Fragments

I DEVELOPED SOME VIEW of these anniversary experiences as denied traumas of adult life, of an exceptional and unusual type. I think at that time I had not as yet integrated a point of view of the significance of the separation-individuation cycles over the course of the life cycle, and of the kinds of transitional experiences that life had, the recycling course of living, the notion of mourning and incomplete mourning that was involved in transitions into autonomy. From an autobiographical point of view, I was a new father, more related to babies and mothers and wives and the immediate pleasures and stresses, than with the long overview of the course and processes of living. Though I was early influenced by the profundity of Erikson's concept of identity transformation and Bowlby's and Spitz' work on the effects of loss and separation of the mothering person on the child, I did not see, sufficiently, their similarities to the loss to the mother of her own child. My later interests in the use of work as transition to adult status and a view of pregnancy as involving profound transformations of inner life were a considerable enrichment of my views on psychological development. I also gained a great deal from my involvement in Kleinian theory and other English school approaches, especially Winnicott's, and their emphasis on the continuing importance of the solutions of early living in developing the far-reaching beacons and frame of orientation and devotion which process and direct adult experience through internal phantasies and inner psychic realities. These theories also influenced me to value immediate experience more, by appreciating the profoundest interplay between developmental successes and failures of the past, which could be seen interwoven amidst the uniqueness and originality of