The Reenchantment of the World

by Morris Berman

  The paradoxes that the discipline is capable of generating, however, were known as far back as the fifth century B.C. Thus, what is called "Mannheim's Paradox" is a version of the ancient puzzle known as the "Liars Paradox" (A Greek said, "All Greeks are liars." Was he telling the truth?). In other words, if one takes Mannheim seriously, his argument that knowledge is situation-bound must apply to that argument itself ("What sort of culture produced the sociology of knowledge?") But if it does apply, then the argument is wrong, or at least thrown in doubt; and if the argument is wrong (knowledge is not situation-bound), then it might be right, and so on. (Plato uses the same line of reasoning against the doctrine of Protagoras in the Theaetetus, 171A.) Various Greek schools of thought, such as those of the Megarians and the Eleatics, delighted in elaborating puzzles of this sort; and in a more serious vein, the so-called Third Man Argument of Plato's dialogue "Parmenides" presents the paradox of infinite regress as a threat to the theory of Forms. But we should be clear that although these various paradoxes do involve radical relativism in suggesting that there may be no fixed truth, they are strictly problems of logic, not equivalent to the sociology of knowledge. That is, they do not develop the theme that information about the world is relative because it is socially conditioned or culture-bound.

  Finally, it is important to add that commentary itself is not an issue here; there is plenty of commentary and analysis in the Talmud, for example. But the rabbis of the Middle Ages did not, to my knowledge, analyze the nature of their own analysis, any more than cultures that lived by myth had myths about the general nature or epistemological status of mythology -- that is, they had no myths explaining how myth per se ascertains truth.

  31. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Francis Golffing (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 95.

  CHAPTER 6. Eros Regained

  1. Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 88, 92.

  2. Erich Neumann, The Child, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), pp. 11-17, 28, 30; Sam Keen, Apology for Wonder (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), p. 46. For two studies of child development that view the first few weeks of life in Freudian terms, see Margaret S. Mahler et al., The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant: Symbiosis and Individuation (New York: Basic Books, 1975), and Edith Jacobson, The Self and the Object World (New York: International Universities Press, 1964). Although Neumann described the first three months of life in these terms, he did take issue with the term "narcissism" as implying a type of power relationship, which is not possible if an other is totally unrecognized.

  The letter from Rolland is mentioned in a footnote inserted in the 1931 edition of Civilization and Its Discontents. Freud admired that the letter "caused me no small difficulty. I cannot discover this 'oceanic' feeling in myself. It is not easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to describe their physiological signs." We can begin to understand why Freud's view of human life was so pessimistic. See James Strachey, ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953-74), 21:65 and n.

  3. At least, this was Freud's position as of 1923, and before 1902. Between those two dates, Freud saw the ego itself as a set of instincts instead of a structure deriving its energy from the id. This position became the central plank of ego psychology, with Heinz Hartmann its leading exponent. For an excellent overview of the evolution of early psychoanalytic thought, see Daniel Yankelovich and William Barrett, Ego and Instinct (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), esp. pp. 25-114.

  4. Cf. Gordon Rattray Taylor's intelligent discussion of "hard" versus "soft" ego in Rethink (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), pp. 81-90, 109ff. What modern psychiatry calls "ego-strength" is more often really ego rigidity, and actually quite brittle. The equation of muted ego virtues with mental illness is characteristic of societies that define health in terms of productive capacity.

  5. T. G. R. Bower, The Perceptual World of the Child (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 19-21, 28.

  6. Ibid., pp. 34, 49-50; Mahler, Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, pp. 46-47, 52-56. I am personally skeptical of this time scale. Although (see below) perceptual development is not the same thing as ego-development, it is doubtful that the unspecific smile lasts for three months or that comparative scanning begins only at age seven months. Joseph Lichtenberg recently demonstrated that at the age of fourteen days, the neonate distinguishes between his mother's face and that of unknown female. See "New findings about the newborn," San Francisco Examiner, 28 May 1980.

  7. Mahler, Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, p. 223n, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Child's Relations with Others, trans. William Cobb; in James M. Edie, ed., The Primacy of Perception (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), pp. 125-26. Merleau-Ponty's discussion is largely based on the work of the brilliant and relatively unknown Marxist child psychologist, Henri Wallon, which stands in sharp contrast to that of Piaget. As of this writing, Wallon would appear to be the only scientist who did extensive studies of children's behavior in front of the mirror, which Merleau-Ponty discusses on pp. 125-40 of his essay. (According to Mahler, such a research project will soon be published by John B. McDevitt.) For more on Wallon, see the Winter 1972/73 issue of the International Journal of Mental Health, as well as his article, "Comment se développe, chez l'enfant, la notion du corps propre," Journal de Psychologie (1931), 705-48.

  8. Mahler, Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, pp. 67, 71, 77-92, 101; R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965; first publ. 1959), pp. 115-19.

  9. Merleau-Ponty, The Child's Relations with Others, pp. 136-37, 152-53.

  10. Yankelovich and Barrett, Ego and Instinct, pp. 320, 386-92, 396-7. This point raises the problem of how language ever arose at all, which has never been solved. On this matter, and material on children raised by animals, see Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, pp. 108-42, and passim. Ashley Montagu presents a Darwinian theory of the origins of speech in The Human Revolution (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1965),pp. 108-13.

  11. Bower, Perceptual World of the Child, p. 42.

  12. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, trans. Robert Baldick (New York: Vintage Books, 1962),pp. 103-6.

  13. See, for example, Mahler, Psychological Birth of the Human Infant, p. 35. In general, I find this study highly teleological, with infants regarded almost as subhuman, but "redeemed" in that they are, after all, going to become adults, The authors do not seem to realize that the scientific terms used to describe childhood, which include "narcissism," "haliucinatory disorientation," and even "autism," are loaded and that such terms assume that the adult perception of the world is correct and anything else is incorrect.

  The question of innate and acquired is discussed later on in this chapter. The importance of socialization was a major feature of Wallon's work (see above, note 7).

  14. This material is taken from remarks made by John Kennell in the "General Discussion" section of Evelyn B. Thoman, ed., Origins of the Infant's Social Responsiveness (Hilldale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979), pp. 435-36.

  15. Stuart A. Queen and Robert W. Habenstein, The Family in Various Cultures, 4th ed. (New York: Lippincott, 1974; first publ. 1952), p. 164; John Ruhräh, Pediatrics of the Past (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1925), p. 34; and Ian G. Wickes, "A History of Infant Feeding," Archives of Disease in Childhood 28 (1953), 156.

  "Extended" is a loaded term, since the time span is being measured from our point of view. It might be more correct to call the twentieth-century period of lactation "curtailed."

  16. Ashley Montagu, Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Row, 1978), pp. 124, 187, 190; 199, 203, and chap. 7, passim.

  17. The study of Bali is Balinese Character by Bateson and Mead, and is discussed by Montagu in Touching, pp. 115-18 (cf. Chapter 7, note 16). See also chap. 7 of Montagu o
n comparative cultural studies, and Beatrice B. Whiting, ed., Six Cultures (New York: John Wiley, 1963). On Ariès see note 12, above. The "new" books on childbirth and infantile sexuality include Alayne Yates, Sex Without Shame (New York: William Morrow, 1978); Frederick Leboyer, Birth Without Violence (New York: Knopf, 1975); and Fernand Lamaze, Painless Childbirth (New York: Pocket Books, 1977).

  18. The following discussion is taken from Ariès, Centuries of Childhood, esp. pp. 10, 33-34, 52, 61, 107, 114-16, 254-60, 264, 353-56, 398-99, 405, 414-15. See also Lawrence Stone, "the Rise of the Nuclear Family in Early Modern England," in Charles E. Rosenberg, ed., The Family in History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), pp. 36-38, 56; David Hunt, Parents and Children in History (New York: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 85-86; and M.J. Tucker, "The Child as Beginning and End: Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century English Childhood," in Lloyd deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: The Psychohistory Press, 1974), p. 238.

  19. This point is very important, and his failure to understand it has made possible Lloyd deMause's attack on Ariès' work in his essay, "The Evolution of Childhood," pp. 1-73 of The History of Childhood. deMause calls Ariès' description of playing with infant genitals an example of sexual molestation, which such action certainly is when it occurs in the West today. But Ariès' whole point was that yesterday is not today; that sexual attitudes were very different then, and that the context of attitudes determines the meaning of an act. As for action that is unequivocally abusive, the point here is that love and hate have close ties. It is absence of contact that is the real psychological danger, for the child experiences such absence as apathy, and his psyche translates it as meaninglessness. Perhaps existential man's search for meaning originates in this tragic experience.

  Second, the absence of ego in history never precluded violence, as the Iliad clearly shows. But such violence was of a very different order, it seems to me. It was moved by spontaneous passion; the concept of discipline as an institutional practice did not exist in schools prior to the sixteenth century (at least not corporal punishment), as Ariès notes. Such discipline is premeditated, done for different reasons than immediate feelings. It is usually a form of sublimation, for example, sadism posing as self-righteousness ("this hurts me more than it does you"). With the crystallization of an ego, emotions get twisted or transmuted into other forms. The result was already present in the monastic flagellant orders of the Middle Ages, and it was Reich's contention that much contemporary sexuality had a sadistic or masochistic edge to it, and vice versa. A brilliant elaboration of this theme was provided by Lindsay Anderson in his film If . . ., released in the late 1960s.

  20. Montagu, Touching, p. 207. The discussion that follows is taken from pp. 60, 77-78, 120-24.

  21 What type of men were Watson and Holt? According to a description provided by one of his colleagues and one of his assistants, Holt was the stereotype of Reich's armored individual. "His manner," they wrote, "was more than serious, it was earnest. There was nothing about him which could be called impressive, due perhaps to the absence of any outstanding feature; rather he appeared a highly efficient, perfectly coordinated human machine. He seemed to us austere and unapproachable." (Quoted in Montagu, Touching, p. 121). As for Watson, it is instructive to learn that not long after the publication of his Psychology from the Standpoint of the Behaviorist (1919) he accepted a job with the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York, where "he applied his principles for controlling rats to the manipulation of consumers" (Philip J. Pauly, "Psychology at Hopkins," Johns Hopkins Magazine 30 [December 1979], 40).

  22. Although I have tended to talk in causal terms in this discussion, I do not believe that the impact of child-rearing practices on adult life and culture is particularly more significant than the reverse. As indicated, I believe that the two form a historical gestalt, but the implications that follow are not fully clear. As Milton Singer shows in his "Survey of Culture and Personality," in Bert Kaplan, ed., Studying Personality Cross-Culturally (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), pp. 9-90, anthropology has had a difficult time trying to extricate itself from causal arguments while continuing to say something meaningful. Thus both Montagu and deMause talk as though this or that child-rearing practice results in this or that adult characteristic, but proof remains elusive and, in any event, theirs is a mechanical approach to very complex problems.

  Some progress has been made by Gregory Batson (see Chapter 7), whose analyses have tended to show that different kinds of interpersonal relations can assume functional patterns that differ from culture to culture. In this view, parent-child relations are part of the culturally patterned themes, and thus the child's relationship to its parents is mutually interactive, or holistic. Children are thus seen as active in stimulating parents into a certain pattern, a thesis supported by several of the studies in the volume by Evelyn Thoman cited in note 14. Margot Witty and T.B. Brazelton made a similar argument in "The Child's Mind," Harper's, April 1978, pp. 46-47. The structure is seen to operate like a circuit rather than a line.

  23. Marshall H. Klaus and John H. Kennell, Maternal-Infant Bonding (St. Louis: The C. V. Mosby Company, 1976), esp. pp. 58ff., and Louis W. Sander, et al; "Change in Infant and Caregiver variables over the First Two Months of Life: Integration of Action in Early Development," in Evelyn Thoman, ed.; Origins of the Infant's Social Responsiveness, pp. 368-75. Popular coverage of the Klaus-Kennell work was provided by the New York Times, 16 August 1977, p. 30, under the title "Closeness in the First Minutes of Life May Have a Lasting Effect." Cf. Aidan Macfarlane, The Psychology of Childbirth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 52-54, 100-101.

  24. Montagu, Touching, pp. 256-58.

  25. See Richard Poirier's interesting analysis of the lyrics, "Learning from the Beatles," in his book The Performing Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 112-40.

  26. From The Child, by Erich Neumann, p. 33. English translation copyright 1973 by the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology, Inc.

  27. N. O. Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1970; first publ. 1959), p. 31.

  28. There "may be another, less systematized, kind of memory [than the cognitive kind]," writes the pediatrician John Davies, "and it does not mean that the [preconscious] experience has been lost, or is not having an influence." Quoted in Macfarlane, The Psychology of Childbirth, p. 31.

  29. C. G. Jung, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud," in The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 48. This was Jung's obituary of Freud, originally published in 1939.

  30. For Bowlby, see his book Separation (New York: Basic Books, 1973). The quotation from Reich is on page 30 of The Function of the Orgasm, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Pocket Books, 1975; orig. German edition 1942). There is some confusion here, as this book is vol. 1 of his Discovery of the Orgone, which he rewrote several times under the same title. In the discussion of Reich that follows, I have drawn on pp. 4-6, 15, 37, 88-96, 128-32, 162-69, 243-44, 269-71, 283 of this work, as well as from his book Character Analysis, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno, 3d ed., enl. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972; orig. publ. 1945), pp. 171-89.

  31. I am not certain who coined this term, but it first becomes important in the anthropological literature in The People of Alor, by Cora DuBois, published in 1944. See Milton Singer, A Survey of Culture and Personality, p. 33.

  32. Actually, Reich said that it existed in all patriarchies, a thesis much more difficult to establish. On Fromm's study of anal typology see "Die psychanalytische Charakterologie und ihre Bedeutung für die Sozialpsychologie," Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 1 (1932), 253-77. The quote from Reich is in "Character Analysis," p. xxvi.

  33. Peter Koestenbaum, Existential Sexuality (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), pp. 63, 75.

  34. Yankelovich and Barrett, Ego and Instinct, esp. pp. 157, 360-61, 365, 367-68, 371, 396. There is of course an immense spec
ialized literature on cell development. A recent, somewhat popular article on cell interconnection is L.A. Staehelin and B.E. Hull, "Junctions between Living Cells," Scientific American 238 (May 1978), 141-52.

  35. Itzhak Bentov, Stalking the Wild Pendulum (New York: Dutton, 1977), pp. 85-86. Another way of seeing this is to regard the brain as an organ like any other, whose function it is to amplify thoughts. What we call mind, which is identical to the body, goes from the top of the head to the bottom of the feet. The sensation of the body as an object of a consciousness localized in the head is a Cartesian illusion. Mircea Eliade has noted that premodern societies typically locate consciousness at a point just below the navel, which is also a classical yogic training exercise. Scientifically, this is probably more accurate than regarding consciousness as located inside the head. Naturally enough, modern culture regards it as located there because in a context so dominated by processing and control, the experience of rationality becomes overwhelming. In other contexts, it is less impressive. We become easily convinced that this mental processing is the most important, or even the only, form of thought. Bentov argues that it is not even thought, a position more or less taken by don Juan in his discussion with Carlos Castaneda in Tales of Power (see above, Chapter 5, note 19). Don Juan also maintains, as I have in the text, that both "tonal" and "nagual" are inherent parts of our being, but that the decisions we make occur in the realm of the nagual. However, he adds (p. 265) that the view of the tonal must prevail if one is to make use of the nagual -- a point I regard as crucial in this whole business.