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In the first draft of their lives together, there had always been a push and pull between them, a closeness and a desire to be rid of that closeness, neither of them being able to fix their uncomfortable nearness and farness, or to understand what distance was best. Then they were one body [Heti 2022, p. 76].
There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life than the impressive caesura of birth would have us believe. What happens is that the child's biological situation as a foetus is replaced for it by a psychical object-relation to its mother [Freud 1926, p. 168].
So begins the lifelong process of separation-individuation. This transition from inside to outside, which begins for the mother before her baby emerges into the world, is the foundation of all that will follow in the long journey toward emancipation—one that in adolescence evokes special challenges for both parties, and replicates, in some measure, the early preverbal period.
In Inside Lives, Margot Waddell (2002) writes, “Puberty is a time when bodily changes occur more rapidly than any other period in life, except in the womb” (p. 139). The two periods of development are linked by rapid growth and separation from a primary object. A good-enough mother, in Winnicott's iconic phrase, is essential in the neonatal period, and her enduring presence will both challenge and support the child's entrance into adolescence. I will include one more quote, this time from Loewald (1962), to underline this tension.