Mahler's concepts of "symbiosis" and separation-individuation: revisited, reevaluated, refined

Mahler's developmental theories are reviewed in the light of subsequent clinical experience and theoretical and empirical critique. Several modifications are proposed, each tending to particularize and focus the nature and scope of developmental events. Particular attention is accorded the "symbiosis" concept, and focus placed on transmission of psychodynamic issues from mother to infant and on the progressive buildup of self-sustaining pathological systems. Overall, an argument is advanced for the continued developmental import of Mahler's "symbiotic" and "separation-individuation" phase formulations, though with recognition of significant individual differences in their role in individual lives. An argument is advanced also for the clinical utility of these ideas, and illustrations presented, though the link between clinical applications and psychoanalytic theories of early development remains problematic.     

Reexamining the acquisition of sex roles: A social interactionist approach

Recent empirical information has challenged existing theories of early sex-role acquisition and stimulated theoretical interest in this process. A social interactionist theory of early sex-role development is outlined, which incorporates the insights of existing theories while moving beyond their limitations. This theory stresses the influence of sex labels on social interactions, social interactional experience on the acquisition of gender identity, and the active participation of the child in his or her own sex-role development. The differences and similarities between the social interactionist and other theories of sex-role development are noted. The necessity for observational studies of naturally occurring interactions and theoretical responsiveness to the findings of such studies is also noted.     

Revisiting rapprochement in the light of contemporary developmental theories

Margaret Mahler's thinking, revolutionary for its time, led to the observational study of mother-infant pairs, followed almost day by day as the preverbal infant developed into a toddler whose increasing cognitive capacities made new demands on the mother's presence and emotional availability. The rapprochement crisis, as formulated based on these observations, is reexamined in the light of contemporary theory, and the concept of co-construction is used to show how mother and toddler repair misunderstandings and inevitable conflicts. With the growth of new verbal capacities during rapprochement, the toddler moves from early, sensorimotor interactions to interactions governed by language, in the process gaining new understanding of his or her emotional life.     

An exploration of separation-individuation themes in the borderline personality disorder

In an attempt to test hypotheses derived from Mahler's theory of borderline development, Rorschach protocols of borderline and schizophrenic patients were studied for the presence of themes related to the separation-individuation process. A specially constructed Separation-Individuation Theme Scale was used with a 96% reliability of agreement between two raters. The borderline group attained more separation-individuation themes than the schizophrenic group, whereas the schizophrenics showed more preseparation-individuation themes. The results were interpreted as a validation of Mahler's theory. In addition, the results tended to confirm a developmental model for the understanding of psychopathology.     

Contexts,Polarities, and Pluralism. Discussion of Slochower’s “Going Too Far: Relational Heroines and Relational Excess”

In her searching paper “Going Too Far: Relational Heroines and Relational Excess,” (this issue) Slochower finds the potential for excess as inherent in any psychoanalytic theory. I argue that context is key in understanding this phenomenon within relational psychoanalysis; what she describes may not be the case for other theories. The beginnings of relational theory as a movement, generational and radical, could lead to therapeutic overconfidence or certainty around countertransference insights and disclosures. Slochower sees an abundance of certainty in this stance, as well as pressure for premature mutuality. As a complement or balance to this intense mode of interpersonal engagement, Slochower elaborates her own work on holding, wherein the analyst “brackets” her experience and respects the patient’s need for privacy and nonimpingement. Uncertainty is an affirmative stance in letting the patient’s inner life come into being. There are a number of polarities in Slochower’s paper—between mutuality and privacy, certainty and uncertainty, and in the origin story of relational psychoanalysis between relational and classical theories. I argue that pluralism offers a path forward from polarities to a rich complex world of multiple possibilities and recognition of different minds and theories.     

Demeter's Compromise: Separation,Loss, and Reconnection in Mothers with Daughters Entering Adulthood

Drawing on contemporary theory of female development that focuses on the dynamics of the mother/daughter relationship regarding issues of separation and individuation, this article examines the treatment of a middle aged mother as she navigates her way through her daughter's adolescence and early adulthood. Psychoanalytic object relations, psychoanalytic relational theory, and feminist theory serve to frame an understanding of the case material in terms of developmental challenges that are uniquely female. Issues around mother/daughter attachment, separation, competition, conflict, and love are explored in the relationships between the patient and her mother, the patient and her daughter, and the patient and the therapist. The therapist's countertransference, intensified by her relationships with her own mother and daughter, suggests the possibility of both pitfalls and opportunities in the treatment. The article attempts to address a gap in psychoanalytic developmental theory, which offers little understanding of the challenges for women in midlife.     

Theory-Based Health Behavior Change: Developing, Testing, and Applying Theories for Evidence-Based Interventions

Theories are needed to explain and predict health behavior, as well as for the design and evaluation of interventions. Although there has been a history of developing, testing, applying, and refining health behavior theories, debates and limitations in evidence exist: The component of theories which, for example, predicts change should be better elaborated so that we can more easily understand what actually drives behavior change. Theories need to be empirically testable in two ways. Theories need to specify a set of changeable predictors to describe, explain, and predict behavior change, and they should enable us to design an effective intervention that produces exactly those changes in behavior that are predicted by the relevant theory. To make this possible, theories need to be specified in such a way that they can be rigorously tested and falsified. Moreover, for the design of theory-based interventions it must be possible to derive change techniques from the theory and to use them to generate changes in behavior. Based on eight state-of-the-science articles that make conceptual and empirical contributions to the current debate on health behavior theories, various approaches are discussed to gain further insights into explaining and changing health behaviors and the iterative process of theory development.     

Feeling one's way in the world: Making a life

This paper argues for the psychoanalytic relevance of the works of James Gibson and Susanne Langer in explicating the early development of the human child and makes use of this combined formulation of development to think about psychoanalytic theory and practice. From the insights of James Gibson's ecological psychology we can appreciate the embodiment and embeddedness of the child's growing mind within both her physical and social environments. Making use of Susanne Langer's concept of feeling to redefine ecological psychology's perceptual counterpart to action allows us to understand the child's seamless transition into active participation in her culture, as she learns to project her animalian capacity to feel into intersubjectively defined forms of behavior and experience with others. The paper presents a lengthy exposition of Gibson's ecological psychology, before explaining Langer's thinking and launching into the combined insights of these scholars to explicate the nature of the child's mind as she feels her way in the world and makes a life for herself within it. This is the life she will be able to remake in the embeddedness of a psychoanalytic therapeutic relationship where she can learn to feel her way in the world in a new light.     

Intersubjectivity,object relations theory,and empirical evidence from mother-infant interactions

The work of John Bowlby and his associates on the development of the infant's attachment to his or her parents in the second half of the first year reflects the fruitfulness of an integration of psychoanalytic insights and empirical research. In line with this approach, this paper considers the mother-infant relationship in the first few months from two perspectives: that of the British School of Object Relations and that of the theory of Intersubjectivity, set out initially within developmental psychology and, more recently, developed within systems theory. These views are considered in the light of evidence from two sources. First, a series of experimental studies is described employing disruptions to both the form and the timing of communication between 6- to 12-week-old infants and their mothers. This work illustrates the sensitivity of young infants to the quality of their interpersonal engagements and, also, the contribution of the infant to the regulation of interactions with others. Second, evidence is presented from a prospective study of the effects of maternal depression in the postnatal period on infant development. This work shows the possible longer term consequences for the infant of early disturbances in the mother-infant relationship. Infants of postnatally depressed women were found to be more insecurely attached to their mothers, were more likely to have mild behavioral problems (especially sleep disturbance), and showed poorer outcome on Object Concept tasks at 18 months. These effects occurred despite the fact that the mother had recovered from depression by 3 months postpartum.     

Phenylketonuria in Children and Mothers: Genes, Environments, Behavior

ABSTRACT— Phenylketonuria (PKU) is an inborn metabolic error in which metabolism of phenylalanine into tyrosine is disrupted. If the diet of an infant with PKU is not restricted, blood phenylalanine levels are elevated, leading to irremediable brain damage and severe mental retardation. Children with PKU who are placed early and continuously on a low-phenylalanine diet develop normal levels of intelligence, and brain damage is largely prevented. However, if the diet of a mother with PKU is unrestricted during her pregnancy, high phenylalanine levels in her blood can cross the placental barrier and damage the developing fetus in multiple ways. These results demonstrate how genes and environmental factors combine to create prenatal environments that can have profound effects on the growth and development of offspring during infancy and childhood.     

UNDERSTANDING AND PREVENTING ADOLESCENT DATING VIOLENCE: THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVELOPMENTAL, SOCIOCULTURAL, AND GENDERED PERSPECTIVES

The three articles in this special section on the development of adolescent dating violence provide important insights that can help shape future research and theory. Several common themes emerged. The roots of adolescent dating violence are broad and deep; thus, developmental and sociocultural perspectives are necessary to adequately understand this phenomenon. Adolescent dating violence is deeply gendered and requires that researchers make gender a centerpiece of their theorizing. These two insights lead to the conclusion that prevention efforts must start early, be broad based, and include gender in a fundamental way. In addition, longitudinal and ecological approaches hold the most promise for future research.     

Separation Versus Connection,The Gender Controversy: Implications for Counseling Women

Traditional developmental theories hold that separation is the primary goal of human emotional development. Numerous current theorists question this notion. They propose that a girl's development of self is dependent on mutually empathic relationships with primary caretakers. This revision of developmental theory has implications for counseling. The counseling relationship with a woman should provide validation for her relational skill and opportunity to practice relational competence within the counseling relationship. Boys and men may also have the need to develop relational competence to secure a strong sense of self. If so, a relational model of counseling would apply to them as well.     

First order logic with empty structures

For first order languages with no individual constants, empty structures and truth values (for sentences) in them are defined. The first order theories of the empty structures and of all structures (the empty ones included) are axiomatized with modus ponens as the only rule of inference. Compactness is proved and decidability is discussed. Furthermore, some well known theorems of model theory are reconsidered under this new situation. Finally, a word is said on other approaches to the whole problem.     

Is Biosphere Doing Theology?

Three theories about evolution are presently under discussion: the genocentric theory, the organismocentric theory, and the biospherocentric theory. A brief discussion of the three theories is presented. These theories have different implications for theology. The genocentric theory is related to the Darwinian interpretation and, for theology, means the end of an apologetic vision of natural science and for this reason the end of natural theology. The organismo-centric theory is mainly related to events of autoorganization and follows the path of the geometrical harmony of nature. But it is far different from the apologetic interpretation of natural theology which cannot be restored. The biospherocentric theory, on the contrary, contains many fruitful perspectives. This theory, which counts Teilhard de Chardin among its founders, allows the development of a new approach to the theology of nature. In this approach, it is actually the biosphere herself that is doing theology thanks to her thinking sphere: the noosphere.     

Uncertainty,Indeterminacy, and Agent-Centred Constraints

Common-sense morality includes various agent-centred constraints, including ones against killing unnecessarily and breaking a promise. However, it's not always clear whether, had an agent ?-ed, she would have violated a constraint. And sometimes the reason for this is not that we lack knowledge of the relevant facts, but that there is no fact about whether her ?-ing would have constituted a constraint-violation. What, then, is a constraint-accepting theory (that is, a theory that includes such constraints) to say about whether it would have been permissible for her to have ?-ed? In this paper, I canvass various possible approaches to answering this question and I argue that teleology offers the most plausible approach—teleology being the view that every act has its deontic status in virtue of how its outcome (or prospect) ranks, relative to those of its alternatives. So although, until recently, it had been thought that only deontological theories can accommodate constraints, it turns out that teleological theories not only can accommodate constraints, but can do so more plausibly than deontological theories can.     

类比推理的发展理论评析

类比在认知科学领域具有特殊的地位,儿童类比推理能力的发展是其认知发展的重要成分之一。本文系统介绍了类比推理发展研究中的几个重要理论,即能力限制说、知识经验说和关系转换说等。在此基础上,作者进一步对类比推理发展研究中涉及的几个焦点问题,如类比推理出现的最早年龄,类比推理发展的影响因素及类比推理的发展趋势等进行了综合评析。     

The Hofgeismar Lectures: A Contemporary Overview of Horneyan Psychoanalysis

Part I of this paper describes Karen Horney's theory of neurosis. In the 1930s, Horney repudiated Freud's view of female developmental psychology. She argued that cultural factors rather than anatomy or innate biological drives were the primary determinants not only of female development but of personality, as well. When genetic and environmental circumstances together lead to basic anxiety early in life, she believed a deep inner conflict emerges in the individual leading to the need for elaborating layers of rigidified protective defenses. She called this the neurotic process. This process can result in discrete symptoms of mental disorder as well as the more generalized problems of alienation from the person's real self and reliance on neurotic solutions. In Part II, the practical application of Horney's theory to clinical work is demonstrated in a case presentation of a notably timid and perfectionistic man. Part III points up elaborations of Horney's theories by later workers of her school, the American Institute for Psychoanalysis, and provides a history of her school within the broader context of American psychoanalysis. The author's emphasis on postmodern and narrativist elements of Horneyan psychoanalysis are illuminated, as well.     

Texture discrimination and the analysis of proximity.

A major theory of early visual processing has recently been proposed by Marr, which considers a number of aspects of visual perception in great detail, including grouping and texture discrimination. New phenomena associated with texture discrimination are described and experiments reported which allow a preliminary comparison of Marr's theory, as it applies to texture discrimination, with more established theories such as that due to Julesz. One experiment produced results which are clearly consistent with Marr's account, but the ability of his theory to deal with additional data on region suppression is not established. The theory of the analysis of proximity relations proposed by Fox offers a broadly satisfactory account of many texture perception results, while relying on the more fundamental parts of Marr's theory of primitive visual processes to deal with the remainder. A further attraction of proximity analysis is that it may shed new light on the classical paradox of symmetry perception. Some ways in which the preliminary proximity analysis model is incomplete are discussed, and it is concluded that development of the model may be profitable for theories of early visual processing.     

道德之一元论与多元论：缘起、内涵与论争

一元论与多元论之争是道德心理学领域近些年最为活跃的理论交锋之一。道德一元论认为所有外在的道德现象与内在的道德结构都可以用一种因素来解释。道德多元论则认为道德不能只用单一因素来解释,而是存在多个不同质的道德维度,且具有文化敏感性。对应道德理论和道德基础理论是这场争议的典型代表。双方就伤害的解释力、道德失声现象、模块化道德与洁净维度独立性等方面展开论争。未来研究应从三个具体方面进一步探索道德之一元论与多元论难题,进而保持道德心理学领域的理论活力。     

The Moral Oracle’s Test

When presented with a situation involving an agent’s choice between alternative actions, a moral oracle says what the agent is allowed to do. The oracle bases her advice on some moral theory, but the nature of that theory is not known by us. The moral oracle’s test consists in determining whether a series of questions to the oracle can be so constructed that her answers will reveal which of two given types of theories she adheres to. The test can be applied to moral theories in order to determine if they differ in their recommendations for action. Based on this test, a terminology is developed to specify different forms and degrees of distinguishability between moral theories, or types of theories, in terms of their recommendations for action. In conclusion, the test is applied to consequentialism and utilitarianism.