The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  Since Freud's first formulation of the subject, students of child development have largely agreed that the first three months of life constitute a period of "primary narcissism," or in Erich Neumann's terminology, the "cosmic-anonymous phase." The infant is all Unconscious (primary process) during this time, its life essentially a continuation of the intrauterine period. It behaves as though it and its mother were a dual unity, having a common boundary, and it lives as easily in others as in itself. External sensations, including the mother's breast, are perceived as coming from the inside. The world is largely explored by hands and mouth. "The child," writes Sam Keen in "Apology for Wonder,"

  is, at first, a mouth, and his oral incorporation of the breast of the mother and other objects in the environment forms his initial way of relating to the exterior world. He quite literally tastes reality and tests it to see whether it is palatable. What promises delight to the taste buds -- whether it be the breast, the thumb, or a nearby toy -- he seeks to incorporate, to intuit, to take into himself.

  For the infant, subject and object are almost completely undifferentiated, a fact that led Freud to argue that it was this particular perception that broke through adult dualistic consciousness in the mystic experience (Romain Rolland called this phenomenon the "oceanic feeling" in a letter he wrote Freud in 1927). The pleasure of reality is identical to the knowledge of reality at this point; fact and value are one and the same thing. "The surface of the body with its erogenous zones," writes Erich Neumann, "is the principal scene of the child's experience both of itself and of others; that is, the infant still experiences everything in its own skin."2

  Between this stage and the child's third year, a gradual series of developments finally produces a discontinuity that constitutes the crystallization of the ego. Yet despite the birth trauma, the comparative harshness of modern child-rearing practices, and the inevitable frustrations of the environment, the term "cosmic anonymity" is not an inappropriate description of all of the first two postnatal years, a virtual paradise compared to what comes after. From the fetal period on, the infant body, or Unconscious, is subjected to the constant message of subject/object merger, of lack of tensions (and thus distinctions) between self and other. The enormous power of this message, which is the foundation of all holistic cognition, becomes apparent when we translate it into physiological terms. It means that the infant's entire existence is sensual, infinitely more sensual than it will ever be again. In Freud's famous formulation, the preconscious infant is "polymorphously perverse." More precisely, it is polymorphously whole. The entire surface of its body is an agent of sense, and its relationship to its surroundings almost completely tactile. Its entire body, and thus its entire world, is sensualized. For more than two full years, then, a fundamental realization is fostered in the body, or unconscious mind, of all of us, a foundation that can never be uprooted: 'I am my environment.' Hence the phrase "primary process": the unconscious knowledge of the world, with its dreamlike structure of reasoning and cognition, comes first. The ego, Freud argued, is a secondary phenomenon; it is a structure that crystallizes out of cosmic anonymity.3

  This situation raises an obvious question: Why leave the Garden of Eden at all? Why does ego-crystallization occur in the first place? Ego psychologists such as Margaret Mahler, Edith Jacobson, and Jean Piaget have dealt with this development as though it were an inherent and universal process. Freud, with his keen historical awareness, was not so easily misled. As our earlier discussion of the history of consciousness reveals, there was a time in human history when the ego did not crystalize out. Pre-Homeric man was completely, or almost completely, primary process, and his mode of knowing correspondingly mimetic. Throughout the Middle Ages people saw themselves as continuous with the environment to some degree, the alchemist being the chief spokesman for this perception. As we saw, the final break occurred only towards the end of the sixteenth century; that is really what "Don Quixote" is all about. Being aware that ego-crystallization in general was a relatively recent development, Freud resolved the problem of its emergence in the individual with the phylogeny/ontogeny argument that the growth of the modern infant recapitulated the history of the race as a whole. But if we accept this formulation, and do not see ego-development as at least partly innate, we must then argue (as Freud did for most of his career) that the ego is forced to crystallize out as a result of the frustrating impact of reality (i.e., the environment). Hence his expression "reality principle," and his famous dictum, "Where id is, there shall ego be." But this statement, if true, implies that reality, especially in the form of child-rearing practices, must have become increasingly frustrating with the passage of centuries, and that there must have been some sort of turning point at the end of the Middle Ages, when ego-strength made its appearance in full-blown form. In fact, ego-development does have its innate aspects, but is also a cultural artifact: there does seem to be a history of increasing alienation that climaxed on the eve of the Scientific Revolution.

  Before discussing the innate and learned (historical) aspects of ego-development, however, I wish to emphasize the staggering implications of the previous paragraph. If Freud's line of reasoning is correct, then the ego, which we take for granted as a given of normal human life, is not only just a cultural artifact, but -- in its contemporary form, at least -- actually a product of the capitalist, or industrial, epoch. The quality of ego-strength, which modern society regards as a yardstick of mental health, is a mode of being-in-the-world which is fully "natural" only since the Renaissance. In reality, it is merely adaptive, a tool necessary for functioning in a manipulative and reifying (i.e., life-denying) society. This historically conditioned nature of ego also suggests that if modern society in its present form were to disappear, "man" as we understand him would vanish as well -- a rather eerie conclusion that Michel Foucault was unable to avoid in the concluding pages of "The Order of Things." In other words, a different way of life might not only mean the end of ego-strength as a virtue, but of ego-strength as a way of existing, and therefore of "man" as he is currently conceived. Equally surprising (perhaps) is the implication that what we regard as healthy personality traits are the product of attitudes toward children, and child-rearing practices, that are hopelessly neurotic -- a thesis central to Reichian psychology.4

  To take the issue of ego-development first, then, recent research has shown that the first two years of life, even the first three months, are not as anonymous or unconscious as Freud and Neumann believed. Newborn infants can localize a touch on the skin, or a source of sound, though not with any great accuracy. They can locate the position of an object in space, and begin to imitate at six days of age. If the mother sticks out her tongue, so will the baby, and as Thomas Bower points out, this is a complex achievement. The baby recognizes that its own tongue (which it can only know by the feel of it) matches its mothers tongue, which it can see. This identification of its own body parts with those of others is a primitive form of subject/object correlation.5

  At about four or five months, the unspecific smile characteristic of the first three months becomes a particular response to the mother. The child acquires a new look of alertness and attentiveness; it is no longer drifting. For Margaret Mahler, this shift in perception is the onset of body-ego formation. At six months, the baby begins to experiment, pulling at the mother's hair or face, putting food into her mouth, straining away from her to get a better look. At seven or eight months, the pattern of comparative scanning begins. The child looks away from the mother and back to her, comparing the familiar with the unfamiliar. At age eight months, the child begins to distinguish between different objects, between father and mother, for example, and also to respond to facial indicators of mood. At nine months children no longer automatically grab at anything presented, but first stop to look at what is being offered. The belief in object constancy, that an object continues to exist when not in view, develops within the next three months.6

  Other aspects of ego-development can be seen
by charting a child's behavior in front of the mirror. The first awareness of one's body-image in the mirror occurs at about six months, at which time the child smiles at the image of another. From six to eight months, it begins to slow down its movements in front of the mirror and start relating them to the movement of the image, appearing thoughtful as it does so. At nine to ten months, it makes deliberate movements while observing its image, actually experimenting with the relationship between itself and the image. At twelve months, the child recognizes that the image is a symbol, but its grasp of that fact remains precarious for a while, and thus it continues to play with its reflection, in some cases up to thirty-one months of age.7

  From ten/twelve months to sixteen/eighteen months the child begins to practice with its larger environment. It moves away from the mother physically by crawling (but still holding on, occasionally); eventually, it masters upright locomotion. The child now begins to perceive mother from a greater distance and establish familiarity with a wider segment of the world. From fifteen to twenty-four months the original "cosmic unity" starts to break down in earnest. The child begins to balance separation and reunion by "shadowing" the mother (watching and following), then darting away, expecting to be chased and picked up. There is both a wish for reunion and a fear of reengulfment. The mother is now a person in its mind, not just "home base." The little boy or girl starts to bring things back from the outside world to show her. He or she also begins to experience the body as a personal possession, not wishing it to be handled. The child learns to cope with mother's absences, and develops disappearance/reappearance games. It will practice deliberately hiding toys and then finding them, or standing in front of a mirror and suddenly ducking out of sight. Mother or father will be instructed to cover their own eyes ("don't see me") and then abruptly uncover them ("see me"), or told to pretend not to see the child and then suddenly "discover" it with exaggerated glee. Language develops in the second year of life, emerging out of a "babbling" phase in which the child makes all kinds of sounds, both invented and imitated. The use of the pronoun "I" occurs at about twenty-one months.8

  So innate do all these actions appear that it would seem impossible to argue for a two-year period in which primary process is dominant. A nascent ego seems to be present and growing from birth. Yet we have to ask ourselves what we mean by ego, or ego-consciousness. Clearly, the pre-Homeric Greeks, who did not possess such consciousness, went through many of the processes just described, including the evolution of a brilliantly sophisticated language system. All of these developments may be necessary conditions for ego-crystallization, but they are not sufficient ones. Ego-consciousness can in fact be compared to pregnancy. There are degrees of it, but (to quote an old saw) one cannot be "just a little bit pregnant." Like a quantum jump, ego-consciousness involves a specific kind of discontinuity, and in the modern infant it occurs at roughly two and a half years of age, when the child one day has the startling thought: "I am I." The child begins to use the pronoun "I" several months before this event, we should add; it is no surprise that it exists in pre-Homeric Greek and all ancient languages. But this is not the same thing as having the thought, "I am I." The latter expresses a wholly different level of existence, one involving the recognition that ultimately you cannot be known by the other and are radically separate from him. This recognition takes place at about the same time that the child becomes convinced of what its image in the mirror represents, and is, as Merleau-Ponty notes, the beginning of alienation. From this point on the child begins to recognize that it is visible for others, and that there is a conflict between the "me" it feels and the "me" others see. The outside world, the child now realizes, can interpret it in a way that denies its own experience of itself. The third year of life (at least in modern Western cultures) is thus a trying period for parents as the child goes about establishing its identity with a determined stubbornness. Indeed, failure to be a "bad boy" or girl at this point can result in eventual psychosis, the key fear being that you are totally transparent to others, being nothing more than what they interpret you to be. The healthy child often objects to being watched at this time, for it now understands that its identity goes beyond the roles or the situation it is in, that it is an "I," an ego at odds with the world (to some extent), and to the interpretation that the world might place upon it. Dualistic consciousness is now an irrevocable fact.9

  We should thus not confuse motor and perceptual skills with ego-crystallization per se, for as we saw in Chapter 3 (following the analysis of Julian Jaynes), entire civilizations can be built without benefit of the latter. One can generate governments and wars, construct the ziggurat or the Code of Hammurabi, and even predict eclipses, without benefit of an ego. In order to undertake such projects one certainly has to be able to imitate, grasp, and locate objects in space, but they require no soul-searching or self-awareness. I belabor this point because it is so difficult for us, with our own ego-consciousness, to comprehend that ego-crystallization is a comparatively recent development; that one can move through all or most of the stages of motor and perceptual development described above without ego discontinuity taking place. At most, then, one can say that ego-development is partly innate, but that it apparently requires certain cultural triggers to "spring" it, to tip the balance all the way. Whereas ego-crystallization may be natural, it does not follow that it is inevitable. Furthermore, the range of ego-strengths present in the world today, especially from culture to culture, as well as the gradual hardening that occurred between Plato's Greece and the Scientific Revolution (with a strong upswing thereafter), shows that even within the context of ego-discontinuity a great variety of behavior is possible. All the evidence thus points to the limits of ego psychology, which, through its laboratory experiments with children, tries to establish a case for the innateness and universality of ego-crystallization.

  What exactly is the ego, then? Although they are not the same thing, ego and language possess important structural similarities. As Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett point out in their pioneering study, "Ego and Instinct," ego and language are the joint product of evolution and culture, and their development will not take place if society does not provide critical experiences at the appropriate time. If the "babbling" phase of language does not occur in a social context, the child will not learn to speak at all -- as has been documented in a few cases where children were discovered being raised by animal species. Both languages and ego can be regarded as "incomplete psychic structures," or what the authors call "depelopmentals": "structures that grow only when phylogenetic factors interact with critical individual experience at specific stages in the life cycle." Such individual experience, however, is really social in nature, and it varies significantly from culture to culture and between different historical epochs.10

  The recognition that cultural factors are important for ego-crystallization actually lurks in the survey of supposedly innate ego-development presented above. As Thomas Bower points out, certain perceptions are innate and certain ones acquired.11 Not all cultures believe in object constancy or solidity, for example, nor is it clear that children of every culture practice "shadowing" games with the mother, or games of "see me"/"don't see me," or those of third-year identity-testing. In earlier times, such games were probably absent altogether. Ego-strength is much softer in nonindustrial cultures than in ours, and such ego-developments are probably correspondingly weaker. Studies such as the one Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead did of Bali, for example, reveal child-rearing patterns that have little in common with our own (see Chapter 7). In a similar vein, the objection to body handling that occurs at around eighteen months of age was not present during the Middle Ages and is apparently still absent in many Third World cultures.12

  In contrast, we discover that some of the mothers in Margaret Mahler's study (see note 2) were highly motivated by the prestige attached to being part of a research unit at the Masters Children's Center in New York and, as a result, they were often achievement-oriented wit
h regard to their children, wanting them to be as precocious as possible in their sensorimotor development. But researchers and mothers watched anxiously for signs of ego-development (or what they took to be such signs). Had these not arisen in any particular child, it would have been branded autistic. Yet at some point in the history of the race, we were all "autistic," and it was ego-development that was viewed with alarm. The strong contemporary bias in favor of ego-development cannot help but prejudice the "scientific" study of it. The research unit at Masters was, in fact, a perfect mirror of the American ethos. The classic Jewish joke, "my son the doctor" (aged six months), is not just a Jewish joke; it is the norm for Western industrial societies, which turn out rigid ego-structures with a vengeance. It becomes difficult to demarcate sharply between innate and acquired when the infant is subject to a socialization process that begins with its first breath.13

  Though the issue of which cultural factors trigger ego-crystallization is immensely complex, and (since ego is erroneously regarded as a universal human characteristic) very poorly researched, one factor can be pointed to with some degree of certainty. It is quite clear that the history of increasing ego-development in the West is also the history of increasing repression and erotic deprivation, manifested over the centuries by a drop in the body contact and sensual enjoyment that normally occurs during the first two years of life. Ego-development is not merely purchased at the expense of sensual enjoyment (the classical theory of sublimation); more significantly, it has repression (i.e., sexual alienation) as a condition necessary -- and possibly even sufficient -- for its development. In short, enough repression may tip the balance, and "impregnate" the psyche. Let us briefly examine the evidence for this thesis.