Voice
Charles Whitfield, Healing the Child Within
Human Flourishing Psychology Literature
One reason is that the mother herself is so impoverished and needy that she uses her infant to satisfy her own unmet needs.
This is an amazing thing about infants. They can sense that the mother is needy, and can eventually detect her specific needs and begin providing them for her.
Of course, this carries a major price.
–Charles Whitfield, Healing the Child Within, p. 19