The Jungian infant
Is there a valid theoretical construct to describe an infant from a Jungian perspective?
I have been attempting to answer this question since 1982 when I started teaching infant observation seminars at the Society of Analytical Psychology in London.
These seminars became an integral part of the Child Analytic Training Program. We have been familiar for some time with the Kleinian infant, who lives in a world of unconscious fantasies, and with the Winnicottian infant, who is enveloped by the maternal preoccupation. But the Jungian infant, who lives in an archetypal world, is a fairly new construct since Jungians traditionally have not been very interested in infancy as a fundamental part of life.
Michael Fordham was the first Jungian to show interest in infancy and to apply Jung’s theory to this stage of life. Following Fordham’s theory, I hypothesized that, given the fact that an infant’s experience is primarily affective, it therefore resides in the psychosomatic realm of the self. In infancy, archetypal activity in the self is very much related to instinctual drives and the discharge of intense emotions.
The seminars in infant observation, in which flesh-and-blood infants are closely observed in their daily relationship with their mothers, confirmed my hypothesis. In developing a theoretical construct to underpin these infant observation courses, I took into account Jung’s theories, which he developed from the analyses of his adult patients, together with Fordham’s theories on infancy. These theories fit the extreme affective level of the infant experience we observed.
This construct is neither antithetical to nor irreconcilable with other conceptual frames, such as Klein’s. The Jungian developmental frame This Jungian conceptual frame made it possible to introduce infant observation to the Jungian world.
Fordham understood that Jung’s theory of the psyche needed to be applicable to the onset of life and to childhood. When I started teaching infant observation seminars, I felt that infant observation could provide the means to demonstrate and confirm the validity of Fordham’s brilliant intuition.
My hypothesis was that concepts such as the self and the primary self (Fordham’s definition of the self at the onset of life) ought to be observable in an infant’s behavior. I further hypothesized that Jung’s concept of the archetypes and Fordham’s descriptions of deintegrative and reintegrative sequences by which the self and the ego develop would also be observable in infancy.
I will now briefly outline the essential aspects of Jung’s thinking that Fordham applied to infancy. unconscious and containing the ego and the archetypes. However, he also paradoxically viewed the self as the archetype of order. Jung conceived the archetypes as the organizers of experience, which operate within the self in the service of the ego.
These are innate predispositions which, although not characterized by the quality of experience which we call consciousness, nonetheless determine and structure the relationship between the internal and external world. Therefore, the archetype in itself is not knowable, but is manifested endopsychically and gives rise to typical imagery, which has archetypal
characteristics. All archetypes have a positive and a negative side—a life-enhancing and a life-destroying potential.
Jung implied that the archetypes contain in potentia the ontological genesis of the human race. Fordham developed the concept of the “primary self” from Jung’s concept of the self.
In Fordham’s view the primary self represents the totality of the psyche and soma in a germinal state. He conceptualized the primary self as a blueprint, a steady state of integration from which the child’s ego and bodily growth will unfold through a dynamic process that he termed deintegration-reintegration.
Jung defined archetypes as the mental representations of instinctual drives and/or the innate predisposition to experience life according to certain patterns, as well as a powerful way of representing affects. In Jung’s view affects are the lifeblood of the psyche.
Perhaps even more significantly, affects are the bridge between body and psyche, instinct and spirit, whereby they influence the psychosoma.
Fordham assumed that archetypes were activated at the onset of life, from within the womb, and that an infant from conception on is an individual in its own right, contained in the womb but separate from the mother.
Fordham conceived of the archetypes as dynamic structures closely related to drives, expressed in impulses originating in neurophysiological structures and biochemical changes.
He writes:
[T]he theory of archetypes could be seen to bring body and psyche together. Jung’s thesis as to their bipolarity then became particularly meaningful: the archetypes can be conceived as unconscious entities having two poles, the one expressing itself in instinctual impulses and drives, the other in the form of fantasies. In contrast to the instinctual drives, which are relatively fixed and few in number, the fantasy (or spiritual) component has wide and flexible application. (Fordham 1976:6)
In early infancy neurophysiological drives and discharges prevail. Hence the quality of the infant’s experience is totally archetypal, that is to say, it is ruled by affects and emotions in response to being bombarded by undifferentiated stimuli that tend to overwhelm the developing ego consciousness.
About emotion Jung wrote:
Emotion is the alchemical fire whose warmth brings everything into existence and whose heat burns all superfluities to ashes…. But on the other hand emotion is the moment when steel meets flint and a spark is struck forth, for emotion is the chief source of consciousness. There is no change from darkness to light or from inertia to movement without emotion. (Jung 1938:96)
Infantile experiences, which are loaded with emotions and affects, are the source of all numinous archetypal imagery which surfaces in fantasies and dreams in later life. At the fetal stage and in early infancy, ego function is rudimentary. Therefore, we can only infer the existence of proto-images, such as shapes and patterns which, enriched by sensory experiences and memory traces, will in time develop into mental representations of self and other.
In infancy instinctual needs have an overwhelming urgency, which is expressed by the infant through fits of screaming, panic, and other affect-loaded somatizations.
The psychic energy bound up in the primary self divides into opposites, constellating the opposing archetypal experiences, psycho-physiological in nature.
There is an opening up of the self (deintegration) during which positive and negative experiences take place. Positive experiences head to good, satisfactory, loving, and comforting feelings in the infant, which Jungians attribute to the good mother archetype (good breast, good holding, good loving mother, and good loving infant).
When negative experiences occur, leading to feelings of discomfort, hate, despair, rage, violence, persecution, fear, and panic, the infant experiences both itself and its mother as destroyed by the baby’s own violent impulses, and the negative mother archetype is constellated (bad breast and unspeakable dread).
The deintegrative phase is followed by a digestive phase called reintegration. This is a phase in which the self closes up again to digest the newly acquired experiences in order to integrate them.
The new experiences coalesce around pre-existing intrauterine protoexperiences and contribute to ego growth.
Both the “loving creative” and the “violent destructive” experiences have a quality of absoluteness. They are absolute for the infant; nothing else exists but that particular experience in which he or she is completely involved. Jung stresses absoluteness as an attribute of the self, indicating that in the infant the self is active and predominates over the ego.
In its postnatal phase the ego is fragmentary and, to use Jung’s imagery, is emerging like many small islands in the vast sea of the unconscious.
The mother is of the utmost importance in this phase. Her psychological task is to intervene and support with her adult ego her infant’s ego in the same way that she looks after the baby’s physical needs.
Thus she transforms into thoughts and ideas and gives a name to the affective experiences that the baby is living through.
The energy released in the deintegrative phase produces instability and tension, which drive the infant towards the outer world (breast/ mother) in an attempt to re-establish the original stable state (homeostasis).
Here it is important to underline a major difference between Fordham’s and Klein’s conceptualization of the ego in infancy. For Klein the ego is present at birth and functions her own chaotic internal feelings get activated in response to Paul’s fits and frustration.
She begins to feel she is a “bad mother” and to experience Paul as a “bad baby.” In this way the stage is set for a cycle of negative interactions dominated by anxiety, frustration, and persecution in both mother and infant. An observation recorded when Paul was twelve days old shows the beginning of the deterioration in the relationship. ~Mara Sidoli, When the Body Speaks: Archetypes in the Body, Page 26-33
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