Since it has become clear that a healthy expression of empathy depends on a high degree of differentiation and the establishment of firm boundaries between the Self and others, it is important to understand how such boundaries are formed. This is the subject of the next section in Liz Greene’s book The Astrological Neptune and the Quest for Redemption (Greene, Liz). The section is entitled “Fusion and Separation”, and it begins with a description of the inner experiences of the infant, because it is precisely these experiences that convey the essence of this archetype.
What is described here is Neptune’s characteristic sense of dissolution, the absence of boundaries, and even the absence of ego-consciousness—a state in which everything is One.
“We cannot understand Neptune without understanding something of the imaginary world of the infant struggling to discover its own reality. Since we have all been infants, we have a basis for investigation. Neptunian dilemmas always involve something unformed. Therefore, we must look more closely at the stages of early development and at what can ‘go wrong,’ both in the environment and within the child itself, in ways that damage the delicate balance between the Neptunian longing and other factors within the personality.”
— Liz Greene
What can go wrong is a failure in the smooth transition from oceanic unity with the mother to the formation of a distinct individuality. To address this, Liz Greene introduces Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “good-enough mother,” which has gained wide recognition even beyond psychotherapeutic circles. This concept articulates with great clarity the central challenge of parenting: providing the right balance between connection and separation as the child grows.
Although this idea is well known, I will revisit it here in order to show more clearly how centrifugal and centripetal forces interact within our own psyche. According to Winnicott:
“The good-enough mother is one who actively adapts to the infant’s needs—an active adaptation that gradually diminishes in accordance with the infant’s growing ability to tolerate failures of adaptation and to endure the results of frustration.”
At the beginning, adaptation to the infant’s needs is total: the mother responds to and satisfies every need of the newborn, sacrificing her own sleep and personal requirements. As the child grows, this one-hundred-percent adaptation gradually decreases, thereby allowing the child to begin encountering reality—namely, the fact that the mother and the child are two separate beings. In this sense, the introduction of moderate doses of frustration is necessary—for example, allowing the baby to cry for a few minutes before a need is met. This requires the mother herself to possess both a high sensitivity to the infant’s needs and a sufficiently stable ego, enabling her to sense, in different situations, the appropriate balance between connection and separation.
Any deviation toward either extreme can lead to difficulties in the formation of the child’s future individuality. On one side is the mother who continues to meet every need of the child even when the child is older and capable of coping independently. On the other side is the mother who, for various reasons, has been insufficiently responsive to the infant’s needs and has therefore failed to establish a sufficiently secure bond.
“A dominant feature of the good-enough mother may be her wish and her ability to withdraw interest from herself and direct it toward the infant… There are two kinds of maternal disturbance that affect this problem. At one pole is the mother whose personal interests are too intrusive to be relinquished… At the other extreme is the mother who tends to be concerned at every moment, and the baby then becomes her pathological concern… The pathologically concerned mother not only remains identified with her baby for too long, but also abruptly shifts from concern for the infant back to her previous preoccupations… The normal recovery of the mother from her concern for the infant provides something akin to weaning. The first type of disturbed mother cannot wean her baby because the baby has never truly had her, so weaning has no meaning; the other type cannot wean, or tends to withdraw suddenly without regard for the baby’s gradually developing need to be weaned.”
— D. W. Winnicott
Winnicott’s theory of the good-enough mother not only helps mothers cope with anxiety about not being perfect. It also offers each of us a model for how to combine the opposites of separation and connection in a healthy way. This is a lifelong challenge, one that becomes particularly acute in experiences of deep romantic love. This is because every profound falling-in-love activates our longing for paradise and for fusion or unity with the other. If, for whatever reason, separation from the mother did not occur in a sufficiently healthy way, this longing places severe strain on our capacity to distinguish between the “imaginary” and the “real.”
However, when considering the mother’s role and the importance of “psychological weaning,” we can also fall into extremes. It is therefore important to recognize that the decisive factor in how we resolve the equation of connection and separation is not our mothers, but ourselves. As Liz Greene writes:
“The ‘not-good-enough mother’ may simply be the unfortunate and unwanted bearer of several generations of family conflict, and we may be confronted with inherited somatic as well as psychological disturbances that are experienced as fate, because they have been woven into the fabric of the family for so long as to appear almost inevitable.”
Rather than placing excessive responsibility on our mothers’ shoulders, it is more constructive to assume responsibility ourselves for transforming the inherited family pattern by making use of the insights of psychology. Both blaming our mothers and blaming ourselves are profoundly unproductive (see School for Parents – the Spiritual Perspective). Liz Greene cites Frances Tustin, who worked extensively with autism and anxious adults:
“I have great sympathy for these [depressed] mothers… The depression of such a mother is usually not clinical and does not lead to hospitalization. It is connected with events that belong to the ordinary vicissitudes of life, which affect the sensitive mother at a particularly vulnerable time. For example, the family may have moved house, or the father may have been away from home for a long period, or the mother may be living in a foreign country, or the marriage may be mixed (racially or religiously, or both), or an emotionally important relative may have died, or there may be intrusive relatives, or there may be significant anniversaries around the time of the child’s birth.
Part of the mother’s difficulty seems to arise from a feeling of being unsupported by the father (which may repeat feelings from her own infancy or childhood). She therefore clings to the child as if it were still part of her body. She does this in order to carry on in spite of depression and lack of confidence. This can occur both when the child is in the womb and after birth. She fears the ‘black hole’ that appears when she recognizes that she is separate from the child. Nevertheless, many relatively normal mothers become depressed as a result of disturbing events, yet their children do not become autistic. I am convinced that there is something in the nature of the child that predisposes it to autism. It therefore seems to me more fruitful to investigate the child’s contribution to the disorder than to concentrate on that of the mother. We may be able to do something for the child even if we cannot change the mother of its infancy.”
Much more could be said on the subject of separation and maturation, but I believe its essence is expressed most succinctly by Jung:
“The most important thing is to be born—to come into this world; otherwise you cannot realize yourself, and the purpose of this world is missed.”
— C. G. Jung, Kundalini Seminar, p. 28
For some, this statement may sound strange, since at first glance we have already been born. Psychological birth—taking responsibility for one’s life and realizing the potential with which one was born—is entirely different from biological birth. And this is a personal task that even the best mother in the world cannot spare us from.
Kameliya Hadzhiyska
