You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In this theoretical paper the author proposes that the earliest communication pattern established between parent and child in the service of mastering distress serves as a prototype for later social relations. The crying infant induces tension in the parent. This tension then causes the parent to relieve the infant's distress, thus reducing the tension. Parents may be overwhelmed by their inability to relieve the crying infant and this inability may become associated with a sense of their own failure and guilt. The reciprocal reaction is the child's dread of his parents' unhappiness for which he feels responsible and which threatens him with the loss of security of parental care.
Both partners in this communicative network are faced with the problem of defining their boundaries. For the infant this task is a necessary first step toward a series of self-differentiations. For the parent unresolved elements of their own autonomic development are re-experienced. Some specific examples of the liabilities arising out of inability to attain 'mature interdependence' in the parent-child dialogue are illustrated. The physician who is unable to remain