It is not possible for the baby, who meets the world at birth, to come into contact with reality. The baby, who interprets the world through his own internal objects, far from reality, is brought to reality in a healthy way as a result of the relationships he establishes with his mother. During this process, the baby begins to establish relationships with external world objects and makes sense of the world with these objects. This study focuses on how the relational dynamics that begin with the birth of the baby affect romantic love relationships and partner choices in adulthood. Especially the first three years of the baby on the path to individuation have been examined in detail and it has been emphasized that the object relationships and childhood experiences play a decisive role in adult relationships.
Love is a subject that is questioned as much as existence is questioned. Maybe that's why it has been adapted into various poems, songs, novels, theater and many other places. The concept of love, on which most of life is spent thinking about and sometimes feeling sad, and which is subjected to a barrage of questions, has been an important preoccupation of psychologists as well as literary writers. The first thing that can be said about love in the context of psychoanalysis is undoubtedly that Freud said that the first love is experienced between the mother and the baby. From an analytical perspective, we can say that every love is a repetition of the first forms of love. In order to explain this inference, which derives its source from psychoanalysts' studies on mother-baby and their relationships, it is necessary to take a look at the baby's first experiences.
When the baby first comes into the world, its libido is directed towards itself, and therefore all its love is towards itself. With healthy development, he directs this libido to objects and begins to love people other than himself. In this way, the baby becomes acquainted with "love objects". Before examining the baby's first love experiences in detail, it would be more accurate to touch upon important points about the object on which the baby loads his libido, his relationship with the object, and what he experiences in this process.
The dictionary meaning of 'object' is "A certain weight and It is defined as "any inanimate object that has volume and color". However, when we look at it as a philosophical term, we see the word that stands in front of our consciousness and ignores the outside world. It emerges as everything that is a part of n. In psychoanalysis, Freud (1905) was the first to use this term and he gave a more philosophical meaning to the term 'object'. By 'object' Freud meant everything that is part of the external world that the baby perceives with instinctive energy. And he said that the baby directs its instincts for satisfaction. In his article "On Narcissism" written in 1914, Freud talks about two types of object selection; anaclitic object selection and narcissistic object selection. Anaclitic object selection represents the selection of objects that provide care for the person in infancy, meet their needs, and overlap with the mother figure. In narcissistic object selection, there is a situation related to the person's self. Here, the person tends to choose objects that represent his or her self, that they once were, that they want to be, that are a part of their self, and that are close to them. According to Freud, who argued that the search for pleasure lies at the basis of urges, any external world entity that satisfies the urges could become an object, and the bond between this object and the drive could only gain meaning through the individual's repetitive cyclical experiences (Freud, 1905). At this point, Klein disagrees with Freud. According to Klein, the search for objects and relationships that provide instinct satisfaction is present in the baby from the very beginning, that is, from birth, and even the Oedipus complex is experienced in the first year of life (Klein, 1957).
The inner world of the individual is full of internalized object relationships. Klein emphasizes that introjected objects and the internal objects that contain them should not be confused with each other, and he accepts introjection as a defense for the individual's anxiety about being "good" in his or her self. Arguing that we are born with the death instinct, Klein (1957) stated that the baby, who has an inner world full of "aggressive, evil and persecutory objects" resulting from this instinct, cannot tolerate this "bad" being in himself, so he projects the "bad" onto the external world object and turns it into "death instinct". While declaring it as "bad", he argued that he tried to protect his self and his internal good objects as good by reflecting the "good" object outside into himself. The baby in the womb is a whole with the mother and there is a safe relationship. At birth, the baby experiences its first separation and, in fact, its first mourning. He will live in this safe union for the rest of his life. He seeks to re-establish unity. The first object of the baby, who makes this search through object relations, is the mother's breast. The breast, which meets the desireful needs (nutrition and love) of the baby, who tries to perceive and make sense of the entire external world through the object relations he establishes from the moment he is born, becomes a good object. The baby, which was contained by the mother while in the womb, now contains the mother by internalizing the mother's breast and taking in both the breast and the mother through the breast (Klein, 1957). For the baby, the breast is his created object because it appears when he needs it and satisfies his desires. He created the breast, it belongs to him, it is under his control. This illusion offers him the opportunity to experience the feeling of omnipotence. Thanks to this object relationship, the baby aims to re-establish the safe relationship in the womb. In her book Envy and Gratitude (1957), Melanie Klein also discussed the situation where the breast is not nutritious enough, regarding the emergence of envy in the baby. When the breast, which we can describe as a fountain of milk for the baby, does not provide as much satisfaction as needed, the baby blames the breast for the deprivation it experiences and projects its negative emotions onto the breast, turning it into a bad object. Thus, he experiences feelings of envy and hatred. In the same book, Klein said the following about the envy that can be felt towards the satisfying breast; “The generous flow of milk (even if it gives the baby a feeling of satisfaction) also creates envy, because such a great gift seems to the baby to be something he can never reach.” At this point, the baby experiences confusion in the relationship with the mother's breast, which is the first object. The baby, who introjects the breast that offers him compassion and meets his desires as a good object, worsens both the breast and the mother by directing his own feeling of envy to the breast, even though it satisfies him. This first object relationship will form the main outline of all the relationships that the baby will establish for the rest of his life, as he distinguishes between "good object" and "bad object" with this shake, and it is very important in this respect. If it is kept together with the good object, it is possible for the aggressive affect attributed to the bad object to destroy the good object. In this respect, the division between "good" and "bad" is very important. From this point on, the baby defines not only the object but also himself as "good me". and divides into “bad self”. The process that Klein calls the "paranoid-schizoid position" covers the first three months, and since the formation of the superego has not yet occurred in this period, he speaks of the "early ego" and a paranoid anxiety experienced in this period. There are two defense mechanisms used by the baby; splitting and projective identification. The purpose of these defense mechanisms is to get rid of the death instinct. In order to protect its self and internal good objects from its death instinct, the baby projects its feelings of aggression and hatred onto external objects, causing paranoid anxiety (Klein, 1946). He calls the period between three and six months the "depressive position". At this stage, the baby's previously divided objects come together. In other words, the beloved and good object, the breast, and the envied, bad object, the breast, are one. The basis of the depressive position in this stage is the feeling of guilt, because there is an ambivalence towards the object. The fact that the good and bad objects are one and the same creates anxiety and guilt that the aggressive affect reflected on the bad object will harm the good object (Klein, 1948).
In addition to Melanie Klein, who shaped her theory by interpreting the baby's internal processes, Winnicott also worked with the baby. It also emphasized the relational area between the mother. In his theory, Winnicott talked not about the instincts that need to be satisfied, but about the developmental needs and the relationship formed when the mother meets them (Tükel, 2011). The baby is the one in need, and the mother is the one who has to meet it. Winnicott says that for healthy development, the baby must get what it needs from the environment, otherwise the baby will experience destruction and extinction (Habip, 2011). By saying that the baby gets what it needs from the environment, it actually means that the baby gets what it needs from the mother. The environment here is the mother who meets the baby's needs and is sensitive to them. Winnicott (1953) calls this mother the “good enough mother”. The baby's first beginning about his/her self is when he/she uses the mother's face as a mirror and questions who is in the mother's gaze (Winnicott, 1967). Looking at the mother's face, the baby makes sense of his own existence and self based on what he sees there. The fact that the baby cannot see itself in this reflection or the reflection is defective affects the individuation process and its own development. It adversely affects marrow formation. The mother must be well enough for soul-body integration, in other words, individuation, to occur in the baby (Habip, 2011). If the mother is not well enough and the baby's needs are not adequately met, the baby's self-formation is in danger, and a division of the self into the "real self" and the "false self" occurs. The real self is formed when the baby receives the response it needs from the mother, but when the baby receives an incompatible response to its needs, it brings its false self to the fore to protect its real self. In this way, the developing false self will isolate and defend the real self, but this causes the development of fears of emptiness, futility and death (Tükel, 2011).
The baby's real self is his first sense of existence, and he gives it the illusion that he is creative. He lives when he enters and feels omnipotence. The false self hides and protects the real self as a shield against any situation that may pose a danger to the real self. However, for a healthy self-development, this illusion of omnipotence must be gradually abandoned. This is possible with the help of the mother and transitional objects (Winnicott, 1953). The meaning of transitional objects is given by the subject, and the mother provides the baby with the mental opportunity to use these transitional objects as a bridge between the illusion of omnipotence and reality. Transitional objects may be behaviors, sounds or objects that the baby first perceives as "not me", such as thumb sucking, mother singing a lullaby, pacifier, teddy bear. In this process, the mother lays the foundations of a healthy self-formation by providing the necessary mental environment without questioning the transitional object.
In parallel with the details about all these object relationships and experiences that the baby has, we continue to examine the roots of the "love" experience with Freud. It would be most appropriate to do so. The first analytical theory about love was created by Freud, and in its simplest form, the basis of the theory is the idea that women are in love with the father and men are in love with the mother (Freud, 1905). The framework of the theory is shaped by the psychosexual development of the child. Each stage in the child's psychosexual development represents a different erogenous zone and the object that satisfies its libidinal drive.
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