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Tandy Brown (Jurgensen)
EDD 412
Research Report
A Summary of Infant Mental Health According to Louise Kaplan, PhD in her book Oneness and Separateness
We all long for the reality that Kaplan calls “constancy.” It is the balance between the longings we all hold in our hearts and the actuality that exists in our lives. We long to find a balance between the two; a sort of anchor that would establish equilibrium in our person. This emotional constancy can be best had in the context of loving partnerships with other people and community. Our first experiences of constancy that make us feel whole are experiences of “oneness” with our mother figure. It is mom who helps to establish our equilibrium and to find the balance our longings and actuality. We all long to go back and have experiences of oneness for the emotional satisfaction it once offered us. I think that maybe some of religious desire starts in this longing to go back to a time when we did not know our separateness and were happy living in illusion. Our second experiences of constancy, according to Kaplan, form as a result of relatedness with another; a relatedness requiring a whole self (which happens later in the toddler years) and a whole other (like the adults or other mature children in our lives). It is this form of constancy that holds us in our adult years. It is the constancy of separateness that we learn as a result of our struggle in toddlerhood. Although it is a tough reality, it is a true one. As we lose the illusion of oneness and move into separateness, we discover and become our own person.
Infant mental health starts before the baby is born; perhaps before he/she is even conceived. It starts with the longings, desires, and fantasizings of her mother and father. As a mother fantasizes about her unborn child, she has her first impressions of her as she is in the womb. Will she be an active child? What calms her? As the mother thinks about her baby, her own experiences of being parented are triggered and have to do with the way she views her child and the way she parents them. When a father can fantasize about his unborn baby, he shows his love not only for the child, but also for his partner who can’t help but fantasize about their baby. Sometimes he may resent his unborn child when his partner is depressed or anxious (common in pregnancy). His partner’s state reminds him of his helplessness and diminishes his power and his image of himself as her protector. The more his culture polarizes masculine and feminine roles, the further away from his nurturing side he will be and the more he will feel his powerlessness in his masculine role toward his partner. In order to be a successful father, he must get in touch with his tender childhood memories. Then, he will feel less deprived of his partner’s attention when the baby is born and have less resentment. If he can also attend the birth, this helps him to take an active part in the birth process and he will feel less isolated from his partner and his child. The mother-infant bond is strong. It is dad who brings them out of their orbit in the toddler years.
The newborn child is biologically ready (assuming the child is typically developing) for his/her environment. He has inherited potentials: physical characteristics, temperament, and intelligence that will help to guide him in his relationship with his mom, dad, and the world. It is due to the evolution of our species that the infant has a need to attach to caregivers and gives communication cues such as crying to get his needs met. Also, when the infant is born, his nervous system is impervious to outer stimulation. He pays attention to those few things that are important to him such as his mom and eating, and shuts the rest out. As the stimulus barrier fades, he becomes more aware of and more affected by his environment. These inherited potentials and evolutionary characteristics will be modified by his/her environment and care-giving.
The newborn likes low-level stimulation and is most interested in eating. By 4-12 weeks old, as the stimulus barrier fades, he has an inner tension due to outside stimuli. Unable to manage his new impressions, he relies on his mother to become like his fallen away stimulus barrier. She regulates outside stimulation to keep him comfortable. By this time, the baby and his mother have formed an attachment and her presence and empathy helps to soothe and regulate him. She provides a “holding” environment for him. That is, when “everything that happens to [him] that sustains him and produces wholeness and integration,” (p. 91) he is “held.” The baby has the illusion that he has created this environment. He has the illusion that he has created all that sustains him: the nipple, mom’s body, etc… In fact, he thinks he has created his known world. By about two months old, he is aware that mom is regulating him and he is held together by her. He has the illusion that he and his mother are one. By about 3 months, he is lured outside of himself by his mother. She smiles and talks to him and he does so back to her. This starts in him a desire for human dialogue whereas until this point, he was mostly interested in sensations that came from within himself such as the flow of breast milk and urination. The baby and his mother are truly in their own orbit: they have created a world of their own. They begin to have conversations which are by now ritualized (feedings, diaper changes, etc.) They look into each other’s eyes and he gurgles and coos. As his desire for more stimulating dialogue mounts, he begins to shut out things that make him irritable and forms his own stimulus barrier. This begins separation.
By about 5 months old, the infant begins his struggle to become a “self.” Hopefully, his attachment to his mother is strong enough for him to bear the reality of his separateness and part from his former illusion. He begins to reach out to her when she or the world disappoints him. He looks to her to restore him to oneness to help him feel “held.” He looks at his mother as an extension of his “self,” magically keeping him safe. This process of becoming a separate self, Kaplan calls the “second” or “psychological” birth. For simplicity’s sake, I will focus on the development of a well-attached child who has healthy interactions with his mother, father, and the world around him. It is his attachment to his mother that allows him to locate himself in the world as he becomes more aware of his body and individual existence. Creeping away from her to explore the world seems exciting but also reminds him of his separateness. For this reason, he uses her lap as a secure base from which to explore. He comes back to her when he needs to be recharged or restored to wholeness. He comes back to her to restore oneness and “hold” him. Being “done to” (bathing, diaper changing etc.) shows him that he has lost control of what will happen to him and what won’t. As he rages against it, he has a vague wish for oneness to make life whole again. As human beings, we never lose this unconscious desire for oneness. We want to feel whole and complete.
By about 9 months old, the baby has learned the possibility of dialogue with someone other than his mother by interactions with his father. He then becomes interested in interaction with the strangers that he can sense his mother trusts. Although these strangers are most interesting to him, he wants to dialogue with them from the comfort of his mother’s arms. This keeps an aspect of oneness so he doesn’t feel too vulnerable which would lead to too much unpredictability for him to feel “held.” Around the time he is interested in strangers, he also becomes interested in a variety of games that have psychological significance. “Peek-a-boo” helps him to build confidence in himself. “Catch me” allows him to explore his separateness in a way that is fun and that he is in control of. “Tossing Away” is a way he explores separateness and no saying. He begins to experience a tension that will become familiar to him in his everyday problems: a desire to hold onto his mother in oneness and a desire to become his own master.
At about 10 months when the infant is learning how to take charge of his own destiny, he becomes attached to a security blanket. It is often his blanket that was used to nurse or cuddle him in an experience of oneness. His blanket becomes, for him, a reminder of oneness and creates for him an illusion by remembering times when he wasn’t struggling with becoming a separate person. He uses his security blanket when he, in his valiant efforts to conquer self-hood, realizes that he’s not up to the task. These are often times when: there is a no saying mother, he is not being admired, and his mother appears and disappears independently of his longings. He wants a mother whom he can control and who he can imagine is a part of himself. He begins an obsession with being vertical. This will eventually lead to a whole new level of separateness between him and his mom.
Between 10 and 18 months, the baby begins to walk. This is the culmination of his triumph to orient himself to the physical world and his place in it. He becomes very much in love with himself around this time and is less concerned with staying close to mom as “home base.” This is around the time that the child discovers their sexual parts and fondles them for quiet self-soothing. They are very observant around this time and sometimes become completely absorbed in watching the world around them. When they begin to speak around 15 months old, they choose words that are connected to their immediate sensate experiences in daily life. His confidence in himself is at an all-time high and he likes to have his words and babbles answered by others. He begins to experience a period of “elation” where his mood is intense and overpowering due to his body being in perfect accord with his senses. He becomes much attuned to the world around him and begins his love affair with it. He experiences himself as being one with the world. His memories of wholeness allow him to create an outer world that “holds” him. He has a magical sense of safety and imagines his mother’s presence everywhere to keep his body safe. Moms are proud of their boy’s sense of prowess as he explores the world. On the other hand, most girls aren’t given the freedom to romp as much as the boys because her mother is often concerned more for her safety. Therefore, girls tend to be held more and this makes girls more cautious than boys. Either way, the child’s elation keeps him/her in touch with the sensate qualities of the external world for the rest of his life. This is when he develops an optimism about himself that will hold him whenever he is disappointed in life. The baby is able to tolerate his mother’s absences by turning inward when she is not there. He doesn’t yet understand that she will come back so he resigns himself to the notion that he is without her forever. He uses outer forms (like toys) along with his interior resources to maintain emotional equilibrium. He searches himself for the perfect state of self that left when his mother did. He longs for her without falling apart unlike in infancy when he felt like he was falling apart without her. He has blue/grey moods that help him to see that he can manage loss and separation. He is creating an inner world that “holds” him.
Between 15 and 18 months old, the baby starts to have the ability to create symbols along with images and concepts. He is open to the world of communication and language. Little by little, his thinking mind takes over from a mind that was mostly concerned with bodily states. Symbolic play gives him an enlarged capacity to “hold” himself and manage his body on his own. He suffers from a wounded narcissism when his thinking mind senses his aloneness in the world. He feels the reality that he is vulnerable. He spends the next half a year trying to restore his wounded narcissism. To repair the damage, he tries to coerce his mother into being an extension of his self yet he wants to claim possession of his own self. He is often in turmoil due to this dilemma. He frequently has temper tantrums, intense mood swings, and words like “No” and “Mine” dominate his vocabulary.
Some time between 15 months and 3 years of age, the baby welcomes the arrival of the self. He begins to have more complex play to help him master his wounded narcissism and help him cope with his feelings of aloneness and helplessness. This process helps him to take his mother’s nurturing inside of himself so that he has a comforting presence within. At the same time, he comes to co-create with his mother an inner psychological distance where he can have his own space while still being a part of hers. He still longs for oneness yet dreads it when he is able to coerce his mother into being an extension of himself. He still has the secret longing (that we never lose) to be a baby of oneness. He goes through a period (between 18 and 24 months) when he thinks in absolutes. He thinks of himself as all bad or all good. If he doesn’t understand his parents’ “no’s” then he thinks he’s an all-bad baby. When he does understand them, he gives up his notion that he must be perfect in order to keep the all-bad part of him in check. It is important that he wins some battles and loses some to get a balanced view of himself.
The main emotions the toddler comes to experience are anger and sadness. He begins to experience emotions when he starts to connect his bodily sensations and arousals with another person (usually his mother). Until that point the baby has only known simple states of arousal which didn’t have to do with others and couldn’t be considered true emotions. These emotions can only come about with the mind that is able to make symbols. He begins to connect what his mom did and what happened in his body. As he begins to experience anger, he sees his mother as the source of the problem as he tries to understand that her wishes are not his wishes. He has frequent outbursts of anger and studies his mom’s reactions to these outbursts. He is learning that anger has limits and that it can alter some aspects of a situation and leaves others unaltered. He learns that even when he is a tyrant, his anger cannot destroy the people he counts on still for survival and wholeness. Sadness is a bit more complex of an emotion for the toddler. He longs for a time which was more whole such as the past while not being able to experience the full realization of his longing which may lead to deep sadness. Deep sadness is too much for him to bear so he may become extra active and lively or angry to avoid the feeling of deep sadness. Sometimes, sadness cannot be avoided. During these times, he is let down because he perceives himself to be less perfect than he was as a baby of oneness. Sadness helps him to reconcile the past with the present. Some parents can’t handle when their baby is sad so they smile and play games and encourage the child not to be sad. The baby gets the idea that being sad is bad and that it is a part of his fundamental badness. He often denies himself the expression of his own sadness in order to please his parents. He learns to look happy when he is not. He has frequent temper tantrums as a way of restoring peace and discharged accumulated tension. During these tantrums, he feels powerful. A part of him wants to stop but he won’t until his tensions are gone. After a tantrum, he wants some reassurance from mom and dad that they still love him. He counts on his parents to be strong and not disintegrate with him. Even though it may have been their “no” that precipitated the tantrum, it actually happens because of the child’s psychological birth. He is experiencing difficulty reconciling his fantasies, wishes, and thoughts with the demands and wishes of others. The illusion of his past no longer relieves him.