The Reenchantment of the World (24 page)

 

 

From ten/twelve months to sixteen/eighteen months the child begins to
practice with its larger environment. It moves away from the mother
physically by crawling (but still holding on, occasionally); eventually,
it masters upright locomotion. The child now begins to perceive mother
from a greater distance and establish familiarity with a wider segment of
the world. From fifteen to twenty-four months the original "cosmic unity"
starts to break down in earnest. The child begins to balance separation
and reunion by "shadowing" the mother (watching and following), then
darting away, expecting to be chased and picked up. There is both a wish
for reunion and a fear of reengulfment. The mother is now a person in
its mind, not just "home base." The little boy or girl starts to bring
things back from the outside world to show her. He or she also begins
to experience the body as a personal possession, not wishing it to be
handled. The child learns to cope with mother's absences, and develops
disappearance/reappearance games. It will practice deliberately hiding
toys and then finding them, or standing in front of a mirror and suddenly
ducking out of sight. Mother or father will be instructed to cover their
own eyes ("don't see me") and then abruptly uncover them ("see me"),
or told to pretend not to see the child and then suddenly "discover"
it with exaggerated glee. Language develops in the second year of life,
emerging out of a "babbling" phase in which the child makes all kinds
of sounds, both invented and imitated. The use of the pronoun "I" occurs
at about twenty-one months.8

 

 

So innate do all these actions appear that it would seem impossible to
argue for a two-year period in which primary process is dominant. A
nascent ego seems to be present and growing from birth. Yet we have
to ask ourselves what we mean by ego, or ego-consciousness. Clearly,
the pre-Homeric Greeks, who did not possess such consciousness, went
through many of the processes just described, including the evolution of
a brilliantly sophisticated language system. All of these developments
may be necessary conditions for ego-crystallization, but they are
not sufficient ones. Ego-consciousness can in fact be compared to
pregnancy. There are degrees of it, but (to quote an old saw) one cannot
be "just a little bit pregnant." Like a quantum jump, ego-consciousness
involves a specific kind of discontinuity, and in the modern infant it
occurs at roughly two and a half years of age, when the child one day has
the startling thought: "I am I." The child begins to use the pronoun "I"
several months before this event, we should add; it is no surprise that
it exists in pre-Homeric Greek and all ancient languages. But this is not
the same thing as having the thought, "I am I." The latter expresses a
wholly different level of existence, one involving the recognition that
ultimately you cannot be known by the other and are radically separate
from him. This recognition takes place at about the same time that the
child becomes convinced of what its image in the mirror represents,
and is, as Merleau-Ponty notes, the beginning of alienation. From this
point on the child begins to recognize that it is visible for others,
and that there is a conflict between the "me" it feels and the "me"
others see. The outside world, the child now realizes, can interpret it
in a way that denies its own experience of itself. The third year of life
(at least in modern Western cultures) is thus a trying period for parents
as the child goes about establishing its identity with a determined
stubbornness. Indeed, failure to be a "bad boy" or girl at this point can
result in eventual psychosis, the key fear being that you are totally
transparent to others, being nothing more than what they interpret you
to be. The healthy child often objects to being watched at this time,
for it now understands that its identity goes beyond the roles or the
situation it is in, that it is an "I," an ego at odds with the world
(to some extent), and to the interpretation that the world might place
upon it. Dualistic consciousness is now an irrevocable fact.9

 

 

We should thus not confuse motor and perceptual skills with
ego-crystallization per se, for as we saw in Chapter 3 (following the
analysis of Julian Jaynes), entire civilizations can be built without
benefit of the latter. One can generate governments and wars, construct
the ziggurat or the Code of Hammurabi, and even predict eclipses, without
benefit of an ego. In order to undertake such projects one certainly
has to be able to imitate, grasp, and locate objects in space, but they
require no soul-searching or self-awareness. I belabor this point because
it is so difficult for us, with our own ego-consciousness, to comprehend
that ego-crystallization is a comparatively recent development; that
one can move through all or most of the stages of motor and perceptual
development described above without ego discontinuity taking place. At
most, then, one can say that ego-development is partly innate, but that
it apparently requires certain cultural triggers to "spring" it, to tip
the balance all the way. Whereas ego-crystallization may be natural,
it does not follow that it is inevitable. Furthermore, the range of
ego-strengths present in the world today, especially from culture to
culture, as well as the gradual hardening that occurred between Plato's
Greece and the Scientific Revolution (with a strong upswing thereafter),
shows that even within the context of ego-discontinuity a great variety
of behavior is possible. All the evidence thus points to the limits
of ego psychology, which, through its laboratory experiments with
children, tries to establish a case for the innateness and universality
of ego-crystallization.

 

 

What exactly is the ego, then? Although they are not the same thing,
ego and language possess important structural similarities. As Daniel
Yankelovich and William Barrett point out in their pioneering study,
"Ego and Instinct," ego and language are the joint product of evolution
and culture, and their development will not take place if society does not
provide critical experiences at the appropriate time. If the "babbling"
phase of language does not occur in a social context, the child will
not learn to speak at all -- as has been documented in a few cases
where children were discovered being raised by animal species. Both
languages and ego can be regarded as "incomplete psychic structures,"
or what the authors call "depelopmentals": "structures that grow only
when phylogenetic factors interact with critical individual experience at
specific stages in the life cycle." Such individual experience, however,
is really social in nature, and it varies significantly from culture to
culture and between different historical epochs.10

 

 

The recognition that cultural factors are important for ego-crystallization
actually lurks in the survey of supposedly innate ego-development presented
above. As Thomas Bower points out, certain perceptions are innate and
certain ones acquired.11 Not all cultures believe in object constancy
or solidity, for example, nor is it clear that children of every culture
practice "shadowing" games with the mother, or games of "see me"/"don't
see me," or those of third-year identity-testing. In earlier times,
such games were probably absent altogether. Ego-strength is much softer
in nonindustrial cultures than in ours, and such ego-developments are
probably correspondingly weaker. Studies such as the one Gregory Bateson
and Margaret Mead did of Bali, for example, reveal child-rearing patterns
that have little in common with our own (see Chapter 7). In a similar
vein, the objection to body handling that occurs at around eighteen
months of age was not present during the Middle Ages and is apparently
still absent in many Third World cultures.12

 

 

In contrast, we discover that some of the mothers in Margaret Mahler's
study (see note 2) were highly motivated by the prestige attached to
being part of a research unit at the Masters Children's Center in New
York and, as a result, they were often achievement-oriented with regard
to their children, wanting them to be as precocious as possible in their
sensorimotor development. But researchers and mothers watched anxiously
for signs of ego-development (or what they took to be such signs). Had
these not arisen in any particular child, it would have been branded
autistic. Yet at some point in the history of the race, we were all
"autistic," and it was ego-development that was viewed with alarm. The
strong contemporary bias in favor of ego-development cannot help but
prejudice the "scientific" study of it. The research unit at Masters was,
in fact, a perfect mirror of the American ethos. The classic Jewish joke,
"my son the doctor" (aged six months), is not just a
Jewish
joke;
it is the norm for Western industrial societies, which turn out rigid
ego-structures with a vengeance. It becomes difficult to demarcate
sharply between innate and acquired when the infant is subject to a
socialization process that begins with its first breath.13

 

 

Though the issue of which cultural factors trigger ego-crystallization is
immensely complex, and (since ego is erroneously regarded as a universal
human characteristic) very poorly researched, one factor can be pointed
to with some degree of certainty. It is quite clear that the history of
increasing ego-development in the West is also the history of increasing
repression and erotic deprivation, manifested over the centuries by a drop
in the body contact and sensual enjoyment that normally occurs during the
first two years of life. Ego-development is not merely purchased at the
expense of sensual enjoyment (the classical theory of sublimation); more
significantly, it has repression (i.e., sexual alienation) as a condition
necessary -- and possibly even sufficient -- for its development. In
short, enough repression may tip the balance, and "impregnate" the
psyche. Let us briefly examine the evidence for this thesis.

 

 

Prior to the rise of agricultural civilization (i.e., before ca. 8,000
B.C.), man lived as a hunter-gatherer. Of necessity, mothers carried
their babies on the body almost all the time. Mother and child were not
separated after birth. They slept together, and the mother breast-fed
the child for nearly four years. Feeding was dependent on spontaneous
hunger rather than prearranged schedules.14

 

 

Much of this practice was retained in the ensuing millennia. Nursing in
andent Judea, for example, averaged two to three years, and babies were
still carried around, rather than put in a crib or left unattended. Older
children were taken on the shoulder or carried astride, as is still
the custom in Third World cultures. The Greeks typically transferred
the neonate to a basin of warm water, to maintain the continuity of
intrauterine experience. In the eleventh century A.D., the great Arab
physician Avicenna recommended nursing for two years, and urged gradual
rather than sudden weaning -- caveats that may suggest the existence of
some departure from the custom of extended breast-feeding.15

 

 

The significance of breast-feeding, curiously enough, lies less in the
chemical value of the mothers milk than in the cutaneous stimulation
provided by the accompanying maternal-infant contact. In "Touching:
The Human Significance of the Skin," Ashley Montagu gathered mountains
of evidence to show that in all mammalian species, a healthy adult life
is not possible without a large amount of tactile stimulation during the
first few years, and especially the first few months, after birth. Indeed,
the proper development of the nervous system, including myelinization
(formation of the fatty sheath of protective tissue around the nerves),
depends on it. Although the quantity of tactile stimulation of infants
has tapered off over time, it was maintained to a very great extent down
to about 1500 A.D. Whether through direct carrying, extended nursing, or
even the gentle manipulation of the infants genitals, body stimulation
was a large part of early life, and all of these practices are still
maintained in those parts of the world which are as yet unaffected by
modernization.16

 

 

Direct correlations cannot be made, but child-rearing practices among
contemporary non-Western cultures may be indicative of what was typical
in the West down to the early Renaissance. In Bali, for example, the
child is carried on the hip or in a sling, in almost constant contact
with the mother for the first two years of life. During the first six
months it is never not in someone's arms except while being bathed,
and the parents typically play with the male infants genitals when he
is in the bath. Similar information has been gathered about a number of
contemporary "primitive" societies, and the matter of playing with the
infants genitals was singled out as a point of comparison by Philippe
Ariès in "Centuries of Childhood." In the Middle Ages, he tells us,
public physical contact with children's private parts was an amusing sort
of game, forbidden only when the child reached puberty. This attitude
changed sharply during the Renaissance, but is, Ariès notes, still
widespread in Islamic cultures. Interestingly enough, practices such as
placing the neonate in a warm bath, or encouraging infantile sexuality,
are slowly making something of a comeback, the rationale being that such
practices lead to a less anxious and more healthy sexual life.17

 

 

Ariès also provides a detailed study of late medieval attitudes toward
children, which imply that this was a period of changing practices in the
matter of body contact.18 Indeed, the single most important theme of
his book is separation, dissociation. Ariès is able to show that prior
to the late sixteenth century, neither the nuclear family nor the child
existed as concepts. Until the twelfth century, art did not portray the
morphology of childhood, and portraits of children were almost nonexistent
until the end of the sixteenth century. The seventeenth century literally
"discovered" childhood, and made a point of demarcating it as a stage
in a series of separate phases of life. Far from implying greater care
of infants, however, this demarcation involved greater alienation from
them. Special children's clothing was now used to make visible the stages
of growth and, at the end of the sixteenth century, there suddenly
emerged a great preoccupation with the supposed dangers of touching
and body contact. Children were taught to conceal their bodies from
others. In addition, it was now believed that children must never be left
alone. The result was that the adult became a sort of psychic watchdog,
always supervising the child but never fondling it -- a practice that
is really the prototype of scientific observation and experimentation.