When people concerned about adoption discuss relationships between babies and mothers, they sometimes refer to a period of symbiosis, in which the identities or “selves” of mother and child are somehow fused, so the baby cannot tell the self from the mother effectively. As I’ve pointed out before, this idea is derived from the work of Margaret Mahler and other psychoanalytically-oriented thinkers, who considered this symbiotic period to last from about the second month to the seventh month or so. It’s important to note that Mahler herself did not think the symbiotic period included the first weeks of life or that the events of that period would have any effect on babies who were separated early from their birth mothers and adopted into different families.
Daniel Stern, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant, refers to symbiosis and discusses the concept in detail, but points out that modern research on early development has revealed a number of phenomena that contradict the possibility of early symbiosis as “fusion”. I want to review a number of facts that suggest that babies have an early concept of “self” versus “other” that makes a sense of fusion unlikely for the baby (although mothers may feel that their “selves” include their babies). This sense has been referred to as “primary intersubjectivity”.
One thing that suggests that young babies already “know” (or act as if they know) the difference between the self and another is that shortly after birth they will imitate the facial expressions of others, opening their mouths, even sticking out their tongues (Meltzoff, A., & Moore, A. [1989]. Imitation in newborn infants: Exploring the range of gestures imitated and the underlying mechanisms. Developmental Psychology, 25, 954-962). It is difficult to imagine that a baby would imitate itself (which brings to mind some infinite progression of mirrors), so the great majority of developmental psychologists today would interpret imitation as some primitive awareness that there are other people “out there”. Incidentally, this newborn imitation is not confined to the mother’s facial expressions as we might expect if the birth mother already had overwhelming importance for the infant.
Another point contradicting the possibility of “fusion” and symbiosis is the infant’s response to the so-called “still-face” situation. In this situation, an adult (the mother or someone else) faces a baby, but does not make eye contact and maintains a blank and unresponsive demeanor (this is not easy to do when the baby is signaling that it wants attention, by the way). From a few months of age, babies are distressed by this and become disorganized in their behavior, whimpering, averting the gaze, looking at their hands, even hiccupping. Babies who are in the developmental period where symbiosis had been thought to occur change their behavior in response to the still-face rather than accepting the unresponsiveness as a part of the “fused selves”.
At the same time, though, mothers or other primary caregivers continue to act as if they feel fused with their young babies. They interpret baby sounds, looks, and gestures as if they (the mothers) know the babies’ intentions. They talk to the baby about his or her needs and feelings. When talking to other adults, they may “speak for the baby”, voicing what they feel to be the babies’ opinions and answering questions or comments made to the baby by other adults. Sometimes they begin their baby remarks by saying “Say” in a lower voice, then switching to a high voice for the words the baby is supposed to mean to say (“Yes, I’m sleepy, Grandma”). As so often occurs, the mothers’ feelings and behavior are parallel to and supportive of the babies’ actions, but are by no means the same.
It’s notable that mothers’ sense of fusion fosters good infant development at the same time that it is not actually in line with reality. The mother who interprets her infant’s signals fairly accurately is encouraging the development of communication, followed by speech and eventually by other cognitive abilities. If she felt “unfused”, was convinced that the baby did not intend to communicate or that she could not understand, and did not try to respond, the mother would not do such a good job and the baby’s development might well be slowed. Problems are likely to occur when the mother is too depressed, tired, or sick to be responsive, or when there are too many young children to care for at once (as in low-quality group care for infants).
Even infants of a few months notice differences in adult emotional facial expressions, but they don’t respond with concern for the worried or frightened adult. By 8 or 9 months, they are interested in the meaning the adult’s emotions have for the child (is there something to be afraid of?). But it’s not until 12 months or so that they begin to have “theory of mind”-- the assumption that other people have their own separate feelings and knowledge, and that those adult facial expressions indicate feelings inside the adult. Without theory of mind, infants can hardly feel a sense of intimacy, much less symbiotic emotional fusion, with adults.
It’s a problem to assume that mothers’ and babies’ feelings about each other are mutual, with each a mirror of the other. We can’t make good guesses about infant abilities just from knowing how adults function. Research on infant abilities tells us that no matter what mothers may feel, babies don’t experience symbiosis. However much adoption reform is needed, it would not be wise to make reforms based on the assumption that mothers and young infants are in symbiotic relationships.
Showing posts with label symbiosis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label symbiosis. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Tuesday, November 2, 2010
Symbiosis: More Fun with Metaphors
There was annoyance expressed by a reader last week when I was perceived as saying that something was “just a metaphor”. I didn’t say that, and I plan to not say it again today. In the study of mental health and other aspects of psychology, metaphors are extraordinarily important because they can guide our thinking into useful-- or useless—channels. A useful metaphor is one in which the psychological event can accurately be “mapped” onto the better-understood event we’re comparing it to, so a lot of things about the psychological event are like aspects of the comparison event. A useless or even harmful metaphor is one where the reality of the psychological event is very different from the reality of the comparison event.
Why am I bringing this up? I’m interested in the metaphor of symbiosis, so much bandied about in discussions of adoption. I believe this is a useless, even a harmful, metaphor. It was used by the psychoanalytically-oriented infant-toddler expert Margaret Mahler, and later by Daniel Stern as well as by others. They used the term symbiosis to describe a period of early life, beginning not at birth but at a few months of age, and going on until about the time that attachment behavior begins. For these authors, the word “symbiosis” was chosen to express the deep intimacy, physical and emotional, that often prevails between mothers and babies at this time in the baby’s life.
The word symbiosis, literally “a living together”, deceives us by looking as if it might be a good word to describe the best mother-infant relationships between about 2 and perhaps 6 or 7 months. But it’s not a word that was invented for this purpose. It describes another, more easily understood phenomenon, and because of this introduces a metaphorical usage into the discussion. Symbionts, or animals that live in symbiosis, are not uncommon in the natural world. They belong to different species but live near each other and behave in ways that are mutually beneficial. For example, pilot fish and sharks benefit each other and contribute to each other’s survival, as the fish eat the parasites that can infest the shark’s skin.
Real symbiosis does not provide a good metaphor for any stage of the mother-child relationship, because mothers and babies are not mutually beneficial to each other’s survival, either before or after birth. Mothers take care of babies; babies do not take care of mothers. On the contrary, aspects of motherhood are so potentially damaging to the mother that we have to look to evolutionary advantages for the species before we see any survival-related reason for having children. (I’m not talking about love, fun, or cultural pressures here, just plain survival of the kind that symbiosis aids.) Aside from a few possibilities like reduction in breast cancer caused by breastfeeding, we see virtually all the benefits of the relationship going to the baby, while the mother serves as an auxiliary immune system as well as an auxiliary ego.
What would be a more suitable metaphor, drawn from the natural world, to guide our thinking about young babies and their mothers? If we’re going to choose a comparison to animals living together, a better choice than symbiosis would be parasitism. A parasite, like a tapeworm living in a human gut, takes what it needs from the host, but usually does only slight damage, as it benefits from the host’s continuing life. Unborn babies function like parasites to a considerable extent, sometimes endangering or even killing their host[ess]. During the first year, or even longer, the long slow maturation of human beings makes them require constant care which they are completely incapable of reciprocating and keeps them in a parasitic relationship to adults.
Well, this is really an ugly metaphor, isn’t it? Babies as tapeworms is a pretty disgusting idea. But they’re not pilot fish either, and look at the problems we get into with the symbiosis metaphor. That way of thinking leads us to believe that the early mother-baby relationship is mutual, a two-way street in which the feelings and needs of one partner reflect the feelings and needs of the other one. We can make a lot of mistakes with that metaphor. One is to assume that anguish of a mother separated from her baby is necessarily mirrored by the anguish of a young baby separated from the mother, though observation of babies of a few months tells us this assumption is false. Another is to confuse the mother’s and child’s feelings as attachment develops and to think of “bonding-and-attachment” as if they meant the same thing. The parasite metaphor actually works much better as a description of the early mother-child relationship because it protects us from making mistakes about mutuality.
Of course, one of the difficulties of choosing a good metaphor for mother-baby relationships is that, like other aspects of development, those relationships don’t follow the same rules throughout life. Babies function in different ways at different points in their development, and within the second year will become less parasitic and more capable of reciprocating care and affection in a faintly adult-like way. Mothers, too, operate differently at different times in their own and their babies’ lives. As time passes, new metaphors need to be chosen to help us understand social and emotional development. It’s possible that symbiosis could be a good metaphor for some kinds of adult relationships, but I doubt that it ever works well for relationships between parents and their children of any age.
Why am I bringing this up? I’m interested in the metaphor of symbiosis, so much bandied about in discussions of adoption. I believe this is a useless, even a harmful, metaphor. It was used by the psychoanalytically-oriented infant-toddler expert Margaret Mahler, and later by Daniel Stern as well as by others. They used the term symbiosis to describe a period of early life, beginning not at birth but at a few months of age, and going on until about the time that attachment behavior begins. For these authors, the word “symbiosis” was chosen to express the deep intimacy, physical and emotional, that often prevails between mothers and babies at this time in the baby’s life.
The word symbiosis, literally “a living together”, deceives us by looking as if it might be a good word to describe the best mother-infant relationships between about 2 and perhaps 6 or 7 months. But it’s not a word that was invented for this purpose. It describes another, more easily understood phenomenon, and because of this introduces a metaphorical usage into the discussion. Symbionts, or animals that live in symbiosis, are not uncommon in the natural world. They belong to different species but live near each other and behave in ways that are mutually beneficial. For example, pilot fish and sharks benefit each other and contribute to each other’s survival, as the fish eat the parasites that can infest the shark’s skin.
Real symbiosis does not provide a good metaphor for any stage of the mother-child relationship, because mothers and babies are not mutually beneficial to each other’s survival, either before or after birth. Mothers take care of babies; babies do not take care of mothers. On the contrary, aspects of motherhood are so potentially damaging to the mother that we have to look to evolutionary advantages for the species before we see any survival-related reason for having children. (I’m not talking about love, fun, or cultural pressures here, just plain survival of the kind that symbiosis aids.) Aside from a few possibilities like reduction in breast cancer caused by breastfeeding, we see virtually all the benefits of the relationship going to the baby, while the mother serves as an auxiliary immune system as well as an auxiliary ego.
What would be a more suitable metaphor, drawn from the natural world, to guide our thinking about young babies and their mothers? If we’re going to choose a comparison to animals living together, a better choice than symbiosis would be parasitism. A parasite, like a tapeworm living in a human gut, takes what it needs from the host, but usually does only slight damage, as it benefits from the host’s continuing life. Unborn babies function like parasites to a considerable extent, sometimes endangering or even killing their host[ess]. During the first year, or even longer, the long slow maturation of human beings makes them require constant care which they are completely incapable of reciprocating and keeps them in a parasitic relationship to adults.
Well, this is really an ugly metaphor, isn’t it? Babies as tapeworms is a pretty disgusting idea. But they’re not pilot fish either, and look at the problems we get into with the symbiosis metaphor. That way of thinking leads us to believe that the early mother-baby relationship is mutual, a two-way street in which the feelings and needs of one partner reflect the feelings and needs of the other one. We can make a lot of mistakes with that metaphor. One is to assume that anguish of a mother separated from her baby is necessarily mirrored by the anguish of a young baby separated from the mother, though observation of babies of a few months tells us this assumption is false. Another is to confuse the mother’s and child’s feelings as attachment develops and to think of “bonding-and-attachment” as if they meant the same thing. The parasite metaphor actually works much better as a description of the early mother-child relationship because it protects us from making mistakes about mutuality.
Of course, one of the difficulties of choosing a good metaphor for mother-baby relationships is that, like other aspects of development, those relationships don’t follow the same rules throughout life. Babies function in different ways at different points in their development, and within the second year will become less parasitic and more capable of reciprocating care and affection in a faintly adult-like way. Mothers, too, operate differently at different times in their own and their babies’ lives. As time passes, new metaphors need to be chosen to help us understand social and emotional development. It’s possible that symbiosis could be a good metaphor for some kinds of adult relationships, but I doubt that it ever works well for relationships between parents and their children of any age.
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