A conflict between distance and closeness: the mother's bittersweet experience of becoming separate from her toddler

Abstract

This paper uses the rapprochement subphase of the child's separation-individuation process (Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 1975) as a framework for thinking about mothers’ separation processes. Complementing a wealth of research into the child's development, more recent work also focuses on mothers and their own processes of separating. I interviewed eight mothers with children between 16 and 24 months old and aimed to give them their own voice and subjectivity. At times these mothers appeared to defend against separation and separateness, which were experienced as a loss, as anxiety-provoking, and as dangerous. At other times they described boundaries in their relationship as positive in as much as they enabled separateness and containment. The mothers expressed highly conflicting desires and presented an inconsistent picture of separation. Settlage (1980) viewed rapprochement as a dependence-independence conflict for the child, and this research suggests that mothers, too, experience ambivalence and conflict over separation.