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Date: | Sat, 1 Aug 2009 09:03:51 +0100 |
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Judy writes:
>
>~ I wonder if part of the problem is that all "modern" US research and
>probably most research in "developed" countries in general, has been
>done with
>children who are artificially fed in ways that do not follow human norms
>established over millenia. I've often wondered about this when reading about
>the "critical importance" of a "comfort object" like a stuffed animal or
>blanket.
This is again part of my current area of study :)
The 'transitional object' was first described by the British D.W.
Winnicott, who came to psychology and paediatrics via Freud, and
was one of the pioneers of psychoanalytic theory as applied to
infants and children.
He was, I think, the first to coin the phrase 'transitional object'
for comfort blankets and so on. The 'explanation' of the transitional
object is rooted in Winnicott's psychoanalytic understanding .
It's more complicated than being a 'mother substitute' or 'symbol' -
it is the child's first object that he understands actually belongs
to him, but is *not actually* him....and this has psychic echoes of
his realisation that 'mother' is 'not me' . This realisation is a
stage of *psychic development* as well as a purely cognitive
understanding.
Much of Winnicott's work emerged from direct observation, done at
a time when most British mothers would at least start off
breastfeeding (40s and 50s) and then moving into a time where fewer
of them would do more than token bf (60s).
Hs writings, including the later ones, place breastfeeding at the
heart of *normality*, though we in the lactation world can't really
claim him as 'one of ours' because he doesn't have much to say about
the social context of bf. He will have observed many babies who were
weaned prematurely, or whose feeding was scheduled - but he didn't
(as far as I can see from the reading I have done by and about him)
understand how very different 'Western' breastfeeding is from what
'Nature' (and the baby) 'expect' to happen.
Presumably babies who are breastfed and cared for the way 'Nature
expects' will reach the same stage of 'knowing that which is not me'
- I have no idea if they have (or need) the equivalent of a
blanket. Maybe the Western baby, as Judy speculates, reveals this
psychic developmental stage in a different way.
I have just seen this study, which sounds interesting:
Relations between children's attachments to their mothers and to
security blankets
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15382970
Heather Welford Neil
NCT bfc, tutor, UK
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