Aspects of family mental health in Europe : contributors, D. Buckle ... [et al.].

Date:
1965
Catalogue details

Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Aspects of family mental health in Europe : contributors, D. Buckle ... [et al.]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    38/128 (page 36)
    36 ASPECTS OF FAMILY MENTAL HEALTH IN EUROPE The communications of children with others are not solely through language; before language there is a rich variety of extra- verbal communication between the mother and baby — pulsations, warmth, posture, odour, movements, and, above all, the physical manner of suckling. The baby cries and moves, the mother responds ; so the cry, at first an expression of hunger, becomes a means of communication, provoking many reactions and different modes of response — an infra-verbal language is set up between the two. The mother-child relationship is reciprocal. The internal psychological world of the infant is based on these experiences, and the interaction of instinct, satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety with perception and imagination creates patterns of individual reaction which later form the structured personality of the child. Anxiety leads to mechanisms for its diminution, and actual experiences of these defensive psychological manoeuvres determine their tendency to be reinforced or inhibited. Identification and pro¬ jection remain as perhaps the two most prominent mechanisms of defence throughout personality development, depending for their individuality on specific environmental reactions. The complicated varieties of individual solutions to the emergence of sexual identity (Oedipus complex) provide one of the most important sources of individual différences,^ In later life, if psychological stresses occur, much will depend on the modes of development in infancy. Thus, each person's symp¬ tomatology is dependent, to a large degree, on his intra-family experience, and especially on points where his emotional develop¬ ment has been inhibited or fixated. The anxious behaviour of a mother about her child's feeding may lead, later, to food fads, and, also, to a colouring of his abstract attitudes of refusal or greed in his social life. Obsessional mechanisms can often be traced to dis¬ turbances in toilet training. Just as the appearance of a psycho- pathological symptom in a patient leads us to suspect a nucleus in his infantile life, so perturbations and fixations created in infancy are suspected of providing potential structures for later symptoms. This theory carries important implications for prevention. The child's importance for his parents The child is important for the parent, a source of satisfaction or anxiety. The parent's attitude is determined, to some extent, by his own experience as a child; his behaviour is related to the nature of ^ Freud, A. (1937) The ego and the mechanisms of defence, London, Hogarth Press.