Unintegrated States and the Process of Integration: A New Formulation

Unintegrated States and the Process of Integration:A New Formulation

Christopher Reeves

SUMMARY. The paper sets out a new approach to identifying stages of early childdevelopment leading up to the acquisition of an integrated sense of self. The model derivesfrom linguistics rather than biology, in particular from the application of concepts of caserelationships found in inflected languages. The author postulates a correlation between caserelationships and developmental stages, and argues that the gradual demise of inflectedlanguage forms may have contributed to our lack of attunement as adults to the psychologicalprocesses and experiences of infancy.

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.L P Hartley The Go-Between (1953)

Introduction

This paper is based on work spanning more than a decade to define and direct thetherapeutic task of a residential unit for severely disturbed children between the ages of fiveand twelve. The treatment approach and concepts were greatly influenced by the ideas ofDonald Winnicott, particularly by the concepts of unintegration, integration anddisintegration and their bearing on the understanding of the developing child. However, thecontext of this work is different from Winnicott's own. He derived his ideas primarily fromobservation of infants and toddlers and the analytic treatment of adult psychotics. The worldof the Mulberry Bush School, on the other hand, is peopled by post-toddlers who still displaymany of the characteristics of feeling, thought, expectation and reaction which Winnicottidentified as indicators that integration had not been reliably achieved in the infant. In thiscontext his original concepts took on a new and developed perspective. The struggle ofdisadvantaged nine to twelve-year-olds to attain a secure sense of self, to distinguish inwardpain from outward projections, and acquire belief over time in the expectable return of figuresout of sight helped in the reappraisal of the time-scale of the integration process as it occursin the child with a favourable environment to support it.

At the beginning of the paper in which he first introduced the concepts of integration andunintegration Winnicott wrote: `About primitive emotional development there is a great dealthat is not known or properly understood' (1945, p. 145). Nearly fifty years later, and in spiteof his work and the vast body of observation and theory of infant development which hasgrown up since, his words still hold true. We may have become better informed about motorand perceptual development, the beginnings of eye contact, the stages of speechdevelopment, and the early signs of reciprocity between baby and mother. And to someextent these growth points can be correlated with

Dr A C Reeves is a member of the Association of Child Psychotherapists. He was Principal for MulberryBush School in Oxfordshire from 1981-1991. Address for correspondence: 'Monnington', Church Lane,Shilton, Burford, Oxon OX18 4AE.

British Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol 9(4), 1993© The author

Christopher Reeves 415

Winnicott's indices of primitive emotional development (cf. Murray 1989). Yet childhoodremains à foreign country'. The vast body of recent physiological, psychological andlinguistic studies has been essentially anthropological in character, concerned with chartingthe similarities and differences in the language and behaviour of the natives of that òthercountry' and our own. Yet we were all once its denizens. So why is there à great deal that isnot known or properly understood' about primitive emotional development? How is it that wecan agree about some of the facts of babyhood yet differ on their interpretation orsignificance?

My purpose in this paper will be to put forward a fresh model for the understanding of theearly stages of emotional development in the child, one of whose incidental benefits, I hope,will be to illuminate why so much about these stages is like a `foreign Ianguage' to us. I alsohope to show that my model incorporates rather than supersedes what Winnicott and othershave brought to light and drawn attention to as crucial in the development of the small child'spersonality. Its novelty resides less in the psychological data it brings to bear, and more in theschema with which it attempts to co-ordinate and organise already familiar phenomena. Thisschema is based upon language and linguistic usage. Its guiding principle is that enunciatedby Malinovski (1923, p. 497): `Language in its structure mirrors the real categories derivedfrom practical attitudes of the child ... to the surrounding world'.

The Declensive Schema

Whatever the merits or drawbacks of the decision by Freud's translators to opt throughoutfor the Latin ègo' rather than the English `self for the German das Ich one doubtlessunintentional benefit should be noted. For Latin, like German but differently from English, isan inflected language. In the latter, nouns do not change their endings depending upon theircase relationship in a sentence (the only exception being the personal pronouns). German stillretains the declensions, though nowadays more obviously in the form of the definite articlethan in the noun endings, thereby hearing out Adam Smith's observation in his Dissertationon the Origin of Languages (1761) that languages tend to become less inflected overtime.Latin, however, is a fully inflected language.

Whether or not Adam Smith (1761, p. 517) was right in attributing the decline ofdeclensions to the social need of individuals to understand different languages and thereforeto simplify them, it is certain that the Latin declensions have nowadays taken o n an archaicand perplexing character. Yet it is also the case, I am arguing, that we are alienated from thelanguage of childhood. In Ferenczi's phrase, there exists a 'confusion of tongues' betweenadults and the child (Ferenczi 1933). My thesis simply stated is this: that reacquaintingourselves with an inflectional case system and discovering the stages of development of theself (or ego) must go hand in hand. Once we comprehend the logic of a case system we shallmore easily and systematically comprehend the interrelatedness of the several stages whichWinnicott recognised the voting child had to take before true integration as an Ì-person' wasaccomplished. It is to this series of stages that the Declensive Schema is addressed.

lief ore embarking on a case-by-case exposition of the correlation between the declensiveforms and developmental stages towards integration, I shall set out (see Table I) the differentpostulated relationships. In so doing I have chosen to borrow certain terminology fromcurrent linguistics.' For instance, I differentiate between

416 British Journal of Psychotherapy

`superficial' and `deep' denotations of cases as Fillmore (1968) does. This distinctionbetween surface and deep forms is as prevalent in modern linguistics as the conscious/unconscious dichotomy in psychoanalytic theory; and the precise meaning and justificationfor the distinction as controversial.'

The Locative Stage

I shall refer only briefly to this stage since it represents in developmental terms anotional starting point rather than a stage proper in primitive emotional development. Idesignate its developmental stage counterpart Winnicott's soma, seen as both differentiatedfrom and inextricably linked with the psyche. The soma is where we start from at birth: it isthat which is invested with personalisation (psyche). And yet it is not an inert mass. Undersoma Winnicott lists all the physical factors (physical endowments) which will contribute tothe shaping of the emergent self: race, heredity, gender, body, health/disorder, perinatalcircumstances.

The implication both practically and theoretically is that physical factors andcircumstances always contribute and can sometimes condition the psychological state anddevelopment of the individual. The fact that our schema and Winnicott's formulations implya continuity between soma and psyche, the physical and the mental, provides a way ofbridging the divide between the unproductive polarisations which have been set up betweenphysical and psychological approaches to conditions such as autism and other somato-psychic disorders. We can regard autism as on the continuum of unintegrated states withoutthis implying that the same psychological methods which might be efficacious for otherunintegrative conditions in the child need necessarily be so here. On the other hand, it wouldbe a mistake to regard any


human condition, save perhaps that of a person in a deep coma, as exemplifying somethingakin to a `pure' Locative state (any more than the neonate should be regarded aspsychologically inert and unresponsive at the start). What is at issue is a judgement over theextent to which physical factors ordain and constrain the psychological and developmentalprognosis. The `determinism' (if that is the appropriate word) of the Locative factor serves asa caution against misplaced therapeutic zeal, and the setting of unrealistic targets andexpectations of change; not as a reason for retreating from therapeutic nurturing.

The Dative (Adjunctive) Relationship

We postulate that following birth and the first experiences of body-to-body contact thebaby modulates from the most remote or locative position to a dative relationship with themother. In this, the baby is still neither an 'I' nor a 'me', has as yet no sense of 'belonging', noreven, at its earliest stage (for we are speaking of a continuous process, not a series of discreteevents) having any awareness of what itself is doing or the effect of its actions on others. Theincidental 'coming together' experiences of the first hours and days of life whose importanceWinnicott emphasises can be viewed on our schema as establishing a linkage between theinfant and mother with the one having its focus and organising centre in the other. This iswhat the dative case directly and specifically addresses.

There is no suggestion here that the baby is merely passive in the relationship orincapable of having an impact on the mother - quite the contrary. What is attended to is thestate of being of the baby during this interactive process. The baby has no selfawareness, nosense of doing something volitionally, or with a view to the consequences of doing it.Deliberative action, forethought, concern, must be located in the mother (Winnicott's 'primary maternal preoccupation' (1956)). Observationally, this is self-evident. It is part of ourimmediate assumptions about what the state of babyhood means. Our difficulties, I suggest,are conceptual, for our language forms dispose us to dichotomise what is observed into thepolarities of subject/object, active/passive, where what we need (and is more readilyavailable in inflected languages) is a gradation of relational categories.

Winnicott's intuitive grasp of the 'interpenetrating mix-up' of mother and baby has beenshared by several other psychodynamic writers from slightly different perspectives. In recentyears Mahler (1975) and Tustin (1981) have drawn on phenomena from the pathology ofchildhood autism and psychosis to shed light on patterns of normal infancy behaviour.Dockar Drysdale (1968), basing her observations on the unintegrated post-infancy child,drew attention to the particular liability of such children to manifest panic and chaos insituations where the adult caregiver was not constantly providing the functions of an ego-auxiliary, such as a mother might spontaneously do with her baby.

Most psychoanalytic writing about this crucial period of development, however, hasextrapolated from the transference phenomena observed in deeply regressed adults. The workof Ferenczi and Rank (1923), Balint (1969), Milner (1969), Kohut (1977), Little (1981) andBollas (1987), all draw on the analogy of the mother baby dyad to point to the similaritiesbetween the maternal function and that of the analyst in certain phases of treatment.Moreover, in coming to their formulations each seems to have felt the need to rediscover apresence and approach to match the patient's stage, and


experienced a certain degree of personal and/or institutional conflict in doing so.The literature on infant observation is naturally the richest source of instances of dative-

type behaviour. One thinks, for instance, of the way in which the small infant comes to fixupon an object or sound particularly during states of distress or discomfort, as if the sensoryexperience fixated upon serves to hold and organise the infant's sensory tumult in the absenceof the mother's containing presence, creating thereby a `second skin' (Bick 1962). Tustin (1990) illustrates how the autistic child appears to perseverate in this sort of fixation, turningthe skin membrane into a solid integument.

Unintegrated children in the therapeutic residential milieu of the Mulberry Bush Schoolfrom which Dockar Drysdale (1968) developed her conceptualisations, and where the presentschema took shape, can demonstrate such dative-type behaviour in multiple ways. It showsitself in the desire to be held, to cling, to have the presence and comfort of an adult whengoing to sleep. The return of bedwetting (sometimes of encopresis) is not at all uncommon,even where bladder and bowel control have been well established. Often with children inresidential care the occurrence of such phenomena is ascribed to anxiety or the displacedexpression of angry attacks. However, such behaviour is usually not accompanied by notableanxiety, and is mostly devoid of active aggressive intent. Instances of wetting and soiling asangry attacks do occur, but the very difference from the dissociated behaviour here referredto only emphasises its distinctive quality. The marked characteristic of this latter is theassumption of the adult presence as `part of the environmental support system (which) ourperverbal baby-selves only notice ... when it fails us' (James 1972).

The Ablative (Ergative) Stage

Winnicott, as we have seen, noted a watershed in early emotional development markedby the small child feeling situated in a body, that is, having a sense of some basic identity (primary integration). Hereabouts the child was able simultaneously to feel held together insome functional unity, and to have some impact on the world about him. This watershed weidentify with the advent of the Ablative Stage of relationships.

It is foreign to our sense of logic to suppose that an individual can be the source of anaction without at the same time being aware and able to acknowledge responsibility for thefact. A small child, however, can readily acknowledge something as done by him, withoutfeeling either responsibility for what has been done or indeed as `the owner' of the outcome.One need look no further than a small child with a painting. Ask the child, `did you paint thatpicture?' in approving tones, and the child is quite likely without a word to offer the pictureto you. The fact that you ascribe something good to what the child has done may be reasonfor passing it over to you, not as a gift, but as an attribution. Similarly, say to a toddler whohas just emptied out your cupboard of pots and pans on to the floor, `look what you havedone!', and the child will do just that - look and see what has been done. You might beassuming that the conjunction of sight and deed will occasion shame, remorse and animpulse to remedy the situation. Yet probably (and typically) the small child will exhibit nosuch sentiments.

Dockar Drysdale (1960, p. 74) described children to whom such absence of ownership ofactions persevered into later childhood as `frozen children' and explicitly linked suchsymptomatology in childhood with psychopathy in certain adults. She emphasised how in themanagement and therapy of such children the need to


anticipate breakdowns or disruptive actions was paramount. Her argument was logical andconsistent: if the child has as yet no established sense of self (no 'personalisation' inWinnicott's terms) it was pointless to appeal to a sense of guilt, or even to confront the childwith the likely consequences of his actions. Centrally important was to anticipatebreakdowns through containment and limit-setting. In that way the child might come toexperience a setting where panic and chaos did not permanently threaten.

Implied by these recommendations for the treatment and management of disturbedchaotic children is essentially the same programme of care as is demanded of the mother ofthe infant at the early toddler stage. It may be useful here to consider the concepts of denial;or of 'not owning up'. The toddler in the examples given displays a natural disregard of theconsequences of his actions and their effect on others, or even, as I have suggested, anunawareness that they are his to take responsibility for. When we consider this state ofaffairs in the light of where the baby has progressed from, such a lack of avowal is notsurprising. If the infant's starting point is an unawareness of separateness of self from other,and of doing and being done to, the achievement of the ablative stage is the experience ofautonomous movement (or sensation). But this sense of autonomy is still of a very basic kind.It is as yet devoid of developed notions of authorship. That it is one's own action is perceivedby the recognition that it was not the action of another; and this fact in turn is recognised bythe infant's observation that the action took that other (the mother) by surprise; or gave herpleasure; or caused her annoyance. And how does the infant confirm this difference betweensomething being clone, and it being the doing of the mother? By repeating the action, manytimes. Yet if t he overriding need is to ascertain that the action done was done by me, thesurest way is to do something which will reliably prompt disapproval, the saying of 'No!',restraint, since this clearly demonstrates the gap between the two. In short, negativism,defiance (though not necessarily hate or aggression) appear to be the necessary, inescapableaccompaniments to the discovery that one is 'in one's body', and not an extension of themother.

Viewed in such a context, the typically disruptive behaviour of an unintegrated olderchild stuck at the ablative stage, the so-called frozen child, need not appear so alarming. Sucha child does not 'own up' to what he has done because there is as yet no self to own it. For achild who might be experiencing great struggles over emancipation from symbiotic or over-adhesive bonds, whether in life vis-d-vis the mother, or in a transference relationship, theexpression of negativism can be dramatic and is nearly ;always surprising to the attachmentfigure. At this juncture (i.e. in the transition from dative to ablative) the importance residesin the acceptance and acknowledgement by the therapist of what the child has done. It maybe an act of destruction; very often in a residential milieu it will be accompanied by thesound of shattering glass. Confronting the child with the action as if it were an act ofchallenge or aggression would, in such , circumstances, be an error on the part of thetherapist since it would tend to confirm a sense, against which the child is having to struggle,that any action is unthinkable which is not compliant, hence hardly one's own, and thatoneself as anything other than a co-respondent of actions is unacceptable. On the other hand,for a child who developmentally is on the borderland between the dative and genitive stages,one's f response to disruptive or destructive displays is likely to be different. Still the primaryheed is to acknowledge what the child has done as a fact for oneself and for the child. linthere the child's response may be more actively to resist the attribution. For the


cumulative effect of experiencing myself as localised in my body is to reach some inchoatesense of the body as a field of action which is attributed to me and not to you. And if afurther consequence of this realisation of distinctiveness is a sense of being distanced from ordisapproved of by my parents (caregivers), then panic is an expectable corollary. The child isthreatened not so much with separation as with disownment anxiety. The task of the therapistat this juncture is to acquaint the child with the sense that acknowledgement of what hasbeen done need not have the annihilating consequences imagined.

Much could be said about the prevalence of disruptive children among the unintegratedchildren who are referred for residential therapeutic education. It is often implied that thefrozen child, or what I would call the ablative-type child, is perhaps the most difficult sort ofchild in whom to effect change, because the pervasiveness of his acting out and hisunreachability combine to frustrate the efforts of parents, teachers, carers and therapists. Myexperience calls this in question. If such children are exceedingly disruptive, the cause Ibelieve is in part due to the discordance between the child's actual state and our socialassumptions about agency, accountability and guilt. In other words, disruption is notnecessarily integral to the frozen child's behaviour nor a lasting feature of it.

Rightly or wrongly, we ascribe a high value to personal accountability. This ascriptionseems to be strongly reflected in our language forms which have largely dispensed with case-relationships other than subject or object, or other modes than the straight division intoactive/passive, willed/involuntary, deliberate/accidental. We know that the fifteen-month-oldtoddler cannot be responsible for the mess he so joyfully and mischievously makes. But ourlanguage forms predispose us to think and relate to him in these terms. Certainly, when facedwith a seven-year-old unintegrated child (in reality a superannuated toddler) we are muchmore inclined to attribute to him our notions of culpability which he cannot comprehend anymore than he can comprehend our own incomprehension of his actual state. Thus àconfusion of tongues' occurs between the adult and the child, exacerbating the child'salienation, isolation and sense of unacceptability (Ferenczi 1933). All of which in turn fuelsthe disruptive drive.

The Genitive (or Àssociative) Stage

With the genitive case we move into the realm of belonging, owning, attachment andseparation. This field has particularly been explored by John Bowlby (1969/1973) and Jamesand Joyce Robertson (1989) and the work, both in sympathy and in reaction to their ideas,which was directly inspired by them. The child developmentally at the genitive stage is theone who, having begun to òwn' what he or she does as coming from him or her, andtherefore properly his or hers, now has to establish a network of relationships within which tosituate this need to belong. Note that according to the view here proposed we do not deriveour sense of `who we belong to' from an intuitive sense of `who we are'. On the contrary, wederive who we are in ourselves from a sense of our rootedness in our family, our name, ourhabitat, etc.

Many of the children who come to residential therapeutic institutions are casualties ofthis sense of belonging, having lacked the stability and security of relationships within whichthey feel a sense of being òwned' and come eventually to òwn' themselves. Hence, theimportance of special relationships within a therapeutic milieu, particularly for such children.If they are ever to achieve a sense of identity in their own


right they need to have a reference point, a stable figure whom they can call or think of astheir own.

The following is an example of a child's acting under the pressure of the genitive stage:

An attractive eight-year-old girl of mixed race, Annette, would regularly `play up' when out of schoolwith other children and staff in attendance. This was liable to happen even when she was out withthose to whom she felt most close. The 'playing up' behaviour took the form of wilful anddemonstratively defiant behaviour. For instance, she would regularly 'make an exhibition of herselfwhen at the public swimming pool; or tear off down the platform at the railway station whenjourneying with others between home and school.

Such behaviour can easily but unhelpfully be described as disruptive, the product ofanxiety, anger or separation experiences. These explanations do not answer the question, whywas this behaviour so noticeably and dramatically exhibited by her at certain times andplaces?

Gradually it emerged from our observations and discussion with her that Annette sensedan acute feeling of not belonging and of not being seen to belong as soon as she was out inpublic with other children and members of staff from the school. The reason was that thestaff accompanying her, as well as the great majority of children, were white. She was black.She 'did not belong' in her eyes to our company; furthermore, she would be seen as differentby onlookers. Feeling herself thus marked out as different, she felt driven to give publicexpression to this lack of owning and being owned, and her way of doing so was throughunbiddable behaviour. It was as if she needed publicly to pronounce: 'You see, I don't belongto them; they are not my family; that's why they can't control me. I don't answer to them'.

Nurturing and preserving special relationships within a therapeutic milieu pose greatproblems. Children such as Annette resist attachments which they nevertheless crave.Moreover, once established, relationships of the genitive type tend to be marked byexclusiveness and competition. Even in normal development, this phase is dominated byambivalence. The child who, months earlier, had seemed to be full of independence ofmovement and exploratory zeal now becomes clinging, dependent, crying over separationand distressed at absences or the fear of absences. The sunny buoyancy of the 15-month-oldtoddler is lost amidst a sea of anxiety and stress. In the older, unintegrated child whosedifficulties centre on this genitive stage, or whose developmental movement forward has nowbrought it to this stage, there are similar problems over separation, stability, continuity andpredictability, all essential for the child in his dealings with the adult he has identified as hisattachment figure. If the adult at this stage is unexpectedly absent (unexpectedly for thechild, that is), the results can be devastating. Changes of job, changes of role within theinstitution, illness - all can play havoc with a child's sense of trust. The effect of some lossesor absences for the child at this stage can be virtually irreparable, at least within the contextof the particular therapeutic milieu which is just then helping the child to get better.

The Accusative (or 'Mirror') Stage

In the normal course of development, children moving from the genitive towards theaccusative (or 'mirror') stage - a stage usually occurring between the ages of three and four -surround themselves with a range of identification marks or figures. It is as if children at thispoint disperse or displace their need to belong away from a single


individual on to a range of persons and properties which will serve to situate them as selvesin relation to others. Thus there is an emphasis at this time in the child's life on theestablishment of relationship bonds and boundaries; of demarcating what is mine from whatis yours; and what is ours (as a family, a group, a class, etc.) from what is other people's.Then, as if distilled from this connection of mine and ours, there gradually emerges thenotion of a `me', as the constant factor through all the range of `mine' and `ours' and whichnever seems to belong in quite the same way to anybody else. This `me' may belong to myparents; indubitably it does. But there is a bit of this `me' that belongs to this child that I ammore intimately than it belongs to the figures I belong to, namely my mother and father; justas they have something which belongs more personally to them than it does to me.

The sense of `being me', in other words, or the sense of identity as it is often called, is notsomething from which the idea of possession and attachment derives; on the contrary, thesense of myself derives from the crystallisation of the sense of belonging.

To contemplate the contrast, yet continuity between the genitive and accusative stages,consider the following example of accusative-type behaviour shown by another girl, Jean,which on the surface appears similar to that displayed by the earlier example of Annette.

Jean was the fourth and last child of her family, conceived following a separation andsubsequent reconciliation between the parents. Her conception was not planned as part ofthis reconciliation; in fact the mother resented the fresh pregnancy and contemplatedtermination. Jean used to be referred to half jocularly, half in exasperation, as `our littlemistake' by her parents. As she grew older she became a big mistake - out of control,disruptive, deceitful and spiteful, the source of endless family troubles and arguments. As anine-year-old girl at the school she exhibited defiance and wilful behaviour in public, ratherlike Annette. She seemed to be driven to demonstrate that she was out of control. But therewas about her way of conducting herself a sense of a non-involvement, as if she could notown to what she was doing. It was not as if, like Annette, she wanted actively to resist theexercise of control by adults, only that she wanted to demonstrate its actual absence.

A particular problem concerned her running away and hiding. She would do thisrepeatedly and without warning. One moment she was in sight; the next she was nowhere tobe found. Now, to hide in this way seems to be a highly deliberate action; this is certainlyhow it felt to those with the task of trying to find her. Yet Jean did not experience her hidingin this way. For her, it was a case of her getting lost, not of her hiding from us. She becamedistressed not when we found her, but when we did not succeed in doing so (and thissometimes after two hours or more of looking for her). Her reasons for hiding seemed to beher need to be found. Being in our sight without being missed was insufficient reassurancefor her, since what her actions gave expression to was the need to be recovered, for a mistaketo be overcome. And this is where the link with the accusative stage becomes apparent. ForJean was acting out the role of the mistaken child. If she was not sought and recovered, thenindeed she felt she was the trouble we (standing for the family) would willing have been ridof. In other words, her being away from us was less of an expression of not belonging (genitive) than of being where she was by mistake (accusative).

And how do I apprehend this sense of myself? The French psychoanalyst, Lacan (1949),identified it as perceived as in a mirror. Indeed, we see the preoccupation of the four-year-oldwith the notion of being seen. The ability to function appears to be


bound up with the reassurance that what is done is seen to be done and reflected in the eyesand approval of the beholder. Lacan, however, made of this insight the foundation stone of apsycho-social doctrine of alienation, thereby bestowing on a precise observation of childhooddevelopment a weight of social, political and philosophical significance which it does nothave to bear. Winnicott (1967) understood Lacan's stade du miroir in much more immediatepsychological terms. It enabled him to derive the rich notions of the `true' and `false' self andto apply them not only to normal child development but to child pathology as well.

Lacan felt that much psychological thinking, and indeed many automatic ways of re-garding individuals in our society, confused the mirror stage with the finding of `the self.Indeed, he repudiated all forms of ego psychology as distortions and aberrations. Certainly,many children (and children-no-longer) seem to be encapsulated at the accusative stage,preoccupied with image, appearance and 'being-in-the-eyes-of-the-other'.

The Vocative (Naming) Relationship

In setting out the inflectional system from which our Declensive Schema was generated, Isuggested that the vocative was an ambiguous and marginal case form. Nevertheless, Ibelieve that its insertion between accusative and nominative, object and subject does reflect,if not a stage proper, at least a significant moment in the process towards selfhood. I refer tothis moment as one of `naming' rather than `calling', although it might be felt that the lattermore correctly designates the Latin term. However, it is about names as they are called thatwe are concerned, that is to say with the calling of somebody by name.

Now naming is conventionally done at around the time of the baby's birth; and even if thebaby is unable to utter its name, it responds to it at an early stage and can pronounce itusually among its first words. Nevertheless, there is a problem of ascription to be noted.Show a two-year-old a family snapshot and ask him to identify the figures in the picture (andlet us assume that the group includes him as a baby). Such a child will typically identify allthe other family members by name or role; but not himself. If remarked on at all he will speakmerely of 'a baby'. A little later on, during the period when the genitive stage has becomeestablished, the child is likely to identify himself in the picture by using his name. But at thisstage, I suggest, there remains a dissociation between the me-as-named and the me-as-naming. The Robert, say, in the picture is not quite the Robert doing the identifying. Indeedthere is a problem about anybody else having `my' name.

How different is the situation of the child at the transition between accusative andnominative stages! One of the engaging yet wearisome characteristics of the child being an-I-in-the-eye-of-another is the accompanying demand to declare oneself. The child requiresmore than confirmation of self through the approving eye of the beholder. The phrase `That'sme!' is just as common as the other phrase `Look at me!'. The distinctiveness of me-in-my-name (the name now recognised as shared, but the fact no longer important) is what seems toencapsulate the vocative moment. The name once so externally imposed and impersonal nowenshrines something of my own singularity. This enables the child to escape from theimpasse of existence begotten from, and thus belonging to, another and to discover a quitesudden and exhilarating specialness. Some such momentary private thrill probably happens toall of us, yet its significance seems rarely to have been alluded to. A particularly vividaccount of this moment of


self-discovery associated with one's owning rather than just having a name is to be found inRichard Hughes' High Wind in Jamaica (1929, pp. 134-140).

The Nominative (or `Agency) Stage

With the nominative stage we reach the point at which the child gets a preliminaryexperience not only of existing in a world which is defined and delimited by adults, but inwhich the child himself feels an agent, having the power to choose or to refuse, and theresponsibility that goes with this. It is difficult for us as adults to perceive themomentousness of this change for the child. Freud identified this moment with the Oedipalmyth, giving it a dramatic impact which it certainly has, but at the same time incorporatingnotions of sexuality, death and displacement which are perhaps not as intrinsic to this stageof development as Freud himself argued.

We perhaps encounter the advent of this stage in another dramatic form in the NurseryRhyme `I am the King of the Castle and you are the dirty rascal'. The theme here isdominance and exclusivity. The King of the Castle displaces the previous occupant who thenbecomes the dirty rascal. What seems to happen with the five-yearold child at this momentin development is that he or she experiences for the first time being the same sort of humanbeing as father and mother. This recognition - that I am an 'I' who can do or say, and has tobe heeded - is something which has hitherto been accorded only to others, not to oneself.Therefore, in according this privilege and dignity - potency, if you will - to the self, the childdisplaces the adult who has previously been the bearer of these atributes. The effect on thechild's psyche is revolutionary and de-stabilising, and tokens of this can be observed in theoften variable and inconsistent behaviour of five-year-olds, who swing from arrogance tosubmissiveness, independence to clingingness, and ruthless self-determination to suddenaccess of guilt. We have reached the stage, as Freud observed, where neurosis is nowpossible.

Many of Freud's successors have tended to demote the importance of this stage in thedevelopment of the child which he - and we, though in slightly different terms - haveaccorded it. Nevertheless, it seems hardly a coincidence that this pivotal stage coincides inour culture with the time the child ceases to have the family as the only or primary focus,and goes out to school, becoming thereby more strongly identified with the larger socialnetwork of society.

It is important to recognise that the achievement of the nominative stage in developmentis a moment rather than a stage proper. It denotes the point at which the child becomesconscious not only of himself as a subject, but also of responsibility, autonomy, guilt and,above all, vulnerability.

Conclusion

So, the process of psychological development does not end here. Rather it is a beginningwith fresh developmental challenges ahead. It is not the purpose of this outline - which, afterall, is devoted to reflections on pre-integration stages - to enter into an examination of thesefurther developmental tasks. What I have tried to do is to indicate how the achievement ofthe nominative stage of development marks a watershed. From that moment the child hashad, however fleetingly, a sense of self as subject, which can be obscured but not lost (except by serious mental illness).

The phase can be likened to learning to ride a bicycle. Before I master the art I wobbleand can easily fall off. I feel quite unsteady and unsure of my balance. Once I have


discovered the knack, something has happenend to my sense of balance. I cannot reproducethe behaviour of one who is still learning the knack of riding once I have acquired it. I maystill lose my balance or fall off, just as I may choose not to ride a bicycle, but I never quite goback to being the person who still has to learn how to ride a bicycle.

It is the same with reaching selfhood at the nominative stage. I do not always act orexperience myself as the subject or doer. Indeed, it was a myth of post-Cartesian philosophyand psychology, inspired by Descartes (with his dictum `I think, therefore I am') to treat it asan axiom that I always did. Freud's great contribution, with the unfolding of the unconscious,was to kill this myth and to accord recognition once again to the many ways in which we, ashuman beings, act involuntarily, irrationally, symptomatically and unthinkingly.Nevertheless, we can be at times consciously aware of what we are doing and heldaccountable for our actions because normal social intercourse derives from this presumptionand neurosis is the price many of us pay for this recognition.

There is one final consideration about the consequences of the nominative stage whichhas a bearing on the understanding of our Declensive Schema. Throughout this exposition, Ihave been using the language of communication. I expect to be understood, even if I canreadily acknowledge that deficiencies of expression on my part obscure the reader'sunderstanding. But there is a paradox which needs to be drawn out. Communicationpresumes a dialogue between two or more subjects, a speaker and a listener. Moreover, itpresumes that both act, or are capable of acting as subjects, the one to express, the other toreceive. Language as communication through the sharing of concepts is a product of theachievement of the nominative stage. What is the understanding, then, of children who haveyet to reach this nominative stage? Can they hear what we say? Do they understand what weas subject-I, assume that they will understand? Maybe we pay insufficient heed to the `confusion of tongues' (Ferenczi 1933) between the adult and the child, just as we can find ithard intuitively to grasp the unease or fears of the cyclist who has not learnt to cycle, or thechild who has yet to learn how to swim.

In describing the pre-integration stages we have been using language forms which are ill-adapted to the experiences we have been striving to describe. The author regrets if this hascaused difficulties to the reader. But he does in conclusion ask the reader to reflect uponwhence these difficulties stem; and invites the question whether the difficulties inunderstanding the text bear some relation to the difficulties we all experience in properlyunderstanding children.

NOTES1An immediate problem presents itself in attempting to articulate and explain the

declensive schema: what system of case relationships should we espouse? Historically,linguists and grammarians adopted the case system of Latin and Greek. This practice,however, fell into disrepute for its Eurocentrist assumptions and its difficulty in reconcilingits case categories with those originating from non-IndoEuropean roots. Moreover, even ifthe case forms of Latin have their counterparts in most IndoEuropean languages, (albeit, asin the case of English and French, in attenuated or atrophied form) and even if from thisperspective at least they can claim some explanatory validity, it is by no means agreedamong grammarians what, if any, are the root signifiers of the different cases. In the case ofthe Nominative and the Accusative there is no problem. These denote the subject and objectof the verb respectively. Likewise, the Vocative case (thought not always accepted as adistinct case, separate from the Nominative) is attributed a single agreed function assignifying the relationship of calling or being called. It has a marginal though notinsignificant role in the schema, in parallel with the Locative (literally 'placing') case.


which also is credited with somewhat ambiguous membership of the conventional Latin declension.The Locative constitutes one of the so-called oblique cases along with Genitive, Dative, Ablative.

Indeed, conventionally, it is regarded as the most `remote', i.e. the one at furthest remove from our keynote, the Nominative case. (I am deliberately pursuing the analogy of the declension and the musicalscale to emphasise the sequential nature of both, and to indicate that the developmental stages I shall beidentifying with the several case forms are part of a continuous progression).

The precise denotation of the Genitive, Dative and Ablative cases is disputed. Generally, theGenitive is thought of as denoting principally possessive or belonging relationships, the Dative to involvethe indirect object relationship (as in giving, sending, telling, etc.); whilst the Ablative is eitheraggregated with the Locative to denote positional relationships or accorded an instrumental role as thesource or means of some effect.

In all of this the situation is further complicated by the role of prepositions in connection withinflected forms: do these articulate, amplify or distort the core designation of the case forms? Indeed, is itan illusion to seek for a core meaning of the case forms at all, especially as their counterparts in otherlanguages are far from certain? To enter into the complex technical arguments here would delayinterminably an exposition of the schema itself. I shall therefore proceed by invoking the Latin case formsto which I shall ascribe a generic reference drawn from my understanding of grammatical usage and thepredominant functional themes in the early emotional development of the child. It will be for the readerto judge whether this synthesis makes sense on a descriptive level. Its justification in terms of linguistictheory must await a separate treatment.

2For the deep-structure designation of the Locative I have used the word 'stative'. The term 'situational' sounds more immediately intelligible but I have opted for stative for two reasons. Firstly, theLocative case is never used in conjunction with a preposition. Latin seems to distinguish between beingin a place where my position in that place is not specified and being in a place where it is. Thus, in Latin,I would use a Locative case to denote living in the country (i.e. without a preposition), and an ablativewith the preposition in to denote living in a particular place. (A somewhat similar distinction seems tooperate in French with the verb ha biter: j'habite Paris and j'habite a Paris, the former designatingwhere one is to be found and the latter where one has set oneself to be; although in this case French, notbeing an inflected language, is not, in its surface structure at least, employing the Locative case.) So thefirst reason for using the term 'stative' rather than 'situational' for the deep-structure of the Locative is toindicate the absence of any implication of decision or movement in the fact of being there. The secondreason has particular reference to the psychological correlates of the Locative 'state'. It is postulated thatthe Locative is at the furthest remove from the Nominative (Ego) position. The implied absence of self-reference is perhaps best caught in the title of a Sellars film some years ago Being There. It suggestspassivity in relation to one's situation and surroundings; as if caught up by circumstances in a particularplace or context. Being born or, at least, being conceived is one such circumstance for all of us.

The other deep-structure designations should be less problematic except perhaps the term 'ergative'to denote the Ablative function. This word (again borrowed from modern linguistic terminology)indicates performance, effect, execution, but without the additional idea of active agency. In Latin theAblative rarely occurs without a preposition. When it does the circumstance or effect denoted by theAblative noun is impersonal. For instance, phrases like overcome with anger, lost in grief, destroyed byfire, would al appear in Latin in the Ablative without preposition, whereas bitten by a snake wouldrequire one. The first series of examples denotes a force, the second an object. It is for this reason that Ihave opted for the designation 'ergative' rather than a more usual term such as 'instrumental'.

Reflection on the difference between prepositional and preposition-free uses of the Ablative suggestsintuitively a connection with whole-object and part-object phenomena. Indeed, so much is implied at acertain level by our overall thesis that the declensive forms cover the phenomenology of pre-integrationstates (as well, of course, as being able to express postintegration, two- and three-person relationships).We might say that prepositional use in Latin refers to whole object, and simple inflectional use to part-object relationships. However, I shall not develop this idea further here.


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Unintegrated States and the Process of Integration: A New Formulation

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