’s physical need for her. The innate appeal of the infant’s helpless ■ physical appearance and immature body movement stimulate the mother to care for him and become attached to him in the specifically human way. “The baby is a conjurer who creates magic with the nipple meeting his searching mouth, his body fitting into a yielding softness that smells and feels like his own body, the top of his head coming to rest against a boundary.” When .a baby’s environment holds him he begins to have the illusion that his excitements and gestures have created the world. However, as the baby becomes irritable, dissatisfied and ungratifiable, a mother has to survive also the opposite pole of hatred for her baby. A baby requires only the right kind of soil and nourishment and .the energy of his growth processes will then do the job of pushing him into the world. He flourishes only when he can gratify his urges to uproot and get moving into the next, phase. At eight or nine months when he rages, he has to learn from his parents that his occasional passions will not actually destroy. For the first years of life then, mother and baby play dangerously on the margin between oneness and separateness with the mother being

counted on for rootedness and anchoring, and the father to be just different enough from a mother to give a delicious mixture of familiarity and novelty, and to experiment with danger. When he plays “peek-a-boo” with mother or father the baby feels the tensions of being let down and falling apart and, when the face reappears, ,the baby relaxes. He is bursting with the excitement of being his own master. The self-aware toddler holds on to his mother and then abruptly lets go of her. He clings to her in order to undo the separateness, but then he angrily pushes her away when she responds to his desperate clinging with a comforting hug. Further, ... congenital sex type predispositions are the base on which sexual gender identity builds Dr Kaplan says. Nevertheless differential parental responses will far outweigh biological factors and parents behave in subtly different ways depending whether the newborn is a girl or a boy, and their inborn features will stimulate different fantasies and different ways of, for example,, holding, with boys tending to be held upright more often than girls during the first five months. In every adult human; in conclusion, she says, there still lives a helpless child who is afraid of aloneness. Like Columbus who hesitated when he realised he was discovering a New World, we pause at the borders of our .new world and return to base and try to reconcile the old geometry with the new calculus that is still only a vision. Such is the tone of this book which endeavours to feel itself into the thinking, not only of adult mothers and fathers, but also prelogical infants. As is to be expected in such a work, the mother’s place is emphasised over and above that of the father, who is given little more than occasional token mention. The awesome responsibility of bringing up healthily adjusted people by the mother is constantly reiterated to make this a possible target of sneers for the feminist faction. Nevertheless, as a contribution to greater understanding based on classical developmental theories of Piaget, Freud and Erikson, the book is strongly recommended reading.