Epilogue

Significant misapplications of mahler's theory occur frequently, both by child-trained and adult-trained psychotherapists and psychoanalysts. For example, excitement within the psychoanalytic community has led to the application of such concepts as disidentification (Greenson, 1978) to the young boy's (age 2) struggle in separating from his mother and his identification with his father. A distorted picture has emerged that has been given a central position in theory; that is, that the young boy gives up his mother early in life. Careful observation and clinical work do not document this position. What we see, rather, is a continued need for, and a developing relationship with, mother (some boys meet this need from a position of physical distance with increased motor abilities). A simultaneous heightened interest in the father occurs, but the mother is still the primary focus of the child's love and the primary object from which selective identifications occur.

Where Mahler and Stern truly agree is in their shared interest in how the complex internal world of object relations begins to establish itself in infancy. Research and knowledge in infant memory and symbolic capacities are relatively new. How these cognitive and perceptual capacities then promote even more complicated processes involving fantasies and distortions is of central concern. Exploration in these areas is necessary to gain a fuller understanding of Mahler's fourth subphase of the separation-individuation process. We do not yet know how many relationships a young child can internalize at any one time. That is, does a child need to put all of his or her energy into internalization of the mother-infant relationship, or can he or she simultaneously internalize several relationships?

Also, inferences regarding observations of behavior and mother-child