Cerebral processes and responses have been observed in utero. Sounds
condition the EEG of fetuses. They startle at loud, sudden noises. This
means that they can hear and interpret what they hear. Fetuses even
remember stories read to them while in the womb. They prefer these
stories to others after they are born. This means that they can tell
auditory patterns and parameters apart. They tilt their head at the
direction sounds are coming from. They do so even in the absence of
visual cues (e.g., in a dark room). They can tell the mother's voice
apart (perhaps because it is high pitched and thus recalled by them).
In general, babies are tuned to human speech and can distinguish sounds
better than adults do. Chinese and Japanese babies react differently to
"pa" and to "ba", to "ra" and to "la". Adults do not - which is the
source of numerous jokes.
The equipment of the newborn is not limited to the auditory. He has
clear smell and taste preferences (he likes sweet things a lot). He
sees the world in three dimensions with a perspective (a skill which he
could not have acquired in the dark womb). Depth perception is well
developed by the sixth month of life.
Expectedly, it is vague in the first four months of life. When
presented with depth, the baby realizes that something is different -
but not what. Babies are born with their eyes open as opposed to most
other animal young ones. Moreover, their eyes are immediately fully
functional. It is the interpretation mechanism that is lacking and this
is why the world looks fuzzy to them. They tend to concentrate on very
distant or on very close objects (their own hand getting closer to
their face). They see very clearly objects 20-25 cm away.
But visual acuity and focusing improve in a matter of days. By the time
the baby is 6 to 8 months old, he sees as well as many adults do,
though the visual system - from the neurological point of view - is
fully developed only at the age of 3 or 4 years. The neonate discerns
some colors in the first few days of his life: yellow, red, green,
orange, gray - and all of them by the age of four months. He shows
clear preferences regarding visual stimuli: he is bored by repeated
stimuli and prefers sharp contours and contrasts, big objects to small
ones, black and white to colored (because of the sharper contrast),
curved lines to straight ones (this is why babies prefer human faces to
abstract paintings). They prefer their mother to strangers. It is not
clear how they come to recognize the mother so quickly. To say that
they collect mental images which they then arrange into a prototypical
scheme is to say nothing (the question is not "what" they do but "how"
they do it). This ability is a clue to the complexity of the internal
mental world of the neonate, which far exceeds our learned assumptions
and theories. It is inconceivable that a human is born with all this
exquisite equipment while incapable of experiencing the birth trauma or
the even the bigger trauma of his own inflation, mental and physical.
As early as the end of the third month of pregnancy, the fetus moves,
his heart beats, his head is enormous relative to his size. His size,
though, is less than 3 cm. Ensconced in the placenta, the fetus is fed
by substances transmitted through the mother's blood vessels (he has no
contact with her blood, though). The waste that he produces is carried
away in the same venue.
The composition of the mother's food and drink, what she inhales and
injects - all are communicated to the embryo. There is no clear
relationship between sensory inputs during pregnancy and later life
development. The levels of maternal hormones do effect the baby's
subsequent physical development but only to a negligible extent. Far
more important is the general state of health of the mother, a trauma,
or a disease of the fetus. It seems that the mother is less important
to the baby than the romantics would have it - and cleverly so. A too
strong attachment between mother and fetus would have adversely
affected the baby's chances of survival outside the uterus. Thus,
contrary to popular opinion, there is no evidence whatsoever that the
mother's emotional, cognitive, or attitudinal state effects the fetus
in any way. The baby is effected by viral infections, obstetric
complications, by protein malnutrition and by the mother's alcoholism.
But these - at least in the West - are rare conditions.
In the first three months of the pregnancy, the central nervous system
"explodes" both quantitatively and qualitatively. This process is
called metaplasia. It is a delicate chain of events, greatly influenced
by malnutrition and other kinds of abuse. But this vulnerability does
not disappear until the age of 6 years out of the womb. There is a
continuum between womb and world. The newborn is almost a very
developed kernel of humanity. He is definitely capable of experiencing
substantive dimensions of his own birth and subsequent metamorphoses.
Neonates can immediately track colors - therefore, they must be
immediately able to tell the striking differences between the dark,
liquid placenta and the colorful maternity ward. They go after certain
light shapes and ignore others.
Without accumulating any experience, these skills improve in the first
few days of life, which proves that they are inherent and not
contingent (learned). They seek patterns selectively because they
remember which pattern was the cause of satisfaction in their very
brief past. Their reactions to visual, auditory and tactile patterns
are very predictable. Therefore, they must possess a MEMORY, however
primitive.
But - even granted that babies can sense, remember and, perhaps emote -
what is the effect of the multiple traumas they are exposed to in the
first few months of their lives?
We mentioned the traumas of birth and of self-inflation (mental and
physical). These are the first links in a chain of traumas, which
continues throughout the first two years of the baby's life. Perhaps
the most threatening and destabilizing is the trauma of separation and
individuation.
The baby's mother (or caregiver - rarely the father, sometimes another
woman) is his auxiliary ego. She is also the world; a guarantor of
livable (as opposed to unbearable) life, a (physiological or gestation)
rhythm (=predictability), a physical presence and a social stimulus (an
other).
To start with, the delivery disrupts continuous physiological processes
not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. The neonate has to
breathe, to feed, to eliminate waste, to regulate his body temperature
- new functions, which were previously performed by the mother. This
physiological catastrophe, this schism increases the baby's dependence
on the mother.
It is through this bonding that he learns to interact socially and to
trust others. The baby's lack of ability to tell the inside world from
the outside only makes matters worse. He "feels" that the upheaval is
contained in himself, that the tumult is threatening to tear him apart,
he experiences implosion rather than explosion. True, in the absence of
evaluative processes, the quality of the baby's experience will be
different to ours. But this does not disqualify it as a PSYCHOLOGICAL
process and does not extinguish the subjective dimension of the
experience. If a psychological process lacks the evaluative or analytic
elements, this lack does not question its existence or its nature.
Birth and the subsequent few days must be a truly terrifying
experience.
Another argument raised against the trauma thesis is that there is no
proof that cruelty, neglect, abuse, torture, or discomfort retard, in
any way, the development of the child. A child - it is claimed - takes
everything in stride and reacts "naturally" to his environment, however
depraved and deprived.
This may be true - but it is irrelevant. It is not the child's
development that we are dealing with here. It is its reactions to a
series of existential traumas. That a process or an event has no
influence later - does not mean that it has no effect at the moment of
occurrence. That it has no influence at the moment of occurrence - does
not prove that it has not been fully and accurately registered. That it
has not been interpreted at all or that it has been interpreted in a
way different from ours - does not imply that it had no effect. In
short: there is no connection between experience, interpretation and
effect. There can exist an interpreted experience that has no effect.
An interpretation can result in an effect without any experience
involved.
And an experience can effect the subject without any (conscious)
interpretation. This means that the baby can experience traumas,
cruelty, neglect, abuse and even interpret them as such (i.e., as bad
things) and still not be effected by them. Otherwise, how can we
explain that a baby cries when confronted by a sudden noise, a sudden
light, wet diapers, or hunger? Isn't this proof that he reacts properly
to "bad" things and that there is such a class of things ("bad things")
in his mind?
Moreover, we must attach some epigenetic importance to some of the
stimuli. If we do, in effect we recognize the effect of early stimuli
upon later life development.
At their beginning, neonates are only vaguely aware, in a binary sort
of way.
l."Comfortable/uncomfortable", "cold/warm", "wet/dry", "color/absence
of color", "light/dark", "face/no face" and so on. There are grounds to
believe that the distinction between the outer world and the inner one
is vague at best. Natal fixed action patterns (rooting, sucking,
postural adjustment, looking, listening, grasping, and crying)
invariably provoke the caregiver to respond. The newborn, as we said
earlier, is able to relate to physical patterns but his ability seems
to extend to the mental as well. He sees a pattern: fixed action
followed by the appearance of the caregiver followed by a satisfying
action on the part of the caregiver. This seems to him to be an
inviolable causal chain (though precious few babies would put it in
these words). Because he is unable to distinguish his inside from the
outside - the newborn "believes" that his action evoked the caregiver
from the inside (in which the caregiver is contained). This is the
kernel of both magical thinking and Narcissism.
The baby attributes to himself magical powers of omnipotence and of
omnipresence (action-appearance). It also loves itself very much
because it is able to thus satisfy himself and his needs. He loves
himself because he has the means to make himself happy. The
tension-relieving and pleasurable world comes to life through the baby
and then he swallows it back through his mouth. This incorporation of
the world through the sensory modalities is the basis for the "oral
stage" in the psychodynamic theories.
This self-containment and self-sufficiency, this lack of recognition of
the environment are why children until their third year of life are
such a homogeneous group (allowing for some variance). Infants show a
characteristic style of behaviour (one is almost tempted to say, a
universal character) in as early as the first few weeks of their lives.
The first two years of life witness the crystallization of consistent
behavioral patterns, common to all children. It is true that even
newborns have an innate temperament but not until an interaction with
the outside environment is established - do the traits of individual
diversity appear.
At birth, the newborn shows no attachment but simple dependence. It is
easy to prove: the child indiscriminately reacts to human signals,
scans for patterns and motions, enjoys soft, high pitched voices and
cooing, soothing sounds. Attachment starts physiologically in the
fourth week. The child turns clearly towards his mother's voice,
ignoring others. He begins to develop a social smile, which is easily
distinguishable from his usual grimace. A virtuous circle is set in
motion by the child's smiles, gurgles and coos. These powerful signals
release social behaviour, elicit attention, loving responses.
This, in turn, drives the child to increase the dose of his signaling
activity. These signals are, of course, reflexes (fixed action
responses, exactly like the palmar grasp). Actually, until the 18th
week of his life, the child continues to react to strangers favorably.
Only then does the child begin to develop a budding social-behavioral
system based on the high correlation between the presence of his
caregiver and gratifying experiences. By the third month there is a
clear preference of the mother and by the sixth month, the child wants
to venture into the world. At first, the child grasps things (as long
as he can see his hand). Then he sits up and watches things in motion
(if not too fast or noisy). Then the child clings to the mother, climbs
all over her and explores her body. There is still no object permanence
and the child gets perplexed and loses interest if a toy disappears
under a blanket, for instance. The child still associates objects with
satisfaction/non-satisfaction. His world is still very much binary.
As the child grows, his attention narrows and is dedicated first to the
mother and to a few other human figures and, by the age of 9 months,
only to the mother. The tendency to seek others virtually disappears
(which is reminiscent of imprinting in animals). The infant tends to
equate his movements and gestures with their results - that is, he is
still in the phase of magical thinking.
The separation from the mother, the formation of an individual, the
separation from the world (the "spewing out" of the outside world) -
are all tremendously traumatic.
The infant is afraid to lose his mother physically (no "mother
permanence") as well as emotionally (will she be angry at this new
found autonomy?). He goes away a step or two and runs back to receive
the mother's reassurance that she still loves him and that she is still
there. The tearing up of one's self into my SELF and the OUTSIDE WORLD
is an unimaginable feat. It is equivalent to discovering irrefutable
proof that the universe is an illusion created by the brain or that our
brain belongs to a universal pool and not to us, or that we are God
(the child discovers that he is not God, it is a discovery of the same
magnitude). The child's mind is shredded to pieces: some pieces are
still HE and others are NOT HE (=the outside world). This is an
absolutely psychedelic experience (and the root of all psychoses,
probably).
If not managed properly, if disturbed in some way (mainly emotionally),
if the separation - individuation process goes awry, it could result in
serious psychopathologies. There are grounds to believe that several
personality disorders (Narcissistic and Borderline) can be traced to a
disturbance in this process in early childhood.
Then, of course, there is the on-going traumatic process that we call
"life".
Parenting - The Irrational Vocation
By: Dr. Sam Vaknin
There are some grounds to assume that a cognitive dissonance is
involved in feeling that children are more a satisfaction than a
nuisance. Why do people bother with parenting? It is time consuming,
exhausting, strains otherwise pleasurable and tranquil relationships to
their limits. Still, humanity keeps at it: breeding.
It is the easiest to resort to Nature. After all, all living species
breed and most of them parent. We are, all taken into consideration,
animals and, therefore, subject to the same instinctive behaviour
patterns. There is no point in looking for a reason: survival itself
(whether of the gene pool or, on a higher level, of the species) is at
stake. Breeding is a transport mechanism: handing the precious cargo of
genetics down generations of "organic containers".
But this is a reductionist view, which both ignores epistemological and
emotional realities - and is tautological, thereby explaining something
in terms of itself. Calling something by a different name or describing
the mechanisms involved in minute detail does not an explanation make.
First hypothesis: we bring children to the world in order to
"circumvent" death. We attain immortality (genetically and
psychologically - though in both cases it is imaginary) by propagating
our genetic material through the medium of our offspring.
This is a highly dubious claim. Any analysis, however shallow, will
reveal its weaknesses. Our genetic material gets diluted beyond
reconstruction with time. It constitutes 50% of the first generation,
25% of the second and so on. If this were the paramount concern -
incest should have been the norm, being a behaviour better able to
preserve a specific set of genes (especially today, when genetic
screening can effectively guard against the birth of defective babies).
Moreover, progeny is a dubious way of perpetuating one's self. No one
remembers one's great great grandfathers. One's memory is better
preserved by intellectual feats or architectural monuments. The latter
are much better conduits than children and grandchildren.
Still, this indoctrinated misconception is so strong that a baby boom
characterizes post war periods. Having been existentially threatened,
people multiply in the vain belief that they thus best protect their
genetic heritage and fixate their memory.
In the better-educated, higher income, low infant mortality part of the
world - the number of children has decreased dramatically - but those
who still bring them to the world do so partly because they believe in
these factually erroneous assumptions.
Second hypothesis: we bring children to the world in order to preserve
the cohesiveness of the family nucleus. This claim can more plausibly
be reversed: the cohesiveness of the social cell of the family
encourages bringing children to the world. In both cases, if true, we
would have expected more children to be born into stable families (ante
or post facto) than into abnormal or dysfunctional ones. The facts
absolutely contradict this expectation: more children are born to
single parent families (between one third and one half of them) and to
other "abnormal" (non-traditional) families than to the mother-father
classic configuration. Dysfunctional families have more children than
any other type of family arrangement. Children are an abject failure at
preserving family cohesiveness. It would seem that the number of
children, or even their very existence, is not correlated to the
stability of the family. Under special circumstances, (Narcissistic
parents, working mothers) they may even be a destabilizing factor.
Hypothesis number three: children are mostly born unwanted. They are
the results of accidents and mishaps, wrong fertility planning, wrong
decisions and misguided turns of events. The more sex people engage in
and the less preventive measures they adopt - the greater the
likelihood of having a child. While this might be factually true
(family planning is all but defunct in most parts of the world), it
neglects the simple fact that people want children and love them.
Children are still economic assets in many parts of the world. They
plough fields and do menial jobs very effectively. This still does not
begin to explain the attachment between parents and their offspring and
the grief experienced by parents when children die or are sick. It
seems that people derive enormous emotional fulfilment from being
parents.
This is true even when the children were unwanted in the first place or
are the results of lacking planning and sexual accidents. That children
ARE the results of sexual ignorance, bad timing, the vigorousness of
the sexual drive (higher frequency of sexual encounters) - can be
proven using birth statistics among teenagers, the less educated and
the young (ages 20 to 30).
People derive great happiness, fulfilment and satisfaction from their
children. Is not this, in itself, a sufficient explanation? The
pleasure principle seems to be at work: people have children because it
gives them great pleasure. Children are sources of emotional
sustenance. As parents grow old, they become sources of economic
support, as well. Unfortunately, these assertions are not sustained by
the facts. Increasing mobility breaks families apart at an early stage.
Children become ever more dependent on the economic reserves of their
parents (during their studies and the formation of a new family). It is
not uncommon today for a child to live with and off his parents until
the age of 30. Increasing individualism leaves parents to cope with the
empty nest syndrome. Communication between parents and children has
rarefied in the 20th century.
It is possible to think of children as habit forming (see: "The Habit
of Identity"). In this hypothesis, parents - especially mothers - form
a habit. Nine months of pregnancy and a host of social reactions
condition the parents. They get used to the presence of an "abstract"
baby. It is a case of a getting used to a concept. This is not very
convincing. Entertaining a notion, a concept, a thought, an idea, a
mental image, or a symbol very rarely leads to the formation of a
habit.
Moreover, the living baby is very different to its pre-natal image. It
cries, it soils, it smells, it severely disrupts the lives of its
parents. It is much easier to reject it then to transform it to a
habit. Moreover, a child is a bad emotional investment. So many things
can and do go wrong with it as it grows. So many expectations and
dreams are frustrated. The child leaves home and rarely reciprocates.
The emotional "returns" on an investment in a child are rarely
commensurate with the magnitude of the investment.
This is not to say that people do NOT derive pleasure and fulfilment
from their offspring. This is undeniable. Yet, it is neither in the
economic nor in the mature emotional arenas. To have children seems to
be a purely Narcissistic drive, a part of the pursuit of Narcissistic
supply.
For further elaboration, please refer to: "Malignant Self Love -
Narcissism Revisited" and the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
sections.
We are all Narcissists, to a greater or lesser degree. A Narcissist is
a person who projects a (false) image to the people around him. He then
proceeds to define himself by this very image reflected back at him.
Thus, he regards people as mere instruments, helpful in his Sisyphean
attempt at self-definition. Their attention is crucial because it
augments his weak ego and defines its boundaries. The Narcissist feeds
off their admiration, adoration and approval and these help him to
maintain a grandiose (fantastic and delusional) sense of self. As the
personality matures, Narcissism is replaced with the ability to
empathize and to love.
The energy (libido) initially directed at loving one's (false) self is
redirected at more multidimensional, less idealized "targets": others.
This edifice of maturity seems to crumble at the sight of one's
offspring. The baby evokes in the parent the most primordial drives, a
regression to infancy, protective, animalistic instincts, the desire to
merge with the newborn and a sense of terror generated by such a desire
(a fear of vanishing and of being assimilated). The parent relives his
infancy and childhood through the agency of the baby. The newborn
provides the parent with endless, unconditional and unbounded
Narcissistic supply. This is euphemistically known as love - but it is
really a form of symbiotic dependence, at least in the beginning of the
relationship. Such narcissistic supply is addictive even to the more
balanced, more mature, more psychodynamically stable of parents.
It enhances the parent's self-confidence, self esteem and buttresses
his self image. It fast becomes indispensable, especially in the
emotionally vulnerable position in which the parent finds himself. This
vulnerability is a result of the reawakening and reconstruction of all
the conflicts and unsolved complexes that the parent had with his own
parents.
If explanation is true, the following should also hold true:
a. The higher the self confidence, the self esteem, the self worth, the
clearer and more realistic the self image of the potential parent - the
less children he will have (the Principle of the Conservation of the
Ego boundaries)
b. The more sources of readily available Narcissistic supply - the less
children are needed (the substitutability of Narcissistic sources of
supply)
Sure enough, both predictions are validated by reality. The higher the
education and the income of adults - the fewer children they tend to
have. People with a higher education and with a greater income are more
likely to have a more established sense of self worth. Children become
counter-productive: not only is their Narcissistic input (supply)
unnecessary, they can also hinder further progress.