A Dream Mother: Maternal Function and Mentalization in Little Bear

Little Bear is myself, about three or four…I was coddled and loved, and life was absolutely blissful—that's who Little Bear is.

When I did those books, I was quite young. And I wished for a mother bear. I wanted somebody like that in my life. My mother was troubled and she was an ordinary human being, but I had high expectations of her. I didn't know about her problems. I didn't care about her problems—I thought she was there for me! And if she wasn't there for me, she was not really a good mother. So, the expectations of children are very charged and difficult.

So mother bear was a fantasy of the best of a mother: the gentle looks, the kindliness of her body. The way she moved, the way she sat, the way she spoke—she was a dream. A dream mother.

Little Bear is a book for beginning readers about the emotional and cognitive experience of developing a sense of self. Telling the story of Little Bear and his mother in four short chapters, the book illustrates the process by which the capacity for mentalization develops, mediated through fantasy, in the context of a secure attachment. This process is necessary in childhood for the consolidation of a coherent identity. It has a similar structure to the process in psychoanalysis, where the transference offers a transitional space between psychic reality