Angst, Motivation and the Human Condition

The Link Between Foundational Separation Angst and What Drives Us (Vol. 6; Issue 11)

The inevitable ending of the dream-like bond between caregivers and infants elicits both lifelong anguish and motivation. We experience lasting anxiety related to that primitive separation, and equally, we continually strive for an elusive unity.

We begin our lives literally inside another human being, a mother. After birth, as psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott (1960) rather coldly notes, we live within a “maternal-care–infant unit” (p. 589). The concept of “primary maternal preoccupation” is another key idea of Winnicott’s. He is referring to the “good enough” mother’s feeling captivated by her baby—throughout the pregnancy and around one year after birth. The caregiver’s attention, combined with the infant’s neediness, creates a mutual and exclusive fusion. Needs seem to be satisfied automatically.

Somewhere between 8 and 14 months of age, infants begin to experience a sense of separation from the caregiver. Simply experiencing a need, as occurs in infancy, no longer leads to its fulfillment. Some communication, even if nonverbal, must occur. That primitive kernel of identity, of a separate “you,” can no longer expect immediate satisfaction. Your need or desire requires another person, one separate from you.

The anguish over separation, brings with it a nagging drive, a wish for more, a sense of something missing. Whatever your particular need, whether for food, say, or for comfort, always falls short.

Why?

Because as Dutch psychoanalyst Paul Verhaeghe (1999) notes:

What you really want is the sense of unity that has been lost forever, the enjoyment of the totality that once existed. (p. 43).

Need satisfaction after the primal separation, therefore, always comes with an absence, a lack. You may get fed and comforted, but something is missing: namely, the “sense of unity.”

Subsequently, the lifelong string of fears arises — about illness, loss, displacement, the annihilation of civilization, and the like. These deserve separate attention. But, it raises the question of whether these later fears combine with the angst of that original separation or whether they are, in fact, distinct.