Gaze not physical fact: it is a caregiving attitude.

The infant has no conception of self, other, and world (external-internal). It is, therefore, initially unable to identify itself in the mother’s gaze (symbiotic phase). When it finally does recognize itself in her gaze, the child experiences a trauma, the schism of the world, and the emergence of the other.

Initially, the child rejects the mother’s traumatizing gaze. He pushes her away, thus realizing her externality. Ironically, it is precisely this rejection that leads to differentiation, the first instance of proto-separation (Lacan's apperception or self-objectification or ambivalent self-alienation).

Lacan suggested that the unconscious - the seat of repressed traumas - is a compendium of other people’s gazes. Thus, the mother’s gaze is the cause of the formation of the unconscious, its nucleus is this primal trauma of being seen.

Why does the unconscious emerge? To resolve the existential dissonance between the survival need to be seen - and the trauma of being seen. The latter has to be repressed in the interest of survival.

Now, the child is ready to objectify and instrumentalise the mother as its first mirror. This gives rise to primary narcissism. The mother actively reflects the child to itself, idealized and aggrandized (“hall of mirrors effect”).

This affords the child the grandiose energy to take on the world and cathect it. The mother’s proactive benevolent gaze is synonymous with her secure base and gives rise to healthy attachment.

The mother’s gaze engenders mentalizing and object relations founded on separate external objects of secure attachment.

But when the mother is “dead”, so is her gaze. The child sees only her (the mirror) and the world, not himself. He fails to develop a concept of the external and operative object relations as well as a constellated self and an ego.

Such a child is incapable of mentalizing (attributing states of mind to others). He remains stuck in narcissism. He offers to his partners the hall of mirrors effect but without mentalizing and object relations, it does not progress beyond grandiose cathexis and causes regressive infantile retraumatization.

At the same time, the partner is converted into a dead, frustrating, withholding, betraying mother who mirrors herself and the world rather than the narcissist - thus undermining the shared fantasy as a persecutory object.

Hegel's negation of the negation

Empathy a form of healthy narcissism

WATCH (ACADEMIC) Empathy as Narcissistic-Psychotic Defense [ Ссылка ]

WATCH Empathy: It is about YOU, not the OTHER person [ Ссылка ]

We need to explore automaticity and mentalization. Where I differ from classic theory (Winnicott, Lacan, Fonagy).

“Automaticity” is probably the wrong model for human behavior – but so is rationality. Even bounded rationality is an optimistic approach.

Fonagy’s teleological non-mentalizing fits insects as well as humans. It is tautological. The existence of a goal implies perforce the existence of intentionality (Brentano) and vice versa.

What we cannot be sure of is the existence of GOALS! This is why teleology is a bogeyman in science.

LITERATURE

Empathy and Mirror-gazing by Giovanni B. Caputo in: Psychology and Neurobiology of Empathy ISBN: 978-1-63484-446-8, Editors: Douglas F. Watt and Jaak Panksepp © 2016 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.

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