The Three Christs of Ypsilanti (5 page)

Object constancy and person constancy both serve important
functions for the growing child. They create within him a basic trust that the physical world will stay put, and also that people can at the very least be depended on to react to physical objects as he does.[
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] It is as if nature and society had co-operated to provide him with a minimum guarantee of stability on the basis of which to build his own sense of self constancy.

Actually, the child seems to need and to strive for far more person constancy than is provided by the fact that people constantly experience physical objects as he does. A child depends on his mother to remain his mother—with the pattern of behavior and all the feelings that the word implies—and on his family and social groups to remain his family and social groups no matter what variations of situation he finds them in.

It may be supposed that any inexplicable disruption of these taken-for-granted constancies—physical or social or self—would lead a person to question the validity of his senses, his competence to cope with reality, or even his sanity. Put another way, violation of any primitive belief supported by unanimous consensus should lead ultimately to a disruption of beliefs about self constancy or the sense of one's identity, and from this, other disturbances should follow.

As Helen Merrell Lynd writes in
On Shame and the Search for Identity
: “[The child's] developing sense of himself and the developing sense of the world about him increase concurrently. Expectation and having expectation met are crucial in developing a sense of coherence in the world and in oneself.

“Sudden experience of a violation of expectation, of incongruity between expectation and outcome, results in a shattering of trust in oneself, even in one's own body and skill and identity, and in the trusted boundaries or framework of the society and the world one has known. As trust in oneself and in the outer world develop together, so doubt of oneself and of the outer world are also intermeshed …

“Shattering of trust in the dependability of one's immediate world means loss of trust in other persons, who are the transmitters and interpreters of that world.”[
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]

Our trust in the dependability of the physical world is rarely an issue in our daily lives, and we do not hear of people becoming neurotic or psychotic because this trust is violated. But, in our complex social relationships, the need for person constancy (which includes group constancy) is often disrupted through such adverse learning experiences as severe punishment, trauma, or the inculcation of shame and guilt. It is in contexts like these that the individual is likely to develop primitive beliefs that have no social support whatever. Such beliefs—phobias, for example, or obsessions, delusions, hallucinations—seem to be a second-best way of achieving constancy in the face of adverse experience. The person who holds them relies solely on his own subjective experience; he abandons social support altogether.

One need not go into the realm of such severe psychopathology to find examples of this development. The child who unconsciously believes he is unloved and unlovable, the person who believes he lives in a hostile and friendless world, the one who believes himself to have some deep-seated inferiority—all, in the present view, hold primitive beliefs that have no social support. It is primitive beliefs like these that lead to neurotic anxieties and conflicts and bring people into psychotherapy. In psychotherapy, their problems are resolved through the establishment of what psychoanalysts call the transference relationship—a relationship in which the patient unconsciously transfers to the analyst all the positive and negative feelings he had, as a child, toward his parents. In working through the transference with the therapist, the patient brings to awareness his previously unconscious responses to these external authorities of his childhood and, at the same time, establishes new and current external authorities in whom he feels trust. In this fashion, by testing the primitive beliefs of his childhood against the realities
of his contemporary life, he is enabled to abandon the earlier neurotic beliefs.

Primitive beliefs are, however, only part of a person's total system of beliefs. What about the others? Non-primitive beliefs can be divided into three groups: (1) beliefs about the authorities to rely on in relation to controversial matters; (2) peripheral beliefs derived from these authorities; and (3) inconsequential beliefs. Such beliefs, which develop out of primitive beliefs and stand in a functional relationship to them, seem to serve the purpose of helping the individual to round out his picture of the world, rationally and realistically to the extent possible, and irrationally and defensively to the extent necessary. Unlike primitive beliefs, however, they are not completely taken for granted. Even though they may be deeply cherished, we learn to expect and even to tolerate differences of opinion or controversy about them. Belief in God, for example, is of such an order: most believers learn that there are others, whose claim to knowledge is as valid as their own, who nevertheless differ with them about this question. This does not mean that such beliefs are unimportant, or that they have no emotional significance for the person who holds them, or that they are easy to change. But, if our hypothesis is correct, they should be easier to change than primitive beliefs.

Most important of these non-primitive beliefs would seem to be those that concern positive and negative authorities—the authorities that sociologists call reference persons or reference groups.[
5
] Which authorities
could
know and also
would
know? Which authorities, positive or negative, are we to trust or distrust as we go
about our daily lives seeking to learn about the good, the beautiful, and the true? For each individual the answer will be different, and will depend on his learning experiences within the historical context of the social structure—family, class, peer group, ethnic group, religious and political group, nationality—to which he belongs.

If we know about a person only that he believes in a particular authority, we should be able to deduce from this the nature of a great many of his other beliefs—all of those that emanate from that authority. These beliefs, which can be called peripheral because they are derived, are less important dynamically than the beliefs about authority from which they spring. Many of them should, therefore, be relatively open to change—either through direct communication from the authority or if the individual abandons that authority as his guide. These peripheral beliefs form what social scientists call an ideology;[
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] along with the identification with authority on which they are based, they provide the individual with his sense of identification with a given group.[
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]

Finally, there is a class of beliefs which for lack of a better term we will call inconsequential. These beliefs concern matters of taste; if they are changed, the total system of beliefs is not altered in any significant way. If a person changes his mind about whether the mountains or the seashore are preferable for a vacation, or about the color that is most becoming to him, or about the movie actress who is most attractive, the rest of his system of beliefs is hardly likely to be affected in any important way.

In summary, a person's total system of beliefs is composed of beliefs that range in importance from the inconsequential, through the peripheral, to beliefs about authority, and finally, at the core, to primitive beliefs about the nature of the physical world, society, and himself. All these beliefs (except, possibly, the inconsequential ones) are formed and developed very early in life, and undoubtedly the child first learns them in the context of his dealings with his parents. As he grows older, he learns that there are certain beliefs which virtually all others hold; others which are true for him even though no one else believes them; and still other beliefs about which men differ. The total system of beliefs may be seen as an organization of beliefs varying in depth, formed as a result of living in nature and in society, designed to help a person maintain, insofar as possible, a sense of ego and group identity stable and continuous over time, an identity which experiences itself to be a part of, and simultaneously apart from, a stable physical and social environment. As Helen Merrell Lynd writes: The search for identity “is a social as well as an individual problem. The kind of answer one gives to the question Who am I? depends in part upon how one answers the question What is this society—and this world—in which I live?”[
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]

It is against this background of theoretical speculation, admittedly incomplete, that I was led, first, to examine various phenomena which seemed to involve violations of primitive belief, and eventually to bring together the three Christs of Ypsilanti.

I had come home from the office one day, late, tired, and irritable. We all sat down to dinner. My two daughters, Miriam and Ruth, eight and five at the time, had been quarreling and continued to quarrel as we sat down to the evening meal. I asked them to stop but they ignored me. They also ignored several additional requests, increasingly less gently put. Completely involved with each other, they paid no attention to me. In my desire to put an end to it, and possibly motivated unconsciously by other preoccupations,
such as those described earlier, I turned to them and, addressing each by the other's name, demanded they stop. The quarrel was immediately forgotten. To my surprise, they turned from each other toward me with laughter and delight. They had interpreted my action as a new game I had invented for their amusement, and they urged me to continue it. I did.

But not for long. Within a few minutes Ruth, the younger, became somewhat uncertain about whether we still were playing and asked for reassurance: “Daddy, this
is
a game, isn't it?”

“No,” I replied, “it's for real.”

We played on a bit longer, but soon both girls became disturbed and apprehensive. Then they pleaded with me to stop—which of course I did. The entire incident took less than ten minutes.

I had violated their primitive belief in their own identities—a belief they had in the first place learned in no small measure from me. For the first time in their lives, something had led them to experience serious doubts about a fact they had previously taken completely for granted, and this sent both of them into a panic reaction. The stimulus that evoked it seemed on the surface trivial enough. It involved nothing more than changing a single word. But this word represents the most succinct summary of many beliefs, all of which together make up one's sense of identity.

To be sure, children love to pretend they are someone else; but this is so only if the child can pick his own role, control the outcome, and thus maintain throughout his sense of identity. In the incident just described, the initial delight quickly gave way to anxiety because the girls were no longer sure whether the play-acting was in fun or real, and because they could no longer control the outcome.

Several of my colleagues have played the name-reversal game with their own children, with the same results. The panic reaction invariably followed within a few minutes. But when the experiment was repeated in a nursery school with an adult who was a stranger to the children, the results were quite different. No anxiety effects
were observed; the children were able to ward them off by some such remark as: “You don't know who I am because you don't know my mother.” Apparently children have somehow learned that a stranger is not in a position to know one's name, and therefore they are not affected as they are when one of their parents, a person who is certainly in a position to know, violates their sense of themselves.

It is possible to point to other examples which suggest how very sensitive we are about maintaining our primitive belief in our own identity. Who among us has not experienced some irritation when our name is forgotten or when a teacher persists in calling us by a wrong name? The O.S.S. Assessment Staff, in their well-known study of candidates for espionage work in World War II,[
9
] found that when a person of high military rank is ordered to report for duty at a post where he is not known, dressed in army fatigues and under an assumed name, he is very likely to show symptoms of severe disturbance in his sense of identity. Under certain circumstances, some people find it necessary to change their names; for example, actors and actresses, members of minority groups, refugees, and those who are fleeing from the police. The changed name often has structural similarities to the original one. Often, the first letters of the Christian name and the surname remain the same, as if to suggest a need for continuity of identity even though there has been a change in name.

The problem of identity in twins is especially interesting in this connection. What must it be like to be continually confused with someone else, and to experience throughout life nameless greetings, doubt, hesitation, and embarrassment on the part of others?

As has already been suggested, belief in one's own identity is not the only primitive belief which, if disrupted, may lead to disturbances. The following two incidents clearly suggest how disturbed a child may become if the identity of “significant others” is tampered with.

George, five, delighted in pretending he was various cowboy
heroes he knew from television Westerns, and whenever he was playing, insisted that his mother call him by his fictitious name. He also loved to watch “Tom Terrific,” a cartoon character who is truly terrific because he is able to change his identity at will. One day George was pretending to be someone else and several times reprimanded his mother for addressing him by his real name. George persisted until his mother became annoyed (possibly, anxious), and finally provoked. “Well,” she exclaimed, “I am not your mommy then, either. I am Tom Terrific pretending I am your mommy.” At first George smiled, pleased that she had joined in the game. Soon he asked for assurance. “You're just fooling me.” When his mother replied she wasn't fooling, he began to cry. “No, you're not Tom Terrific. I don't want Tom Terrific for a mommy. I want my mommy back again.” He stopped crying when she promised never to do it again.