2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
In the history of psychosomatic patients, it is often possible to find that their mother was unable to find and develop her own identity in her family, has an unrealistically overestimated image of the ideal mother and ideal child. A helpless and physically imperfect newborn is perceived by the mother as a severe narcissistic abuse, especially if its gender is not what is desired. The mother perceives the child as primarily defective, and his somatic needs as another insult. Protecting herself from this, the mother imposes on the child her own unconscious demand for perfection, mostly in the form of tight control of all his life manifestations, especially somatic functions. The child's protest against this violence, which leaves his needs unmet, the mother reacts with misunderstanding and hostility.
Only the somatic illness of the child allows the mother to confirm her unconscious ideal idea of herself as a perfect mother and
reward the child for this with real attention and care. At the same time, the mother has a contradictory unconscious attitude, which can be formulated as follows: “I do not love my child, because he turned out to be imperfect. It makes me feel guilty and inferior. To get rid of it, I must strive to make it perfect. It is difficult, the result is always insufficient, there are constant conflicts with the child, the feeling of guilt and inferiority persists. Everything changes when he gets sick. Then it is easy for me to prove to myself by taking care of him that I am a good mother after all. He must be sick so that I can feel perfect."
On the one hand, the mother expects the child to grow up strong, mature and independent. On the other hand, all manifestations of the child's independence frighten the mother, since, as a rule, they do not correspond to her unrealistically overestimated ideal. The mother cannot realize the inconsistency of these mutually exclusive attitudes, therefore, from communication with the child, she excludes everything that one way or another can lead to the recognition of the obviousness of her inconsistency as an educator. In illness, this conflict is deactivated, but recovery again deprives the child of care, as the mother returns to her usual behavior. A child cannot return maternal care by abandoning his claims to independence, because he, too, will not correspond to her ideal. It is possible to return it only by being sick again. At the same time, psychosomatic illness has a double function:
1. It gives the mother the opportunity to avoid her own conflict of ambivalent attitude towards the child and provides the form of treatment that is consonant with her unconscious demands and fears. As a mother of a sick child, she receives a false identity that allows her to distinguish herself from the child in this role and thereby allow him to delimit in other areas, for example, in the field of intellectual activity.
2. By adapting to the unconscious conflict of the mother's ambivalence in the form of illness, it gives the child the opportunity to gain freedom of maneuver for the development of the functions of his I in other zones.
However, the child pays for this stabilization of the symbiotic relationship with the mother with a very sensitive constraint. He has, as they say, on his own skin to experience the conflict of the mother's ambivalence, her inability to delimit her identity. The mother, who compensates for the child's unconscious rejection by caring for and caring for him when he is sick, forces him to give up his independence and serve as a symptom bearer to the mother to resolve her identity conflict.
It can be said that a psychosomatically ill child serves the mother as a means of embodying her unconscious identity conflict in the maternal role, thereby making it possible to control this conflict. The child serves the mother, so to speak, as an external bearer of the symptoms. In the same way, as a mother, out of fear of her identity, can function only as a pseudo-mother, since she also makes the child she cares for, so the child can use only the false identity of a psychosomatic patient to thereby close herself A "hole" in the mother's self.
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