The Reenchantment of the World (25 page)

 

 

These same patterns were institutionalized in the colleges of the late
Middle Ages, where they took the form of constant supervision, a system
of informing (i.e., spying), and the extended application of corporal
punishment. The birch replaced fines as the predominant penalty, and
students were commonly whipped in public until they bled. By the
eighteenth century, flogging occurred on a daily basis in England, where
it was viewed as a way of teaching children and adolescents self-control.

 

 

The late Middle Ages thus saw an abrupt shift in the emphasis of
child-rearing practices, a shift from nurturing to mastery which was
one aspect of the emergence of a civilizatlon marked by categorization
and control. As child-rearing practices reveal, Western society
was still heavily sexualized down to the sixteenth century. It was
"the essentially masculine civilization of modern times," as Ariès
puts it, which discouraged such nurturing practices. The rise of the
nuclear family, with the man at the head, reached full expression in
the seventeenth century, whereas the crucial unit had previously been
the "line," that is, the extended family of descendants from a single
ancestor. With the evolution of the nuclear unit, the soft heterogeneity
of communal life began to disappear. Distinctions were made within the
family and between families. The medieval household, which might contain
up to thirty members of the extended family, began to shrink and become
uniform. Beds, which used to be scattered everywhere, were now confined to
a special room. What we would call chaos was in effect the multiplicity of
realities, a "medley of colors," says Ariès, and it is still observable in
the streets of (say) Delhi or Benares, where eight types of transport and
forty different types of people can be seen on a single narrow street,
or in the throngs of people which crowd the streets of Mediterranean
towns after sunset. "Masculine" civilization, with its desire to have
everything neat, clean, and uniform, erupted in full force on the eve of
the Scientific Revolution. From the thirteenth century onward, the power
of the wife steadily diminished, the law of primogeniture (the eldest son
has exclusive right of inheritance) being a prime example of this. Down
to the mid-sixteenth century, no man save the occasional astrologer was
allowed to be present when a woman gave birth. By 1700, a very great
percentage of "midwives" was male. "Professional" civilization, the world
of categorization and control, is a world of male power and dominance.

 

 

The desensualization of childhood, and the subsumption of child-rearing
under masculine control and scientific management, reached their apogee in
the twentieth century. This development has not, of course, been without
its positive consequences. We cannot, for example, ignore the marked
drop in the infant mortality rate. But the accompanying psychic cost of
this desensualization may lead us to question how much has really been
gained. I am not referring here to child
abuse
, which has apparently
declined over the centuries, but to desexualization, estrangement, to
being "out of touch," a condition that arises when the parent relates
to the child with a deliberate failure of responsiveness. Abusive
treatment can be as sexual as loving treatment, and it is anything but
unresponsive.19 It may create angry adults, but it does not of itself
lead to existential anxiety. It is the latter condition that comprises
the daily fare of today's adult; and it is crucial to note that this
same existential anxiety characterizes the consciousness of the schizoid
personality, which, according to Ashley Montagu, can itself often result
from a lack of tactile stimulation in infancy.20 And given the assembly
line of modern obstetrics, this situation is perhaps no surprise. How
does the child enter the world of Western industrial societies? "The
moment it is born," writes Montagu,

 

 

the cord is cut or clamped, the child is exhibited to its mother,
and then it is taken away by a nurse to a babyroom called the nursery,
so called presumably because the one thing that is not done in it is
the nursing of the baby. Here it is weighed, measured, its physical
and any other traits recorded, a number is put around its wrist,
and it is then put in a crib to howl away to its hearts discontent.

 

 

The child is put on a fixed feeding schedule that is maintained for
months, and which has little relation to its own hunger pangs. Rapid
weaning from the breast is encouraged by modern medicine, if indeed the
child is breast-fed at all.

 

 

That cutaneous stimulation is crucial for health, if not life itself,
is not difficult to demonstrate. During the nineteenth century more than
half the infants in the United States died in the first year of life
from marasmus, a word that literally means "wasting away." As late as
1920, the death rate for this age group in foundling institutions, where
absolutely no body contact was provided, was
nearly 100 percent
. As
Montagu explains, American infant care was then under the influence of
Luther Emmett Holt, Sr., a professor of pediatrics and the Dr. Spock of
his generation, whose popular writings urged fixed feeding schedules,
abolition of the cradle, and a minimum of fondling. J.B. Watson, the
founder, of behavioral psychology, was also very influential at this
time, and he urged mothers to keep their emotional distance from their
children. He specifically stated that such treatment, in addition to fixed
feeding schedules, strict regimens, and toilet training, would mold the
child's capacities in a manner that would facilitate its conquest of the
world. The goal, he said, was to make the child "as free as possible of
sensitivities to people" -- an objective that has, in the late twentieth
century, come to fruition with stunning "success."21

 

 

Though it may be difficult to make a strict causal argument here (a
fact that continues to plague modern anthropology 22), it is noteworthy
that the discarding of the cradle, the abandonment of fondling, and
the rise of mechanistic child-rearing practices have gained ground
in those Third World countries that have taken industrial development
and Westernization as their express purpose. It is somehow understood
that science, "progress," and dehumanized child-rearing practices go
hand in hand. The formula becomes, to turn E.M. Forster upside down,
"only disconnect."

 

 

Further evidence for the destructive influence of modern child-rearing
practices has been provided by Marshall Klaus and John Kennell of the Case
Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland. Their studies reveal that
when the birth is natural and not interfered with by the institution,
there is a common pattern to mother-infant bonding. The first sixty
to ninety minutes of life are an extraordinary period, during which
the neonate is unusually alert and engages with the mother in a sort
of primeval bonding "dance," in which the two touch, fondle, and gaze
profoundiy into each others eyes. The modern hospital does not permit this
interaction to occur, however. The mother is often given painkillers,
which dull her perception, and medication is routinely applied to the
newborn's eyes, blurring its vision. In fact these practices make no real
difference, for the hospitals immediately separate mother and child,
with quite noticeable effects. In one experiment, Klaus and Kennell
compared a group of mother-infant pairs that were allowed sixteen hours
of immediate contact to a control group that was not. Two years later,
the mothers in the first group dealt with their children in a relaxed
way, using more questions and adjectives, and fewer commands, in their
speech. The second set was caught up in scolding, inhibiting, and giving
frequent commands. Sixteen hours of fondling apparently had an effect
lasting two years. Klaus and Kennell also visited nurseries in Guatemala,
where there is extensive early body contact between mothers and children,
and witnessed much less fussing and crying. Similar variations in behavior
were observed by Louis Sander and his colleagues at the Boston University
Medical Center. They found that babies raised by nurses were affected
adversely if the nurses' orientation was markedly "professional," that
is, geared to the hospital staff rather than to the children.23

 

 

What is the implication of this survey of child-rearing practices for
ego-crystallization? Although no causal connections can be confidently
asserted, it does seem that there is a historical gestalt at work. Simply
put, contemporary "primitive" cultures, similar to the West before 1600,
have much softer ego-structures than we do, and are characterized by
a more communal and heterogeneous way of life, far less anxiety and
madness, and much gentler subject/object distinctions. In general, says
Montagu, adult personalities in extended body-contact cultures are less
competitive; and those few "primitive" societies that do not have such
contact, such as the Mundugumor people of New Guinea studied by Margaret
Mead, produce irritable and anxious adults.24 These findings are hardly
surprising. Child-rearing in Western industrial culture is so stark that
it is not difficult to understand that it is crucial in the maintenance,
if not the genesis, of modern anomie. Reich's sadomasochism, Laing's
schizoid personality, Sartre's nausea are conditions that could thrive
only in such a desexualized context.

 

 

Of course, the ego has its positive aspects. It certainly existed in
the West from about 800 B.C. to 1600 A.D. without massive alienation as
its corollary, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in its modern
form the ego is the product and expression of pathology. Specifically,
it seems to be (again, in its modern form) a structure evolved to obtain
love by way of mastery in an unloving world. But as Reich pointed out,
love and mastery are, physiologically, incompatible goals. We search
desperately for love and authenticity, but in the context of a world that
has taught us to fear these very things. The results are, inevitably,
mass neurosis and substitute gratification (see Plate 17). In a curious
parody of the Uncertainty Principle, the very precision of the modern
ego has created a kind of parataxis in our social relations, whereby they
seem to be foggy, disconnected, even autistic. This is the tragic message
of the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper" album, released in 1967, essentially a set
of vignettes about human dissociation. "Will you still need me, will you
still feed me,/ When I'm sixty-four" could well be the national anthem"
of the industrialized world.25

 

 

 

 

 

Plate 17. Luis Jimenez, Jr., "The American Dream" (1969/76).
Fiberglass and epoxy, 20" x 3.5" x 30". By permission of the artist.

 

 

 

 

The sickness of contemporary life, pervaded as it is with heavy drug use
and alcoholism, stems from the futile attempt of scientific culture to
eradicate holistic perception. But holistic cognition is a primary,
ecological perception of nature rooted in a biological substrate,
and present before the ego ever arises. The history of archaic man,
and the cosmic-anonymous phase of childhood, bear clear witness to the
existence of this primeval substrate of primary-process material. This
stratum is hardly a developmental; it is the ground of our being,
and unlike the ego, does not need cultural factors to trigger it. No
mount of civilization can eradicate it, and the soentific attempt to
do so can only drive us to drink. We never escape the impact of the
cosmic-anonymous phase; participation remains the basis of our perception
throughout our lives. "The primary unitary reality," writes Erich Neumann
in "The Child," "is not merely something that precedes our experience;
it remains the foundation of our existence even after our consciousness,
grown independent with the separation of the systems, has begun to
elaborate its scientifically objective view of the world."26

 

 

Holism haunts modern man, tugs unmercifully at his consciousness. Despite
the way he is forced to live, he still hears that preconsoous echo,
"I am my environment." He is trained into asceticism, writes Norman
O. Brown, trained into a posture of analytical distancing from nature,
yet he remains unconvinced, "because in infancy he tasted the fruit of the
tree of life, and knows that it is good, and never forgets."27 As Reich
realized, this memory is stored in the body, and whether expressed in the
terms of original participation (the occult world view), or through the
deliberate resexualization of life (which Reich courageously attempted to
effect), there is no getting away from it.28 It is for this reason that
primary-process material is at the root of all premodern epistemologies,
that children's thought patterns are largely magical in structure down
to about age seven, and that participating consciousness survives,
even in modern scientific epistemology. What the child, the "primitive,"
and the madman know, and the average adult fights to keep out of his or
her conscious awareness, is that the skin is an artificial boundary;
that self and other really do merge in some unspecified way. In the
last analysis, we cannot avoid the conviction that everything really is
related to everything else.