All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (45 page)

Winnicott is well aware that mothers grow despondent and also depressed, are sometimes absent even when physically present, perhaps because their baby evokes dimly flickering events from their own infancy. The child may follow suit, give up in some way, as children in institutions do when there is no one to hold them–to respond to their ruthless needs which are also a primitive form of love. Time can be made up, someone else may be able to step in. But when there is no rallying on the mother’s part, the consequences, Winnicott’s work with deprived and delinquent children showed him, could be harsh.

This false, compliant self will eventually feel futile and inevitably at some period of later difficulty, break down.

In all the schools of relational therapy that stem from Winnicott, the analyst, by providing or mimicking a good-enough childhood environment where trust and continuity reign despite the patient’s anger or aggression, tries to make good or at least bring into awareness the many permutations of lack and deprivation from early childhood. The hope is that failures in loving are not perpetuated through the generations.

In the therapeutic models, much hangs on mother’s or a first carer’s love. It is hardly surprising, then, that contemporary young women may feel daunted by the prospect of babies. When they do engage in the challenge, often at a later age than their mothers, they’re determined somehow to make a consummate success of it. So it’s as well to put things in perspective, to underline that ‘good enough’ may be far better than perfect, and that children have blossomed under many and varying regimes, some in which they were considered as diminutive adults, others in which childhood was separated off as a special sphere of innocence.

The Child in History

The place of the infant within the family has shifted greatly over the centuries. In historical agrarian societies, extended families constituted a team, sharing work. Children–conceived in large numbers although only a small percentage survived into maturity–were understood as an eventual part of the labour force. Once out of their swaddled state and past their earliest game-playing infancy, they took part in the tasks of the household. According to the seventeenth-century French cleric Pierre de Bérulle, childhood was ‘the most vile and abject state of human nature, after that of death’. Even unweaned children were enjoined to learn the catechism, while a special four-hundred-page version existed for the tutoring of five-year-olds. Shaping unruly children into disciplined adults, by means of either religion or the rod, was a primary preoccupation for Catholics and Puritans alike.

Ushering in the Enlightenment, John Locke counselled that reason and education should guide child-rearing. In
Some Thoughts concerning Education
(1683) he drew on his experience as a tutor to advise on children’s diet, stool, clothes and cleanliness. He also drew attention to parents’ psychologically formative influence. Though each child had its own ‘natural Genius and Constitution’ and all should be ‘tenderly used… and have Play-things’,

The ‘Principle of all Vertue and Excellency,’ he continued, ‘lies in a power of denying ourselves the satisfaction of our own Desires, where Reason does not authorize them’.

Locke’s ‘nature’ is a reasonable human nature, not the sublime one of the Romantics. That reason also advises that parents teach their children by example: their beatings incur more of the same in their children, as do their lies and gluttony. Though restraint is necessary, imperiousness only leads the child to ask the question, ‘When will you die, Father?’

While the Romantics imagined childhood as a privileged, innocent space where the principles of a beloved and wild nature took their own shape, the Victorians brought that nature, at least for middle-class children, into a disciplined garden where happiness was intended to reign. This was the era of tough love and the inculcation of a rigid sense of duty. School became compulsory from 1870: the wealthy sent their sons off to board, far from mother-love, from a young age. Indeed, as Philippe Ariès argued in his classic
Centuries of Childhood
, for the rising middle classes from the seventeenth century onwards, schooling confined childhood within ‘a severe disciplinary system, which culminated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the total claustration of the boarding school’. Though it inflicted what was tantamount to the punishing life of a convict on the child, all was done out of an ‘obsessive love’. Rigid restraint and demand for obedience prevailed, both for the privileged middle-class and for the working child, bound in apprenticeship or in menial, repetitive toil. Corporal punishment was everywhere in use, as were those anti-masturbating devices that bear a close relationship to torture instruments. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, reformers campaigned to put an end to child labour and protect children from the adult sphere of work and responsibility.

Though named the ‘century of the child’, the twentieth has seen as much cruelty to children as earlier ones. Nonetheless, expectations of how children should be treated have risen hugely. In the West, this has come in tandem with welfare provision for health, care and schooling to at least sixteen, and with various theorizations of infancy and childhood, each of which has drawn up its own guidelines for rearing. Alongside the rise of psychoanalytic theories like Winnicott’s emerged the influential ones of John Bowlby and his ‘attachment’ school. Based in part on animal observation, attachment theory even more emphatically prioritized the importance of mother-love, understood as a warm, intimate, secure and continuous relationship with the mother. Maternal deprivation caused the child to protest, then despair, and finally to enter a state of denial, the damaging effects of which would resurface later in life.

Towards the end of the twentieth century and into our own, the values placed on childhood and on mother-love have both increased. This has coincided, perhaps not unexpectedly, with a generalized anxiety that children are everywhere in danger. Images of children under attack from famine or war feature regularly in the media. Statistics about child poverty, on the increase in our ever more stratified Western world, sit alongside sensationalist reports of abuse in the family: torture, and paedophilia. Teenagers unrestrained by parents seem ever to be on the rampage–at least on the news–though rarely at work in the universities which nearly half of them at least manage to attend. Divorce and lone or dysfunctional parenting are regularly elided with such problems, though poverty rarely plays into the same statistics-gathering and has a far greater impact. In such an environment, the pressure for perfect mother-love and calls for father-love looms ever larger. All of it sits uneasily with women’s need or desire to work, even though equality for women in all spheres is rightly championed and enshrined in law. Meanwhile little provision is made, except in the Scandinavian countries, for a life–work balance that might meet family needs.

Probing the forces underlying the difficulties in love, marriage and parenting in our competitive capitalist world, sociologists Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim have pointed in the first instance to an economic model which undermines the stability of families. During the second half of the twentieth century, they note, an increasingly mobile job market has meant that individuals must follow the demands of work
first
. In thrall to economic forces, families have grown increasingly atomized, rarely living near potentially supportive kin. With both partners in a family needing or wanting to work, the birth-rate has fallen. Meanwhile, given our cultural habit of serial monogamy, lone parenting, at least for part of a child’s life, has increased. In the UK in 2004, one in four children lived in lone-parent families, up from one in fourteen in 1972. Despite this, we continue to assume marriage to be based on love and intimacy. And the nuclear family, with so much evidence to the contrary, persists in appearing as a secure haven.

Bred in ever smaller numbers, children, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim argue, accrue greater and greater value. While the world of work trains one to behave rationally, to be efficient, quick and disciplined, the world of childhood emerges as its utopian opposite–enticingly green and golden. Play, the imagination, the love a partner can’t altogether or has failed to satisfy, all come to be located in the child. The baby holds out the promise that, through him, we may rediscover some of the lost sides of ourselves, express and fulfil all the needs that we fail to satisfy in the rest of our high-tech lives. For women in particular, motherhood may take on the glow of a refuge and fulfil the deepest private needs of home and love.

When we do at last make the difficult decision to have this precious child, his very value marks him out as a site of demands and expense. He becomes ‘a focus of parental effort, a carefully tended plant, a work of art, a cult object’. Childhood is transformed into a ‘programme’ requiring careful surveillance and monitoring. Each of the child’s phases becomes heavy with meanings learned from the psychobabble industries, as well as a site for parental squabbling. The more changing of partners there is, the more special the child becomes, to emerge as the parent’s only alternative to loneliness, ‘a bastion against the vanishing chances of loving and being loved’, a bulwark against utter disenchantment, a stand-in for a more equal partner or, indeed, a compensation for that partner’s lacks. With such an investment of hopes, loving can be volatile and may quickly deteriorate into bitter disappointment and even cruelty.

Enter the new technology of assisted reproduction: the glow of science now attends the making of babies, giving them an extra dimension of specialness. But this further complicates parental love. Like virtual dating and porn, AR seems to have expanded our sphere of possibilities and choice, at the same time making what once belonged more or less to the province of the uncontrollable into a rational, self-determined matter. Fertility is no longer a question of fate. Women can choose to have the desired children alone, independent of embodied males. They can store eggs and manipulate time. This can feel like a form of empowerment. But like all choices, it can also increase anxiety. Equally, the very fact of AR can resonate to reduce the value of being gendered female to that old reproductive function.

Parthenogenesis–women conceiving without the help of a male–is a symbolically freighted matter. Ever enraged at the philandering Zeus, who had given birth to wise Athena from his brow, the goddess Hera set out to match him. In Flora’s garden, one of the stories goes, she is shown a rare seed which, once swallowed, has her pregnant with Ares–god, of course, of war. Typhon, the monster with the savage jaws, father of Cerberus and the Gorgon, is another offspring conceived without the help of a male. Lame Hephaestus follows: Hera throws him down from the heavens. Breeding without a mate seems here to introduce rather unenviable progeny.

But science, like miraculous religion, pays little heed to pagan precedent. As he did for Mary, the Holy Spirit, now in the figure of a lab-coated doctor, can intercede to give any of us the possibility of a miraculous child, with no intervention necessary from a really existing male. This extraordinary change has been naturalized within just a few decades. So highly prized are children today, so enshrined has the right to fertility (with a little help from medical science) become, that some young and emancipated women–whether gay or simply single–prefer to engender donor babies than have a child with a man. Others have surrogate babes or make use, with their partners, of the various other available forms of reproductive technology.

It might be said that all this extends the simple continuum created by the invention of the contraceptive pill, which did so much to enable women to control reproduction: their children, whose unconscious was shaped in the homes of liberated mothers, find no great difficulty in taking the leap into assisted reproduction. Yet the shift is a remarkable one, and inevitably accompanied with some unease and residual apprehension. Its attendant anxieties can percolate through generations of siblings–in the way that old-fashioned arrangements did when secret loves brought children fathered outside into the family. Now children conceived with donor sperm, once they grow up, can and do seek out any number of donor kin and establish sometimes large horizontal kinship networks. New meanings of ‘father’, ‘mother’ and ‘sibling’ tug against the old, forcing conventional notions of family love and responsibility into frames that often don’t fit. Little wonder that the whole notion of ‘family’, already endangered and in question from both outside and in, renders traditionalists shrill in their attempts to sanctify it, while others live out its many permutations of gender and stepparenting.