Early in life, if mothering is experienced as othering, frightened and frightening attachment expectations can get set in stone. Winnicott said that the infant’s first mirror is the mother’s face, in which the infant learns to feel seen and known, and to feel for and know the other. Developmental research shows how a caregiver’s “still face” stirs deeply disturbing emotions. Whether maternal mirroring or mirror neurons is our metaphor of choice, the challenge for the psychoanalyst is to be-hold our analysand's darkest terror while strengthening their protective shield. Three kinds of distortion—internalized early and externalized in later relationships—will exemplify this: the flat mirror (minimizing the self-image), the carnival mirror (magnifying a carnal self), and the shattering mirror (causing violent self-fragmentation). These three primal domestic terrors reemerge in our collective schisms and ostracisms.

Stan Case, LCSW, PhD, is in private practice in Edmonds, Washington. He is a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and the Northwestern Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He is a courtesy Clinical Supervisor in the University of Washington Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.