The Bonds of Love: Looking Backward

"Establishing within American psychoanalysis the position of infancy as well as the importance of the mother was a new enterprise in the 1980s, and the arguments in The Bonds of Love (1988) reflected, in part, a decade of immersion in research on infancy (and motherhood). The discovery of the interpersonally active infant—more than a bundle of disorganized drives declared unsuitable for psychoanalytic understanding by orthodox analysts of the time—constituted a kind of revolution in psychoanalytic thought. Infant capacities for social engagement and differentiation far outstripped the kinds of primitive ego actions Freud attributed to earliest life, for example, hostility to the impingement of the outside world. In particular the studies of early communication confirmed the idea of primary intersubjectivity, a position first developed by Trevarthen (1977, 1980) and then taken up with some differences by Daniel Stern (1985)." Pp.5In short, when we incorporate the ideas that have been expanded by queer theory, what is left ofidentificatory love?Identificatory love, I think, still gives powerful meaning to the idea that being recognized in one’s loving desire to be like the other is as crucial as being safely attached to the source of goodness. Rejection of that need for recognition can be withering and crippling.
When what was traditionally the paternal figure, the exciting separation figure, is unavailable, disdainful, shaming, belittling, rivalrous—whether because frightened of his own erotic feeling for the child (boy or girl)or envious of the baby’s gratifications with mother—this rejection intensifies the split between being mom’s baby and dad’s son/daughter." Pp.11