Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

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СКАЧАТЬ comes self-consciousness. Just how and when these changes take place is not understood, but current knowledge suggests that consciousness develops slowly, coming on, as the scientist Susan Greenfield once remarked, like a light turned on with a dimmer switch.

      Even though a baby may not be experiencing fully what we call consciousness, he can from his past experience create expectations. When these expectations are fulfilled (e.g., a baby’s version of ‘There’s the music. Now I’m going to feel more comfortable’) that part of his meaning structure is strengthened, but when these expectations are not fulfilled his meaning structure is threatened. A baby cries not just from hunger but from the fear created when the expectation that the discomfort of being hungry will be assuaged is not fulfilled. Learning to become a member of society is a process of having expectations not fulfilled and of finding ways of coping with such threats to the meaning structure.

      To enter into the life of their family and thus into society, a baby has to acquire the knowledge that in society there are limits to self-expression. These limits, the baby soon finds, apply particularly to defecation and micturation and everything to do with cleanliness, to greed, and to anger.

      All families are clean. The world over, all families are clean. They each have high standards of what constitutes cleanliness. The trouble is there is no universal agreement as to what constitutes cleanliness. When India was part of the British Empire the fastidious English in India deplored what they saw as the lack of hygiene in Indian homes, while Indians, the Hindus especially, deplored the disgusting habit of the English of lying in their own bath water. Similarly, in one family, underclothes may be changed every day but there are no rules about teeth-cleaning, while the family next door changes underclothes less frequently but brushes their teeth without fail after every meal. If each family discovers the rules of the other family, then each regards the other as dirty, or at least as not following the proper rules of cleanliness. Dividing the world into categories of ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ is something all human beings do. We just do not agree on what these categories should be, and each of us believes that our categories are right and everyone else’s are wrong.

      A baby’s introduction to his family’s rules about cleanliness comes when he discovers that he is no longer allowed to relieve the pressure in his body when and where he pleases, but only at certain times and places as his family decrees. Some fortunate infants do not encounter these rules until the sphincter muscles are strong enough to hold back the pressure of urine and faeces. A baby does not acquire voluntary control over his sphincter muscles until he is about three years old. If the rules of the family are imposed at a time when the infant has a good chance of complying with the rules successfully, he can enjoy the great pleasure of basking in his family’s praise and approval. However, in our society there are still a great many babies who are sat on pots and ordered to perform long before they can possibly understand what is expected of them, much less carry it out. Even more are there babies whose performance of their natural functions is treated by the adults around them with disgust and rejection. Many parents whose own toilet training left them feeling great disgust for their own excreta find that they cannot cope with their baby’s. Other parents, who have followed a plan of patience and praise in toilet-training their babies, suddenly become extremely anxious when their three-year-old is in danger of failing to gain admittance to a nursery which will not take an untoilet-trained toddler.

      There are sound reasons why the waste products of our body should be kept separate from other objects in our environment. Such waste products can contain elements and processes which can bring about illness and death. But our reactions to these substances are more than a sensible response to possible physical danger. There is another danger there, something so terrible that we cannot utter its name. Fire is dangerous, but we still just call it ‘fire’. Whereas these waste products are never spoken of directly by well-brought-up people. All kinds of circumlocutions are used. However, if one wishes to be extremely vulgar or express great disgust and rejection, then there are a multitude of words and phrases referring to these products which can be used. ‘Shit’ means much more than ‘faeces’.

      Every infant has to learn far more than the practical procedures for the disposal of one’s faeces and urine. All the magical and fantastical meanings which the members of the infant’s family hold have to be learned and reacted to. There are meanings which relate to the sense of having within oneself something bad and contaminating which has to be expelled. These meanings link with a sense of being disgusted with oneself when one is the object of other people’s disgust. A mother may not express disgust and rejection as she bathes her smelly baby and dresses him in clean clothes, but the contrast with dirt and disgust is implied as she says, ‘Don’t you feel better now? Aren’t you a lovely clean baby?’

      There are meanings which relate to the sense of having within oneself something which is powerful and destructive which can be used against other people or retained so that other people are not injured or such power is not lost. Infants soon discover how to take revenge on a parent by interrupting the parent’s meal and demanding to be put on the pot. However, revenge against parents can be dangerous because they are giants who hold all the power.

      There are meanings which relate to the need for privacy and the danger of intrusions on this privacy. Such intrusions may be in terms of being the butt of other people’s humour, as when others laugh at our discomfiture when we are discovered emptying our bowels and bladder, or in terms of other people’s curiosity, as when others want to inspect what we produce and to assist in its production with enemas and emetics. Such intrusions can take on a sexual quality, so that the anus can become partly or even wholly the location of the person’s sexual feeling and interest. It is no wonder that so many of us are incapable of letting our body perform its functions of digestion and elimination but are forever caught in a painful oscillation between diarrhoea and constipation.

      For many of us simple cleanliness is a source of fear. We have to defend ourselves against this fear. Dirt we see as danger. We divide our world into the categories of clean and dirty, categories which become fixed and impenetrable. We learn our society’s methods of dealing with dirt and establishing cleanliness, and we adapt these methods to create our own rules which seem to us unbreakable, absolute laws of the universe. Every one of us operates with such a set of laws.

      Often our rules go beyond their function of ordering the universe and become rituals, regular patterns of behaviour which have a magical quality. To protect our meaning structure, primitive pride, with its lack of interest in reality and reason, can easily suggest rituals which we deem capable of influencing our good fortune and keeping death at bay. The obsessions and compulsions of someone considered to have obsessive-compulsive disorder are not symptoms which present themselves at the onset of disease but are simply an extension of the rules, rituals and ideas which the individual has long held.

      Our notions about dirt and cleanliness do not form one distinct part of our meaning structure, separate from all other parts. Rather, these notions connect to other ideas, and are reinforced by other ideas. Many of us have abandoned the idea that a dirty person is necessarily a wicked person, but most of us see clean as beautiful. Then we can call cleanliness purity. Robyn Davidson wrote:

      A couple of years before [my journey in the desert] someone had asked me a question: ‘What is the substance of the world in which you live?’ As it happened, I had not slept or eaten for three or four days and it struck me at the time as a very profound question. It took me an hour to answer, and when I did, my answer seemed to come directly from the subconscious: ‘Desert, purity, fire, air, hot wind, space, sun, desert desert desert.’ It had surprised me, I had no idea those symbols had been working so strongly within me.⁵

      Purity can also mean the absence of excess, and this was certainly the way Robyn saw it. Her camel journey across the Western Australian desert was one of shedding burdens both literally and metaphorically. However, even before this journey she had learnt in childhood that she must not be greedy.

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