All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (41 page)

The family is the little-sung crucible of our passions. We learn to love within it, whatever its configuration. It is here that our capacity for loving and the ways we live love–in all their specificity and particularity–are shaped or misshaped. Mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents and other relations play into the picture. Their characters, their memories, fantasies and hopes leave indelible marks on us, though not always ones we can see. The social environment and the cultural moment, with their shifting conditions, fears and expectations, provide the grain of this canvas of domestic love, and some of its hues.

Site of our most intense and durable emotions, collective artist of our contents and our woes, the family is remade afresh with each new life. So what is this thing called love as it cascades through the family? It’s best to begin at the beginning…

Babies

It is a truth universally acknowledged that love attends the arrival of new life. Plump or papery, still or squalling, the newborn turns all around her into the three biblical kings gazing in rapturous awe at the heralded babe who holds in her tiny body a whole world of promise.

In
The Millstone
(1965), her ground-breaking novel of single motherhood, Margaret Drabble gives us a heroine who had expected little of her newborn: she had been told of their ugliness, ‘their red and wrinkled faces, their waxy covering, their emaciated limbs, their hairy cheeks, their piercing cries’. Yet when she looks at her daughter, she is beautiful: ‘I sat there looking at her, and her great wide blue eyes looked at me with seeming recognition, and what I felt it is pointless to try to describe. Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life.’ ‘What did my fingers do before they held him? What did my heart do, with its love?’ one of the three women in Sylvia Plath’s radio play of that name wonders, as she looks at the ‘shiny and strange’ creature to whom she has just given birth.

When Levin, in
Anna Karenina
, wakes from the torment of Kitty’s anguished screams during labour, that ‘mysterious and terrible, unearthly world in which he had lived for those twenty-two hours’, to the fact of birth, ‘to this new human being who had appeared incomprehensibly from somewhere’, he feels he has been catapulted into a radiant new sphere of happiness, so intense he can hardly bear it. Wavering ‘like a small flame over a lamp’ is a life ‘who had never existed before and who, with the same right, with the same importance for itself, would live and produce its own kind’. Unforeseen sobs and tears of joy rise in him, ‘with such force, heaving his whole body’, that for a long time he simply cannot speak.

‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch,’ Sylvia Plath writes in her ‘Morning Song’. Just as in the greatest of passions, the intoxicating love affair with this new creature releases a redemptive hope–and this time it really feels, and it may indeed well be, for ever. This new being embodies the promise of a future.

The rapturous new love affair which parents, and particularly mother and child, are wrapped up in is as bodily as it is of the imagination. That delicious skin, those luscious folds at knee and arm, those bubble-blowing lips, those seemingly omniscient eyes staring only at you, captivate us. We gaze and stroke, listen for the sound of their breath and cry, sniff and nuzzle, cuddle and rock, nibble and tickle, gathering them up into ourselves. We devour them. We’re infatuated, besotted.

Hardly surprising that Eros, or Cupid, is pictured as a plump, joyous babe. Plenitude has entered the world and for the mother, in particular, the relationship can feel, and indeed in part is, symbiotic. Two are one. After all, this squidgy new life in which love seems to inhere is utterly dependent on us, on the love of others for milk and warmth and movement. Helpless, vulnerable, destined to a protracted immaturity, this little being calls on all our resources of loving care.

But who are these miraculous babies who would perish without us and who throughout their lives will bear the imprint of our ways of loving?

It is only in the last hundred years or so that babies, once prone to early mortality, have become the focus of significant study and expert discourse. The Jesuits’ old motto of ‘Give me a boy of seven, and I’ll have him for life’ was premised on the importance of reason, of thinking, as the predominant force in shaping character. This has been displaced: the first five years of a child’s life are now seen as being crucially formative. Not surprising, perhaps, that the weight given to these early years, traditionally the mother’s sphere, also coincides with the rise of women’s importance in shaping our ways of thinking.

In the last decades, physiological and neural research has shown that the newborn is at first akin to an external foetus. The baby may carry her own unique set of genes which provide a blueprint for the complex being she will become. But these are activated by experience and environment. The carers’ touch, smell, movement, voice, excitement or despondency all impact on the babe’s circuitry and chemistry, working to establish the kind of individual she will become.

‘Physiologically, the human baby is still very much part of the mother’s body,’ Sue Gerhardt writes in
Why Love Matters.
‘He depends on her milk to feed him, to regulate his heart rate and blood pressure, and to provide immune protection. His muscular activity is regulated by her touch, as is his growth hormone level. Her body keeps him warm and she disperses his stress hormones for him by her touch and her feeding. This basic physiological regulation keeps the baby alive.’

In some scientific research, this early sensuous love has in part displaced genes as a significant shaper of future health and character. Scientists working for the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research have stressed that genes are not ‘the weavers of our fate, the sole determinants of our destiny’. The new field of epigenetics studies the way environmental and social factors influence children’s health and well-being: it has shown that children with identical DNA can follow different patterns of development, depending on their experience in earliest life. A mixture of neuro-imaging and non-invasive techniques brings to light that certain genes regulating the stress hormone cortisol and others associated with inflammation, for example, are less or more active in babies, depending on early conditions. An adverse environment, such as that associated with poverty, leads to a lifelong rise in the risk of a number of chronic diseases.

If love isn’t there, if it is nowhere in a small child’s environment and instead all touch is violent and there is hate, abuse, deprivation, trauma, then the emotional cauldron that he is boils over. Untempered, unregulated by the carer’s stroke, sound and attention, the child grows mad: psychotic ideas take over. Empathy, putting oneself in another’s shoes, imagining another mind, becomes nigh impossible.

In
The Philosophical Baby
, her tour of the recent findings of cognitive science about the first five years of life, those years all but shrouded in amnesia or layers of forgetting, Alison Gopnik paints an enthusiastic picture of the complexity of the infant mind before the age of five. This is the point at which autobiographical memory comes into play and this miraculous alien being is transformed into a person continuous with the adult. So babies and toddlers really are radically different from older humans, as their carers have long known.

Nearly all the hundred billion neurons in our nervous system may already be in place from birth. But through early childhood, synapses–the points of contact between neurons that transmit information and thereby fire memory and sensation–are produced in far greater quantity than later. The infant brain is thus poised to make connections, wild or pedestrian. Infants, like scientists, Gopnik argues, make causal maps of the world, posit links between things and make predictions on the basis of their hypotheses. They have theories on the nature of their surroundings and the universe as heady as those of dreaming scientists. They speculate on origins, on birth and the facts of life. Like poets and novelists, they confabulate, treat the imaginary as real. Their fantasy life is rich, inhabited by monsters, angels and imaginary friends who follow them through their days, serve as playmates or persecuting ghouls demanding to be placated. To the adult, their minds seem to work in mysterious, uninhibited ways.

Maturity, in fact, the neuroscientists now tell us, consists in a neural trimming, leaving adult consciousness with only what is most expedient for conducting our everyday lives. The prefrontal lobe, which plays a part in blocking out stimuli from other facets of the brain, doesn’t, it seems, come to full maturity until we are in our twenties. This leaves small children less capable of internally driven attention, but far more fully alert than adults to external stimuli; far more open to the full panoply of their sensory environment and the imaginative and speculative elaborations this sets in motion. Such findings may make us wonder whether ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’, so liberally diagnosed in recent years, may in part mark an adult unwillingness to countenance the very essence, the
difference
, of early childhood. As poets have long known, one is simply more alive to the world in childhood than in adulthood.

Given the very young’s extreme sensitivity to their environment, to stimulus, the love parents or carers offer their children radically affects the way they mature–neurally, physiologically, emotionally, mentally. ‘It isn’t just that without mothering humans would lack nurturance, warmth and emotional security,’ Gopnik writes. ‘They would also lack culture, history, morality, science and literature.’

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists give us an evidence-based discourse for ideas about the exceptionality and importance of early childhood. But these ideas are not altogether discontinuous with certain aspects of a Christian tradition, or of a Romantic or a psychoanalytic one. All accord a special place to the extraordinary creature the infant is. In the first, the innocent, vulnerable child has a privileged access to the Kingdom of God: the child is not only a gift, but a teacher of virtue, spontaneous love, and receptiveness to the Word of God. Rousseau and the Romantic poets also acknowledged the unique imagination and curiosity of the child, his particular aptitude for wonder, his otherworldliness. Nature and sensuous experience–his environment, one might now say–were better teachers than stultifying institutions, which also corrupted. In
Émile
(1762), Rousseau, echoing a Lockean empiricism, noted: ‘Since everything that comes into the human mind enters through the gates of sense, man’s first reason is a reason of sense-experience. It is this that serves as a foundation for the reason of the intelligence; our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes.’ Rousseau even convinced middle-class mothers of the desirability of nursing their own babies, then an unusual occurrence.

Ever since Freud set out to excavate the residues of early childhood experience in the adult–experience that was later obscured or repressed and therefore ‘unconscious’, not available to the adult except in dreams or flashes of imagistic memory–psychoanalysts, too, have been particularly alert to the infant’s uniquely rich and responsive world–a world before later inhibitions or ‘neural trimmings’ came into being. In the 1890s Freud worked as a consultant neurologist at the Children’s Hospital in Vienna. As an analyst he never practised directly with children, but he observed his own children and grandchildren, and theories about early childhood became crucial to his speculations. In part, these theories were based on the childhood memories he elicited from his patients. Such memories seemed to reside as much in their bodies–as symptoms or gestures or as sense-experiences unrelated to a context–as they did in the mind. The Freudian unconscious was thus a residue of early childhood: it was also always individual, whatever generalizable patterns might then be extrapolated from it.

The Freudian baby and toddler is a pleasure-seeking creature driven by libidinal appetites, ‘a cauldron of seething excitations’, seeking satisfaction for her ‘polymorphous perversity’. Her demands for love are always immoderate, and coexist with a ‘powerful tendency to aggressiveness’. Indeed, the more passionately a child loves its mother or first carer, ‘the more sensitive does it become to disappointments and frustrations’. The infant’s ego–transposing discursive languages, one could say its autobiographical self–is not yet in place, not integrated. Thinking and feeling occur at this early stage through what Freud calls the ‘primary process’, characteristic of the unconscious system. These intense primary processes are obscured to adult consciousness during waking hours, but they come into prominence in dreams, hallucinations, mystical moments, fantasy and imaginative work. Then, like infants, our thoughts are ‘unbounded’ by the reality principle.

Freud’s descriptions of the child’s early psychosexual development now seem commonplace. As he grows, the babe’s interests and satisfactions seem to concentrate on key areas of the body, first the mouth, the so-called oral phase, then the anus during toilet training, then the genitals. Difficulties, deprivations, excessive stimulus at any stage shape later character and can produce what Freud called ‘fixations’ on particular erogenous zones.

One of the resonant effects of the Freudian revolution is to have made the child the father of the man: our early and largely forgotten childhoods, we now acknowledge, remain with us to echo through our lives. This gives particular and shaping force to our first instinctual loves and attachments.

Mother, for Freud, is the first object of infant pleasure, the site of a symbiotic plenitude, a fusion which is ever both momentary and for ever, since the infant has no sense of time, only of want or lack. Into this space of lack, the darker, death or aggressive instincts also tumble. That early plenitude, in any case, is soon to be lost, when father, a rival in love and the representative of the law and of prohibitions, steps into the frame.