The Mother's Eye—For Better and for Worse

Eye-to-eye contact is one of the universal modes of communication between people in general and between parent and child in particular. Its slowly evolving cognitive and emotional complexity from infancy to later childhood has been traced. Its potential positive and negative contribution toward object relations between mother and child has been described. In particular, an attempt has been made to show the preverbal child's vulnerability to eye-to-eye contact with his mother and

its potentially damaging and even devastating effect on the child's personality development. In the two patients discussed in this paper, the damage was in the direction of severe impulse inhibition and massive guilt. Their infantile wishes for emotional and intellectual gratifications seemed "frozen" by the mothers' stern eye or its unavailability. In empathic identification with their mothers' prohibitive attitudes, these patients early in life rejected their strivings for pleasure and autonomy and came to see themselves as unworthy and undeserving of love. In adulthood, their relationships were characterized by conflict and disappointment, and an inability to assert themselves. They abandoned their intellectual pursuits and eventually dropped out of college. Their traumatization early in their lives required long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy and some speculative reconstruction of the nature of their preverbal relations with their mothers.