1/5/2023 0 Comments Dialectic defined![]() ![]() ![]() The baby, however, doesn’t understand the inevitability of at least some parental failures it can’t differentiate between good enough parents who sometimes fail, and bad parents who fail by habit or by design. Without yet a clearly-defined sense of self, the baby imagines the breast, later the whole mother, as an extension of himself, something he in his fantasied omnipotence can (or should be able to) summon at will to satisfy his needs.Įven the best of parents fail to satisfy the baby for extended periods of time. ![]() The dichotomy of a splitting into the ‘good mother’ and ‘bad mother’, where the head bites the tail, is the only way the baby is able to understand his or her caregiver in fact, during the first few months, he or she is capable of conceiving only a part– object, a ‘ good breast‘ that gives milk immediately on demand, and a ‘bad breast’ that frustrates the baby with its absence. While allowing for various levels of parental imperfection, we can see a good enough mother (or, by extension, a good enough early caregiver of either sex) as lying anywhere along the ouroboros’s length from its head (the best mothers) to the middle of its body (average mothers) anywhere on the other half of its body, approaching the bitten tail, is where all the bad mothers, fathers, and other early caregivers lie, at every point of severity, from moderately bad to the very worst. We should strive towards a unity of the opposites, not an irreconcilable dichotomy.) I use the ouroboros to symbolize this dialectical conception of any continuum, including the self/other dialectic, with the serpent biting its tail at the extremes. (Recall from my previous posts that I don’t conceive of a continuum as being in a straight line, with the extremes at either end, far away from each other but as coiled in a circle, with the extremes touching and phasing into each other. Then, of course, there’s every intermediate circumstance between the best and worst along a continuum. In the best of circumstances, the mother gives the most love and attention to the baby that she can, unifying them in the worst of cases, she is terribly neglectful, even abusive to her baby, as Sandy McDougall is to her baby, Randy, in ‘Salem’s Lot, or as Margaret White is to her ‘psychological baby’ Carrie. We start with the most basic unit, the mother and her baby. #Dialectic defined how toA unifying analysis of all human relationships, starting with the family and fanning outward, can, I believe, help us better understand how to deal with their ups and downs. I will try to resolve the contradiction between self and other, or subject and object, in order to help show the unity between people, and move us in the direction of a cure for the social alienation, disintegration, and fragmentation that plague our relationships. ![]()
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