The Reenchantment of the World (23 page)

live
those consequences; and in a Cartesian culture,
that is not an easy task.

 

 

Until recently, only two major scientific figures had met this challenge,
and it is perhaps not an accident that they were both psychiatrists,
immersed in the problem of how various individuals negotiated the
boundary between "in here" and "out there." We have discussed the first,
Carl Jung, in some detail. As we saw, Jung broke with scientism, but
doing so propelled him backward in time. In medieval and Renaissance
alchemy he recognized a wholeness that permeated the psyche of the
Middle Ages, and which was still present in human dream life. Clearly,
dream analysis has a timeless importance, but any science constructed
on Jungian premises would necessarily be a straightforward revival of
the occult world view and thus a return to naive animism. Jung shows us
the path to a non-Cartesian world view, but his premises cannot be the
basis for a post-Cartesian paradigm, which this book seeks to define.

 

 

The second major scientific figure who lived the consequences of rejecting
Cartesiamsm was Wilhelm Reich, despite the unlikely claims and outright
scientism of his later years, Reich's work is a major breakthrough in our
knowledge of the mind/body relationship and an enormous contribution
to any post-Cartesian epistemology. Since Reich, unlike Jung, was
forward-looking (i.e., contemporary and politically progressive) rather
than medieval in outlook, the social reaction to him could not be confined
simply to branding him an obscurantist. That Reich is (to my knowledge)
the only thinker to have had the distinction of seeing his works burned
by the FBI suggests that he struck a fairly deep nerve and tends, in fact,
to validate his own argument about the dialectical longing for, and hatred
of, repressed instincts in Western industrial society. Reich attempted
to reintroduce Dionysus to a culture gone berserk from Apollo, but the
real importance of his work is that it points to the primacy of visceral
understanding: the recognition that the intellect is grounded in affect,
and the contention that instinctual repression is not merely unhealthy,
but productive of a world view that is factually inaccurate. For our
own purposes, Reich's work, specifically his understanding of the human
unconscious, puts flesh and blood into the concept of tacit knowing,
and in doing so, makes nonanimistic participation possible. With the
scientific discovery that the body and the unconscious are one, and the
concomitant recognition of a close relationship between the unconscious
and tacit knowing, the subject/object distinction collapses, for body
knowledge (sensual knowledge) then becomes a part of all cognition. The
divorce between Logos and Eros may have been relatively brief, and these
traditional partners in the search for truth may now be beginning to
renegotiate their relationship.

 

 

Reich's discovery has remarkable implications for the whole question
of participating consciousness. Since the seventeenth century only
scientific thought has been regarded as truly cognitive; other types of
understanding are "merely" emotion. The identity of the sensual and the
intellectual was, as I have shown, the crux of the mimetic tradition,
and is perhaps best illustrated by the decidedly nonmetaphoncal use of the
word "know" in the Bible: "And Abraham knew his wife Sarah." In the modern
period, the relationship between science and other forms of knowledge or
belief remains highly problematic. All serious philosophies that have
made concessions to nondiscursive thought, notes Susanne Langer, have
turned to mysticism or irrationalism, that is, "dispensed with thought
altogether."1 If Eros can be revived at all, it has to be through the
claim that Eros is a fully articulated way of knowing the world, the
ignorance of which has been intellectually crippling. It is precisely
this that Reich, and his followers, have claimed.

 

 

In this chapter I hope first to demonstrate that the union of Eros and
Logos is a scientific fact rooted in the experience of preconscious
infancy, and thus that the holistic world view, or participating
consciousness, has a physiological basis. Second, I wish to elaborate
Reich's equation of the body with the unconscious and apply it to the
concept of tacit knowing, thus making the point that the holistic
experience of infancy continues to permeate adult cognition and
understanding of the world. Taken together, these two points substantiate
the analysis of Chapter 5 in a biological way; close the Cartesian
paradigm down as a legitimate way of knowing reality; and open the door
to an exploration of what might constitute a neo-holistic science.

 

 

Since Freud's first formulation of the subject, students of child
development have largely agreed that the first three months of life
constitute a period of "primary narcissism," or in Erich Neumann's
terminology, the "cosmic-anonymous phase." The infant is all Unconscious
(primary process) during this time, its life essentially a continuation
of the intrauterine period. It behaves as though it and its mother were
a dual unity, having a common boundary, and it lives as easily in others
as in itself. External sensations, including the mother's breast, are
perceived as coming from the inside. The world is largely explored by
hands and mouth. "The child," writes Sam Keen in "Apology for Wonder,"

 

 

is, at first, a mouth, and his oral incorporation of the breast of
the mother and other objects in the environment forms his initial way
of relating to the exterior world. He quite literally tastes reality
and tests it to see whether it is palatable. What promises delight
to the taste buds -- whether it be the breast, the thumb, or a nearby
toy -- he seeks to incorporate, to intuit, to take into himself.

 

 

For the infant, subject and object are almost completely undifferentiated,
a fact that led Freud to argue that it was this particular perception
that broke through adult dualistic consciousness in the mystic experience
(Romain Rolland called this phenomenon the "oceanic feeling" in a letter
he wrote Freud in 1927). The pleasure of reality is identical to the
knowledge of reality at this point; fact and value are one and the same
thing. "The surface of the body with its erogenous zones," writes Erich
Neumann, "is the principal scene of the child's experience both of itself
and of others; that is, the infant still experiences everything in its
own skin."2

 

 

Between this stage and the child's third year, a gradual series of
developments finally produces a discontinuity that constitutes the
crystallization of the ego. Yet despite the birth trauma, the comparative
harshness of modern child-rearing practices, and the inevitable
frustrations of the environment, the term "cosmic anonymity" is not an
inappropriate description of all of the first two postnatal years, a
virtual paradise compared to what comes after. From the fetal period on,
the infant body, or Unconscious, is subjected to the constant message
of subject/object merger, of lack of tensions (and thus distinctions)
between self and other. The enormous power of this message, which
is the foundation of all holistic cognition, becomes apparent when
we translate it into physiological terms. It means that the infant's
entire existence is sensual, infinitely more sensual than it will ever
be again. In Freud's famous formulation, the preconscious infant is
"polymorphously perverse." More precisely, it is polymorphously whole. The
entire surface of its body is an agent of sense, and its relationship
to its surroundings almost completely tactile. Its entire body, and
thus its entire world, is sensualized. For more than two full years,
then, a fundamental realization is fostered in the body, or unconscious
mind, of all of us, a foundation that can never be uprooted: 'I am my
environment.' Hence the phrase "
primary
process": the unconscious
knowledge of the world, with its dreamlike structure of reasoning and
cognition, comes first. The ego, Freud argued, is a secondary phenomenon;
it is a structure that crystallizes out of cosmic anonymity.3

 

 

This situation raises an obvious question: Why leave the Garden of
Eden at all? Why does ego-crystallization occur in the first place? Ego
psychologists such as Margaret Mahler, Edith Jacobson, and Jean Piaget
have dealt with this development as though it were an inherent and
universal process. Freud, with his keen historical awareness, was
not so easily misled. As our earlier discussion of the history of
consciousness reveals, there was a time in human history when the
ego did not crystalize out. Pre-Homeric man was completely, or almost
completely, primary process, and his mode of knowing correspondingly
mimetic. Throughout the Middle Ages people saw themselves as continuous
with the environment to some degree, the alchemist being the chief
spokesman for this perception. As we saw, the final break occurred
only towards the end of the sixteenth century; that is really what "Don
Quixote" is all about. Being aware that ego-crystallization in general
was a relatively recent development, Freud resolved the problem of its
emergence in the individual with the phylogeny/ontogeny argument that the
growth of the modern infant recapitulated the history of the race as a
whole. But if we accept this formulation, and do not see ego-development
as at least partly innate, we must then argue (as Freud did for most of
his career) that the ego is forced to crystallize out as a result of
the frustrating impact of reality (i.e., the environment). Hence his
expression "reality principle," and his famous dictum, "Where id is,
there shall ego be." But this statement, if true, implies that reality,
especially in the form of child-rearing practices, must have become
increasingly frustrating with the passage of centuries, and that there
must have been some sort of turning point at the end of the Middle Ages,
when ego-strength made its appearance in full-blown form. In fact,
ego-development does have its innate aspects, but is also a cultural
artifact: there does seem to be a history of increasing alienation that
climaxed on the eve of the Scientific Revolution.

 

 

Before discussing the innate and learned (historical) aspects of
ego-development, however, I wish to emphasize the staggering implications
of the previous paragraph. If Freud's line of reasoning is correct,
then the ego, which we take for granted as a given of normal human
life, is not only just a cultural artifact, but -- in its contemporary
form, at least -- actually a product of the capitalist, or industrial,
epoch. The quality of ego-strength, which modern society regards as a
yardstick of mental health, is a mode of being-in-the-world which is
fully "natural" only since the Renaissance. In reality, it is merely
adaptive, a tool necessary for functioning in a manipulative and
reifying (i.e., life-denying) society. This historically conditioned
nature of ego also suggests that if modern society in its present form
were to disappear, "man" as we understand him would vanish as well --
a rather eerie conclusion that Michel Foucault was unable to avoid
in the concluding pages of "The Order of Things." In other words, a
different way of life might not only mean the end of ego-strength as
a virtue, but of ego-strength as a way of existing, and therefore of
"man" as he is currently conceived. Equally surprising (perhaps) is
the implication that what we regard as healthy personality traits are
the product of attitudes toward children, and child-rearing practices,
that are hopelessly neurotic -- a thesis central to Reichian psychology.4

 

 

To take the issue of ego-development first, then, recent research has
shown that the first two years of life, even the first three months, are
not as anonymous or unconscious as Freud and Neumann believed. Newborn
infants can localize a touch on the skin, or a source of sound, though
not with any great accuracy. They can locate the position of an object
in space, and begin to imitate at six days of age. If the mother sticks
out her tongue, so will the baby, and as Thomas Bower points out,
this is a complex achievement. The baby recognizes that its own tongue
(which it can only know by the feel of it) matches its mothers tongue,
which it can see. This identification of its own body parts with those
of others is a primitive form of subject/object correlation.5

 

 

At about four or five months, the unspecific smile characteristic of
the first three months becomes a particular response to the mother. The
child acquires a new look of alertness and attentiveness; it is no longer
drifting. For Margaret Mahler, this shift in perception is the onset
of body-ego formation. At six months, the baby begins to experiment,
pulling at the mother's hair or face, putting food into her mouth,
straining away from her to get a better look. At seven or eight months,
the pattern of comparative scanning begins. The child looks away from the
mother and back to her, comparing the familiar with the unfamiliar. At age
eight months, the child begins to distinguish between different objects,
between father and mother, for example, and also to respond to facial
indicators of mood. At nine months children no longer automatically
grab at anything presented, but first stop to look at what is being
offered. The belief in object constancy, that an object continues to
exist when not in view, develops within the next three months.6

 

 

Other aspects of ego-development can be seen by charting a child's
behavior in front of the mirror. The first awareness of one's body-image
in the mirror occurs at about six months, at which time the child smiles
at the image of another. From six to eight months, it begins to slow
down its movements in front of the mirror and start relating them to the
movement of the image, appearing thoughtful as it does so. At nine to
ten months, it makes deliberate movements while observing its image,
actually experimenting with the relationship between itself and the
image. At twelve months, the child recognizes that the image is a symbol,
but its grasp of that fact remains precarious for a while, and thus it
continues to play with its reflection, in some cases up to thirty-one
months of age.7