Encountering Alterity: Development as an Erotic Ecology

Every decade or so, research in clinical psychology forces development in how we think about the mind and the various forms of suffering faced by our patients. Sudden shifts in understanding call for a reorganisation of popular theories and models; John Bowlby's work on mother/infant separation, Aaron Beck's works on cognition, van der Kolk's emphasis on the effects of childhood trauma and Marsha Linehan's contribution to theories of personality disorders are all examples of paradigm shifts in psychological research and practice.

In the last decade, several eminent theorists such as Peter Fonagy and Jon Allen have stated they believe Sydney Blatt's work to be the first comprehensive, integrated model of personality development, and that it may provide the foundations for the future paradigm of developmental psychopathology. In his book Polarities of Experience, Blatt defines personality development as the integration of the capacity for relatedness and self-definition. For Blatt, establishing meaningful, mutually satisfying, reciprocal interpersonal relationships as well as establishing a differentiated, integrated, realistic, essentially positive sense of self are the most fundamental processes in personality development, from infancy to old age.

Importantly, self-definition and relatedness are involved in a constant dialectic interaction where progress in one dimension reciprocally primes advances in the other dimension. A mature sense of self that is differentiated and integrated cannot develop without satisfying interpersonal relationships. Likewise, mature, reciprocal, interpersonal relationships cannot exist without a coherent sense of identity and relatively clear self-definition. Here, psychopathology in various forms is reframed as compensatory exaggeration, the failure to achieve balance within a normal transactional developmental process.

It's important to emphasise that Blatt's model doesn't just restate and cohere older theories and research. Instead, pushing for a dialectic model allows for a total reinterpretation of the existing literature. This reinterpretation overcomes previous shortcomings of various psychodiagnostic models such as the DSM, wherein "mental disorders" are conceptualised atheoretically, leading to symptom-based inferences and rampant comorbid diagnoses.

Rather than present a summary of the 40-plus years of clinical research supporting Blatt's model, I instead want to demonstrate how this dialectic operates not only within the development of individual human lives but extends beyond into the realms of ecology and evolutionary biology. Here, systems theory offers an apt illustration that life itself is engaged in this interweaving reciprocity of relatedness and self-definition. Following that, I will present a basic overview of early infant development that emphasises how one's sense of self and identity evolve through the perception of oneself in the mind of other subjects.

The Universal - Life

Living beings are both enclosed within themselves, defined by the boundaries that separate them from their environment, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environment and transacting with it. This polarity is found even in the single-cell … this polarity of dependence and independence always permeates organic existence. - Schwartz & Wiggins

While common sense suggests the universe is populated by autonomous objects or solid discrete entities, systems theory views the world as made up of many multilayered bonds or relationships. When renowned biologist Gregory Bateson provocatively asks, "what is the pattern that connects the orchid to the primrose and the dolphin to the whale and all four to me?", he points to the interconnected network of relationships that constitute the biotic world.

Thus, it is possible to describe not only biology but physics as a science of relationship. While physics has shown that the universe is trending towards a slow "heat death" through a process known as entropy, it also demonstrates that biotic complexity itself is made possible by the knots and chains of relationship that form as time unfolds. This latter process, known as negentropy, is the tendency for things to congregate, coagulate and bond together into new, sophisticated and complex forms.

In a historical consideration of relatedness and self-definition, McAdams traced these themes to pre-Socratic discussions of love and strife, or union and division, as the two primary principles of the cosmos. Here, one can imagine entropy and negentropy as the universal forms of the fundamental cosmic polarity of Eros and Thanatos, chaos and order, or relatedness and self-definition. While physicists ensure that eventually, the universe will collapse into heat death, it seems, for the meantime at least, matter will also organise itself into complex and unique arabesques of unfolding form, from koalas to coral reefs.

Following this, the biologist Stuart Kauffman contends that complex forms will invariably arise from unorganised matter, and given enough time, these forms will develop lives of their own. The word which Kauffman uses to describe this process is autocatalysis, or mutual aid. The more diverse the components, the greater the potential for the emergence of autocatalytic chains in which each molecule helps produce the others, stabilising the system as a whole. Through forming relationships, the individual parts aid each other in the mutual overcoming of entropy, which in turn produce new parts to assist the negentropic process, and so on. Importantly, every living thing is the outcome of this process. The cells that constitute me result from an unbroken autocatalytic chain reaching back to the first forms of self-organisation ever.

In his book Matter and Desire, poet and biologist Andreas Weber explores the ecological manifestations of relationality and self-definition through what he terms erotic ecology. For Weber, it is a fundamental principle of reality that two sides always enter into relationship such that both come away irrevocably changed. He notes that "the river gravel is stone that water has transformed into a flowing form, and the swiftly cascading water is liquid that the stone has shattered and cracked [...] Only by altering one another do they become what they are".

Thus, the world is not inhabited by discrete and autonomous objects but is composed of a bustling network of dynamic interactions in which selfhood is defined through its relationship with alterity. For anything to be known and defined as itself, it must be touched and transformed by something it is not. Here, the river stone is ultimately defined through a mercurial engagement with its elemental antithesis, the flowing water. Hence, the erotic component of Weber's ecology is a manifestation of Eros, the penetrative and transformative qualities of attachment that inhere and find expression not only within psychology but physics and biology.

The Particular - Human Life

Martin Buber (1978) poetically described prenatal life as "a pure natural association, a flowing toward each other, a bodily reciprocity" (p. 76). He held that the infant leaves the "undifferentiated not yet formed primal world" (p. 76) in order to:

Enter a personal life … from the glowing darkness of the chaos, he has stepped into the cool and light of creation without immediately possessing it … to make it a reality for himself; he joins his world by seeing, listening, feeling, forming. It is in an encounter that the creation reveals its formhood…. Nothing is a component of experiences or reveals itself except through the reciprocal force of confrontation. (p. 77)

A child is able to develop a sense of self only because it confronts an other who displays independent, individual and uncontrollable emotions, an other who is a subject. The experience of the boundary, the encounter with a You, makes possible the unfolding of the I. The parent's role in this relationship is to strengthen the child's sense of security and not hinder its unfolding, its development into the world. Through confronting the subjectivity of the (m)other, the infant gradually comes to know itself as a subject, as a being in the world.

Beebe and Lachmann reviewed and integrated extensive developmental research that indicates infant psychological development, consistent with Buber's emphasis on the "reciprocal force of confrontation", develops from a fundamental process of engagement and disengagement, of relatedness and interruptions of this relatedness and its eventual repair. These experiences of engagement and disengagement provide the basis for the development of self- and co-regulation during the first year. Notably, the process of engagement and disengagement in infancy is the basic prototype for processes of psychological development throughout life.

A vital component of attachment security involves learning to trust the connection between inside reality and outside reality. With good enough accuracy, parents must get a sense of the inner meaning of the infant's display of raw affect and reflect it back in modulated form. It is this crucial task of the caregiver in helping the infant establish an internal homeostasis that forms the basis for the development of later physiological regulation, including emotional arousal.

For example, when the infant cries in distress, the caregiver must infer if it is an expression of hunger, tiredness or something else. Based on these guesses, the caregiver can soothe the distress. Over time, the caregiver can share its inferences in age-appropriate ways, such as "aww, you're upset 'cause you missed your nap". In doing so, the child learns, first through co- then self-regulation, that its internal reality corresponds to an external language, that there is a map for the territory.

In other words, it is the relational context that enables the capacity for self-definition.

In terms of identity, humans are blind, deaf and dumb without others, robbed of the affective subjectivity essential for being in the world. In a sense, this is the continuation of the autocatalytic chain as it emerges in the human realm. As negentropy increases, energy clumps into atoms, atoms pull together as molecules, molecules assemble to form chain reactions, which themselves eventually become enclosed as living cells against the environment that produced them. Some of these cells may combine in novel ways to create an organised colony of cells known as a human being, which eventually emerges into an even greater nexus of reciprocity and subjectivity. Through relationships, the individual components become strengthened and more defined, reinforcing the connections, enacting a feedback loop that stabilises the system as a whole.

Whether atomic, cellular or human, development in self-definition reciprocally primes advances in the dimension of relatedness and vice versa. Perceiver and perceived realise and frame one another mutually in an endless act of co-creation, forming, as Weber says, "a single, endless thread knotted onto itself" forever.