Fusion and Anxiety: Children's Drawings and Renaissance Art*

It is by now a commonplace of child psychology that in the earliest stage of life an infant and his mother cannot be seen as two separate individuals, but rather as a single unit, or dual unity, as Mahler (1963, 1968) calls it. The infant's life revolves around holding and feeding (Escalona 1952), the two activities in which he is totally dependent on his mother. And, indeed, he in no way sees himself as separate from his mother. Visually, the unity of mother and child is illustrated by the molding response, which is captured in a Renaissance Virgin and Child (Fig. 1). Here the child's body and the mother's body fit together like two halves of a circle.

The fusion or dual unity is eventually broken up in the separation-individuation phase. This process does not really begin until around five months, and is not completed until the third year of life. In fact, there is some question as to whether it is ever truly completed, a problem which will be discussed shortly.

Mahler's (1968) conceptualization of the process of separation-individuation is well known. One point, however, bears reemphasizing, and that is the intensity of the child's conflict as he separates his identity from that of his mother. Particularly in the “practicing” period, when the child runs back and forth between the brave new world and the comforts of mothering, and in the “rapprochement” period, when this vacillation between dependence and independence takes on the form of painful ambivalence, the child clearly knows all too well what adults endeavor to forget: