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Mirroring

The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut proposed the term 'mirroring'.

To put it simply: mirroring is what you see in the eyes of the other that looks at you,

and causes you to think 'I am worthy' or, on the other way round: 'I am lousy'.

 

"I use the image of “the gleam in the mother’s eye” and give Arnold Goldberg credit.

If you’re a kid and you come home from school and your mother gives you a big hello and a smile, and seems delighted to see you, that’s successful mirroring.

An abundance of these experience and you develop as a confident whole self.

If you come home from school and she says “your hair looks awful—did it look like that all day?”, that’s a failure in mirror functioning. The child “fragments” and fails to develop an integrated solid sense of herself."

(www.teachpsychoanalysis.com/Teaching_Specific_Topics/Post...)

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Uploaded on January 17, 2014
Taken on May 8, 2013