Dependence, elaboration, freedom

Abstract

The author addresses the elaboration of dependence in its early, neonatal stage. She argues that the first weeks after birth are crucial and foundational to the baby’s incipient mind. In this relatively brief puerperal period, important elaborative work takes place between the asymmetric minds of mother and baby. Under normal conditions of sufficient constitutional and mental health, the mother goes into a state of primary maternal preoccupation, as described by Winnicott. This paper describes the mother’s movements of immersion into the baby’s primitive unconscious, and her return to her own secondary functioning capacity to give it meaning, change it, and then give it back to the infant through her care. These movements of maternal immersions are also towards her finding her own inner mother. Important identifications and elaborations take place for both in the mother-baby pair. The first rudimentary notions of inside and outside, self and object, exteriority, the existence of the other, and a certain degree of the sense of continuing to be are developed through identifications, constraints and transformations. Mother and baby elaborate issues in significant flows of projective and introjective identification, being subject and object to each other. They bond deeply and then gradually separate themselves into two units, increasing their feelings of freedom for the self and for the object.