The Mother-as-Self Controversy

One of the first load-bearing disagreements within post-Jungian thought about infancy turns on Neumann’s claim that the mother functions as “carrier” of the infant’s self. Neumann’s own strong form is: “the development of the later ego-Self axis of the psyche and the communication and opposition between ego and Self are initiated by the relationship between mother as Self and the child as ego” (Neumann 1973, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 93). Edinger receives the claim and develops from it the ego-self-axis and its characteristic pathologies, calling Neumann’s 1966 paper on the primary relationship “seminal” (Edinger 1972, p. 39).

Michael Fordham and the Developmental School press back on logical grounds. “Fordham (1981) has pointed out that, if self means the totality, there would then be no baby. Or, viewed from another angle, if the mother is the baby’s self, there would be no mother. Fordham feels that all he can accept is that to the baby, his mother is a part of the self” (Samuels 1985, p. 93).

Andrew Samuels finds the rapprochement in Newton and Redfearn’s bridging formulation: the mother’s capacity to hold the infant through zonal-drive conflict “sustains and supports her infant through the vicissitudes of the emotional conflict associated with his oral drive, through her capacity to keep in touch with him as a ‘whole person’” (Newton and Redfearn 1977, quoted in Samuels 1985, p. 93). Inner feelings of harmony and purpose, experiences of the self, can be envisioned as internalizations of the maternal presence. The self remains archetypal at its core but depends “for its individual incarnation on the feeling experiences of infancy” (Samuels 1985, p. 93) — a “relativisation of the self” that Samuels identifies as a key theoretical rapprochement between post-Jungians and psychoanalytic object-relations theory.

Sources

• erich-neumann: mother as carrier of the infant’s self; primary relationship as germ of the ego-Self axis
• edward-edinger: elaborates primary relationship into the ego-Self axis and its pathologies
• andrew-samuels: documents and mediates the Fordham–Neumann disagreement