Symbiosis with a mother is as important for a baby as a way out of it-for a teenage girl and an adult woman. What is the meaning of the merger and why to separate is so difficult, says children’s analyst Anna Skavitina.
Psychologies: How and why is
the symbiosis of a girl with a mother? And when it ends?
Anna Skavitina: Symbiosis usually occurs immediately after childbirth or after a few weeks. Mother perceives the newborn as her continuation, while she herself becomes a baby to some extent, which helps her feel her child. The merger is justified biologically: otherwise the baby, whether it be a boy or a girl, is not enough chances to survive. However, for the child to develop motor skills and psyche, he needs to do something himself.
Ideally, the exit from symbiosis begins at about 4 months: the baby is already reaching for objects, indicates them. He can withstand a short dissatisfaction when he does not receive a toy, milk or attention instantly. The baby learns to endure and tries to get the desired. Every month, the child can withstand frustration longer and gets more and more skills, and the mother can step away from him step by step, separate.
When the separation ends?
A. WITH.: It is believed that in adolescence, but this is the “peak” of the rebellion, the final point. A critical view of parents begins to take shape earlier, and by the age of 13-15, the girl is ready to defend her personality and is able to rebel. The purpose of the rebellion is to realize oneself as another person, different from the mother.
What depends on the mother’s ability to let her daughter go?
A. WITH.: To give her daughter the opportunity to develop, without surrounding her with an impenetrable cocoon of care, the mother must feel like an independent person, have her own interests: work, friends, hobbies. Otherwise, she acutely experiences her daughter’s attempts to become independent as her own unnecessary, “abandonment”, and unconsciously seeks such attempts to stop.
There is an Indian saying: “A child is a guest in your house: feed, learn and let go”. The time when the daughter begins to live her own life, sooner or later comes, but not every mother is ready to come to terms with this thought. To safely survive the destruction of symbiosis with his daughter, The woman had to successfully get out of symbiotic relations with her own mother. I often have to observe entire “families of Amazons”, chains of symbiotically related women of different generations.
How much the appearance of purely female families is due to our history?
A. WITH.: Only partly. Grandfather died in the war, grandmother needed her daughter as a support and support – yes, this is possible. But then this model is fixed: the daughter does not marry, giving birth to “for herself”, or returns to her mother after divorce. The second cause of symbiosis is when the mother herself finds himself in the position of the baby (due to old age or illness), and the former adult position loses its attractiveness. She is well in a state of “second infancy”.
The third reason is when a man is absent in the relationship of the mother, emotionally or physically. The girl’s father can and should become a buffer between her and her mother, divide them, giving both freedom. But even if he is present and expresses a desire to participate in worries about the child, the mother, prone to symbiosis, can eliminate him under one or another pretext.
