planeta_if
Well-Known Member
А вот еще вброс из жизни психоаналитиков. Совсем другой уровень, ну собственно, анализа.. -) Понимания природы человека, родительской роли.
Опыт наблюдения за младенцами позволил когда-то психоаналитикам лучше понять природу некоторых серьезных невротических расстройств уже у взрослых. И правда, что может сделать совершенно беспомощное еще существо, чтобы приспособиться к не самым удачным и совершенно неизбежным условиям, неадекватной (неадекватной потребностям) или отсутствующей матери?
Вот вдумчивая статья про это.
Вообще мы ее перевели, но частично и устно, т.к. ей нужно было делать доклад, а не сдавать текст.
А переводить заново я не буду.. прицеплю письменный перевод если он до меня доберется.
оригинал на английском
Цитата:
Опыт наблюдения за младенцами позволил когда-то психоаналитикам лучше понять природу некоторых серьезных невротических расстройств уже у взрослых. И правда, что может сделать совершенно беспомощное еще существо, чтобы приспособиться к не самым удачным и совершенно неизбежным условиям, неадекватной (неадекватной потребностям) или отсутствующей матери?
Вот вдумчивая статья про это.
Вообще мы ее перевели, но частично и устно, т.к. ей нужно было делать доклад, а не сдавать текст.
А переводить заново я не буду.. прицеплю письменный перевод если он до меня доберется.
оригинал на английском
Цитата:
MARGOT WADDELL
«INSINDE LIVES: PSYCHOANALISIS AND THE GROWTH OF THE PERSONALITY», 1998
Infancy:defences against pain
"That element of tragedy which lies in the fact of frequency, ?has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of? mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much?of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary?human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the?squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which?lies on the other side of silence".
George Eliot
In the previous chapter we saw how, if sufficiently held psychically and emotionally by a containing presence, the baby develops a sense of his own internal holding capacity, an experience of integration, of having a centre. But many babies do not have the opportunity to discover themselves in a mind that is able to register their gusts and storms, passions and pleasures and to respond accordingly. For in many mothers birth arouses joy, but also unforeseen difficulties. Their own emotional life becomes shadowed by depression, by unfamiliar feelings of loss, ambivalence or confusion. Responsibility for the very survival of a new life may weigh heavily and the physical and psychological disturbance be felt a burden rather than as a discovery. The infant may only occasionally find the resonance and reciprocity he seeks and may, from very early on, have to struggle with the impact of emotional absence, despite physical presence.
Distracted, depressed or puzzled by, for example, the restlessness and distress of her baby, despite having been recently fed, a mother may decide that his nappy needs to be changed, or that he wants to be put to bed. This mother may have difficulty in being in touch with the quality of her baby's communications and may also, perhaps, prefer "doing" to "being". This baby will have the ?experience of not being understood which, if too frequent, will be confusing to his ability to investigate, and therefore to organize, an integrated sense of the relationship between the experience of hunger which he has inside himself, and what seems to be happening outside. A persecutory feeling is aroused in relation to something, which is felt to be hostile to understanding. In such circumstances the baby not only has no sense of coherence between internal and external experiences, but he is also subjected to a malign mismatch, in the face of which he has to find alternative sources of strength to bolster his fragile efforts at psychic survival.
This experience of an absence of primary containment on the part of a mother who, for whatever reason, cannot be available and responsive to her baby's communications, is part of normal development. Any number of factors will bear on whether or not a mother is able to make sense of her baby's tentative, or tyrannical emotional cues. Externally, she may herself be ill-supported, depressed, pressurized by circumstantial worries, traumatized by a difficult birth. Or, internally, she may be especially affected by her private hopes and fears about the baby's role in her life and his relationship to past and future figures. She may manage emotionally to be present some of the time, but with an inconsistency which will puzzle and confuse her baby.1
Too much emotional absence is felt as an insecure or "leaky" form of containment. It may be inferred from later accounts of very fragmented states of mind, that the baby feels that he is literally falling apart, in the face of an experience of not having his feelings taken in and understood, or of?having nowhere to put them, that is, lacking a "psychic" skin to hold his emotional self together, the baby can draw on a range of tactics to help him to tolerate temporary absence or adversity.
The infant's immediate impulse, as we have seen, is to get rid of the painful experience by pushing it elsewhere, by projecting it. Crying, farting, defecating, urinating, vomiting may be impulsive attempts, emotionally as well as physically, to expel the discomforting feeling. In good circumstances this will occur in the context of a breast, or "thinking breast", which has the capacity emotionally to digest the pain and thus to render the experience meaningful, in the sense that its source and the nature of its impact have been understood. Inherent in this experience is a feeling that it has been possible to push, or put, emotions elsewhere, that is, into something (the other), and also to take them back inside, likewise into something (the self). In other words, this is a three-dimensional experience of the existence of an interior, or inside space.
In the absence of a containing presence, the individual, at whatever point in life, will resort to an array of defensive mechanisms to help him retain as great a sense of integration as he can muster. These mechanisms are detectable in infancy and thread themselves through the different phases of the life cycle. They will necessarily be drawn on, in the short-term, as immediately available measures to alleviate anxiety and to retain, or retrieve, some kind of equilibrium. But if they have to be resorted to too often, or for too extensive a period of time, they may become "built-in" as aspects of character, rather than functioning as temporary respites.
The central question is whether powerful emotions are felt to be bearable; whether there is a sense that mental states of intense love or hatred, of gratification or abandonment, can be engaged with, borne, processed and digested; whether a genuine link can be established between a mother and child which is felt to be a thoroughfare for feelings.
If the emotions are not felt to be bearable the consequences are stark:
Normal development follows if the relationship between infant and breast permits the infant to project a feeling, say, that it is dying into the mother and to reintroject it after its sojourn in the breast has made it tolerable to the infant psyche. If the projection is not accepted by the mother the infant feels that its feeling that it is dying is stripped of such meaning as it has. It therefore reintrojects, not afear of dying made tolerable, but a nameless dread ...
The rudimentary consciousness cannot carry the burden placed onit. The establishment internally of a projective-identification-rejecting object means that instead of an understanding object the infant has a wilfully misunderstanding object—with which it is identified. Further its psychic qualities are perceived by a precocious and fragile consciousness. [Bion, 1962a, 1967, pp. 116-117]
The epithet "nameless dread" (1962b, p. 96) describes the experience of a baby who not only does not have available to him a mind into which he can project his distress, but whose distress becomes?terrifyingly augmented both by the discovery that this is so and by the fact that the weight of his own feelings is thereby being added to. For the primary presence which should be relieving him of his distress is now actively increasing it. The term "nameless dread" catches the essence of such an experience: the experience has no nameable shape or form of a kind which could render it meaningful, even negatively. The epithet describes a losing of any vestige of meaning because the incipient capacity to establish possible meaning has been reversed (Bion, 1962b, calls this process the "reversal of alpha-function", p. 25).
No correspondence of thought or feeling can be found. Even a terrible one, for example that the fear of dying has been understood, is stripped of the sort of resonance which might make it more bearable. Ronald Britton describes such a state of mind as one of "psychic atopia".2
When psychic pain is felt to be unheld and therefore unbearable, there may be a withdrawal into a closed-off state of petrified emotional isolation. The baby, or child, may retreat to a deeply?withdrawn, or borderline state, unable to allow anything in, so traumatic to the self's emotional survival has the "loss" of the needed presence (physically or psychically) been felt to be. In some cases there may be a literal refusal to take things in, whether partial or regulated, as manifest, for example, in eating disorders – even in infancy. Such a refusal is not an uncommon response to what Gianna Williams (1997) describes as a "convex container", one that pours projections into the baby rather than receiving them from him.3 Alternatively, a child may attempt to project all the more forcefully, mentally, and later perhaps physically, battering away at the resistant surface of the mother's mind sometimes with the tragic result of being physically battered in return, as the mother unable to bear the anger, tries to "push it back" into the baby.
Unless he is to give up, or to give in, the deprived or frantic child has to make desperate attempts to deal with his unbearable emotional experiences. These constitute primitive and extreme psychic defences against overwhelming pain and anxiety As long as the ordinary pain and anxiety of everyday life is not felt to be unmanageable, defensive measures may be observed which offer necessary and appropriate balm. It is only if resorted to too much of the time, that these defences result in a lasting impact on the personality.
Esther Bick posited a stage prior to the three-dimensional world of projection and introjection, a more primitive two, or even one-dimensional mode of functioning. This is a defensive system which may be drawn on when an experience of psychic containment has been lacking from so early on that scarcely any external or internal holding capacity is felt to exist. The baby will seek some psychic equivalent to the physical skin which enfolds his body in an effort to create for himself a sense that the rudimentary parts of his personality can somehow be made to cohere. Attempts can be observed to create a kind of continuous, containing, skin-equivalent — what Bick calls a "second-skin". There are many ways in which the infant tries to bring such a defensive structure about each with a distinctive "sticky" or adhesive quality: for instance, by fixing attention onto a sensory object, whether visual (for example, a light bulb); auditory (possibly a repetitive sound); tactile (the experience of being clothed, or of surface contact); muscular (the tensing, or clenching and unclenching, of bodily parts); or by repetitive?movement (stroking, tonguing, fiddling). These babies seem to be attempting to hold themselves together as if threatened by a sense that they may at any moment fall to pieces. In later life, the tendency literally to be "buttoned up", or to stride up and down, never to stop talking (to have the "gift of the gab"), may serve a similar function. The "second-skin" phenomenon constitutes a form of primitive omnipotence and is felt to serve a primary survival function.
The following example illustrates the survival mechanism provided by holding on to a visual sensory stimulus:
On arrival the observer noticed that the mother looked tired and depressed. The mother had commented on the dark winter afternoon, and on her feeling of isolation with her baby. Later in the observation, after the baby had been bathed and fed, the mother brought her into the kitchen and sat her in her baby seat on the table. At this point, the husband returned home from work and, having greeted the observer, immediately began telling his wife of some incident at work. The baby began to make demanding noises, getting louder and louder as she was ignored. The mother noticed this and went to the baby, lifting her up briefly and then putting her back in her chair. She turned back to her husband who was also wanting her attention. The baby squirmed and wriggled in apparent distress, looked upwards, saw the light and stared at it. Her face and body relaxed and she smiled at the light, making a brief cooing noise. On turning back to the baby to see what had quietened her, the mother's face registered distress, even hurt. She asked why the baby was staring at the light, as though she feared that something was wrong, and that she may have driven the baby into this sort of behaviour by her intolerance. [Symington, J., 1985, p. 482]
One can observe the ordinary ways in which the infant resiliency and appropriately seeks a temporary source of solace and coherence in the absence of a focus for the needed sense of integration. Yet if babies have to draw on their own devices for too much of the time, living within a second-skin can be felt to be a necessity and become a habit. This kind of shell can protect the baby from feelings of psychic disintegration and panic, but it also cuts him off from the external world. Bion invoked the term "exo-skeleton" for this form of psychic defence, one which forms in the absence of an endo-skeletal structure of the kind which develops out of confident dependency on internalized containing functions. The "second-skin" can constitute a pseudo-independence; as if the individual were autonomous, while really psychically, if not actually, he is always seeking to stick himself to a surface in a way which is felt to be essential to ongoing existence. George Eliot has an image for such a personality: she describes Hetty in Adam Bede as being like one of those climbing plants which, when tom from their native nook of rock orto which they cling, have such shallow roots that they will, if simply laid over an ornamental flowerpot, immediately attach themselves and "blossom none the worse".4
In her therapy sessions, an adult patient, Miss Pearce, would often describe her emotional states in "Bick-like" language. With great articulacy she would talk about feeling that she was "falling apart", "disintegrating", "liquefying", "falling through holes", "spilling out". Around the time of weekend or holiday breaks in particular, she would speak about her sense that she could not hold anything in. On one occasion she said that the best she could do was to try to exercise her "psychic muscle". This turned out to mean her mind.
This young woman had suffered terribly as a child. She was brought up in a violent and loveless household and her troubles had begun early. When she was four months old, her mother had suddenly stopped breastfeeding her on discovering that she was again pregnant. The mother had apparently said that there was "no room for two"—a striking statement of her sense of the absence of mental or emotional space for herself or for her baby. The story went that Miss Pearce had been inconsolable. She had screamed for a week and refused any other form of food. She became seriously ill and finally had to be fed by tube.
Versions of the trauma of this separation were constantly relived thereafter. Miss Pearce had, nonetheless, become professionally successful, having developed a particular kind of very marketable cleverness. In the early stages of her therapy, her inexhaustible stream of words and ideas did not seem to be about anything, in the sense of being connected to genuine thought or feeling. Rather, they seemed to function as a constant flexing of her "psychic muscle" (a description which she associated with her fear of being identified with her father whom she regarded as "pseudo-potent"). This "flexing" functioned as a defensive manoeuvre against the pain of being in touch with her intolerable feelings of loss and fragmentation. Her extraordinary verbal fluency, especially about emotional states, served the purpose less of communicating, than of ensuring that there could be no experience of her therapist as someone with her own mind and therefore as someone who was different and separable from herself. It was a long time before Miss Pearce was able to trust her therapist's constancy and in so doing to begin to give up her tendency to keep herself insulated from any form of intimacy, from "the dread of allowing another to become precious".
Her mode of using her mind and speech was equivalent to a continuous
Miss Pearce's defensive system was not unlike that of a much younger patient, a little four-year-old, Peter, who had also already undergone many traumatic experiences by the time he began therapy. His parents had separated amidst his mother's increasingly severe psychotic episodes and frequent hospitalizations. Despite her deteriorating mental state, Peter had stayed with her. He too was extraordinarily articulate for his age and had developed an encyclopaedic knowledge of monsters, dinosaurs and reptiles which passed for intelligence. This "knowledge" felt to his therapist to be an acquisition of facts and information in the attempt to master his anxieties rather than to engage with them. When he was not talking, Peter was moving around at great speed in the therapy room. He would leap from surface to surface with terrifying agility. Rather surprisingly, despite this activity he was considerably overweight. Apparently he would eat the food off his emaciated mother's plate, as if trying to glean physical resources from her in the absence of meaningful emotional ones. He was terrified of her disappearing or dying and had enormous difficulty detaching himself from her in order to go to his sessions. His cleverness was matched by his jokiness. A rather manic stream of witticisms often accompanied the flow of information which he would impart to his therapist. To the therapist it felt like a desperate attempt to keep himself going and certainly to be an effort to "revive" his mother's spirits. He was utterly delighted when he managed to make his mother laugh or when she told him how brilliant he was.
In one particular session his therapist commented upon how anxious Peter seemed to feel about his taking up too much space.
Peter became increasingly excitable, countering that it was true that people did get pushed out and animals got pushed out when there wasn't enough room for them, and then they started killing and eating each other. "That's to make more room", he said. He then recounted having seen a film of Popeye who was floating over the ocean with a cut in his leg, "which is the worst place to be if you happen to have a cut in your leg". When asked why this was so, Peter replied "Because of the sharks". His therapist suggested that Peter felt that he could not afford to let himself be weak and little, for then he would be destroyed and eaten up himself. Not surprisingly, Peter's reply was a clever intellectual comment to the effect that sharks could detect one millilitre of blood in a hundred thousand litres of water. "If they were hungry", he said, "they would eat anything, even their own children". With an anxious look, he modified his last statement, "Well, perhaps not their own children, maybe they wouldn't be able to find them". He then stated that not all sharks were man-eaters, although people thought they were. There were some, like the Woebegone and the Thrasher sharks, which didn't eat people. The Thrasher shark rounded up little fish into smaller and smaller circles and then lunged at them.
The session continued in this vein, with his therapist listening to, and briefly commenting on what he said. Peter began to calm down and asked if it was known whether sharks could survive in fresh water. He thought there was a place, perhaps called Nicaragua, in which sharks had swum through a tunnel and attacked people anyway, even though they were not by the sea. Underlying this statement was the sense that one could not feel safe anywhere. In this session Peter's vulnerability and anxiety come through very clearly, despite his constant mental, physical and verbal activity. That is, the so-called "facts" were no protection from his more infantile fears. His last comment suggested that, on some level, he feared that sharks might even swim up the water pipes and attack him while he was in his bath.
This example is introduced both as further illustration of "second-skin" functioning as a mode of defence, and also as a way of conveying, whether in a therapeutic or in a family setting, the difficulty of being on the "right wavelength" with so anxious and insecure a child. What needed to be thought about was not so much what Peter was saying as how he was behaving, that is the excessive speed and energy in everything that he said and did, in addition to the way he was using his mind. Of note was the fragility of the "performances" which were being elaborately mobilized in an attempt to fend off his more persecutory feelings.
Because Peter was so anxious and behaviourally so disturbed, his difficulties came to light when he was quite young. But for many, the modes of defence which may, to an acute observer, already be detectable in infancy, can take years to become evident, whether to the self or to others. The brittle, protective facade may suddenly crack, exposing an absence of inner resources and a panic about being tom away from the supportive structures which had been felt to hold the personality together, albeit only externally.
The experience of eighteen-year-old Sophie, urgently referred to an adolescent unit, would seem to bear out some such situation. Sophie had become panic stricken. She was unable to go out, scarcely even to get up. She could neither stop crying nor allow her mother out of her sight. An arrangement was made that she should be assessed for psychotherapy. During the first meeting she simply sat and sobbed. The therapist spoke to her very simply about the degree of her distress, about her need for somebody to understand the pain of it, and also about her hope that it could be understood and made sense of. Sophie was unable to articulate anything beyond a request for permission to go to the lavatory and, when it was time to conclude the session, a statement that it felt impossible to leave.
The three meetings which followed were more coherent. With a flicker of a smile, Sophie said how relieved she had felt that her therapist, unlike her family, had seemed able to bear her "wailing and snivelling". It was true that at the time her therapist's thoughts had focused on the importance of just trying to "hold" Sophie's infantile state, in the sense of wrapping her up with words, less for their interpretative content than to provide some kind of seamless web of continuous and containing sound—a sort of descriptive lullaby.
Slowly a picture began to emerge. Sophie lived with her mother and twin brother. Her father and an older sister had been killed in a car-crash when the twins were six months old. Haltingly Sophie described how she felt that she had got through life from an early age "by subterfuge". Unlike her twin brother, who had gone out and excelled at everything, she had kept close to home, modeling herself on her beautiful and steadfast mother, identified with her mother's pain and stoicism, fitting in with the family culture, as if she understood it and supported it. In fact, Sophie felt that she had nothing of any value inside herself at all, certainly not what was routinely attributed to her—"how lovely she is"; "what an angel" etc, Sophie felt that she simply stuck to a surface accommodation to the exigencies of her complex circumstances without "a thought of my own in my head". The current crisis coincided with major separations: her boyfriend was going abroad; her mother was beginning full-time work. To her amazement Sophie herself had been accepted at drama school. "Of course I can't really act—it's all imitation, perfect for me since I haven't the faintest idea who I am. It's just like my drawing—brilliant still-lives!—a con." A few minutes later she started crying again: "There really is nothing inside me, or only rubbish".
Sophie's predicament is not unfamiliar. Her response to the difficulties of her early infancy and childhood seemed to have been to make an attempt at emotional survived by way of conforming as much as possible, to the point of experiencing herself as "stuck" to the surface of those she loved in what is being described as an "adhesive" way. This sticking was indeed felt to hold her together but in a manner which, in fact, offered her little lasting strength and no sense of having a centre of her own. "I'm just a fraud", she said, "people think I'm so intelligent and deep. I try to provide what I think is wanted without really understanding anything." Now that her boyfriend and mother were both working away from home, and her twin was off "getting on with his life", Sophie was having to confront her sense of inner emptiness. No longer in a position to cling to external figures, she had to find the courage to be herself.
In the early days, it seemed that mother and daughter had each found their own rather fragile and two-dimensional defences against the pain of their lives by clinging to one another. When she was twelve Sophie had been very shaken by her mother unexpectedly marrying again, finding in her new husband the emotional support which she had previously sought from Sophie.
Sophie herself had remained as "stuck" to her mother as ever but now, threatened with physical separation, her survival mechanisms were felt no longer to hold. The fragile, externally erected structures broke, leaving Sophie unsustained by any capacity internal!? To limit her distress. It simply, and literally, spilled out of her. It would seem that her mother, burdened by grief and by the sole care of the twins, had had minimal emotional resources to cope. The boy twig had become precociously independent early on, removing himself from the family and pursuing an intensive interest in sport latterly becoming a passionate body-builder. One might speculate that his preoccupations were also evidence of a need to be held together, in this case by a muscular carapace which might protect him from having to engage with his own particular pain of loss and the sense of deprivation within.
Each child had, in different ways, conformed, adjusted and appeared to be capable and talented. Sophie was more vulnerable at this point, partly because of the closeness of her attachment to her mother, but perhaps also because of a willingness to address he sense of internal emptiness, an alarming task which her highly performing twin was not yet ready to undertake. Sophie's good- girl-self could not sustain the impact of separation, of being tom away from her supportive structures. She "fell apart", as she put it.
To return again to early infancy, a final, brief example will indicate how thoughtful intervention can rescue a situation which might otherwise have led to the development of the kinds of defensive structure just described. We have seen how the hapless, helpless baby is born into a maelstrom of new and startling sensations over which he has no control. Bombarded with sensory experiences which both relate to, and yet feel wholly distinct from, anything known hitherto, he struggles to maintain a sense of coherence. There will be moment by moment shifts from the panic of feeling wholly uncontained, under the pressure of unsustainable emotions whether of isolation, over-impingement, physical pain confusion, to the bliss of being securely and lovingly held by nipple and gaze. Terror then gives way to satisfaction, overwhelming disintegration to the beauty of integration, fragments become a whole.
Much depends, as we have seen, on how the primitive anxieties, issuing from this kind of psychic pain are managed in early infancy. And yet as the child grows up, different qualities of experience may variously affect the early patterning. Indeed, that patterning may itself change and modify, enabling a floor to be put into what, for some, may have felt like a bottomless and terrifying abyss. An example of the impact of a sensitive approach, offered by a young health visitor to a troubled family, illustrates the hopeful effect of well-timed understanding. In the grip of post-natal depression, Mrs Thomas seemed to have been drained of any shred of positive feeling towards her baby, Jane. The health visitor found her to be feeding her baby listlessly, silently, heavily, scarcely even holding her. And yet Jane, whose disposition appeared to be that of a fighter rather than a giver-up, was observed rooting for the breast, reaching for it, and holding on to it, in an effort, it seemed, not just to survive, but to instil in her mother some confidence in the capacity to feed her.
However, the health visitor described how, as the weeks went by, Jane found it increasingly hard to sustain her endeavour. Her faltering spirits set in train a descending spiral of depression, frustration and rage. There was a sense of desperation in both baby and mother. It was as if Jane's capacity to remain on the side of life in the face of her mother's depression had dwindled and, unable to engage with any loving light in her mother's eye, and having access only to a lifeless rather than a lively breast, she seemed to feel herself on the edge of despair. Jane became withdrawn and lifeless herself. The health visitor became extremely anxious about this struggling pair and was at a loss as to how she might help them. During one of her visits she picked up on some asides of Mrs Thomas's about her own mother's difficulties in feeding her and about how she traced her later eating problems to what she had been told about the distress of this early relationship. The health visitor tentatively wondered whether perhaps what had been described as the "moral imperative" to breastfeed was not one that, in practice, Mrs Thomas found manageable. She suggested that she might try the bottle instead.
After a few days a much more happy feeding situation became established between Jane and her mother and, to her astonishment and delight, the health visitor witnessed the baby being changed by a now smiling and engaged parent. Each was able to greet the other with transports of giggles and delight. To suggest the bottle rather than the breast was an apparently simple idea. But the result was transformative. The consequence of the health visitor's understanding, her capacity to take in and process the nature of Mrs Thomas's anxiety, was that she was able to respond in precisely the way that was needed.
Feeling uncontained in the mother's mind, the baby anxiously seeks some means of holding himself together. A range of defences against the fear of disintegration can be observed from earliest days. In terms of their impact on a person's character, it is those defences which affect the relative shallowness or depth of the personality which are of particular interest. Early on psychoanalytic work with very disturbed children and adults revealed states of mind which seemed to have a paper-thin, adhesive quality. As time went on, such states began to be detected in younger and younger children and even in descriptions of infantile behaviour. It was as if there was little or no sense of an inner world in such children, a world where experiences of the self and of the other might be engaged with and found meaningful. Instead, there was a fragile quality of superficial attachment, initially to sensory objects and experiences and later to certain kinds of relationship, whether to people or to things. With the two-dimensional view of the world go particular kinds of learning (see Chapter 7) which may bring social rewards, as with Miss Pearce, but which offer little opportunity for emotional growth and change.
In exploring the beginnings of these patterns in infancy and in describing some of the internal and external relationships which underlie them, we can begin to see how deeply the baby's experience affects the potential growth of his personality. Subsequent events may modify, or even alter, these early patterns of relating but, broadly, infancy constitutes the foundation for the way in which the developmental process unfolds, functioning as a model for the child's later relationships with family, school and the wider world.
Notes
1. This was an aspect of mothering which particularly concerned Winnicott, for example (1965) The Maturational Processes and № Facilitating Environment, London: Hogarth (1972), p. 183. INFANCY
2. In “Subjectivity, Objectivity and Triangular Space", Ch. 4 of Britton, R. Belief and Imagination, London: Routledge (1998).
3. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 78(5): 927-941. In Internal landscapes and Foreign Bodies Williams (1997) explores the way in which early experiences of absence and loss can stir up a defensive "dread of allowing another to become precious". Winnicott (1948) discusses the impingement of the mother's state of mind on the baby, in particular in "Reparation in respect of mother's organized defence against depression", in Collected Papers: through paediatrics to psycho- analysis, London: Tavistock, (1958).
4. Adam Bede, Ch. 15, p. 199. This aspect of Esther Bick's thinking is very similar to the "as if" personality described by Helene Deutsch (1934), and to the concept of the "false self", extensively discussed by?Winnicott (1958).
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