Attachment, loss and rediscovery.
This paper suggests that separation and loss in early childhood may be less critical to later life than some people believe. Rather, internalization--after as well as before, age five--may be a developmental process to which psychotherapists need to pay particular attention. By attending to our patient's experiences of separation and loss, we allow them a metaphor, a language, with which they can describe the vicissitudes of lasting attachments. Similarly, the separation/individuation process of infancy, popularized by Klein and Mahler, is important, not just because it describes the biosocial fact of preverbal infancy but because it draws our attention to a metaphor that describes the struggle for identity that characterizes young adulthood.
Vaillant
G E
GE
Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH 03756.
D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008149:Love; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory; D008875:Middle Aged; D009769:Object Attachment; D011613:Psychotherapy