An Infant’s Experience as a Selfobject

Exploration of the clinical literature shows an awareness that an infant’s experience as a selfobject often is traumatic, but if there is an experience of mutuality, the trauma might be avoided. Where such mutuality does not occur, an infant’s experience of constantly repairing a depressed parent, or of being blamed, abused or having an identity imposed by a parent, leads to exhaustion and/or traumatization. Kohut’s paradigmatic case of Mr. Z is presented as an example of the distressful effects of being a selfobject (of idealization) for a mother. Patients who were traumatized as infants by functioning as a selfobject for a parent often present for psychotherapy seeking an archaic form of twinship that recreates the infant-parent traumatizing relationship by imposing on the therapist the function that had been imposed on them as infants. Until this archaic twinship is empathically understood, accepted and explored with the patient, the lasting effects of the traumatization are not resolved.