Rapprochement: An interactional exploration of a significant developmental phenomenon and its clinical manifestations (Margaret Mahler)

I investigated the studies of Margaret Mahler and others who have vividly documented the pattern by which the baby, or especially the toddler, interactionally works out his separateness from mother, and then how this process becomes internalized. In addition, I observed the process myself. I followed a small group of mother/child dyads over the course of a year. When I began, the youngsters were burgeoning toddlers, approximately one year of age, in the state of being primarily invested in their newly experienced selfhood: their newly developed capacity to explore the world from an upright position. I watched the toddler's transition from primarily experienced selfhood to the next stage of return involvement with mother: the originally significant "other." In this succeeding stage it seemed these youngsters' explorations were once again intended to be shared with mother. Thus, I witnessed the transition into the rapprochement stage: the third subphase of separation individuation characterized by a rediscovery of mother, now as a separate individual. Prior to this point, there existed either exclusive devotion to mother, or the opposite joy of independence exclusive of mother. The challenge of rapprochement involved resolving the seeming contradiction inherent in the two experiences.; My impression was that a mature ego, capable of perceiving and synthesizing complexity, was necessary for coming to terms with paradoxes, life's paradoxes which arise in the puzzles and struggles of rapprochement. I thus made a research assumption; in order for a woman to be a success as a mother during rapprochement the following ego strengths were necessary: a mother had to have the capacity to be comfortable both with closeness and with distance, with dependency and independency demands and with fluctuating and often ambiguous messages. The instruments I decided to utilize to test this assumption to measure my hypothesis were diverse in nature. The first was Jane Loevinger's sentence completion test for women, a validated test to assess ego development. As a second instrument, I employed the method of interview to measure a mother's comfort with closeness and distance. Both of these measures had to be correlated with some measure of her child's ability to function. Thus I devised a toddler assessment scale for this purpose. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...