Childhood deafness: compensatory deintegration of the self

The primary self postulated by Fordham draws upon both psychic and bodily structures to unfold needs and potentials in the external world. In this paper I have presented some thoughts on the role of the ear and of hearing in bringing the neonate into relationship with its mother and broader environment in early deintegrative processes. The ear serves as an important organ not only in receiving sound, but also in orientating the neonate in relation to the world and to its mother's body, and perceiving and sustaining a sense of self. When in infancy the sense of hearing is lost, the spontaneous activities of the self appear to operate in a compensatory way, enhancing the operations of viable organs of perception. This speculation was drawn from a series of observations of a deaf baby girl. The most significant negative result of deafness is the way it affects body image. Deaf children feel not only different about not being able to hear and speak like others, but, far more profoundly, also excluded from the intercourse between others, living on an everyday basis with the primal scene predominant in the mind. The nature of this experience, as I have tried to show, was illustrated by material from work with a profoundly deaf girl.