Below are the remarks of the luminous John Auerbach, PhD. on the notions of attachment, imitation and
introjection and their historical development and integration into personality theory.
This is an excerpted conversation that appeared in a professional forum in response
to other psychologists’ queries, including my own. By permission, with some redaction of other comments for privacy sake. DL
On Fri, Jan 21, 2022,
,,,In his day, Freud developed a theory that united his view of early childhood sexuality, a complex discussion for another day, with an understanding that children, like bigger people, have intense needs for love, sometimes want that love exclusively, and engage in intense rivalries, whenever there are three people and hence a relationship triangle, over who loves whom the most. The relationship triangle is therefore also a basic concept in family therapy, and sibling rivalries also contain this dynamic.
From this perspective, Freud’s theories about anatomical differences and gender, which are now largely discredited, especially in an age in which there are more than two genders, scarcely matter at all. What matters is that, whenever there are three people, there is the possibility of rivalry over who loves whom the most, regardless of the gender of the individuals involved (I.e., whether same gender or of differing genders). And this is a particular problem for six-year-olds not because their need for love is more or less intense than that of bigger people but because, from a Piagetian perspective, it is about then that cognitively they begin to struggle with the coordination and mastery of two dimensions, as in the conservation tasks. Rivalries for love involve the coordination of two relationships, rather than two physical dimensions, but the cognitive structure is the same. Children simply have more difficulty in seeing the bigger picture that, to use the heteronormative case, sometimes I matter more than mommy or daddy and sometimes mommy or daddy matters more than I. By the way, many adults continue to have this problem and therefore engage in repetitive love triangles, otherwise known as affairs. Both sides of the affair involve this dynamic.
There are empirical studies that find an upsurge in these kinds of love rivalries in children of about the age in question, although it would take me some time to track down the references. Regardless, the above analysis suggests that a six-year-old child of two same-sex parents is just as likely to develop love rivalries based on relationship triangles as is the six-year-old child of two parents of differing sexes. And the only child of a single parent may find a way to play this dynamic out with a third person outside the family structure (e.g., mommy or daddy seems to like my best friend better than me).
I hope that these ideas are helpful to you. I also recommend that you look at the work of Larry Josephs. His ideas are psychoanalytic, as are mine, but they are very similar to those I have outlined here. I was able to formulate much of the above analysis because of his work and also because of the work of my mentor Sidney Blatt, especially his papers, once again psychoanalytic, with Rachel Blass in the 1990s on the Oedipal stage as being primarily about rivalry or competition over love.
John S.
Auerbach, PhD
On Jan 21, 2022
So let me try this next mountain. Introjection (or taking things into the personality from outside) and identification (or modeling oneself after significant others) are psychoanalytic concepts meant to explain why children ultimately take after their parents with regard to personality traits. Freud coined the term identification, as used here, and the early analyst Sandor Ferenczi coined the term introjection. Both terms date to the early 1900s. Introjection is the developmentally earlier process, associated in Freud’s theory with the oral phase, and identification is the developmentally more advanced or complex process, associated with the Oedipal phase.
These actually are potentially useful concepts,
but they have their problems. First, modern genetics was in its infancy
at the same as Freud developed his theories. It is now a fairly safe conclusion
that about half of the variance in most personality traits is due to genetics,
but in 1900, no one could have known that. We know it now. Some
personality variables, such as attachment style, are much more environmental
than genetic in their origins, but things like the five factors have the
aforementioned large genetic loading.
Second, the accuracy of Freud’s developmental
theories has been significantly challenged by later research, a large
proportion of it done by psychoanalytic researchers, mostly influenced by John
Bowlby, who was himself an analyst. Both psychoanalysis and early behavior
theory held that hunger/feeding is the primary drive (psychoanalysis) or
reinforcer (behaviorism) and that attachment to one’s parents is a consequence
of being fed by one’s parents. Bowlby’s
Sent from my iPhone
January 22,
2022,
To get back to it, next installment, Bowlby was not the first to propose that attachment is a primary drive, independent of hunger/feeding, but he was the first to formulate the theory in a rigorous, testable fashion, such that attachment theory can be considered the best researched theory of personality development that we have. The critical experiment here is of course Harlow’s monkey study since it effectively refutes early behavior theory on the development of attachment and also demolishes much of Freud’s thinking on the oral stage.
The rest of Freud’s thinking on orality, and therefore also the concept of Introjection, was demolished by psychoanalytic researcher Daniel Stern (1985) in his book “The Interpersonal World of the Infant.” Freud’s theory had been that, with the exception of the basic drives (sex and hunger or sex and aggression), the mind of the infant was empty, initially almost incapable of differentiating self from others, except through mechanisms like introjection, which is modeled after feeding, and projection, which is modeled after spitting out. What Stern did was to compile the extensive research on the considerable cognitive abilities of neonates, which included not only the ability to differentiate self from other but also the ability to “imitate” the behavior of others. These imitations were considered to be something more automatic than the intentional symbolic imitations that Piaget found in 18-24 month olds but complex behavior nonetheless because the infants could often emit the imitations a day or two after the observed parental behavior. In other words, children start taking after parents from birth on and maybe even prenatally, given evidence that babies have memory for material read to them by their mothers, as opposed to material read to them by others, in the last trimester of pregnancy, and these imitations are clearly a better, scientifically better grounded explanation of how babies start taking after their parents than introjection and projection are.
But what is the underlying neural mechanism for how infants can accomplish these imitations? In 1992, Italian researchers discovered mirror neurons, neurons in the pre motor cortex and related regions in the association cortex, that activate in response to observation of another’s actions in macaques. These mirror neurons have been found in marmosets, in songbirds, and in humans, and they are probably the basis of infant imitative ability. It is also proposed that the relative immaturity of the infant cortex is the reason that neonates cannot inhibit these automatic imitative displays but that older children (and adults), who have greater cortical maturation, can do so.
The foregoing explains one aspect of what is called internalization, but the kinds of identifications mentioned by Damon in his post will require another long post in response.
Till then,
John
On Saturday, January 22, 2022, 06:52:52 PM EST, Damon LaBarbera
" In other words, children start taking after parents from birth on and maybe even prenatally, given evidence that babies have memory for material read to them by their mothers, as opposed to material read to them by others."
A question: Do babies have better memories for material read by mothers than by fathers? Do they also imitate mothers more easily than fathers? Is there something about the mother's femaleness that influences imitation? And if so, would Stern's ideas have relevance for the discussion of babies raised by two males?
For years I have been using the term introjection loosely, or at least using that idea privately, as when a person seems to incorporate another person, a parent, or role model into their own personalities after bonding, observation or modeling, and even has a feeling of having incorporated that person's value system. Maybe it really is an inaccurate concept or animism and should be retired...
Thanks for your erudition!
On Mon,
Jan 24, 2022
Damon,
I have to get back to the rest of this. As for prenatal memory, the parent tested in the study was the mother, with another female voice as the control. The test passage came from “The Cat in the Hat.” The control passage was changed to “The Dog in the Fog.” You need a control passage because that gets rid of the objection that the infant is remembering the passage, rather than mother’s voice. I don’t know if anyone has since tested mother versus father. I think that the outcome variable was probably physiological change in response to mother’s voice versus control voice, but I would have to track down the study to check on this. The one thing that cannot be controlled, of course, is that the infant is inside mother’s body, so mother’s voice will sound unique for that reason alone. I would imagine that there would be differences between awareness of mother’s voice and awareness of father’s voice, but as I said, I do not know what is in that literature over a period 40 to 50 years to tell you about this.
I can say, and should have said, that another major source of early internalization/introjection is the affect attunement, again per the researches of people like Daniel Stern, Beatrice Beebe, Edward Tronick, and others, that begins to come into play around age 3 or 4 months. Parents (usually mother or whoever is the primary caregiver but also father or whoever are secondary caregivers) engage in complex exchanges of affect with their babies by facial display and other noverbal channels. Beatrice Beebe’s research group has demonstrated how mindboggingly complex this process is. Basically, babies and their primary caregivers go through cycles of affect match, mismatch, and repair, with split-second accuracy. The caregiver-infant system needs to be loosely conjoined, basically in the Goldilocks zone, to work correctly. Affective matching that is too tight at 4 months old statistically predicts insecure-resistant attachment at 1 year old, as measured in the Strange Situation paradigm. Affective matching that is too tight statistically predicts insecure-avoidant attachment. A dyad that cycles fluidly between match and mismatch statistically predicts secure attachment. It is plausible to think of the moments of match and repair as also moments of introjection on the baby’s part as the baby learns to synchronize with the parent’s affective state—of saying nonverbally that, at this moment, “we are together, and I am like you.” By contrast, moments of mismatch would be moments of differentiation—of saying that, at this moment, “we are apart emotionally, and I am different from you.”
I hope that this helps. Next post will go into the matter of imitation and identification, but I have already left a major breadcrumb for you to follow. In well-functioning parent-infant dyads, an act of sameness, of saying, “I am like you,” as in affect matching, is also an act of differentiation, of saying, “I am not like you,” because of the cycle of match, mismatch, and repair. But these are presymbolic processes. Imitation and identification are symbolic processes, but the same dialectic occurs there two. To say, “I am like you” implies “I am not like you.” And as for your question about children both identifying with and disidentifying from their parents, the answer to that question lies this dialectical process.
ONE THING I WANT TO STRESS FOR EVERYONE ON THIS LISTSERVE, especially if you have been taught that psychoanalysis is unscientific because it cannot be falsified and therefore researched, and also it is false (and please think about those two ideas back to back, is that clearly psychoanalysis contains a whole lot of falsifiable propositions, many of which have been significantly revised in response to scientific evidence like the material I have presented here. But MORE IMPORTANT is that it is quite clear that psychoanalytic ideas, especially when reformulated in terms of attachment theory, which is after all psychoanalytic theory, has many, many things to tell us about human life and human personality development that virtually no other perspective can tell us.
Happy
Monday,
John
On
Monday, January 31, 2022,
Thanks
to everyone for their kind words.
On the
next piece of the story, I am afraid I am not as up on the current literature
as I should be. However, the next piece of the story is that, around 18
to 24 months children develop the following interrelated capacities—mirror
self-recognition, pretend play, and intentional (symbolic) imitations—per
Piaget’s developmental timetable. There may be studies that now date this
stuff earlier than this period, but either way, the basic point is that
imitations and what psychoanalysis calls identifications require things like
symbolic functioning and the capacity to recognize oneself as separate and
therefore different from the person one is making oneself like—i.e., imitating
or identifying with. In other words, imitations and identifications
require difference as well as sameness, and this dialectical relationship
starts to get at Damon’s question from a few weeks ago.
But
first another definitional clarification. Imitations tend to be short
term, conscious, and deliberate: I am not you, but for a moment I am
pretending to be you. Identifications are usually long term, unconscious
or nonconscious, and often undertaken without deliberate or conscious intent:
I am not you, but I am modeling myself after you; sometimes I am aware
that I am doing this, and sometimes I am not. The modeling and
observational learning that were Albert Bandura’s contribution to the
behavioral literature—this was before there were Beck and Ellis, both of them
originally psychoanalysts—depend on these underlying symbolic capacities.
Oh, and before I forget, unconscious processes are a well established
fact in cognitive science and are entirely consistent with radical behaviorism.
For Skinner, remember, consciousness was not sn important variable or
concept at all.
Damon’s
specific question about Oedipal rivalry and identification will be the subject
of the next post. For now, consider that, in the Oedipal situation, as in
any relationship triangle, there is competition or rivalry on the one hand and
attachment or love on the other and that these things often come into
conflict—I love my parent or sibling or friend, but I also want to outdo my
parent or sibling or friend. And this is a highly ambivalent condition.
I will
leave things there for now.
Until
the next post,
John
On Feb
1, 2022, at 9:59 PM, Damon LaBarbera > wrote:
John,
I am reading with great interest and pleasure the response to my modest question regarding the Oedipus Complex I don't know how you produce with such fluidity and speed your responses--they create an absolute effulgence of disinterested light in the vast darkness of the usual daily reading--insurance and policy updates, economic challenges to the profession, news from the political front and the like that are the typical days viewing. Anyway, at the risk of proving the adage that "a fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer," here are a couple more.
First, in terms of the Harlow experiment, how is that a preference for contact comfort proves evidence of the primacy of attachment as a reinforcer. Doesn't a preference for a furry feel under stress just show that contact comfort is more reinforcing to a primate, in this "discriminative task", than food, for whatever reason. Isn't it a leap to interpret the primates preference for the cloth covered doll as reflective of attachment. What if there is just something about texture which soothes--as we know, FTs on the Rorschach appear more in protocols with individuals reactive to dependency stresses. Fur may just feel good. Discriminative learning was, incidentally, the area of research of one Allen Schrier, a pupil of Harlow, though I do not know of his particular view of the classic experiments.
Second, is the use of genetic epistemology to recast the Oedipus Complex. What puzzles me is that Piaget's stage theory is primarily cognitive, the advancement from one level to the next in terms of problem solving and abstract thinking. Extending it to the very visceral and primal world of family relationships seems like an overemphasis on cognition.
Also, another interesting point you made. You remark, with the laconic style of a Laingian knot, the following internal dialogue involved in identification.
"I am not you, but I am modeling myself after you; sometimes I am aware that I am doing this, and sometimes I am not."
In reference to your sentence above, would you guess that people get better at developing awareness of when they are or aren't modeling? Does the discernment develop over time. And if so, would we expect that youth is most vulnerable to a goose-stepping style, mass movements, groupthink, persuasion, and changeable identity. Certainly, oldsters use youthful naivety and unconscious modeling to fuel military recruiting. Or, on the other hand, are younger people better at recognizing when they are modeling--they are after all at the height of formal operation brain power, and they are very keen introspectors, as known by any therapist who has read adolescent poetry.
I am also curious about the strophe and anti-strophe of identification. Is that an analogue of the Piagetian idea of assimilation and accommodation? A child may at times see themselves like their parents, and at times not like their parents. Does schooling, the separation of children from their parents, enhance that process, and how is that effected by recent events and families being cooped up together.
I recall getting a book "The Myth of Mirror Neurons"
from Audible, and persisting with it, and then returning it because of its
exceeding density. But the point derived after that strenuous bout of reading
is that mirror neurons are a myth. Is there really controversy about whether
mirror neurons exist?
Thanks,
Damon LaBarbera, PhD
Licensed Psychologist
Damon,
Thanks for some more simple, easy questions. I was
having enough trouble responding to the initial question as it was. Sigh.
I will try a couple of brief responses.
First, the Harlow monkey studies do not by themselves prove
that attachment is a fundamental motivational system. They are one piece
of evidence that supports the idea. At the very least, they prove, as you
say, that soft textures are a powerful reinforcer for primates. But in
addition, they prove that this preference for soft textures cannot be reduced
to a need for feeding. This preference is autonomous from the
feeding/hunger motivational system, this in contradiction to what classical
psychoanalysis and classical behaviorism would predict. Other pieces of
evidence are involved in the interpretation of these studies. For
example, the infant monkeys used the cloth mothers not only to cling to during
the day but also as a secure base, as attachment theory would predict, That is,
these monkeys would eventually explore the environment while infant monkeys
with wire mothers that gave food spent most of the day huddled in the corner,
cowering in fear. When confronted with a new toy that was potentially
dangerous or threatening because noisy, the infant monkeys with cloth mothers
would approach and even attack the new threatening toy; the infant monkeys with
wire mothers would cower in fear and try to avoid the new object. Harlow
also found that there were significant social deficits in infant monkeys raised
with wire mothers that gave food that were absent or reduced in infant monkeys
raised with cloth mothers. Harlow therefore began to study prolonged
social deprivation in infant monkeys and found, in his most unethical
experiments, that this isolation produced profound social deficits, deficits
that could often not be remediated. In short, this is not just a
preference for contact comfort, but the simple fact that contact comfort is not
reducible to feeding is crucial in and of itself. Also, by now, there is
a large research literature on attachment in all kinds of nonhuman species,
including the brain systems that mediate attachment, so as far as I am
concerned, attachment in mammals, humans included, is a well-established
scientific fact.
Second, the Oedipus complex is, as I have said, about
rivalry over love—over who loves whom the most. The Piagetian
sequence—and Piaget was heavily influenced by psychoanalysis (his analyst was
Sabina Spielrein)—explains the cognitive mechanisms that underlie a child’s
having difficulties with rivalry that an adult will negotiate with greater ease
at least some of the time. But you are certainly right that the Piagetian
genetic epistemology by itself is a rather a bloodless perspective that does
not get at how love rivalries actually feel—how they can drive us sometimes to
madness and beyond—in adults, no less than in children. Your comments on
the complexities of identification seem completely right, at least to me.
The ability to deploy identification flexibly improves with cognitive and
emotional maturation—and vice versa because these are interlinked phenomena.
Adolescents are much more likely to be emotionally derailed by these
processes than adults are, but adults are not immune from pathological identifications.
For evidence of this, just consider the number of seeming normal people
who suddenly get sucked in to a cult like QAnon, as has happened recently,
especially with the pandemic cutting off normal, in-person social contact while
heightening mortality salience, per terror management theory, in everyone.
The Piagetian notions of accommodation and assimilation certainly sound
relevant to the dialect of being simultaneously like and unlike a valued other.
Your analysis of how daily separations for school might be a stimulus to
the twin processes of identifying and disidentifying sounds right to me, and I
suspect that having everyone at home all the time during the pandemic disrupts
the normal processes, but I don’t know any studies that are relevant or that
prove these contentions.
On mirror neurons, these are readily found in monkeys
because we can do the studies to isolate them. We cannot ethically do
studies to isolate them in humans because we cannot put probes in people’s
brains to identify them. We are left, therefore, with fMRI evidence,
which finds mirror regions in the brain but cannot identify specific mirror
neurons. It is therefore easy to oversell the mirror neuron notion, but
consider this: If we can say that attachment exists in monkeys and other
mammalian species, that fact does not prove that attachment exists in humans,
but that fact certainly renders attachment in humans more plausible, unless we
want to say that attachment in monkeys is a primary drive but is secondary to
hunger and feeding in human beings. That contention would make humans
less advanced psychologically that monkeys are. Not very plausible.
Similarly, if mirror neurons can be identified in monkeys, it is a
reasonable inference that mirror regions in human fMRIs are likely the result
of mirror neurons in human brains, unless we want to say that monkeys have this
mirroring capacity but humans do not.
And now I need some sleep.
John
"But you are certainly right that the Piagetian genetic
epistemology by itself is a rather a bloodless perspective that does not get at
how love rivalries actually feel—how they can drive us sometimes to madness and
beyond—in adults, no less than in children."
I re
Bloodless may be a good term.
But maybe the broader tradition within Piaget exists might provide a more
robust basis for understanding family processes. That tradition is
"Structuralism." I assume Piaget would have said he was a structuralist,
or at least uses that method. The idea is there are invariant patterns in human
development, nature, moral reasoning, anthropology etc. The adherents of this
style of thinking would be Lacan in psychoanalysis, Scholes in literary
criticism, Levi-Straus in anthropology, Kohlberg (possibly somewhat
anemically), Chomsky in linguistics, and others. Development has some innate
efflorescent quality, rather than incremental accretions of growth or
behavioral advantage. Hence, it is not bits of food that are reinforcing but
rather anything that enhances the general movement towards a role in the family
and social world, and assumption of a a social role. This philosophy centered
in France, or at least French speaking countries. Certainly it is a more
reassuring philosophy than the Gaulic ideas
DLimmediately preceding-- existentialism with its focus on aloneness,
alienation, absurdity, anomie.
DL
For the most part, I agree regarding Piaget’s structuralism, but I am not going into more detail here because of the great complexity of all of the thinkers you namecheck, including such qualifications as that there are many varieties of structuralism and that not everyone you list would accept the designation.
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