The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  Prior to the rise of agricultural civilization (i.e., before ca. 8,000 B.C.), man lived as a hunter-gatherer. Of necessity, mothers carried their babies on the body almost all the time. Mother and child were not separated after birth. They slept together, and the mother breast-fed the child for nearly four years. Feeding was dependent on spontaneous hunger rather than prearranged schedules.14

  Much of this practice was retained in the ensuing millennia. Nursing in andent Judea, for example, averaged two to three years, and babies were still carried around, rather than put in a crib or left unattended. Older children were taken on the shoulder or carried astride, as is still the custom in Third World cultures. The Greeks typically transferred the neonate to a basin of warm water, to maintain the continuity of intrauterine experience. In the eleventh century A.D., the great Arab physician Avicenna recommended nursing for two years, and urged gradual rather than sudden weaning -- caveats that may suggest the existence of some departure from the custom of extended breast-feeding.15

  The significance of breast-feeding, curiously enough, lies less in the chemical value of the mothers milk than in the cutaneous stimulation provided by the accompanying maternal-infant contact. In "Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin," Ashley Montagu gathered mountains of evidence to show that in all mammalian species, a healthy adult life is not possible without a large amount of tactile stimulation during the first few years, and especially the first few months, after birth. Indeed, the proper development of the nervous system, including myelinization (formation of the fatty sheath of protective tissue around the nerves), depends on it. Although the quantity of tactile stimulation of infants has tapered off over time, it was maintained to a very great extent down to about 1500 A.D. Whether through direct carrying, extended nursing, or even the gentle manipulation of the infants genitals, body stimulation was a large part of early life, and all of these practices are still maintained in those parts of the world which are as yet unaffected by modernization.16

  Direct correlations cannot be made, but child-rearing practices among contemporary non-Western cultures may be indicative of what was typical in the West down to the early Renaissance. In Bali, for example, the child is carried on the hip or in a sling, in almost constant contact with the mother for the first two years of life. During the first six months it is never not in someone's arms except while being bathed, and the parents typically play with the male infants genitals when he is in the bath. Similar information has been gathered about a number of contemporary "primitive" societies, and the matter of playing with the infants genitals was singled out as a point of comparison by Philippe Ariès in "Centuries of Childhood." In the Middle Ages, he tells us, public physical contact with children's private parts was an amusing sort of game, forbidden only when the child reached puberty. This attitude changed sharply during the Renaissance, but is, Ariès notes, still widespread in Islamic cultures. Interestingly enough, practices such as placing the neonate in a warm bath, or encouraging infantile sexuality, are slowly making something of a comeback, the rationale being that such practices lead to a less anxious and more healthy sexual life.17

  Ariès also provides a detailed study of late medieval attitudes toward children, which imply that this was a period of changing practices in the matter of body contact.18 Indeed, the single most important theme of his book is separation, dissociation. Ariès is able to show that prior to the late sixteenth century, neither the nuclear family nor the child existed as concepts. Until the twelfth century, art did not portray the morphology of childhood, and portraits of children were almost nonexistent until the end of the sixteenth century. The seventeenth century literally "discovered" childhood, and made a point of demarcating it as a stage in a series of separate phases of life. Far from implying greater care of infants, however, this demarcation involved greater alienation from them. Special children's clothing was now used to make visible the stages of growth and, at the end of the sixteenth century, there suddenly emerged a great preoccupation with the supposed dangers of touching and body contact. Children were taught to conceal their bodies from others. In addition, it was now believed that children must never be left alone. The result was that the adult became a sort of psychic watchdog, always supervising the child but never fondling it -- a practice that is really the prototype of scientific observation and experimentation.

  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 participatin
g 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.

  In effect, it was this continuity of holistic perception which Reich sought to demonstrate in scientific (and later, scientistic) terms. To do so one must show that unconscious knowledge is essentially body knowledge or, more plainly put, that the body and the unconscious are one and the same thing, and this was precisely Reich's major contribution to psychoanalysis. A brief sketch of his work will help to substantiate our argument for the continuity of holistic consciousness.