Why Diaper Weaning is Essential in the Solidification of Individuation

Abstract

This paper explores the importance of diaper weaning, which takes place in a period of life when the toddler is capable of individuation and partnership with his parents. Furthermore, the weaning process may take on a pivotal role in the consolidation of the personality. This article also elaborates upon the crucial conflict that the toddler encounters for the first time in his life; a conflict between his wish to do everything alone, yet also contending with feelings of being afraid that if he does not obey his parents he might lose control over them, and that they might lose their love for him. Hence, the toddler must invest his energy in an economic way. He must choose profitable or costeffective emotional investments that enable him to balance those two poles in the conflict; to target the emotional investments by mixing or mingling aggression with libido, safeguarding his love for his parents while regulating his aroused aggression toward the same, yet frustrating, libidinal parents. Moreover, the toddler (or his personality components like narcissism, ego and its regulation of object relations) regulates this mixing or mingling aggression with libido while investing it both in his autonomy and the leadership of his parents. Diaper weaning is here considered a developmental process of the emotional capacity to delay satisfaction, to master retention, to learn from others, release and separation from a toddler’s “bodily products”. It is a pivotal stage of the separationindividuation- autonomy/separateness and “Jointness” process.