b Charles Dickens, David Copperfied, ch.ll.
'swindlers' and 'robbers'; and these ineffectual too, would sometimes go to the extremity
of crossing the street, and roaring up at the windows of the second floor, where he
knew Mr.Micawber was. At these times Mr.Micawber would be transported with grief
and morticifation, even to the length (as I was once made aware by a scream of his wife)
of making motions at himself with the razor; but within half-an-hour afterwards he
would polish up his shoes with extraordinary pains, and go out, humming a tune with a
greater air of gentility than even. Mrs.Micawber was quite as elastic.(b)
Het is niet moeilijk je voor te stellen hoe pijnlijk verlegen een kind (de jonge Charles) zich hierbij
voelde, aldus Naef-Hinderling. Zij vervolgt:
It seems, however, that all his life Dickens's conflicts centred mainly around his
wish to exhibit himself, whereas the pursuance of his ideals did not really pose a
problem. In other words, the main damage to his self must have been acquainted in his
early infancy.
The American psychoanalyst Margaret Mahler argues that there is a period in the
toddler's life - roughly between the age of 18 to 36 months - during which the child is
particularly vulnerable. He has lost the symbiotic union with his mother and experiences
himself already as a separate human being but at the same time he realizes how weak and
dependent he still is. During this phase - the "rapprochement" stage of the
individuation-separation process - the child particularly needs his mother's emotional
availability. He wants to explore himself and his surroundings and he also wants his
mother to share in his discoveries. The child no longer fears so much to lose his mother
as he fears to lose her love.
It was during this time that Dickens's younger brother Alfred was born. It is
natural for a pregnant woman to be narcissistically self-absorbed, and Mrs.Dickens may
have been less responsive than before to Charles's needs in consequence of her
pregnancy. When the new baby has come the older sibling will usually feel threatened in
his rights and sometimes wish to get rid of the pretender to the mother's lap and the
mother's attention. These wishes are experienced by the child as something very
powerful, and as something very destructive if the baby actually does die - and this is
what happened to Charles, for his brother Alfred died when he was six months old.
Charles must have felt guilty at the death of his brother. It is probable that his mother -
due to he natural reaction - withdrew from him even more. Should this have been the
case, he would have attributed it to his own wickedness, as a punishment for his murde
rous aggression.
However, if the mother is not emotionally available, the child will feel that she
does not love him, and if she does not love him, there must be a cause for the lack of
love. The child will veer from considering himself as all good and his mother all bad and
back again. His one question will be: "Who is the culprit, is it mother or is it I?"
However, the infant, who is defendant on his mother's care, cannot afford to lose her
and will usually shoulder the blame himself. He will perceive himself as the cause of the
lack of love he experiences. He is convinced that his parents are sure to love him once
he has really become a good child. Meanwhile his deep sense of being unworthy cannot
be borne without consolation.
Often the child developes an opposite picture of himself as a child who is full of
love and kindness, as somebody who cannot hurt a fly. And he will never be able to
integrate these contradictory self-representations if he is not accepted by his love objects
