Mediation of the Image of Infant-Mother Togetherness

I Am going to discuss the image of infant-mother togetherness, which appeared in the analytical material of one of my patients, and its relevance to the original self, unconscious identity, and infantile omnipotence on the one hand, and to a body image and ego integration on the other.

I will start with two quotations from Jung. In ‘Psychological aspects of the mother archetype’ he says:

‘The carrier of the archetype is in the first place the personal mother, because the child lives at first in a complete participation with her, and in a state of unconscious identity. She is the psychic as well as the physical precondition of the child. With the awakening of ego consciousness the participation gradually weakens, and consciousness begins to enter into opposition with the unconscious, its own precondition. This leads to the differentiation of the ego from the mother’ ( C.W.  9, i, p.  102).

Jung here describes the infant's state of unconscious identity with the mother. It is a state in which there is no consciousness of boundaries; the infant, therefore, is unable to distinguish in terms of actuality between himself and the world. When there is no differentiation between inner and outer there is in effect only oneness. Marion Milner puts it imaginatively when she says that the infant experiences this as a feeling that his mother's arms are his own creation—‘All heaven is ours and all power’. She goes on to say that this state in which the baby is omnipotent is inevitably broken up with the frustration of instinctual experiences.

My second quotation is from ‘The psychology of the transference’, where Jung says:

‘The individual's specious unity that emphatically says “I want”, “I think”, breaks down under the impact of the unconscious. So long as the patient can think that somebody else (his father, his mother) is responsible for his

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difficulties, he can save some semblance of unity, but once he realizes that he himself has a shadow, that the enemy is in his own heart, the co