The Divided Self by R. D. Laing

Author:R. D. Laing
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf

Freud adds this significant footnote to his account of this game: A further observation subsequently confirmed this interpretation fully. One day, the child's mother had been away for several hours and on her return was met with the words, 'Baby o-o-o-o! ' which was at first incomprehensible. It soon turned out, however, that during this long period of solitude the child had found a method of making himself disappear [italics mine]. He had discovered his reflection in a full-length mirror which did not quite reach to the ground so that by crouching down he could make his mirror-image 'gone'.

Thus, this little boy not only plays at making his mother disappear, but plays also at making himself disappear. Freud suggests that both games are to be understood as attempts to master the anxiety of a danger situation by repeating it again and again in play.

If this is so, the fear of being invisible, of disappearing, is closely associated with the fear of his mother disappearing. It seems that loss of the mother, at a certain stage, threatens the individual with loss of his self. The mother, however, is not simply a thing which the child can see, but a person who sees the child. Therefore, we suggest that a necessary component in the development of the self is the experience of oneself as a person under the loving eye of the mother. The ordinary infant lives almost continually under the eyes of adults. But being seen is simply one of innumerable ways in which the infant's total being is given attention. He is attended to, by being noticed, petted, rocked, cuddled, thrown in the air, bathed: his body is handled to an extent that it never will be again. Some mothers can recognize and respond to the child's 'mental' processes but cannot responsively accept its concrete bodily actuality and vice versa. It may be that a failure of responsiveness on the mother's part to one or other aspect of the infant's being will have important consequences.

A further consideration of what this boy was achieving by his game suggests that he was able, as Freud presumes, to make himself disappear by not being able to see his reflection in the mirror. That is to say, if he could not see himself there, he himself would be 'gone'; thus he was employing a schizoid presupposition by the help of the mirror, whereby there were two 'hims', one there and the other here. That is to say, in overcoming or attempting to overcome the loss or absence of the real other in whose eyes he lived and moved and had his being, he becomes another person to himself who could look at him from the mirror.

However, although the 'person' whom he could see in the mirror was neither his own self nor another person but only a reflection of his own person, when he could no longer see that other reflected image of his own person in the mirror he himself disappeared, possibly in

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