Читать книгу The Handbook of Solitude - Группа авторов - Страница 62

Inspired by the Freudian views discussed above is the separation‐individuation theory, which was formulated by Margaret Mahler (Mahler et al., 1975). In this theory, two concepts – normal autism and symbiosis – are relevant to the study of beneficial solitude. More specifically, according to this theory, immediately after birth the infant is a profoundly alone and helpless being. In the first two months of life – the normal autistic phase – the infant lives in an autistic shell, which does not lead to disorganization. Instead, the stimulus barrier, the omnipotence stemming from the satisfaction of biological needs, and the hallucinatory wish‐fulfillment protect the infant from the awareness of isolation, which could be overwhelming for his/her immature ego. The controversial claim that this normal developmental phase could be called autistic initiated an intense scientific dialogue. In 1982, Mahler admitted that this is a phase of adaptation in extrauterine life, during which “the newborn has to achieve physiological homeostasis, that is, adequate inner regulation in synchrony with the vocal and gestural rhythms of the caregiver […] each infant is an active partner in the early dialogue” (our emphasis; Bergman, 1999, p. 5). In a personal communication with Stern in 1983, Mahler also suggested that the autistic phase could have been named awakening (Stern, 1985/2000, p. 235), a term very similar to Stern’s emerging sense of self. Pine (1994), Mahler’s collaborator, described a relative autism, which he considered as “primary attunement to internal physiological stimuli” (p. 10).

Following the autistic period, separation‐individuation theory suggests that the infant’s experience is one involving social symbiosis. The infant emerges from the autistic shell and enters a dual unity, that is, an undifferentiated state with mother, with “the delusion of a common boundary” (Mahler et al., 1975, p. 45). Omnipotent symbiotic fusion protects the infant from the awareness of separateness (which is different from separation) and thus from the premature frightening realization of aloneness. In the light of infant research, Pine (1994, 2004) proposed that this phase is critical for the experience of moments of merger (e.g., undifferentiatedness, boundarylessness) that can emerge during nursing (for a discussion of oneness experiences, see succeeding text). It is then that merging becomes highly significant, not only for the infant but for the mother as well, and reaches a kind of resolution, different for each mother–infant dyad.

In a similar line of thought, Thomas Ogden (1994) introduced a primitive infantile state, which he named autistic‐contiguous position. In the beginning of life, the relation to the object is a sensation experience, that is to say, the infant feels the object (mainly the breast) at the skin surface. Ogden adopted the concept autistic shapes and autistic objects introduced by Tustin (1990) for high‐functioning autistic children, but, like Mahler, he did not refer to the psychopathological condition of autism. Rather, he described a realm of personal isolation, an experience of being‐in‐sensation, which serves as a sanctuary in the face of stress inherent in human relationships and is an essential part of aliveness (Ogden was inspired by Winnicott’s theory, which is discussed in the next section). It is as if the infant suspends life in the world of objects by creating an autonomous and insulated realm of nonhuman, machine‐like sensation shapes. Although self‐generated, this position develops only if the mother has the capacity to allow her infant to exist for some moments without her and to wait.

Taken together, the psychoanalytic insights on the solitary self and its origins suggest that solitude plays an important role in protecting the infant from disorganization caused by excessive internal and external excitation, in a time when his/her ego functions, responsible for self‐regulation, are not yet developed. In all these views, there is an implicit recognition that the infant’s solitude is at first a state of primary narcissism and, after the emergence of specific object relations, evolves into secondary narcissism, as Freud conceptualized these states. However, although the infant is described as a rather isolated self‐system, he/she is protected by the premature and traumatic awareness of aloneness through fantasy and experiences of merger with the caregiver. These two means of protection may be regarded as the prototypes of creativity and engagement with the world (both animate and inanimate), which are the content of beneficial solitude throughout life.