The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant
Separation-individuation, observed rather than reconstructed from the couch.
The biological birth of the human infant and the psychological birth of the individual are not coincident in time. The former is a dramatic, observable, and well-circumscribed event; the latter a slowly unfolding intrapsychic process.
Published in 1975, this book sets out the separation-individuation theory that Margaret Mahler developed with Fred Pine and Anni Bergman from years of watching mothers and infants together in a research nursery. It reports what that observational work found: the child's slow movement out of an early undifferentiated state, traced through the phases the authors name normal autism and symbiosis and then the subphases of separation-individuation proper, differentiation, practising, rapprochement, and the consolidation of individuality and emotional object constancy. The account gives particular weight to rapprochement, the point at which the newly mobile toddler, having tasted autonomy, turns back toward the mother and must hold the wish for independence and the need for her together at once. Because the material comes from direct observation rather than reconstruction from adult treatment, it offers the clinician a developmental map grounded in behaviour, a frame for reading regression, ambivalence, and the pull toward and away from closeness in the consulting room.
About the authors
Margaret Schönberger Mahler
Margaret S. Mahler (1897 to 1985) was a Hungarian-American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked in New York on early child development. Her theory of separation-individuation argues that the infant undergoes a psychological birth, moving from a symbiotic union with the mother through hatching, practicing, and rapprochement toward object constancy. Mahler built this account from direct observation of mothers and infants together, tracking how the child gradually establishes a separate self while holding the maternal bond.
Fred Pine
Fred Pine (1931 to 2022) was an American clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, long based in the Department of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. With Margaret Mahler and Anni Bergman he carried out the observational research on separation and individuation in early childhood. His later writing argues that psychoanalysis holds four psychologies, those of drive, ego, object relations, and self, and that a clinician moves among them according to what a given patient and moment require.
Anni Bergman
Anni Bergman was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst and researcher whose work centres on how a child separates from the mother and becomes a distinct self. In 1959 she joined Margaret Mahler, and their observational study of mother and infant pairs shaped the separation-individuation model set out in The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. Her later clinical practice concentrated on children, including those with severe early disturbance, where sustained relationship and patient attentiveness carry the therapeutic work.
Details
- 1975
- English
- Basic Books
- Basic Books, 1975
- 336
- 9780465095544