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The title of my article is a play on a phrase that has been reverberating in my head for years: “the child of this particular mother.” It comes from the widely known Mahler and McDevitt (1980) article, “The Separation-Individuation Process and Identity Formation.” It is mentioned in the context of mutual cueing, which “during the symbiotic phase creates that indelibly imprinted configuration, that complex pattern that becomes the leitmotif for ‘the child of this particular mother’” (Lichtenstein, 1961). The phrase itself is borrowed from an earlier article by Lichtenstein: “Identity and Sexuality: A Study of Their Interrelationship in Man.”
The title implies that mutual cueing does not stop at the symbiotic phase or at the mother-infant relationship. Child and parent, patient and therapist continually participate in defining one another. This article examines the treatment of a 10-year-old girl and how its course and eventual outcome were set, at least in part, by the emotional processes that the therapist and her young patient invoked in each other.