All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (44 page)
Read All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Online
Authors: Lisa Appignanesi
The natural paradigm, which in any case shifts its attributes through history, is rarely an altogether useful one for the cultural beings humans are. The animal life that evolutionary psychologists so like to compare us to provides a very distant template for human motherhood. There are continuities of course: all young animals need nurture, and in most species the female will provide it, though often both parents are implicated. Sometimes, too, as Darwin himself tells us, the instinct for self-preservation may take over from maternal care: the swift’s migratory instinct triumphs over her maternal instinct and she takes off in the appropriate season, whatever the age of her brood. That said, animals do not take a year of tending before they can get up on their hind legs, another before they can learn the basics of language, and some eighteen more years before they (may) leave home. So the long immaturity of humans–and their vast and malleable brains continually shaped and reshaped by childhood experience–calls upon capacities for loving which are great, complex, and subject to change through a child’s life.
Expert Knowledge
Before I got married I had six theories about bringing up children; now I have six children, and no theories.
John Wilmot, (2nd Earl of Rochester)
Until this recent wave of instinctual motherhood, middle-class babies were rarely breast-fed by their own mothers. Facts are not the easiest to come by in this area, but it is clear that until the twentieth century an infant’s proximity to mother was not understood as an indication of future happiness or accomplishment. Nor was it, necessarily. Jane Austen was farmed out from birth for some five years, as were her siblings, to a woman who lived miles away. Balzac, as custom then had it, was similarly sent to a wet-nurse and spent four years away from home. Historians will undoubtedly also discover that some lovingly breast-fed babes matured into unloving, murderous tyrants.
One of the difficulties attending parental love in our cultural moment is that the child, and first of all, the baby, has become the focus of so much expert know-how alongside so many redemptive hopes. Bringing up children now often seems to require a concentration of programmatic activity and consumerist expenditure so intense that love can flip into frustration and disappointment, though this may have little to do with the child’s own individuality. The pleasures of love too often seem to have been displaced by a work and production ethic in which parental achievement is judged by effort and by the honed product at its ever receding terminus.
Though the advice of the experts may be well meant, the generalized repertoire of dos and don’ts is difficult to abide by, since every child is so different–as are family constellation and circumstance. Nor is the effort particularly conducive to the ineffable appreciation of another that love also is.
In
The Child in Time
(1987) Ian McEwan’s hero, a writer of children’s fiction and member of a government commission on childcare, humorously reflects that over three centuries, generations of experts–priests, moralists, social scientists and doctors–mostly men, have provided ever mutating instructions, dressed up as facts, for the benefit of mothers. Each generation, of course, has paraded its own as the apogee of common sense and scientific insight.
He had read solemn pronouncements on the necessity of binding the newborn baby’s limbs to a board to prevent movement and self-inflicted damage; of the dangers of breastfeeding, or elsewhere, its physical necessity and moral superiority; how affection or stimulation corrupts a young child; the importance of purges and enemas, severe physical punishment, cold baths, and earlier in this century, of constant fresh air, however inconvenient; the desirability of scientifically controlled intervals between feeds, and conversely, of feeding the baby whenever it is hungry; the perils of picking a baby up whenever it cries–that makes it feel dangerously powerful–and of not picking it up when it cries–dangerously impotent; the importance of regular bowel movements, of potty training a child by three months, of constant mothering all day and night, all year, and elsewhere, the necessity of wet-nurses, nursery maids, twenty-four-hour state nurseries; the grave consequences of mouth-breathing, nose picking, thumb-sucking and maternal deprivation, of not having your child expertly delivered under bright lights, of lacking the courage to have it at home in the bath, of failing to have it circumcised or its tonsils removed; and later the contemptuous destruction of all these fashions; how children should be allowed to do whatever they want so that their divine natures can blossom, and how it is never too soon to break a child’s will; the dementia and blindness caused by masturbation, and the pleasure and comfort it affords the growing child; how sex can be taught by reference to tadpoles, storks, flower fairies and acorns, or not mentioned at all, or only with lurid, painstaking frankness; the trauma imparted to the child who sees its parents naked, the chronic disturbance nourished by strange suspicions, if it only ever sees them clothed; how to give your nine-month-old baby a head-start by teaching it maths.
Sifting through the welter of oft-conflicting advice, parents will inevitably follow dollops of what suits their needs best within the aegis of their own time’s cultural imperatives, and give their behaviour the name of love.
Having somehow made my way through decades of motherhood with all its ups and downs, its rows and pleasures, the competing needs of children, partners, work and oneself, I now sometimes think that, basic care apart, children thrive best on imaginative understanding. Though it can’t be there at every minute of the day, and sometimes fails, regular applications of it will see them and you through. Love, after all, is more of an art than a rigorous production line with targets in place at each step of the way. And like art, it asks of us both form and freedom, attentiveness and its relaxed suspension.
Because of his attempts to understand the child first rather than focus on a programme of care, D.W. Winnicott (1896–1971) remains interesting: one could say there’s a strong anti-expert expert in him. Winnicott’s ability to enter a small child’s very particular sphere is legendary. Play was Winnicott’s therapeutic tool. Play, here, is not a question of sophisticated toys bought to assuage parents’ guilts or a child’s often momentary and shifting demands–stand-ins for desires or lacks they can’t place (and are rarely given the quiet time, the necessary and creative boredom, in which they might). Play, for Winnicott, is serious activity. It exists within its own suspended time, engages the imagination and hones our ability to think symbolically. It helps to locate a child’s desires. A train or a ball or a rag doll can stand in for a host of emotionally charged events or people and situations. The writer John Berger, who had a small top-floor studio in Winnicott’s house during the late 1940s, told me that he has never forgotten the striking sight, on coming in, of Winnicott sprawled on the floor of his living room, which doubled as a consulting room. The door was always kept open and Winnicott could be seen absorbed in playing with his small clients. He was so imaginatively engrossed that he might himself have been a somewhat oversized child, or indeed a stand-in for his ideal of the good-enough mother.
In Freud’s wake, a host of analysts had turned their attention to the child–his own daughter, Anna Freud, amongst them. Britain became a fertile centre for the study of infancy and the kind of love under which children thrive. Here, a romantic tradition of childhood, elaborated in a wealth of literature, had long existed. From the turn of the nineteenth century on, play, too, had been seen as something of a child’s foundational and privileged right, as Antonia Byatt so well elaborates in her novel
The Children’s Book.
The analyst Melanie Klein, who established herself in London in 1926, used play to understand infants: her theories focused on the forces at work in the child before language developed. The infant who emerges from her writings is a dramatic creature whose inner landscape is the site of warfare between conflicting passions–aggressive and libidinal demands–all of them at first focused on the mother’s breast, which stands in for his whole life. Site of his satisfaction, or lack, the baby fantasizes the breast as good, loved, idealized; or bad, persecutory, destructive. This split cannot be reconciled until the infant is old enough to integrate his ‘self’ as a whole; in other words, to become another, a separate person. In some, the split is never reconciled. Klein’s followers suggested that this depends, in large part, on the kind of love the mother provides. Unlike Freud, whose work reflects his time’s patriarchal pre-eminence, Klein and her followers shifted the psychological focus within the family to the mother. In that spirit of scientific inquiry which always seems to propel searchers back to an understanding of earliest forces and origins, early mothering displaced castrating, disciplinary fathering as the crucial shaping influence on the child and on the formation of mind and inner life.
Klein’s theories about the earliest life of the infant fed countless practitioners. Principal amongst them was Winnicott himself, who added psychotherapy with children to his practice as a hospital paediatrician. In the course of his working life Winnicott saw some sixty thousand children and their mothers, fathers and grandparents in his ‘paediatric snackbar’. Here he gathered a wealth of observations which fed his writing, much of it in common, comprehensible and playful language. Ordinary doctors and parents were his public, not only fellow professionals; and his BBC talks on childhood spoke to the nation, informing notions of childhood and good parenting.
The Winnicottian baby is a bundle of ruthless instinctual forces utterly dependent on mother (or primary carer), without whom existence would not be possible. In this sense, mother and child are a couple. Yet she is primarily part, if the central part, of a facilitating environment. And she needs to trust herself to be responsive to her baby’s needs: simply put, to be interested in him, ‘to see the human being in the new-born infant’. Winnicott posits that in the last stage of pregnancy and in the first few weeks of a baby’s life, the mother inhabits a trance-like state of heightened sensitivity. This ‘primary maternal preoccupation’, a lulling attention in which she feels herself into the child’s place, is a crucial component of maternal love.
Concerned to free mothers from the anxiety-inducing pressure of guidebooks and the conflicting advice of doctors, nurses, grandmothers and friends, Winnicott constantly reassures the mother that she will know just what to do ‘spontaneously’ in order to be ‘good enough’–not perfect. Striving for perfection, her anxiety infiltrates the baby, provoking his. Given good-enough mothering, good-enough love, the baby will go on to create what it is within him to create and contribute. In a BBC broadcast of 1949, Winnicott stated:
In each baby is a vital spark, and this urge towards life and growth and development is a part of the baby, something the child is born with and which is carried forward in a way that we do not have to understand. For instance, if you have just put a bulb in the window-box you know perfectly well that you do not have to make the bulb grow into a daffodil. You supply the right kind of earth or fibre and you keep the bulb watered just the right amount, and the rest comes naturally, because the bulb has life in it.
The baby needs attentiveness: she needs to be held and fed, more or less when she likes, and changed, perhaps not too soon, since she enjoys the warmth, and indeed the excitement, of producing and sometimes retaining excrement. Excited by feeding, which is also a sexual activity, she may turn away or prove aggressive, but eventually she will be satisfied, at least for the time being–which isn’t long. Babies cry and can be a downright nuisance. But Winnicottian babies are allowed, often enough, to shriek and scream: every mother will soon recognize which cries are to do with hunger or pain and which are simply a mark of what the baby is living out internally–for the baby has his own fears and fantasies to live through, which produce inner conflicts.
Feeding difficulties are common amongst all children at one point or another, and can return periodically, Winnicott notes, thus calming his listeners. So, too, are orgies–of sex, food or excrement. This needn’t worry mother. There is a tug-of-war going on in the infant between inner and outer reality: destructive thoughts go along with excitement, and these frighten him. Growing fond of the person he gradually recognizes as mother, he may worry that he will destroy her in the very act of eating her, so he stops eating. As long as the good-enough mother (or her partner) doesn’t panic, shows the baby that she can withstand his attacks; as long as she is reliably there, alive and breathing, the baby will grow happily enough, sensing that his rampant needs and conflictual desires are somehow being held–and held together–as he moves towards that integration which marks his existence as a bounded self.
Parents don’t need to know everything that goes on in the minds of their small children, any more than they need to know everything about physiology. (The analogy here might be with the state: we want it to provide basic security, but rebel against invasive surveillance.) Winnicott says: it’s not the head, but the heart that counts. Parents simply need ‘to have the imagination to recognize that parental love… is something which a child absolutely needs of them’. Above all, he needs mother to be ‘real’ for him, to provide security, so that he can hate her, bite, stab, kick, without destroying her. Gradually he’ll move from a state of illusion–that omnipotent, magical time when the imaginary world dominates–to ‘disillusion’, a recognition that there are other beings in the world, that satisfactions are dependent and may be sporadic and limited.
Mother-love is what sees the child through and shapes the kind of being he will become.