Dr Wiola Rebecka:
In the quiet space between a mother and her infant, something extraordinary takes place. Long before words, long before a child knows themselves as a self, they look into their mother’s eyes — and if the mother is attuned, emotionally present, and capable of holding the infant’s fear, joy, and hunger — the child sees not just the mother, but a reflection of their own emerging being. This moment, described by psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, is not a metaphor. It is an emotional reality. What the child sees — or fails to see — in the mother’s gaze becomes a template for selfhood. The mother’s face, as Winnicott writes, is the mirror in which the baby first recognizes themselves as real.
But this mirror is never culturally neutral.
In societies shaped by war, colonization, rape, and generational silence, the mother’s gaze may be clouded — not by indifference, but by unprocessed grief, shame, and inherited trauma. The child peers into the mother’s eyes and encounters not only their own hunger to be seen, but the weight of centuries. A history they cannot name — yet which pulses in the quality of their mother’s attention.
Wilfred Bion’s concept of reverie gives language to this subtle alchemy. Reverie is the mother’s capacity to receive the child’s raw emotional projections — to hold their terror, rage, confusion — and transform it into something digestible, meaningful, human. But what happens when the mother’s capacity for reverie is compromised by her own unprocessed trauma? When her internal world is saturated with ghosts of war, with the shame of sexual violence, with unspoken sorrow inherited from mothers before her?
Then, the child’s early experience of self may become fractured, confused, or filled with a sense of un-belonging.
Across many Indigenous cultures, this early mirroring is not just the task of one mother, but of a community of caretakers, elders, and storytellers. Identity is formed not only through individual reflection, but through collective reverie — songs, rituals, and stories that name the child’s place in the world. In the Andean Quechua tradition, a newborn is wrapped not just in blankets but in language, in myth, in the breath of ancestors. In many African and Slavic traditions, lullabies carry multigenerational knowledge — acts of singing-as-containing, soothing the child through rhythm and collective memory. Reverie is shared, and the mother is not left to hold it alone.
But in Western psychoanalytic traditions, shaped by individualism and a linear sense of time, reverie is often framed as a one-way function: mother contains, child internalizes. This model — while insightful — can become colonized by the very assumptions it ignores: the idea that the individual psyche exists in isolation, and that healing happens only within the dyad of therapist and patient, mother and child.
To decolonize reverie is to remember that the gaze in which a child finds themselves is also shaped by colonial trauma, forced silences, and the erasure of communal holding.
The granddaughter of a war rape survivor, for instance, the mother’s eyes may carry the pain of being violated, the silence that followed, the effort to survive through forgetting. The child looks up, seeking to be mirrored — but what they meet is a face veiled in protective absence. Not because the mother does not love, but because she has not been seen herself. Her own pain, unspoken, fills the room.
Thomas Ogden reminds us that the child builds identity not only through what they see in the mother’s eyes, but through the knowledge that their thoughts and feelings exist in someone else’s mind. When the mother can think about the child — truly hold them in mind — the child begins to understand that they are real. But what if the mother has been taught not to think about her own pain? Not to feel too much, speak too much, remember too much? Then reverie is ruptured — and the child grows up surrounded by emotional smoke, trying to breathe through a fog they cannot name.
And yet, even in silence, something survives. The act of storytelling — the kind passed through whispered fragments, gestures, and half-said sentences — becomes a form of cultural reverie. When a granddaughter gathers her grandmother’s testimony, when she listens not as an extractor of trauma but as a receiver of sacred truth, she repairs the broken mirror. She becomes both the child and the container, holding what the mother could not. She re-members, reclaims, and in doing so, offers a new reflection to those who will come after her.
This is what psychoanalysis must now learn from Indigenous and decolonial traditions: that identity is not born only in the eyes of one caregiver, but in the eyes of the collective, in the holding field of language, land, and lineage. Reverie is not only a psychological function. It is a cultural ritual, a survival technology, and — in its deepest sense — an act of love across generations.
How Culture Shapes the Way We Raise Our Children hope with communal approach
A mother sits on a park bench in San Francisco, watching her three-year-old son climb the jungle gym. She smiles, cheering him on. “You’re so strong!” she calls out. Later that day, she’ll ask him what he liked best, what he felt, what made him proud. She will write it down in his baby book. His memories — rich with personal detail and self-expression — will become the bricks of his story: “This is who I am.”
Half a world away, a mother walks her daughter home from preschool in a quiet Tokyo suburb. She asks how her friends were, if she shared her crayons, if she said “thank you” to her teacher. When her daughter hesitates or pouts, the mother gently reminds her of the importance of harmony — wa. “It’s not just about what you feel,” she says softly, “it’s about how we all feel together.”
Though separated by oceans and language, these mothers are doing the same thing: raising children with love. And yet, embedded in their interactions is something deeper — a cultural script that shapes not only how children learn to behave, but how they come to know themselves.
In the West, the self is treated as a distinct, autonomous entity. Children are encouraged to express themselves, to articulate preferences, feelings, and opinions. Mothers often engage their toddlers in long, elaborative conversations about past experiences: “Do you remember your birthday party? You were so happy when you saw the cake!” These conversations don’t just entertain — they teach children how to build autobiographical memory, the ability to tell a personal story. And, as psychologist Qi Wang has shown, Western children tend to recall events in ways that highlight their own actions, desires, and emotions.
In Japan, by contrast, the child is not imagined as an isolated self, but as a thread woven into a social fabric. Here, mothers are less likely to dwell on the child’s personal feelings and more likely to discuss social roles and context. Rather than asking, “What did you want?” a Japanese mother might ask, “How did you help?” or “Were your friends happy?” Memory becomes relational, not individual — a mirror that reflects not just the child, but their place within a network of relationships.
This difference is not superficial. It reaches into how children learn to think. According to cognitive psychologist Richard Nisbett, Western children develop an analytic thinking style: they focus on objects, categories, and rules. A dog is a “mammal” because it fits a logical group. But Japanese children, shaped by holistic traditions, are more likely to notice context, relationships, and change. The dog is not just a “mammal,” but a companion in a field, chasing a butterfly, responding to its environment.
These different cognitive styles are shaped from infancy. In Western homes, children may sleep in separate rooms early, be praised for independence, and encouraged to make choices. In Japanese homes, children often sleep beside their mothers for several years, learn by imitation, and are gently guided toward emotional attunement and social sensitivity. There is no rush to say “I”—rather, the child learns to sense the “we.”
Of course, both systems have their shadows. In the West, the emphasis on personal expression can sometimes lead to isolation, anxiety, or narcissism — a pressure to be someone exceptional, even when one longs for belonging. In Japan, the focus on harmony can suppress difference or force conformity, making it difficult to voice pain or dissent.
Yet each carries profound wisdom. The American child learns to speak their truth. The Japanese child learns to listen to others’. One learns that freedom is a right; the other, that connection is a responsibility.
Neither is superior — they are simply different maps of what it means to be human. And as the world becomes more global, more plural, we are given the gift — and the challenge — of holding both maps at once.
What would it mean to raise a child who can say “I feel proud” and also ask, “How does this affect us?” What would it look like to build memory not just around personal triumphs, but around shared rituals, struggles, and silences?
In the end, perhaps the best mirror is the one that reflects both self and other — a face that holds autonomy and interdependence, a reverie not just between mother and child, but between cultures, echoing across time.
Part II: In the Mother’s Eyes/ Reverie, Reflection, and the Cultural Mirror: Part II – Women Chapter
About the author:
Dr Wiola Rebecka is a psychologist and researcher based in NYC. She is the author of the book “Rape :a history of shame diary of the survivors”.