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Attempts to manifest autonomous behavior can be seen throughout the life cycle: in the infant who turns away from his mother who wants to feed him; in the 12-month-old child who is beginning to take steps away from his mother; in the toddler who repeatedly says “no” to assert his own desires in contrast to his mother's desires; in the preschool child who insists on wearing particular clothes despite the inclement weather; in the school-age child who insists on walking to school by himself; in the adolescent who rails against his parents' rules, which he perceives as an interference; in the married man who leaves his wife because he experiences marriage as a hindrance to his autonomy; and in the older man who insists on living by himself despite a variety of serious infirmities.
Yet the concept of autonomy is psychoanalytically difficult to unravel. One might wonder whether Salmony's (1983) conclusion that “autonomy is a topic that has drawn the attention of generations of thinkers, and yet one about which relatively little is understood” (p. 571) may still be relevant. Some references to autonomy and autonomous ego functions include those of Freud (1938), Hartmann (1950), Erikson (1956), Kohut (1972), and Blum and Blum (1990). Others, such as Galatzer-Levy and Cohler (1990), state that “psychological autonomy is not a primary goal for a