Word: mother
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...months, Baby knows Mother is separate...
...with the awesome power of parents. In a remarkable new book, Oneness and Separateness, Psychologist Louise Kaplan, 48, offers a baby's-eye view of the child's struggle to become an individual. Behind that struggle, says Kaplan, are opposing needs of the child-to cling to mother and to strike out on its own. The child's solution to the dilemma will powerfully affect its adult attitudes toward love, initiative and trust...
...other researchers, chiefly Psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler, who describes the child's efforts to establish its own identity as "a second birth" or "psychological birth" that occurs around the age of 18 months. In the first four months of life, says Kaplan, the baby is merged with the mother in "the bliss of unconditional love" that later becomes the model for adult conceptions of ecstasy and perfect union...
...tinged with uncertainty and loss. "Peekaboo" is a serious game; the baby toys with separateness without fearing that he or she will be abandoned. In "Catch Me," a separation game found in many cultures, the child creeps quickly away, looking back over its shoulder to make sure the mother is in pursuit. The child both wants to be caught and wants to escape...
Until the age of ten months, the baby's world is in fragments. It is still not sure where its body begins and ends and does not fully realize that the mother is a separate individual. Outbursts of rage, sometimes violent ones centering on feeding, rise from this stress, Kaplan says; they result from "a vague wish to make life whole again." A parent who responds with rage just reinforces the fear of fragmentation. What the child needs, says Kaplan, is a "calming yes-saying voice," conveying assurance that its aggressive urges are not dangerous...