Eight months fear

The eight-month fear describes the fear a child has when the mother leaves him and the child encounters strangers with strong  distrust , aversion or fear. It occurs on average for the first time at the age of eight months, where strangers develop. A long absence of the mother can lead to severe physical and mental disorders.

Explanatory approach

In this phase, the child is for the first time able to distinguish the mother from other people by means of certain features such as facial features, voice or clothing. The American psychoanalyst René Spitz deals in detail with the phase of the first year of life and the child's strangeness and came to the conclusion that the child interprets all faces as belonging to the mother beforehand. He formulated six different pathological behaviors in the mother-child relationship that lead to physical damage in the child. These are:

• an undisguised denial
• an anxiously exaggerated concern
• an unconscious hostility turned into fearfulness
• constant fluctuations between indulgence and hostility
• cyclical mood swings in the mother ( moodiness )
• compensated hostility, e.g. B. is compensated by pampering

According to him, these causes lead to certain reactions and damage in the child. For example, anxious concern leads to excessive crying in infancy and fluctuations between pampering and hostility to childlike rocking.

consequences

Early separations between mother and child can lead to stress , behavioral disorders , learning and development disorders , attachment disorders, and physical illnesses such as depression .

See also

• Attachment theory
• Separation anxiety
• Emotional disorders of childhood
• Parent-child relationship

literature

• Richard L. Fellner: The Psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud , 2004
• Anne-Marie Sandler : Beyond Eight-Month Anxiety . In: Int. J. Psycho-Anal. tape 58 , 1977, pp. 195-207 (English).
• Inge Seiffge-Krenke : Psychotherapy and developmental psychology: relationships: challenges, resources, risks. Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-662-09600-0
• René A. Spitz : The emergence of the first object relationships. Klett-Cotta, 1992, ISBN 978-3-608-95935-2

Web links

• Entry in the online lexicon for psychology and education