Kowakare: A New Perspective on the Development of Early Mother–Offspring Relationship

The mother–offspring relationship has components of both positivity and negativity. Kowakare is a new concept introduced to explain an adaptive function of the negativity in the early mother-offspring relationship. Kowakare is the psycho-somatic development of the relationship as the process of accumulation in the otherness of offspring. Early human Kowakare has two frameworks, biological inter-body antagonism and socio-cultural allomothering compensating the antagonism. Some features of feeding/weaning, parental aversion to offspring’s bodily products, and transition from dyad to triad relationship (proto–triad relationship) in tactile play are discussed. Early human Kowakare is promoted by allomothering with the nested systems of objects/persons/institutions as interfaces between mother and offspring. Kowakare makes mother–offspring relationship a mutually autonomous and cooperative companionship.