Friends and Enemies: Our Need to Love and Hate. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ which each of us inherits is an array of possibilities. How each of these possibilities becomes an actuality depends on the experiences each individual encounters.

      The array of possibilities is an array of forms. There is the form of a heart, a brain, a hand and so on. One individual’s form of a hand might become a hand which is soft and slender. Another individual’s form of a hand might become a hand which is large and muscular, while for another individual the form of a hand might become corrupted by the effects of Agent Orange with which the baby’s father was sprayed during the Vietnam War, and the baby is born with two stumps at the end of his arms but no fingers.

      Similarly, that array of genetic possibilities which can become the ability to create meaning contains forms of thought. These are forms which are found in all human beings. Just as we explore our environment using the form of the hand so we think about our environment using our different forms of thought.

      Just how many forms of thought there are I do not know, but it seems to me that there are three forms which are essential for the effective functioning of the meaning system, so that we can each live as an individual in a society where other individuals are essential to our survival, both as a body and as a person, yet where other individuals, while they might cherish our body and indeed our existence, often threaten our survival as a person. In families this happens all the time.

      These three forms of thought are:

      1. The Face, the means by which a baby bonds with a mothering person;

      2. The Story, the means by which an event becomes meaningful to us;

      3. The Strategy for Survival – Primitive Pride, the means by which the meaning structure maintains its existence in the face of threat.

       The Face

      Amongst the artefacts in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens is a statue much older than the beautiful gold jewellery and the charming pottery of Mycenean Greece also in the museum. This statue comes from the Cyclades and was sculpted nearly 3,000 years before the birth of Christ. Despite its age it looks remarkably modern. It is a representation of the human form, about five feet high, in cool, pale marble, elegant and calm and without adornment or accretions of hair or clothes. The head is smooth, the face oval, the eyes no more than dots, nose straight and vertical, mouth no more than two half moons, the ears small circles. All human faces are more complex and irregular than this simple design, yet each of us, whether we lived five thousand years ago or now, sees this simple pattern as a face. To us an upright oval which encloses a vertical line in the middle, topped by two small circles on either side and below its base a horizontal line, is a face.

      This interpretation of this design seems not to be a learned but an innate response. Newborn babies prefer to look at a face than at anything else, be they real faces, photographs of faces or cartoon faces. When a baby is offered an array of designs where each design consists of a vertical oval containing two small circles and two straight lines in various positions the baby fixes his eyes on the one particular arrangement of circles and lines which we call a face. The form of thought which enables us to recognize a face allows us not only to identify the basic form of a face but to make fine distinctions which allow us to distinguish one person from another. ‘We are our faces. To our fellow human beings, if not to ourselves, they are the key identifiers. Our brains have exquisite machinery for processing and storing a particular arrangement of eyes, nose and mouth and for picking it out from other very similar arrangements.’²⁰ Computer experts are now turning this ability of ours into algorithms which can identify one particular face in a crowd of faces and give it a name. Big Brother is indeed watching you.

      The form of the face is essential to the formation of relationships. With this form of thought the baby has a hook for catching hold of other people. Offered a number of faces and particularly a face which appears frequently the baby elaborates the basic form. If a baby at two or three weeks is offered an array of photographs, one of which is the face of his mother and the others the faces of women who look like his mother, the baby will identify his mother’s photograph and gaze at that in preference to all the other photographs. Of course the baby has more information about this face than he has about the others. ‘The distance between the eyes of the baby at the breast and the mother’s eyes is about ten inches, exactly the distance for the sharpest focus and clearest vision for the young infant.’²¹ Now he knows her smell, her touch, and the comfort, satisfaction and pleasure she can provide. He learnt the sound of her voice when he was still in her womb. (Babies are born interested in human voices. At birth babies prefer to listen to human speech than to other sounds, and at four days they can distinguish certain properties of their mother tongue from those of other languages.)

      Cartoons and photographs are all very well, but what the baby wants is a face which responds, which moves and talks, and shows those changes which reveal something of what is always hidden: the other person’s thoughts and feelings. Just as the stony face of the Cycladian statue is as disturbing as it is intriguing, so we are all disturbed by someone whose face reveals nothing of their thoughts and feelings. The face of authority, emotionless, unrevealing, is adopted by those who want to inspire anxiety in those over whom they wish to have power.

      It is impossible to establish a relationship with someone whose face reveals nothing of their thoughts and feelings. A baby who is born to a mother who is depressed soon discovers this.

      Studies of depressed mothers and their babies show how, when the mother fails to respond to the baby or when the mother begins an interaction with the baby and then does not complete it, the baby is profoundly affected. Daniel Stern, who has been studying the interactions between mothers and babies for many years, described what happens.

      Compared with the infant’s expectations and wishes, the mother’s face is flat and expressionless. (I am assuming that the mother has become depressed recently enough that the infant has a set of schemas of her normal behaviour with which to compare her present, depressed behaviour.) She breaks eye contact and does not reestablish it. Her contingent responsiveness is less, and her animation and tonicity disappear. Along with these invariants coming from the mother, there are resonant invariants evoked in the infant: the flight of his animation, a deflation of his posture, a fall in positive affect and facial expressivity, a decrease in activation, and so on. In sum, the experience is descriptively one of ‘microdepression’.²²

      Those people who claim that, since depression ‘runs in families’, it must be caused by a gene are ignoring the profound effects a depressed mother has on a child. What neuronal gestalts does a ‘microdepression’ form and what behaviour do they later produce?

      The form of the face which we each inherit carries with it the information not just that the face is significant for the baby but that it is qualitatively different from those other patterns which the baby learns are called ‘bottle’, ‘cot’, ‘rattle’, ‘dummy’ and so on. Human beings are different from objects because, even though there are objects which move and make sounds as humans do, objects do not have thoughts and feelings.

      Babies are born with the potential to acquire this information but they cannot make this potential actual unless they are presented with one consistent, caring, interacting face. This face does not have to belong to the baby’s biological mother. Adoptive mothers, fathers, aunts, grandmothers, siblings or one attentive nurse can provide the relationship which becomes a model for all subsequent models in the baby’s life. This model states that all human beings have thoughts and feelings, and that a relationship consists of an engagement of the thoughts and feelings of two people, one with the other. In acquiring this model the baby becomes a fully paid-up member of the human race.

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