Neonates have no psychology. If operated upon, for instance, they are
not supposed to show signs of trauma later on in life. Birth, according
to this
school of thought is of no psychological consequence to the newborn baby. It is immeasurably more important to his "primary
caregiver"
(mother) and to her supporters (read: father and other members of the
family). It is through them that the baby is, supposedly, effected. This
effect is evident in his (I will use
the male
form only for convenience's sake) ability to bond. The late Karl Sagan
professed to possess the diametrically opposed view when he compared
the process of death to that of being born. He was commenting upon the numerous testimonies of people brought back to life following their
confirmed,
clinical death. Most of them shared an experience of traversing a dark
tunnel. A combination of soft light and soothing voices and the figures
of their deceased nearest and dearest awaited them at the end of this
tunnel. All those who experienced it described the light as the
manifestation of an omnipotent, benevolent being. The tunnel - suggested
Sagan - is a rendition of the
mother's tract. The process
of birth involves gradual exposure to light and to the figures of
humans. Clinical death experiences only recreate birth experiences.
The
womb is a self-contained though open (not self-sufficient) ecosystem.
The Baby's Planet is spatially confined, almost devoid of light and
homeostatic. The fetus breathes liquid oxygen, rather than the gaseous
variant. He is subjected to an unending barrage of noises, most of them
rhythmical. Otherwise, there are very few stimuli to elicit any of his
fixed action responses. There, dependent and protected, his world lacks
the most evident features of ours. There are no dimensions where there
is no light. There is no "inside" and "outside", "self" and "others",
"extension" and "main body", "here" and "there". Our Planet is exactly
converse. There could be no greater disparity. In this sense - and it is
not a restricted sense at all - the baby is an alien. He has to
train himself and to learn to become human. Kittens, whose
eyes
were tied immediately after birth - could not "see" straight lines and
kept tumbling over tightly strung cords. Even sense data involve some
modicum and modes of conceptualization (see: "Appendix 5 - The Manifold
of Sense").
Even lower animals (worms) avoid unpleasant corners
in mazes in the wake of nasty experiences. To suggest that a human
neonate, equipped with hundreds of neural cubic feet does not recall
migrating from one planet to another, from one extreme to its total
opposition - stretches credulity. Babies may be asleep 16-20 hours a day
because they are shocked and depressed. These abnormal spans of sleep
are more typical of major depressive episodes than of vigorous,
vivacious, vibrant growth. Taking into consideration the mind-boggling
amounts of information that the baby has to absorb just in order to stay
alive - sleeping through most of it seems like an inordinately inane
strategy. The baby seems to be awake in the womb more than he is outside
it. Cast into the outer light, the baby tries, at first, to ignore
reality. This is our first defence line. It stays with us as we grow up.
It has long been noted that
pregnancy
continues outside the womb. The brain develops and reaches 75% of adult
size by the age of 2 years. It is completed only by the age of 10. It
takes, therefore, ten years to complete the development of this
indispensable organ – almost wholly outside the womb. And this "external
pregnancy" is not limited to the brain only. The baby grows by 25 cm
and by 6 kilos in the first year alone. He doubles his weight by his
fourth month and triples it by his first birthday. The development
process is not smooth but by fits and starts. Not only do the
parameters
of the body change – but its proportions do as well. In the first two
years, for instance, the head is larger in order to accommodate the
rapid growth of the Central Nervous System. This changes drastically
later on as the growth of the head is dwarfed by the growth of the
extremities of the body. The transformation is so fundamental, the
plasticity of the body so pronounced – that in most likelihood this is
the reason why no operative sense of identity emerges until after the
fourth year of childhood. It calls to mind Kafka's Gregor Samsa (who
woke up to find that he is a giant
cockroach).
It is identity shattering. It must engender in the baby a sense of
self-estrangement and loss of control over who is and what he is.
The
motor development of the baby is heavily influenced both by the lack of
sufficient neural equipment and by the ever-changing dimensions and
proportions of the body. While all other animal cubs are fully motoric
in their first few weeks of life –
the human
baby is woefully slow and hesitant. The motor development is
proximodistal. The baby moves in ever widening concentric circles from
itself to the outside world. First the whole arm, grasping, then the
useful fingers (especially the thumb and forefinger combination), first
batting at random, then reaching accurately. The inflation of its body
must give the baby the impression that he is in the process of devouring
the world. Right up to his second year the baby tries to assimilate the
world through his mouth (which is the prima causa of his own growth).
He divides the world into "suckable" and "insuckable" (as well as to
"stimuli-generating" and "not generating stimuli"). His mind expands
even faster than his body. He must feel that he is all-encompassing,
all-inclusive, all-engulfing, all-pervasive. This is why a baby has no
object permanence. In other words, a baby finds it hard to believe the
existence of other objects if he does not see them (=if they are not IN
his eyes). They all exist in his outlandishly exploding mind and only
there. The universe cannot accommodate a creature, which doubles itself
physically every 4 months as well as objects outside the perimeter of
such an inflationary being, the baby "believes". The inflation of the
body has a correlate in the inflation of consciousness. These two
processes overwhelm the baby into a passive absorption and inclusion
mode.
To assume that the child is born a "tabula rasa" is
superstition. 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 colours 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 coloured (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 colours – therefore, they must be
immediately able to tell the striking differences between the dark,
liquid placenta and the colourful 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", "colour/absence of
colour", "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 behavioural 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 favourably. Only then does the child
begin to develop a budding social-behavioural 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".
