The Broken Connection by Robert J. Lifton
In early childhood death images
consisting of “death equivalents” come from separation, disintegration, and stasis. The opposites or counterpoints of
these death equivalents are vitality and affirmation. Connection vs.
separation, integrity vs. disintegration and movement vs. stasis.
Connection and Separation is the
fundamental of all there is in human life.
John Bowlby’s work, that separation anxiety has a primal
quality to it, and that separation from
loved ones or the threat of separation is the principal
source of anxiety and distress. It is not reducible to other terms.
Otto Rank spoke about the birth
fear, the trauma of separation and the loss of the Mother, which he spoke of as
the primal fear. Those fears later become what we generally call the fears of
life whereas the background was the fears
of death. This primal fear, Rank thought was the loss of connection with the
greater whole, in the last analysis with the ‘all’. This primal fear has both elements of life and death in it. As
with birth, there is the death of a
previous life in this case inside the womb.
What Erickson calls “basic trust”
can be understood as the infant’s earliest
“feeling’ that life is reliable: that goal-directed
behavior engenders a response that satisfies
and vitalizes. Although there are always flaws
in the fit between what the infant anticipates and what he experiences which
results by mistrust.
John Bowlby’s work on Protest, Despair, and Detachment is basic to an understanding of
early infant bonding and disruptions in this bonding, which affects the infant.
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