CHAPTER 3We left our newly conceived infant organism in the process of--what is the appropriate word?--planting in, relating, joining, fusing, attaching, embedding, becoming part of, sticking to, touching, feeling, sensing,...loving, being loved by, the uterine wall. I raise the possibilities within all those words because what goes on between what is to become child and what is part of mother is so fundamental to all levels of sensing, relating, loving, being, etc., that will go on or not go on in the future. If there is to be love between humans, it must have its primitive beginnings here. If there is to be relating between two humans it must be rooted here. On the negative side, if there is to be difficulty in individuating the personality--that is, in becoming a separate, discrete, identifiable, autonomous, single individual--it must begin with the difficulties created by the necessity for the parent organism to be so materially and concretely a part of the child organism in order to provide the child organism with capacity to survive and develop. The success of the individuating process depends on the quality and type of interactions between parent and child during pregnancy and the quality and type of interactions after birth and during early childhood.
To be separate and to know that one is separate is the task and fate of the human individual. Animals, in the natural course of events, seem to be able to become individuals relatively easily. However, in their individuality they are without the tensions, apparently, of fully knowing the implications and responsibilities of their separateness. In another sense they have not become individuals because they are fully embedded in their instincts, and it is to their instincts that the credit for the individuality must go. In the animal world the individuating process is mainly physiological. Certain physiological processes must be carried out in a certain order for the animal to survive infancy and become adult. The same is true for the human infant, but built upon the base of those physiological processes must be certain psychological or relationship or attitudinal processes.
Let me clarify the two issues that are beginning to surface in this discussion. The first is the development of the individual out of the universal with the paradoxical addition of the necessity for the individual to recognize both the individual and universal aspects of his being and to achieve a balanced relationship between the two. The second is the relationship and differences between physiological and psychological events. Both these issues must be understood and dealt with in order to understand the implications of the rearing process in human life. It is incumbent on the parent to make the proper decisions regarding these issues in the development of the child. If the proper decisions are not made, it is incumbent on future teachers and/or therapists to make up for the lacks in the upbringing and to provide what has been missing.
It must be said here that among other things, this book represents the philosophical, therapeutic, and educational viewpoints that I have arrived at from doing my work. My understanding can come only from my own experience as a human being, parent, teacher, and therapist living in this particular culture at this particular time, watching hundreds of people from this culture in thousands of hours of structure time while considering myself a member of the world community and wondering what is best from all those standpoints. It must be understood then, that all my statements regarding universality, individuality, the best possible conditions for human growth, etc., are to be seen in the light of my particular culture. While it is my hope to transcend or see beyond my own provincial guidelines, one is ever a child of one's own time. Yet I extend these distillations of my experience in the hope that they may fall on fertile or accepting ground, there to provide the receiver with some value in the way of a more satisfying life.
It seems to me that it is important for a child to find those factors in his personality that lead him to a relationship with others, nature, and the unknown without feeling that they are foreign to him or indeed that they could be of a different material universe than his. For he is made of the same basic particles that all nature is made of and must share in some of the same history with all living things. At the same time he is the only one living in his own skin during his time of life and place of life, and no one can see, experience, and relate to the world in precisely the way he sees, experiences, and relates to the world. He also must do those things which are important to the world at large, in an ecological sense, without doing injury to his own individual needs and vice versa.
There is an analogy in the relationships between universal and individual, and physiological and psychological, in that individuality is abstracted from or rises from universality and that which is psychological is abstracted or arises from what is physiological. (Clearly a human being must be able to deal with problems of individuality, psychology, and abstractions for animals apparently cannot.)
Man's first experience with relating is a profound joining. The sperm and egg relate to each other by joining. The fertilized egg relates to the wall of the uterus by joining it physiologically. This second joining however is only a temporary one in the physiological sense. In the psychological sense the joining is more correctly understood as relating. I want to point out that all relating has its history and roots in having been joined, all that is psychological has its history or roots in the physiological, all abstractions have their roots in the concrete, all that is individual has its roots in the universal.
As the fertilized egg could not live without joining the wall of the uterus, and by extension, the mother, a human being cannot live without relating to other human beings. This is more true in the earlier years, for man can, in later years, having accumulated a history of real relationships, live on the memories of those years while in actuality being relatively or entirely isolated, That is, having had sufficient quantities of actual experience with people, he can, albeit with difficulty, if he must, relate to the symbolic abstractions of those experiences--his memories--and still remain a human being. Whereas a child who has been abandoned, and in one of those rare circumstances been reared by animals or is old enough to forage for food himself in isolation from other humans, will likely be permanently distorted and unlike most human beings, that is, if he lives at all. What I am suggesting here is that we can as humans relate to symbols as if they were real and with some success, so long as they have been well rooted in concrete reality, but should that symbol-relating propensity occur too soon, before sufficient concrete experiences have been assimilated, distortions of the psyche are the result. We have to be able to live in the concrete world and in the abstract, symbolic world, but the timing and the balance between the two worlds is of utmost importance in the rearing situation. The same is true of the balance between individuality and universality. The parent must assist in the process of teaching the child that his needs and feelings are important and of value, while also giving him the opportunity to learn that his relationship of giving and caring for others beyond himself is to be developed for the satisfaction of others and for the satisfaction of that aspect of himself that needs and is capable of enjoying the role of giving.
What does the uterus give to the fertilized egg? Everything that it needs from the outside world at that time. The egg has genetic information that uses the nurturant flow from the placenta to grow on. The fetus is supported and carried by the uterus and is then free of the need to counter the force of gravity. The walls of the uterus protect the growing fetus, with the assistance of the cushioning effect of the amniotic fluid. The walls of the uterus represent flexible but limiting barriers to its growth and powers. As the fetus stretches and moves in the uterus it comes in contact with the limitations imposed by the size of the womb and "learns" that there are some things it cannot do.
We who are doing psychomotor therapy have become accustomed to listing the functions of the uterus as: nurturance, support, protection, and limits. These four concrete relationships with the fetus imply a fifth, abstract relationship--that of respect. It could be metaphorically said that the uterus respects the fetus in that it responds to it by supplying those things necessary for its survival. I do not mean to personalize the uterus by using the term "respect" but to lead up to the idea that the four basic functions of the uterus are similar to the manner of relating that the mother (and then later the father) has with the child after it is born. The mother correctly could be said to view the child with respect when she ministers to the child's needs for nurturance, support, protection, and limits. The child who has become an adult, autonomous person, who has learned to nurture, support, protect, and limit himself can be said to have self-respect. Thus there can be seen to be three levels or stages which must be passed through and which deal with the same phenomena, rising from the concrete and physiological to the abstract and psychological. All those moves and relationships must be carried out in such a way as to provide maximum matching with the needs of the growing organism-person without subverting his future needs and capacity to carry out those matchings and needs for himself. Parenthetically, I must include the fact that the adult client must be able to redo or reexperience this trip from the concrete to the abstract without losing the capacity to experience in the concrete and physiological realm. His growth should not leave him in the dubious position of being able only to live and experience on the symbolic and abstract levels. Living calls for the widest possible ranges of interactions and feelings and demands a balance of all human capacities.
The first level is the intrauterine level which is physiological, concrete, real, cellular, unconscious, automatic. The analogy with the tree would be most appropriate here--the seed being the fertilized egg, the placenta wall being the earth, the growing tree being the growing fetus. Comparatively speaking, the greatest learning and growth of the fetus at the earliest points is cellular and not behavioral; although there is movement of the fetus quite early, it is a mere suggestion of what is to come.
The second level is the postnatal level which is interactive and movement-oriented. It is still the realm of the real, but is already in transition toward the abstract. It is the time of organ use and further differentiation and motor use and differentiation. It is a time of consciousness for the mother and growing consciousness for the child. A second stage in this level includes the interaction with the father and the entrance into the world beyond the protective home.
The third level is the relationship with the world at large including conscious peer, autonomous, individual, symbolic aspects. It deals with finding a place and a role in the larger society through one's own efforts and capacities. Obviously, success at this level is dependent on success at earlier levels.
Ordinarily, very little goes wrong in the first intrauterine level; however I have seen some clients whose responses, actions, and reactions in a structure lead me to wonder about the varying kinds of environments that mothers provide because of their physical structure or psychological attitudes toward the growing fetus. I wonder if some fetuses are uncomfortable due to the restrictive structure of the mother's body; to the unpleasant character of the mother's movements; to actual blows felt by the infant caused by falls of the mother or blows administered to the mother by others; to the unpleasant quality of the mother's voice; to the strongly varying heartbeat of the mother; and to a possibly unpleasant chemistry of the amniotic fluid.
Autism Versus Autonomy
The goal of the growing organism-person is to become an autonomous individual. In order for this to happen, the person has to have sufficient concrete experiences with the mother and the father which then can be internalized or internally symbolized and available to the person as information or learning which he can apply for himself autonomously. There must be a stage of dependent concrete relationships before autonomy can occur and independence from others result. If, during the stage when the person should be dependent, the intrauterine environment or the home environment fails to provide the necessary concrete experiences, the child-organism has the humanly possible alternative of providing for itself what was missing. This too-soon turning toward one's self for one's basic needs can be understood as an autistic rather than autonomous solution to survival. When this autistic solution occurs, one's interactive energies which are other-oriented, become oriented toward portions of the self and the individual turns away from relating to the external world, just at those times when he most needs the external world to develop normally.
One possibility, in the absence of concrete, behavioral interactions with the mother, is for the child to relate to certain symbols, within himself or in the inanimate world, in lieu of the concrete objects he is missing. Then, instead of learning to manipulate and control the external world to provide his needs, he turns to learning to control his internal world, confusing it symbolically with the external world, and becomes within himself the individual and the world, without learning to make the trip from universal to individual but remaining fused with the universal.
It has often been noted that autistic children have high intellectual capacities. Perhaps, by an accident of genetic structure, the symbol-making capacities of those children have been too rapidly developed, and those capacities too soon attract the interest and interactive energy of the child away from the less manipulable real world.
Some Responses to Failures in the Satisfaction of the Four Basic Needs
If there has been a failure of the mother in the realm of nurture, the child is forced to postpone the development that should accrue from the oral and tactile input and to seek alternate figures and means to satisfy needs. Since the flow of milk to the mouth is second only, in importance to the infant, to the flow of blood through the umbilical cord in establishing an interactive, learning, growing relationship with the world for the future, a failure of the mother in the nurturant role has disastrous consequences. Of course there must be sufficient milk of one kind or another to keep the child alive physiologically, but milk is not enough. There must be sufficient opportunities for sucking for its own sake and sufficient touching and cuddling for its own sake. In the absence of those neural inputs around the mouth and the surface of the body in general, other types of neural inputs seem to be able to be substituted. Once these substitute inputs have become integrated into the child's life processes, they acquire the same value for survival as the normal process of suckling and cuddling and are very difficult to change. They contribute to the style of interaction that the child maintains throughout the rest of its life unless there is an intercession by way of therapy or intense educational processes.
The input must be experienced and because of the flexible nature of man's psychic being, because of man's capacity to treat his own body and his own movements symbolically (there is symbolic action as well as symbolic words in man's inner being), he can take in cooing sounds or music in his ear with the same affection that he takes in milk and cuddling and impute to them the same importance. In a sense then, the ear can be interchanged with the mouth as the organ for nurturant input; the ear becomes symbolically confused with the mouth, so to speak.
Primary process in this instance becomes not only a primitive flow from the individual back into the universal in the sense of all organs being interchangeable to the unconscious, but an expression of the higher capacities of man to symbolize, again not only to use thought symbolically but to use body and action symbolically.
To return to nurturance distortions, the ear-mouth confusion is relatively benign. Consider the confusions that can occur if the mother is unduly concerned with the anus of the child. We have seen instances where the client has been given enemas regularly from the first week of life on through most of childhood. If the father rather than the mother is the one who tends to offer nurturance by way of bottle feeding and cuddling, there may be repercussions in that the organ of giving may become confused and may even shift from the mother's breast to the father's penis. This shift has shown up in therapy quite often.
Negative Nurturance
Sometimes a child is not fed and cuddled at all in its infancy but is regularly abused physically and rejected. Significantly, this type of neural input is precisely what the child learns to live with. The child learns to "eat" or be nurtured by pain and rejection. This child, when he is grown, might unwittingly place himself in situations where he is physically abused and rejected, all the while unhappy and miserable that that is his fate (and not seeing that this is precisely the type of interaction he seeks). This we label negative nurturance.
Primary Mode of Relationship
We have learned in psychomotor therapy to be on the lookout for those modes of relationship which can be understood to be replicas of the distortions in the nurturant cuddling phase and which the client tends to reproduce in the therapeutic sessions. We have learned to watch what it is that the client demands in the way of treatment from the therapist and from other group members, speculating that he will then "eat" or consume the response that he has generated. Some patients place themselves in a situation where they will be humiliated and degraded symbolically, made to "eat shit." Some clients tend to make the group or the therapist want to strike them and hit them, figuratively trying to "eat fist." Some clients try to provoke a powerful sexual reaction in all those whom they come in contact with, including the therapist and group members, and this can be seen as an attempt to arouse sexual feelings in order to "receive or eat cock."
One of the goals in therapy is to bring out these confusions and to clarify them by giving the appropriate organs the appropriate input. It is hypothesized that those styles of interaction that are compulsive and unsatisfying might have their roots in insufficient and unsatisfying nurturant experiences. We attempt to provide the client with the fulfillment of the oral and tactile needs he has missed. However, it is not possible simply to tell the client to lie down on an accommodator's lap and pretend to suckle at her breast, while in actuality suckling on a fleshy portion of her hand or arm. It is first necessary to permit the client to move entirely as his own body wishes at the moment of his structure and to keep in mind the problem and clarify it when the situation permits. An important point to note is that in order to return successfully to the mouth as the organ of nurturant input, one must first gather the interactive energy that is being applied to other organs or the sucking that one does will be forced and meaningless. We will go into detail regarding this when discussing individual structures.
Support Needs
Just as the fetus needs the support of the womb to give it mobility, the infant, after birth, needs the supporting arms and bodies of the parents to carry him about until such time as he can walk and carry himself about. The child needs the guiding presence of the parent when he begins to walk so that, should he trip, he can grasp for the hand of the nearby parent for stability and support. It is important that a good balance between dependence and independence be established by the parent so that the child's natural curiosity and mobility are not overcome by a too solicitous parent. The child has to get a sense of the parents' "being there" when he needs them. This shows up later on the psychological level in the parents' backing up the child in events in which the child needs moral support. The child must have the sense of the parent's being behind him when he attempts to deal with a challenging situation. Quite often in a structure, when support issues are arising, the client may feel wobbly in the knees and wish to be held or carried, feeling unable to carry himself and needing the strength and support of parent figures.
Sometimes when a client in a support issue is offered the ministrations of strong parents, the client reports that he feels his own knees stiffening at the approach of the parents. He may comment that he doesn't feel he can depend on his parents and that he would rather depend on himself. When questioned about his past the client may relate that he was the eldest in the family and had to take on the responsibilities of the family support as the father was ill, etc. He may recall that in crises when he needed his parents they were never there, etc. Once again we are faced with a situation in which the client, not having received the quality of experience he needs from his parents, develops too soon (and with relationship-damaging consequences) the capacity to make do for himself out of his young resources. Of course it is important for children to learn to stand on their own feet but the timing is of the essence. Too soon and the child may be unable ever to receive from other people even when it is reasonable to do so, too late and the child may become over-dependent and unable to care for himself. The physical areas of the body that seem to be involved in the support experience are under the knees and thighs, and on the back.
Protection Needs
The walls of the uterus protect the child from the force of overpowering interactive events. They shield the child from the potentially hostile elements in the environment. Symbolically and literally the arms and bodies of the parents carry on the protection after the child is born. The parent's function is to stave off hostile attacks, literally blows, from the child. Symbolically the parent holds off the threatening energies from the environment. The parent keeps at arms length those events and relationships that would overwhelm the inner coherence of the child (remember the rock being hit by another rock?).
If the child is not sufficiently protected from hostile energies, he can either develop his own strength too soon and learn to combat external threat by becoming "hard" and not permitting anything to "get to him." Or he can succumb to the excessive energies that come his fragile way and he can be overwhelmed, invaded and destroyed by the forces that are greater than the force of his personal coherence. In the absence of adequate physical strength, the child may find symbolic inner processes or thoughts which can give him supernatural power to drain his interactive energy from external targets and intensify his relationship to his own inner processes.
Experience indicates that the bodily expression of the parent's mode of protection is in the circular embrace of the arms. Sometimes a client who is in need of this protection while in a structure will wrap his own arms around himself and when offered strong parental figures will ask them to hold him tightly. The two parents can make a circle of their arms around the client, making a shield with their arms and bodies, and they can verbalize how they will protect the client from real of imagined threatening forces. (Of course it is important to ascertain whether the client is experiencing the threat from within, as of his own feelings. That is responded to differently, but that will be dealt with later.) In the issue of protection the father seems more emphasized than the mother, as the client seems to search for and find the strength of the father as indicative of protection. When the client is being held, he may wish to be held very tightly, to hold on to the arms of his good parents, and to seek physical and verbal reassurance that they are strong enough to take care of him.
"Promise Me You'll Always Be There"
Frequently, in a structure a client will beseech the parents to vow that they will always care for him and always be there when he needs them. Although this plea on the surface might appear as a negative indication of one's ability or willingness to become independent and autonomous it seems to me more definitely a necessary and important aspect of the parental relationship with the child--the parent must satisfy the child's needs for constancy and stability. By answering "yes" to the child's wish, we are not undermining the child's drive toward self-reliance; we are giving him a psychological and symbolic sense of firmness, constancy and stability. If one's parents have been that constant, while at the same time offering the child ample opportunities for practicing self-reliance, the results will certainly be in favor of independence and the discovery of those firm, stable qualities in one's self.
The Need to Be Limited
In order to be an individual, one needs to have a shape. In order to have a shape, there must be a boundary or a limit delineating the individual. A child has no sense of his power until he tests it in a concrete, behavioral way. He must live in an atmosphere where it is permissible for him to exercise all the genetic energies at his disposal, from love to hate, without fear that his energies will overcome either him or his world. He must learn that he is master of his genetic being and that he is not a "bump on his omnipotent emotions." Some clients have expressed the fear that should they let their feelings go, they would be washed away as so many sand buildings under the force of the tide and waves on the seashore. In a structure the good parents let the child client know that they are strong enough to "handle" him--that they can take all his emotions without being overwhelmed, destroyed, killed, or raped. The emotion of hate which is being experienced as an overwhelming, world-destroying force can be tested and limited in a structure, not by accommodating it as would be done with ordinary levels of anger by literally containing it. The entire group participates in this, acting as extensions of the good parents. The client lies on the floor (which should be well carpeted) or a mat or mattress and the group members place their hands on his legs, torso, and arms. The good parents usually place themselves at opposite sides of the clients head so that he will be most conscious of them and be able to hear what they may say. Then the client can attempt to "kill" the group, the world, the parents or whomever, attempting to get free while doing so. The amount of energy that this permits is impressive. Some male clients may need seven or more people to hold them down. They may scream, shriek, froth, and rage, but the group and the good parents hold them down while letting them know that they are not afraid of their emotions and that they can keep the clients from killing them.
It is interesting how often the client will describe his reaction to this restrain with relief and pleasure. He may comment that he tried with every ounce of his strength and was sure that he would throw everyone off and go berserk but found that he could not do it and was surprised to find that he liked that and that he could relax a good deal more after the effort. This exercise is reminiscent of the nonverbal exercise of breaking in or breaking out, used in some encounter groups; however, in this case of the client were permitted to break out it would reinforce his omnipotent fantasies and fears, precisely what we are trying to contain!
An important factor to observe is whether the client is ready for such a limiting structure. One, it might be that he is not at the moment experiencing the intense feelings which he is fearful will overwhelm him. Having him go through this structure half-heartedly will serve no good effect. Two, by pointed questioning the group leader must ascertain whether the client is experiencing the constraint as a rape or invasion of himself. If this appears to be happening, the therapist should terminate the holding at once, to avoid reinforcing a potential negative nurturance where the client seeks to be overcome by the group.
A parent or parents who give the message to their child that he is too much for them to handle is playing into the hands of the child's fantasies of omnipotence. Of course a child should not be overly limited or he will feel trapped and constrained where his emotional energies are concerned. Being limiting in a punitive way would tend to result in an invasion of the child by the very figures who were supposed to protect him from invasion. That is why the good father figure in a structure will often say that he uses his strength to protect the child and not to invade the child. The bodily symbolic and concrete posture for this is to have the father figure facing the outside world with his arms extended in a protective fashion with his back to the client, demonstrating that the power of his hands and arms is directed towards the world and not towards him.
If in reality a child is not sufficiently limited he may respond in a variety of ways. He may abuse those around him in a thoughtless way; he may be fearful of his emotions and repress them following an event in which he may have caused serious or even near fatal injury; he may fantasize that his untouched and untested emotions are all powerful and not use these energies for any real situation.
There seems to be a connection between limiting and guilt (superego processes if you will). Consider the following event: During a structure with a student group of clinical psychology graduate students, the limiting was attempted with the student in a standing position. Even though there were a large number of people in the group, including a majority of males, the student almost broke free when the group members who were holding his legs lost their grasp of him. He was successfully contained however and when the structure was over the student verbalized his reaction to the moment when it seemed he could break free. He said that he fantasized that if he broke free he would plunge for the large windows and crash through them (we were on the fifteenth floor of the building). My interpretation of this event is the student, unable to be limited by the parent figures (who are really to be understood as external symbols of his own ego), handled the force of his hostility by turning it toward himself. My hypothesis is that when ego controls break down, sometimes superego controls deflect the energy away from the environment and toward the self. Guilt and punishment seem to me to be part of the process by which the individual places the needs of the rest of the world alongside the needs of himself. The superego can be seen as an expression of an individual's awareness of his universal components in a non-omnipotent way.
* TMs and © Copyright Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso 1998 all rights reserved
