Eating difficulties in early infancy and experience of the combined object

Abstract

This paper explores the link between mothers’ pathology and infants’ eating difficulties. It shows how the failure of basic processes of integration in a mother's infantile internal world, such as the integration of good and bad objects and parts of the self, and the integration between the two branches of psychic bisexuality at a part object level, determines a proliferation of anxieties that invade the child in its early relationship with mother and her food. What is transmitted to the child is not a good combined object, which is the foundation of healthy development, but a badly split and confused one which the child cannot integrate as its mother could not before it. The experience of something that is poisonous in the object is concretely enacted by the infant in its relationship to its mother's food which is refused either totally or partially. The paper is based on the material of three infant observations.