Page - 8 - in Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Puberty and Adolescence - The Inner Worlds of Teenagers and their Parents

8 The body ego itself emotionally, which it attempts to do through a pseudo -independence and premature maturity. I can make my point by going straight over to the case of the baby whose mother reflects her own mood or, worse still, the rigidity of her own defenses. (Winnicott 1967, 112) Such early experiences form the roots of a child’s personality. Psychoanalysts pre- sume that the emotional reaction a baby evokes from its mother supplies it with a sense of its own “reality” – the sense that it is indeed alive. The baby internalizes this experience, which in turn serves as a basis for the fundamental feeling of self - worth. Only when we have experienced the feeling of being loved and observed, admired, can we love ourselves. Winnicott continues: To return to the normal progress of events, when the average girl studies her face in the mirror she is reassuring herself that the mother image is there and that the mother can see her and that the mother is en rapport with her. (Italics in original; ibid, p. 112) Winnicott believes that girls see not only themselves but (unconsciously) also the image of their mother here. We must remember that no mother or father always looks upon their baby with love. Winnicott speaks of a “good enough mother”, who encounters her baby mainly with love, while sometimes reacting in annoy- ance, irritation or tension. The adolescent girl now graduates (so to speak) from her mother’s gaze – which is effectively replaced by her own gaze into the mirror, as well as observation by her peer group. Particularly for an adolescent, it is of vital importance to be considered attractive by friends, and to be viewed – gazed upon – affectionately and with interest. It is a fact that some autistic children cannot look at themselves in the mir- ror, since – for diverse reasons – they could not embark on a relationship to their mother, instead withdrawing into their private world. Schizophrenics also avoid looking into the mirror, and indeed are more likely to shatter a mirror than to gaze into it. In a footnote to his paper “Formulations Regarding the Two Principles in Men- tal Functioning” (1911), Freud pointed out the function of maternal nurturing in the infant’s emotional development. It probably hallucinates the fulfillment of its internal needs; it betrays its unpleasure, when there is an increase in stimulus and an absence of satisfac- tion, by the motor discharge of screaming and beating about with its arms and legs, and it then experiences the satisfaction it has hallucinated. Later, as an older child, it learns to employ these manifestations of discharge intention- ally as methods of expressing its feelings. Since the later care of children is modelled on the care of infants, the dominance of the pleasure principle can