Shadowing and Darting Away.

This dynamic operates like a push-pull behavior. In essence, the child runs away from mother and expects to be swooped up in the safely of her arms.  Ambivalence is striking and evident since the child wishes for dependence on mother (shadowing) and then independence (darting away).  It becomes a flirtatious game of play, of testing new capacities toward independence.  It can also become an ambivalent nightmare.  However, there are times the junior toddler may not wish to be swoop up and may react with rage on contact.  Other times the child is permitted greater expansions that may lead to the engulfment of the void, and this emptiness may also cause rage.  To the observer it appears as a no-win situation.  During this period the child is in an emotional crises and cannot tolerate ambivalence. 

Abandonment

When a child becomes separated from mother before he is emotionally ready, his libido reserves may not be sufficiently in place to overcome separation anxiety.  This anxiety engenders insecurity and neediness.

The rapprochement toddler is peculiarly vulnerable due to his increasing autonomy along with his elevated cognation.  He can no longer contain the illusion of the symbiotic orbit that he and mother operate as one.  As the rapprochement toddler separates, his individualization is more apparent because reality is gaining ground.  There is a growing realization that mother will not share in his quest for new discoveries at his beck-and-call.  We now have a clash.  The elated �superman� qualities from the practicing phase (NPD) are now head-on with the depressive and anxiety rapprochement phase (BPD).  The toddler has gone from a �high� to a �low� in a short time during the shift from one phase to the next.  Some theorists speculate that resolution of the rapprochement phase sets toddler�s �base mood� for life.  This model suggests that is it prudent that good-enough mother establishes attunement with her toddler to survive the rapprochement crisis.

A child that is deprived from being emotionally refueled can be haunted with pervasive emptiness and a lack of identify, or a loss of self.  This is how one fixated adult put it:

It�s hard to be a child in a grown up world.  It�s a feeling of being lost.  It�s sad sometimes because when I see other children they don�t look lost.  They have parents, structure and guidelines.  This helped them grow and form into an adult.  They went through the maze and arrived at the other end.  It was a maze I have never had the opportunity to enter.  What is structure?  I remember at 6 being on the other side of town in the blackness of the night.  No one cared where I was.  What are parents?  I can�t ever remember being loved, rocked, cuddled or held.  I have no memory traces of this.  What are guidelines?  I had none and made them up as I went along in life.  I�m afraid my guidelines are not very stable since I didn�t have a measuring stick that was constant in my life.  Is it any wonder that I am still a lost child that is pretending to be an adult?

Engulfment

On the flip side, a mother that projects her insecurities (i.e. obsession with perfection, fear) onto her infant through constant handling can prevent the infant�s satisfaction through exploration.  With mother�s incessant patterns of containment, the infant may resent her encroachment of his expanding world.  The infant may learn to scan the restricted environment for opportunities to experience his independence. As the child progresses, engulfment may looked as though it were a glass bubble.  Freedom is imposed and deferred to inappropriate responsibilities that gives the impression the child is a �little adult.�  This encroaches on his developing identity since to �mother himself� takes on a distorted view of individually in the formation of the false-self.   In other words, the child is being taken intellectually advantage of with no regard for his developmental and emotional lag.  Kramer validates �Cut off from the needed relationship and parental regulatory help, the child is at the mercy of the inner impulses and feelings�the child does not experience the usual parental pleasure in the child�s growth.  Instead, the child feels used in the service of the parent�s anxieties and needs [1]. In a clear sense, this can be seen when the older child assumes the adult role of caretaker without sufficient provision for libidinous nurturing and affection.  A child that is saddled with added responsibilities without appropriate developmental nurturing is at risk for developmental fixation.  

The Rapprochement Crisis

As the child becomes psychically and cognitively aware of his new budding world, he becomes increasingly conscious that he can no longer maintain his delusional symbiotic orbit with mother.   Mahler states that  �While individuation proceeds very rapidly and the child exercises it to the limit, he also becomes more and more aware of his separateness from mother.�  The crisis of the rapprochement subphase heightens as the child realizes mother is not an extension of himself, but he is rather a small, helpless diminutive individual.  In contrast to the practicing phase when the child�s narcissism was at its peak and the world was his oyster sort of speak, the child is now overwhelmed with narcissist injury on a daily basis.  The world that seemed as a treasure trove for new opportunities to conquer with his new ambulatory locomotion during the practicing phase is now being delineated by the harsher psychical boundaries of reality.  He cannot do as he anticipated.  It begins to dawn on him that he is not as grandiose or powerful as his first imagined.

Transitional Object

Winnicott who coined the term transitional object suggested that the child intimately cathected (energized) the object (diaper, blanket, etc) with the libidinal investment of mother.  �Transitional objects tend to be soft and are capable of being cuddly; they help evoke primitive memories of being held, comforted, fed and, importantly, played with.  Eventually, probably 70 percent of children in separately bedded situations (Ekecranz and Ruhde 1971) have transitional objects (blankets, diapers, stuffed animals)[8]. The cathexis of the transitional object usually begins during the preverbal period and depending on the resolution of the separation � individualization phase, the transitional object may take on a more pervasive function to ease anxiety.  It is important to note that the transitional object is within the complete control of the child and yielding unlike the individually of mother.  This serves the purpose to help the child separate from mother because the transitional object is available when needed or can be discarded during periods of exploration.

Once the child displays his limited independent abilities, his mother may resent or refuse to partake in his regressive dependencies and the child may feel emotionally abandoned.  Other times the when child may be libidinally (love, nurturing, essence) separated from mother via a phone call, or more physically, out of the room for long periods of time.  Since the child�s increasing awareness of separation embarks on the transitional period, the transitional object takes on a greater significance if mother is not emotionally available to supply the child with object libido. To help ease libidinal separations the child cathexed an object with representation of mother. Bergman summarizes �The transitional object (Winnicott 1953) of the early months is a object found by the baby which stands between the self- and the object world and provides a safe intermediary area of experience which allows both separateness and fusion.� [2]

Resolution vs. Progression of the Transitional Object

As the child progress through the separation-individualization stages, there is a shift toward object constancy.  Maternal supplies bridged with the transitional object can help a child to transition from the powerful influence of the infant-mother dyadic position (symbiotic dual unit), to the �first meaningful triangulation of the infant-mother dyad, the transitional object [8].� The temporary transitional object (aid/support �temporary maternal supply) paves the way to a consistent internalized representation of maternal nurturing and soothing (object constancy) when mother is not available.   Grolnick explains, �Transitional objects and phenomena are only the first steps toward the development of, hopefully, an equally treasured symbolic and cultural world.� [8] 

Disturbance in the Transitional Period

Yet on occasion because of the child�s genetic endowment and inability to internalize the maternal object into a satisfactory holding environment, the transitional object remains.  It is not uncommon for an individual to puzzle over the idea what went wrong?  They may reason, �I had a great childhood and etc.� However, since developmental phases are largely repressed and unconscious, preverbal disturbances are elusive.Perhaps through professional deconstruction, confrontation, examination and the realignment genetic endowment, the unconscious may be brought into the conscious. What may appear as a �normal� rapprochement crisis for one child may completely, and chronically overwhelm another child to create an almost psychotic cathected transitional object.  In other words, there is a fixation of libido energy during the transitional period that did not get recathected. To hold and resonate with the transitional object, is to hold and resonate with maternal handling.  What remains is the artifact, the libidinally cathected transitional object.  Bergman suggests, �It would seem that that the transitional object serves the illusion of oneness�� [2]

IV. Separation Individuation Disturbances

The failure to reach a resolution during the developmental phase can have far reaching implications.  �As old, partially unresolved sense of self-identity and of body boundaries, or old conflicts over separation and separateness, can be reactivated (or remain peripherally or even centrally active) at any and all stages of life�� 

Autism

Mahler suggests that in some cases the infant will not hatch out of his autistic orbit if an attunement with mother is too painful.In other words, the infant retreats into his own internal world.  The communication between mother and infant are out of sync. The task to resolve the miscommunication may frustrate and prevent the joint path into the symbolic dual unit. The miscommunication may be grounded in the infant�s ego endowment and advancement is too painful, therefore the infant retreats into the autistic realm where mother�s smile is not mirrored back to her.

Symbiotic Magnetic Pull (SMP)

Matterson found that treating certain patients was difficult because there �is still a strong internal regressive pull to maintain the old familiar rewarding object relations unit� [11].  The Symbiotic Magnetic Pull (SMP) derives from the unconscious attraction to the symbiotic orbit of the mother-infant dyad that was experienced when mother was conceptualize as an extension of the self (symbiotic phase), as a container that resolved and metabolized anxiety through her affect modulation.  The strength of the SMP is a regressive force, an energy, a �pull�.  SMP is conceptualized as a nexuses, a oneness with creation, a completeness.  For example, this force to return, to regress is exemplified with the rival of baby into the family unit in the face of an older child. 

Here we see �another form of attempted adaptation was identification with the rival baby.  Matthew showed signs of wanting to be a baby himself; like this baby brother, of instance, he would climb into the playpen [4].  Mother was intolerant of his regressive behavior and Matthew; the happy radiant child began to adapt aggressive conduct by throwing objects out of frustration.  It was observed that Matthew had lost his spark for life in service of the mother, the influence of the false-self, �all of which on superficial observation seemed to be in compliance with mother�s wishes that he be independent and remain her happy little �big� boy [4].