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Language is that which binds us together even as it gives simultaneous witness to our awesome and terrifying separateness. Feelings aroused by man's essential isolation resonate to the echoes of earlier feelings of helplessness, fragmentation, and annihilation that arose when faced prematurely with the knowledge of the non-I. It is this aloneness that is said to have led the astronauts to dread most the possibility of being permanently separated from earth in the event of a disaster. It is against the awareness of this separateness that the infant is protected through his omnipotent fantasied oneness with and denial of the “not self” mother who is experienced instead as within, around, or a part of him.
Throughout life, man struggles between the desire to return to that infantile Eden of thoughtless blissful merger and the opposing wish to escape from it (Ekstein and Caruth, 1965).
This is the transitional dilemma of men of all ages who are engaged in this dialectic struggle between the need for the the other and the need for the self, respectively, between the need for mutuality and intimacy and the need for privacy and autonomy.
The need for the other originates in that beginning total dependency of the neonate that led Winnicott (1965) to observe that there is no such thing as A baby but only a baby and an Other, since a baby cannot exist except as a part of a dyad and as dependent upon a “facilitating or holding environment.” An interesting aside in this connection was the observation of the doctors attending the Fratushi septuplets that the level of oxygenation rose significantly when the baby was in contact with the mother, and that in fact, the death of the