Separation is not merely a process of physical, emotional and value-based detachment from one’s parents.
It is the only opportunity to meet your own Self, to come to know it, to gain your own unique self-identity.
In the course of a child’s individual development we can observe their periodic movements from the parents toward themselves and back again.
These are movements from the Self to the Other and from the Other back to the Self.
To meet themselves, a person has to solve some difficult tasks:
to come out of psychological symbiosis, of confluence with their parents,
to separate from them,
to gain autonomy while preserving connection and closeness with the parents.
This is why separation is not destruction but a rebuilding of the relationship. Separation is also a process of «reassembling» the Self, of a new self-identity coming into being.
REPARATION AS A WAY OF RESTORING THE WHOLENESS OF THE SELF
It is very important that during the separation rebellion and the separation anger the parents do not react in kind.
In such a situation, by no means everyone can hold back the beast inside and refrain from responding symmetrically, from «annihilating» the child in return.
You are no daughter of mine!
You are no son of mine!
After all this I want nothing to do with you!
Such parental reactions are essentially borderline, and they are triggered in response to the child’s borderline dynamics.
Parents who manage to contain the child’s negative feelings toward them create the conditions for reparative guilt to arise in the child.
Reparation is the process of reducing guilt through an action intended to make up for imagined harm supposedly done to the attachment object; the process of restoring an internal object that was destroyed in fantasy.
Reparative guilt, unlike neurotic guilt, in which the parents blame the child for behaving badly, is «triggered from within», in the inner world.
And what also matters is that it is triggered at the moment when the child has already «committed a crime against the Other».
So the child’s experience of guilt is, in this case, appropriate and necessary; it can help restore the Other as a value within their psychic reality.
This is, in essence, existential guilt.
Aggression is needed in order to «destroy» the attachment object; guilt is needed in order to «put it back together».
Aggression makes it possible to symbolically kill the attachment object, while reparative guilt makes it possible to revive it and to meet it anew.
Reparative guilt allows the attachment object to be appropriated once more, to become an element of one’s own psychic reality.
And then the self-image becomes integrated, whole and creatively balanced.