Wisdom Notes on Psychology

Overview of Bonding

The links in the table on the left take you to sub-headings on this page.

The task for the baby is to create full consciousness by developing a conscious mind. It does this by gradually forming an ego, and it is the ego that becomes the centre around which consciousness functions. My analysis of the time period needed for the child to create its ego is given in my philosophy article The Ego and Relativity . 

In the early months of its life it only experiences its subconscious mind reacting to sensations. Once the ego is in the process of creation then conscious life begins. As the ego begins to form, its emerging conscious mind is dominated by the body’s senses. This process allows the ego to identify with the physical body; this is an essential first step because the ego gradually learns to use the body to separate itself from what it is not. The ego can manipulate its body but it cannot manipulate anything that is separate from itself.

This first step in identification is the formation of an attachment to a physical object, the body. As it slowly develops, the ego begins the progression of attachments to psychological objects, when it starts to identify with the mother. The difference is that whilst attachment to the body puts a physical boundary to the ego, psychological attachments put psychological boundaries to it. The overall result is that the emerging ego is that aspect of consciousness that has boundaries.

The Ego needs Boundaries

Why are boundaries needed?  The problem that faces the infant is that life is just too complex to master in its totality; therefore this complexity has to be restricted in some way in order to manage at least some part of it. The subconscious mind and the unconscious mind have few boundaries, so the only way to make sense of the multitude of sensory impressions is to create boundaries. Boundaries create a sense of separation. Such boundaries enable the mind of the infant to manage the sheer complexity of life that it is witness to. Such boundaries form “landmarks” in the sheer overwhelming expanse of consciousness.

The difficulty of trying to understand the multitude of sensations when boundaries are absent is illustrated very clearly by taking any powerful hallucinatory agent such as LSD. I took LSD a few times during my early 20s, the period of my hippie lifestyle. Hallucinatory agents often push the person far beyond his normal boundaries and so the hallucinatory experiences are usually very difficult to interpret, except when they feature aspects of consciousness and experience that the person is familiar with. Hallucinations clearly indicate that when we go far beyond our normal psychological boundaries we become confused.

To help in the task of creating an ego the infant takes its mother as a role model. It begins to identify with the parental image. Identification can be thought of as a psychological union with the role model, so as to encourage the development in the child of characteristics admired in the role model. As the child grows up it changes its identification model several times, to father, to adolescent peers, to teachers. Each change of identification focuses on different aspects of consciousness, such as the need for love (from the parents), group identity (for psychological support), sexual expression, etc. The resulting adult is a montage of different psychological models, of different foci of identification. The emotion that drives this process is jealousy in its mode of love.[¹]

A different drama is enacted by the introverted child (such as myself ). Identification with a role model usually ceases to have any intensity beyond the parental models. The child begins to take itself as its own model: it begins to identify with itself. A better way of expressing this identification is to say that the child becomes self-absorbed. Self-absorption is a feature of narcissism in love mode.

The growing child will swing between jealousy and narcissism as its ego develops. Eventually it will settle down to a preference for one or the other. Either way, the love modes can generate intense emotional experience. Jealousy is the basis of most social interactions, whilst narcissism is the basis of most forms of individuality.

Narcissism and Jealousy

I liked the ideas of R. D. Laing, an unconventional psychiatrist.[²]. When I was reading Laing’s books one word that caught my eye was “smothered”. Smothering is an aspect of what Laing terms “engulfment”, the process of being absorbed into the personality of another person. I realised that this process is based on jealousy. I set up a comparison between two states of mind and their underlying emotions:
Absorption in self  versus  Absorption in another person
(narcissism)                                      ( jealousy)

Absorption in another person means almost the same as identification with that person. The only difference is that children and adults may feel identification with someone they like to be embracing, whilst they will view an identification with someone they dislike as an engulfment.

It was this comparison that led me to understand that narcissism is binary to jealousy. This binary sets up absorption in oneself against an identification with someone who is external to self. I considered my relationships: they usually focus on intensity (a sure sign that either absorption or identification is involved). I can choose either absorption in myself or absorption in another person. When I am centred in narcissism I do not need other people. Then I understood that it is narcissism that propels the person towards individuality. By comparison, jealousy keeps a person socially defined.

Absorption/identification can work in either direction. In an adult relationship, either adult can be absorbed into the other one. Jealousy in me can lead me to the manipulation of the person that I want to be absorbed in (since possessiveness is an attribute of jealousy). The same process works even in an adult-child relationship.

For example, I watched a mother who kept shouting orders to her child every few minutes; she refused to let him play as he wanted. I could see the resentment in his face. This mother was refusing to let the child be independent; she was controlling him when there was no need to. This is jealousy. This is the refusal to allow the child to become different in any way that is at odds with the mother’s desire to mould him according to her views, her needs, according to her use of the child as a vehicle for her absorption. The idea that the parent becomes absorbed into the child is only another way of saying that the parent is going to use the child as a way of fulfilling that parent’s ambitions in life, irrespective of what the child wants to achieve.

The Process of Bonding

Bonding is the psychological attachment that a person has with someone else. It is the attachment that a child has with its parents, uncles and aunts, and it can also be the attachment that an adult has with a revered teacher or an older adult.

What interests me is the case where the child does not form emotionally satisfactory bonds with a parent. This will create an emotional need which the child, once it becomes an adult itself, may seek to satisfy in its adult relationships. The person will pursue an adult pattern of bonding that is subconsciously modelled on his childhood need for bonding. So if the child did not have some of its bonding needs met by its parents, then once it becomes an adult it seeks to fulfil its bonding needs through emotional attachments to suitable partners or even teachers (any who are felt to be suitable role models). Suppose, for example, a man, when he was a child, did not have a caring mother. Now he is an adult he will be attracted towards older women who have a caring nature. He can bond with suitable older women because they will fulfil his childhood needs for loving care.

During my own psycho-analysis I analysed the process of bonding. What is the usefulness of doing this?  More often than not, a child does not fully grow out of the bonding process, so that the relationships that the child has with its parents are continued into its adult life in its relationships with other people. If we do not understand the bonding process, then it is likely that some, or all, of our relationships are based on a search for the emotional happiness we elusively sought as a child. In this case, our relationships are based on our childhood needs rather than on our adult needs.

My understanding of bonding is different from conventional views of it. In the analysis that follows, I use a model of consciousness that has three parts: will, mind, and feeling. An alternative version of the model is that the three parts are desire, mind, and emotion. Using this model I analyse bonding into three factors, each factor aligning with a separate part of consciousness. The three factors are imprinting, identification, and transference. All three factors feature mind, will or desire, and emotion, but the emphasis differs. The emotion is always jealousy.

Three Factors of Bonding

My analysis is of a heterosexual boy.

a). Imprinting
Imprinting centres primarily on emotion. The infant forms emotional bonds to its first carers, who are usually the parents. The mother handles the infant more than the husband does and so she becomes the primary source of happiness for the infant. Its dominant emotion is jealousy in self-pity mode; this mode creates a dependency state of mind and thereby allows imprinting to happen.

At later times of its young life, when imprinting is being influential, the child will follow the parent around the house, in the same way that in nature young ducks will follow the parent duck. Similarly, the adult man, when experiencing jealousy in self-pity mode, may follow a woman that he admires, or who has previously given him emotional support. When the jealousy mode of self-pity is particularly intense in a man, as happens in the abreaction of jealousy, then the phenomenon of stalking may occur.[³]. The same process is visible in some young females (groupies) through their sexual obsession with and pursuit of male rock stars. These adult effects are being influenced by childhood imprinting.

The influence of imprinting is not always noticeable in the adult. The stages of identification and transference usually take the limelight.

b). Identification
Identification centres primarily on will or desire; it reflects traits and attitudes of personal stature and temperament, such as poise, courtesy, nobility, dignity, assurance, friendliness, trust, distrust, slyness, unreliability, aggressiveness, etc. These attributes reveal aspects of character (who I am). The emotion is jealousy in love mode.

This is the second stage of bonding and occurs when the child begins to model itself on the traits and attitudes of the parents. It tries to assimilate the desired characteristics into its sense of character, so that it becomes a little like the parents.

The stage of identification is a crucial one. If it does not occur, then the bonding process will not complete itself in transference. This stage represents the influence of character. If a child does not like a parent’s character, then it is unlikely to fully accept that parent’s beliefs.

c). Transference
Transference centres primarily on mind. It reflects beliefs, needs, sexual beliefs, moral beliefs, and behavioural traits that reflect such beliefs. These attributes reveal aspects of value (what I am). The emotion is jealousy in love mode.

Transference is the last stage of bonding. In this aspect of the bond, minds overlap: the child is part of the mother, and the mother is part of the child. Similarly in the father-child relationship. Hence transference produces overlapping ego boundaries. When I analysed my relationship to mother, I had to investigate which part of me is me, and which part of me is mother!  Transference bonding is mutual; not only does the child bond to the parent, but the parent bonds to the child as well. How does the parent bond to the child?  The parent sees something of itself in the child. 

The mother’s femininity becomes the child's preferred pattern of beauty in a woman, and the father’s masculinity becomes the preferred pattern of beauty in a man.

Transference and identification may be considered to be psychological forms of imprinting; they differ from primary imprinting since they are changeable during later life.

I sum up a couple of points:
Identification means who I am.
Transference means what I am

When the child identifies with the parent, then that parent will be able to transfer (by transference) his or her beliefs to that child.
If the child does not identify with the parent, then that parent will not be able to transfer his or her beliefs to that child.
If the child only partly identifies with the parent, then only some of the parent's beliefs will transfer to the child.

All three factors of bonding carry through into adulthood and are involved, to some degree, in all forms of personal relationships. What do these views entail?  When a man is acting from within his pattern of bonding then at that moment his relationship with any woman is modelled on his relationship to his mother; similarly, he acts towards other men in accordance with his relationship to his father. In this scenario, the factor of transference is the most emphasised of the bonding factors. When we look more closely at bonding we find that there are both positive and negative aspects to it.

The positive aspect of bonding is that the values and traits of parental character and identity that a child admires become the basis of the traits and values of adult character and identity that it will later, as an adult itself, admire in other people.

The negative aspect of bonding is that it can create psychological problems for the child that will carry over into its age of adulthood. Suppose, as an adult, we are trying to understand the difficulties that we have in our relationships. When we first begin to analyse and assess our childhood, we naturally look at it only from our point of view. Then, if we continue to seek answers for our difficulties, we begin to understand the problems that the parents had. Then we can see that some of the problems that we have are the same as some of the problems that the parents had. This is one effect of transference. Or, to put this view another way, some of the character limitations that the parents have are mirrored, in some degree, in us. In effect, the problems that the parents have are “handed down” to the young child. Therefore, looking at the negative side of childhood, what we acquire from the parents are their problems in relationships. It is unlikely that these problems originated with the parents: in effect, the problems are handed down the family line, so even the grandparents had similar issues to face. However, each new generation has a chance of modifying its difficulties. Overall, bonding produces psychological inheritance (which is variable), which makes it different from genetic inheritance (which is invariable).

Taking a broad view of family life, what the parental setting usually does is to set the agenda for what we seek in life. The parental setting develops or inhibits our skills, strengths and limitations, in terms of how we use them in relationships. Unless we learn to overcome our limitations in some degree, then if we have a family, there is a good chance that we will pass on to our children the same limitations that our parents had and which they passed on to us.

[¹]. I have three articles on Emotion on the Home page. [1]

[²]. Laing wrote several books. For example:
Self and Others. Penguin/Pelican Books, 1988.
The Divided Self. Penguin/Pelican Books, 1987. [2]

[³]. The abreaction of jealousy is described in the 6th article on Abreaction on the Home page. [3]

Copyright © 2026 Ian Heath
All Rights Reserved

The copyright is mine, and the articles are free to use. They can be reproduced
anywhere, so long as the source is acknowledged.