Psychoanalytic practitioners of all persuasions have theorized that infants psychically retreat into an ideal and omnipotent fantasy space in order to cope with anxiety that stems from breaks in the caregiver/child connection. When distress calls prove fruitless, some infants defend against distress by fully retreating into fantasy with a romanticized object who is perfectly attuned to the infant. The fantasy satisfies the infant’s need to feel wanted and cared for. Although this false protective construction fosters a false confidence, hopelessness and fear of a motherless world is quelled, for now. Relief from the terror of the void provides a blissful experience worth revisiting....

Infants are unable to communicate their needs, therefore, they lay crying in their cribs longing for their needs to be met. Predictability and attunement train us to be patient and have faith that we will be cared for. An unpredictable or misattuned caregiver necessarily compels an infant to construct a set of self-soothing skills out of the fear that they have been abandoned and need to survive. I’m thinking about rocking, thumb-sucking, and limerence...

Limerence has qualities that feel reminiscent of the crying infant pining for its inconsistent caregiver. If the fear of abandonment is instilled in us for survival, then securing unconditional love is the primary objective. Perhaps someone under the influence of limerence is persistently...

In limerence, obsessive fantasies of an idealized love object and that happily-ever-after rush are made possible by splitting the love object’s bad qualities off from the good. In object relations theory, splitting – a concept first coined by object-relationist Melanie Klein, then expanded upon by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn – refers to the coping mechanism whereby infants unconsciously defend against having negative feelings toward their inattentive or neglectful caregivers, splitting the nuanced array of emotions into good and bad. Fairbairn suggested that some infants compartmentalize these feelings, seeing and preserving the caregiver as the idealized object and then internalizing all the bad feelings...