Loneliness and Compulsion

This paper has tried to show a rather common mother-child relationship marked by too great a maternal emotional withdrawal from the child even when she is with him physically. In such a situation the child will produce, via the path laid down by the repetition compulsion, compulsive manifestations. The compulsive activity symbolized repetitively the wished-for possession of the mother and helped ward off the threatening sorrow due to loneliness which the child has already experienced overwhelmingly. It

acts as both defense and gratification and becomes most prominent in the individuation-separation (anal-phallic) period of the child when he becomes aware of himself as a separately functioning psychological entity with special interest in his genital. The mother's withdrawal is occasioned by her unconscious equating of the child with her fantasied infantile phallus damaged by masturbation. The withdrawn relationship, punctuated by sporadic interruptions of closeness, appears to be a re-enactment of the mother's infantile struggle against masturbation with occasional yielding to temptation. The mother, intolerant of the child's phallic impulses, functions most comfortably with him on the sadomasochistic level thus reinforcing his fixation to anality.