Breastfeeding, Mutual Gratification, and Emotion Self-Regulation: Bridging Gaps Across Object Relations, Drive- and Attachment-Based Psychoanalytic Theories

Like all mammals, human beings are born vulnerable and dependent on the care of another in order to survive and navigate embodied emotionality, and through most of human history and across cultures (Stuart-Macadam & Dettwyler, 1995), breastfeeding has served to this end. While emotion self-regulation (ESR) is unequivocally considered a major developmental achievement, less is known about how and why emotion regulation takes place. Drawing on object relations, drive- and attachment-based theories, we speculatively address these underexplored questions through a theoretical reappraisal of the breast, a (once) rich and important metaphor that is growing obsolete in contemporary psychoanalytic thinking. Based on Freud's argument that the breast's function in infant development goes beyond the purely nutritional, as libidinal drive gains its power from being propped upon a bodily function necessary to preserve life, we tentatively explore the possible interplay between breastfeeding and ESR. Above and beyond its well-recognized function as a distress modulator for the infant, we draw on a range of knowledge sources to hypothesize that, provided basic conditions are in place, breastfeeding holds a potential for sensual, affective, and erotic gratification for the mother likewise. We propose a paradigm according to which the possibility of embodied breastfeeding to generate a mutual experience of pleasure, intimacy, and desire can serve two interconnected purposes. First, if experienced as fulfilling and pleasurable, breastfeeding may allow for effective dyadic attunement while alleviating the emotional labor of regulating the infant's emotions. Second, we posit that mutually gratifying breastfeeding may facilitate the development of affective, relational, and protosexual experiences among children that can positively affect ESR, as well as how they may later relate to desire, affect, and intimacy. Conversely, we wonder whether early deprivation or uneroticized breastfeeding could lead to disturbances in the development of the attachment and pleasure systems, which in turn could manifest as a disruption of ESR, relational and sexual processes, and may result in adult psychopathology.