ABSTRACT
The emergence of self-consciousness and awareness of self and other are central preoccupations of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and developmental theories. For Donald Winnicott the self emerges in relational context—both physical and psychological—in which the infant is held and thought about by the primary caregiver. Attempts to integrate neurodevelopmental and psychoanalytic accounts struggle to align accounts of the development of individual subjectivity with those focusing on the social construction of self. The mother, for Winnicott, plays a crucial role in mirroring or seeing the infant's emotional reality. There is tension between the mother's and infant's desire for fusion and counterforce to impose distinction between self and other. The infant experiences a lack or deprivation of crucial connections with inner states and the self develops as an empty structure, barren and unknowable. Psychoanalytic developmental theories, and attachment theory as described initially by J. Bowlby, have long stressed the significance of the infant's relationship with the primary caretaker for ongoing development.
