The Discontinuity in the Ontogeny of Self: Possibilities for Integration or Destructiveness

Sie weiht es küssend ein zum Leben

und dieser erste Liebeskuss

hat ihm das Bürgerrecht gegeben.*

One's claim to life comes into being through the mother's responsiveness. Without it the drive for life withers away.15 Through it the child's experience of itself both as an alive being who matters and as a functioning entity vis-à-vis its surroundings is initiated. And if lovingness in some form was there just once, it is in the nature of our capacity for phantasy that the subsequent void can be filled by ourselves in order to maintain the life-giving experience of a bond with one's mother. Sullivan19 suggested that one positive experience was sufficient to give rise to the conviction that if only the right thing is done the desirable experience would be reproduced, We would put it differently: Man's capacity for inner phantasy makes it possible for him to sustain positive experiences that have not been followed by continued feedback. It is in this way that phantasy serves to overcome the unbearable pains arising out of the unsustained love experiences of childhood. But in making unbearable pain bearable through the pursuit in phantasy of previous positive experiences a basic distortion enters man's view of himself. The deepest despair the infant is faced with arises out of the utter unacceptability that the source of his sense of being and aliveness is less than adequate. What