her instinctual needs. Instead, the caretaker deprived the infant trough her own self-involvement. As a result, a child often withdrew from spontaneity and authenticity. Intellectualization is often associated with the false self. The concept of true and false self have central relevance to family pathology and family therapy because the predominance of false self and intellectualization can significantly reduce a married couple’s ability to satisfy one another in the relationship. Since marital choice or love object choice is a matter of idealization and looking only at the best in the loved one to complement oneself, persons with a false self will hide their own unpleasant feelings but seek the needed love from the partner.
Separation – Individuation theory
The separation individuation theory of Margaret Mahler (1975) has become an increasingly dominant theory for the explanation of childhood development, particularly in the first three years of life. Mahler’s theory is based on her observation of the developmental process in infancy and early childhood. It proposed that the infant enters as a symbiotic relationship with his or her care giver after a brief phase of being primarily preoccupied with the establishment of internal homeostasis. In the first three years of life, the child goes through a succession of phases by which he or she attempts to arrive at a differentiated sense of self and the mother (object). By the end of the third year, the child is on the way to individuation,” a process which would take many evolutionary years. However, at the third year of life, the child is expected to have achieved the minimum level of individuation and separation from the caregiver and be able to function with relative autonomy, for a period of time, in the physical absence of the caregiver. This capacity is related to the achievement of “object constancy”. The establishment of an internalized and relatively stable sense of self and object that can with stand the anxiety of the separation.
A decisive period in the separation-individuation process is the “rapprochement”, phase, in which the infant is pulled between two forces : the need to stay close to the caretaker while being pushed to function autonomously. This result in the “rapprochement crisis” that that reaches its height in the second half of the second year of life. The failure to negotiate the rapprochement phase successfully can result in the inability to establish a satisfactory distance and harmonious relationship with the caregiver or other people in the future.
Self Psychology Theory And Self Pathology
The model of “self” proposed by the school of self psychology of Kohut (1977) has clear application to family therapy, because the disturbances of self can readily result in the projection of a person’s inner experience onto intimate relations in family. “Self” or “self organization” refers to three phenomena: the cohesive self, the fragmented self, and the self regulatory structure. The person with a cohesive self exhibits a high level of well-being, self esteem, vitality and productivity. The “fragmentation” of self occurs when there is a failure to establish the cohesive sel. The person with a fragmented self