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Margaret Mahler conceives that individuation takes place in childhood. She has defined a number of interlacing but none the less distinct stages in maturation culminating in the separation-individuation, phase.
Her primary assumption is this: an infant's life at first ‘centres round continuous attempts to achieve homeostasis’; consequently a baby attempts to discharge tensions by
‘urinating, defaecating, coughing, sneezing, spitting, regurgitating, vomiting …’; and because of his inability to record anything but visceral release of tension and because there are no representational objects and no boundaries to the self, he cannot distinguish his own activities from the ‘mother's ministrations in reducing the pangs of need—hunger’. This phase is called normal autism.
From the second month onwards and culminating at around four to five months the baby develops some ‘dim awareness of the need satisfying object’ and so he behaves and functions as though he and his mother were an omnipotent system—‘a dual unity within one common boundary’. This is the symbiotic phase which is a creation of the baby and is a ‘hallucinatory somatopsychic omnipotent fusion with the representation of the mother and in particular the delusion of a common boundary of the two actually and physically separate individuals’.
The separation-individuation phase culminates at the toddler stage at about two-and-a-half years. It takes place when the infant detaches himself from his mother and is a landmark in the development of identity experience based on the self. ‘The infant's inner sensations form the core of the self. They seem to remain the central, the crystallization point of the “feeling of self” round which the sense of identity will become established … The sensori-perceptive organ—the “peripheral mind of the ego”, as Freud called it—contributes mainly to the self's demarcation from the object world. The two kinds of intrapsychic structures form the framework for self-orientation.’
These conclu