[coberst]

Walk a mile in the shoes of an infant!

Empathy is the act of imaginatively projecting one’s self into the shoes of another for the purpose of understanding that other person. I have never before made an attempt to empathize with an infant. When I try to do so now, I fail to find that eureka moment that leads me to conclude that my effort was successful. Have you ever successfully been able to empathize with an infant?

I have only recently begun to study the sciences of psychology and psychoanalysis, which started when I began reading the books of Ernest Becker. It appears that a major eruption within these fields of knowledge developed because Freud failed to make clear the nature of anxiety for the child. This eruption became visible when the psychoanalytic theory of humanization clashed with the sociological one.

Freud saw two principal sources for the child’s anxiety: at birth the child emerges utterly helpless and dependent; secondly the fear of castration resulting from the child’s own sexual urges. Evolution had created this explosive genetic mixture within a creature with a brain of almost infinite potential and malleability.

I have raised five children and have been around the development of seven grandchildren; never did I recognize during this time that the child is a creature that has a psyche that is constantly seeking to find contentment within a strange and frightening world. It was beyond my very limited comprehension that sexual urges were a force operating on this tiny creature or that fear was such a constant companion. I try to empathize but I find that it is a difficult task for the imagination.

“Evolution had decided the child’s fate, by building into him strong instincts of sexuality and a destructive aggression. With these strong drives, and his sense of helplessness, the child is baffled by his world: most of all, he must not lose the mother’s support, no matter how strong his dawning desires, and in order to keep that support he must fight against his own urges. Thus his major anxiety, over the loss of the protective and loving mother, is a problem stemming from his relentless search for pleasure. Freud could never get away from his instinct theory, and so he could never leave the idea that anxiety was due to social frustration.”

There seems to have developed consensus within the professional community that the child is not driven by sexuality and aggressive aggression as Freud’s theory proposed. Empirical research supplies significant evidence that the child’s anxiety is based upon helplessness in its situation as having desires that must continually be denied by his or her social environment. In the mother-child relationship the child does not bring any basic desires that can only be fulfilled by its bodily orifices, but the child does bring a vast need for physical support and closeness.

The important question in childhood development is regarding its training and the adaptation taking place between the child and the adult world. A curtailment of joy in the child’s life results from the need to adapt behavior that brings favorable response from the social milieu. The child shuts up within it self its biological urges and tries extra hard for security. Technically we say that the libido is “object-oriented rather than pleasure-oriented”.

The infant becomes passive, not because of toilet-training, because the world undermines her initiative and self-confidence. The infant is basically only a body and has yet to become a fully symbolic animal. The more that the child becomes frustrated by the demands of the adult world the more he falls back on his body; s/he is forced to affirm the priority of the body. A harsh training regime deprives her of her first and only secure footing; she is obliged to feel secondary to symbols.