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"The nature of the child's sense of himself cannot be traced without characterizing his relationship to his closest objects, his parents" and to the child's helplessness at birth. There are two stages of child-parent bonding: the first is a need-satisfying attachment of infant to mother; the second is the stage of object constancy, in which the child can feel the nurturant, guiding aspects of the parents, even when they are frustrating, disappointing, or absent. The former occurs around the end of the first year when the child can differentiate parents from others and self from parents. The latter occurs over the next two years. Identification with the parents and its internalization lead not only to object constancy, but also to self-constancy. Thus short separations in the early years, and longer ones for the three- or four-year-old child, can be tolerated as the child retains emotionally and cognitively the image of the nurturant and supportive parent. The empathy of the parent is crucial for the development of object constancy and object relatedness and also for the normal development of certain ego functions. Its absence impairs the child's ability to separate and individuate. The child who is emotionally deprived recovers with difficulty. The pathway may be through aggression, then to affection. That is, the aggression can be seen as a demand for limits and boundaries, an aggressive reaching out for new objects, and a reconstruction of the child's sense of himself as "connected," "whole," and "integrated."