Rapprochement and other crises. The specific and nonspecific in analytic reconstruction

The historical development of preoedipality in evolving psychoanalytic theory is traced. Particular reference is paid to the elaboration by Mahler of the separation-individuation phase and the specific rapprochement conflict and crisis within it. In addition to the valuable contributions these discoveries have brought about, the tendency is noted for every new locus of interest to be obscured by excessive claims, and distorted by overuse and reductionism to explain complex and multidetermined behavior. This leads to the question of the specific and nonspecific in analytic reconstruction. Psychoanalysis invites a search for the specific superimposed upon the general. What I believe is nonspecific is the experience of the traumatic state, variable in degree, and the anxiety always adherent to it. The cognitive and historical data which initiated and maintain these affective states need to be arrived at with clinical accuracy and sustaining data, transference and historical. With discipline and restraint, and effective clinical bridges for interpretation, reapprochement and other distant preoedipal determinants can be pointed to in analytic reconstruction with confidence and profit to the analysis. Clinical examples are cited of valid and therapeutically effective reconstruction of early infantile traumas, including reapprochement, as well as instances in which significant etiologic determinants from contiguous phases are fused and continuous. Reapprochement plays an important role, but the temptation to isolate it is to be tempered with an openness to all levels and an awareness of the continuing developmental line. Such a wide etiologic spectrum is in keeping with the total range of observations and formulations made by Mahler, from the psychological birth of the infant, through separation-individuation, to phenomena and stages long after the attainment of object constancy.