| Abstrakt: |
The author cites material from infant observation and from work with children with autism which illustrates primitive processes of identification and their relation to the development of the body image. The sense of a skin which reliably contains the child's body is seen as being built up through the combination of eye contact with the mother, as a mediator of emotional containment, and tactile reinforcement of the child's sense of having a backbone. The author proposes the term ‘lateral object of primary identification’ to describe the baby's experience of his mother and himself each occupying half of his body. She describes the process by means of which the dual link with the mother — tactile and visual — is progressively inscribed in the major joints of the body, from the neck downwards, in the course of normal development. In this way, separation can be experienced as a loss of part of the body. The experience of losing part of the mouth, as described by Tustin, is discussed with reference to theories of containment (Bion) and projection (Green). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
