Differentiation – Infant to Adult

This paper explores the subject of differentiation from infant to adult theoretically and applies these ideas to a 16year old girl whose development is compromised.

1. The developmental process of ‘differentiation’ is the functional and aesthetic link between ‘attachment’ and ‘adult identity’.
2. ‘Attachment’ is genetically compelled and constrained with limited variation across all societies, cultures, and time. The baby is not fully developed at birth and to develop someone close and older must attach to that baby for them to survive. In due course that baby must attach back to that older person for them to grow, and that ‘attachment’ must be replicated multiple times with multiple people for that baby to develop appropriately and eventually complete its development into adulthood.

   3. What is that development? It is the formation of an adult identity, a productive and procreative identity this is the genetic determination for each one of us, especially women, who dictate and define fertility.

   4. Attachment and identity are two sacred propositions. Attachment and identity are possibly more gendered than we know, and more powerfully defined by women than by men.

   5. It is arguable that identity is as constrained and corralled as attachment, possibly symmetrically so, socially, and psychometrically, and that differentiation is designed to be the path of maximum flexibility, dexterity and complementarity between these two symmetrical propositions of relative inflexibility, each sacred in its own way.

   6. Differentiation is not sacred, it is the functional link between these two esoteric and sacred parts of being human, driven as we are by a powerful and desperate longing to survive, live, and replicate.

   7. Replication is central to who we are, and this occurs in the attachment process primarily through women and later through the replication process, that is fertility, again through women. Men may want into the attachment process: we will see.

   8. There are multiple pathways between attachment and identity, almost all peddling fundamental dualities such as constraint and licence, inclusion and exclusion, productivity and learning, sexuality and procreation, similarity and the difference, inequality and equality, love and justice, me and we, obligation and motivation, inside and outside, and so on and so forth.

   9. Running from birth until death as a mirror of the double helix are the twin pillars of morality – reciprocity and compassion, beginning in an ever-widening gyre, that is possibly Gaia, that becomes an ever-narrowing gyre as we approach the end, death. In this paper we are focused upon the beginning of that ever-widening gyre, as the reciprocity and compassion we are inducted into through the attachment process is progressively made fully manifest in that differentiation process between attachment and identity, from 10/15 years of age through to 25/30 years of age in Western culture rapidly becoming global culture.

   10. Differentiation transforms this nascent reciprocity and compassion into something that is fully functional and productive and capable of sustaining human replication. Unequal reciprocity and compassion guarantee the survival of the baby, equal reciprocity and compassion produce the relationships that produce the baby, and the entire differentiation process is designed to produce people who can participate in a fully reciprocal, give and take, in the family, in the community, in a way that is truly compassionate and empathic. This is not to everyone, only those people who are your village, your kin, those people who are likely to replicate you.

   11. It must be that the differentiation process is replete with multiple pathways across multiple social groupings and cultures that take us as humans from the inflexibility of attachment to the relative in flexibility of identity. I imagine these are the multivariate ways of doing reciprocity and compassion, these multiple pathways must carry the seeds of transformation in identity, transforming identity against requirements of the broader context, the economics, the desert, prosperity, drought, wealth, pandemics, abundance, disease and so on and so forth. Identity must be able to take full advantage of those circumstances against the ravages of those circumstances. It must be that identity must be transformative. It can be no other way. We must be no different to any other species in terms of survival. We must be like the fish whose breeding grounds we destroy, who go in search of new breeding grounds in safer places.

   12. Our task is to sketch the multiple pathways for differentiation and the advantages and risks that each of these carry. The most obvious is the way in which differentiation is managed by the privileged and the wealthy and how such privilege and wealth runs the differentiation process into producing greater inflexibility; or how the differentiation process is managed in the migration and refugee process, how a problem of differentiation in one place becomes a point of inflexibility in another.

   13. Let us consider a particular 16-year-old girl who presents to therapy. It appears her attachment processes as a baby and a child was extremely good although circumscribed and focused upon the mother, not in a larger village.

   14. For this 16-year-old girl to attain full adulthood she will need to establish for herself a coherent adult identity. To do that she will need to be focused into the transformative effects of work or study, earning, or learning and at present she is not and neither compel her.

   15. It appears that the conventional parent-child hierarchy between her and her mother is tipped upside down, inverted. What this means is authority and responsibility have been completely thrown off balance where the girl has more authority than her mother. The girl commands significant authority over everything through what she does and more particularly what she does not do and does not participate in. The mother, for her part, excessively accommodates around her daughter’s emotional dysregulation and unreasonable demands. This is developmentally inappropriate. Childhood is a developmental period in which authority and responsibility are balanced and shared in a very particular way. The mother under such circumstances ordinarily retains very significant authority. That is in the nature of parenting. In sharp contrast the baby commands phenomenal authority over the mother. The baby only has to scream, and the mother comes running. The mother can recognise the cry of her own baby. With this 16-year-old girl, all she must do is scream and her mother comes running. This is no way for the girl to grow up into a fully-fledged adult human being.

   16. It appears that this 16-year-old girls’ development is stalling, she is not developing the beginnings of an appropriate adult identity. She does not have the rudiments of a ‘productive identity’, the basis upon which attachment identity transforms an adult identity. The absence of an appropriate ‘productive identity’ usually means that other aspects of identity become intensified (e.g., ‘attachment identity’ and ‘sexual identity’).

   17. It is the sacred duty of the parent to grow the child up to become a fully-fledged adult with a fully-fledged adult identity able to procreate and replicate if they choose. In this matter it is clear that the parent is failing in this sacred duty and that parent will be feeling this very intensely. This usually makes a parent anxious and when the parent is anxious, they ordinarily try harder and harder, often making and amplifying the same mistake.

   18. When a young person at 16 years of age is faltering in terms of their development, they ordinarily become very anxious about themselves at an age when being preoccupied and anxious about yourself is developmentally normal. That young person typically regresses developmentally or breaks loose from the family structure and is lost for a period; often a very long time.

   19. The pressing question is how this mother can best position herself so that her daughter is able to transition from adolescence into a full adult identity. The pressing question for the daughter is how she can best position herself so that she can develop a full adult identity in reasonably short order. The anxieties are symmetrical as are the central developmental questions for each party in this matter.

   20. Symmetry can connect or fracture, align or divide.

   21. The misalignment of responsibility and authority in such matters is unlikely to be remediated by conventional methods. Once a person has authority in their hands it is extremely difficult to take it away from them. That is the case here. The only way for the mother is to increase the level of responsibility put into her daughter’s hands, for the mother to increase responsibility to match the authority the girl commands. That is why a leaving home process even at this age is a very prudent strategy. To leave home the girl would require her mother’s full support. This does not have to happen immediately; however, the dialogue needs to begin. This mother will need to tackle this question in an entirely different way. The leaving home process needs to be discussed sooner rather than later and it is likely that this girl will now have to grow up faster rather than slower, simply because the process is now underway, and to stop it is like telling the river to stop flowing.

   22. As a practitioner you can sketch what the future will look like even when this girl is living independently, mapping out what that future will not include rather than what it will include. This will take you back into the key points about identity construction. The mother and her daughter would need to come to some understanding about her productive identity, what work she will do to support herself, how will money be handled: her attachment identity, what relationship will she have with family; peer identity, how will friendships and relationships be handled, and this will include alcohol and drugs, depression, suicidal ideation, and sexual identity, love, intimacy, sexuality and sex.

   23. My recommendation in such matters, is that the leaving home dialogue become the central and primary strategy for addressing the inverted hierarchy, and the failure to develop. One needs to develop a clear explanation about development and this age of development and what are the imperatives therein. We have a massive literature about the pathologies of childhood and early adolescence, but we don’t have anywhere near the repertoire in relationship to late adolescence into adult identity formation.