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NEUROBIOLOGY
Leading the child from a state of psychic fragmentation--a lack of integration best described by Piaget and by Lacan, and designated by Freud as primary narcissism--to his full participation in the social drama of the Oedipus complex is the task of maternal seduction. This seduction is in very large part conducted through facial, particularly gaze interactions, according to child developmentalists (Sherrod, 1981). The human face, designed with the most complex array of muscles for expression, connects multiple sensory-motor channels to crucial networks of the human brain to hardwire the foundations of emotion, cognition, character, and psychopathology. The autistic infant of Mahler is already born strongly biased toward the discrete odor of the mother, the motherly voice, and the human facial shape. He will gradually move, through symbiosis, toward ultimately developing a mature dependency largely based on the so-called distant sensory modalities and the symbolic mode of language. The gaze, however, will forever retain its power of seduction in interpersonal relationships, measurable by a newly discovered pupillary reflex. Besides the traditional distance and light reflex accommodations of the pupil, we now also talk about pupillary interpersonal accommodation (Hess, 1975). The size of our pupils, as we look at others, is an unconscious indicator of our acceptance or rejection.
By the end of the first year, the infant peaks in his visual capacity as measured by number of synapses in the visual cortex. This is parallel with the capacity to achieve crucial foveal synchronization with the mother in fractions of a second. Today's developmental axiom was foreseen by Kohut (1971) when he spoke about "the gleam in the mother's eye." The related concept of "social referencing" (Klinnert, 1984) denotes the child's request for external control through the approving face of the mother as his exploratory adventures escalate with age.
The mother endorses and enhances the infant's growing narcissism through most of the first year. As the infant replicates emotional facial expressions accompanied by specific emotions and a language he does not understand at first except for its emotional content, the physiognomic narrative is etched in a brain where inexhaustible plasticity is the earliest rule. By the end of the first year, it is all about fun as the mother celebrates any and all of her infant's...