Recapitulation – Part II

The net result, then, is that we as adults create a society that reflects our collective childhood experience, though that society is extant before we are born. We have no real choice about the world into which we are born. The newborn must immediately begin to adapt – and one can do so easily because one’s nervous system is still relatively unformed, incredibly ready to absorb life-giving information. It is indeed feedback that nurtures the nascent nervous system.

No one creates the world into which he or she is born. Each of us comes as a result of the successful joining and germination of a sperm cell and an egg. Each of these contains 23 chromosomes, half the blueprint for a new body to house life.

I believe that these sex cells contain much, much more. They contain the essence of the two humans who are joining – their hopes and dreams, their fears and shame, their desires and aspirations, not only of and for themselves, but for the child they are creating (even if by default, as in the case of one or both of the two parties not being aware of wanting to conceive). These desires and tendencies are shaped by the life experiences of the makers of the new body. I believe that they are projected onto and into this newly created form, are carried, waiting, as it were, for the form to form.

Society exists before any individual does. There is always a pre-existing structure into which any individual is born, one with its own diverse cultures, dreams and visions, rules and regulations. Everyone in that extant society is invested in the operative paradigm, or blueprint, of that society – even those who are most opposed or resistant to its basic tenets and work against the stated or implied aims. The society contains the collective essence of all of its individual components and shapes these individuals just as the individuals, to some greater or lesser extent, shape society for survival and the furtherance of their goals.

One is actually being socially conditioned from the moment of one’s first breath. Kotulak (1996/1997) pointed to a great variety of learning that is documented from the moment a newborn begins to organize his or her brain through feedback from sensory stimuli in the environment. The mother’s hormones are the primary influence upon the developing fetus, but she is continually interacting with the world at large; and the complex set of others with whom she daily interacts, not the least of whom might be the child’s biological father – and his complex set of needs, wants, desires, hopes, visions. One’s birth mother has a tremendous influence on one in so many subtle and complex ways, including her choice of foods and use of medicines and other drugs, including alcohol. All drugs, are mood-altering, and mutagenic, hence the mother-to-be’s choices in this arena are extremely significant.

Thus the whole of society acts upon one from the moment of first breath through one’s birth parents and circumstances – especially as they carry their own complex set of experiences, pains, joys, and traumas. No one is perfect, and no one has perfect parents. Even the desire to give the newborn child “the very best” is colored by the life experiences and choices of the parents, who will discriminate and be prejudiced toward or against those choices they themselves have made – and will therefore choose for their child. Thus from that very first primal moment, each of us is being influenced by the entire of extant society acting through our birth parents to absorb and imprint lessons, behavioral patterns, and what will ultimately become the foundation for choices formed in those earliest moments of one’s separate existence in the highly chaotic and disorganized period of earliest gestation. Notwithstanding, Bohm (1990), expressed an idea to which I will return later, that there is an:

Implicate Order [that] exists as an ultimate physical substrate that underlies our present perception of reality. Although the parts appear to be distinct from the whole, in fact, because they “enfold” or include the whole, they are identical with the whole. If we could invoke the precedent of quantum mechanical indefinability, we could leap to the idea of a united entity encompassing all space and time in which each part contains the whole and is identical to it. (p. 34)

Schmidt (1995) defines self as a “process of becoming which requires otherness to come to itself. In going out of itself, it finds what is other to it. In being found, it finds itself, thereby gaining its constituent nature” (p.192). Malon, Paulus, and Hurley (1994) noted that “a self evolves in social interaction, and each person, through the ability to symbolize experience, carries internal representations of their real social world” (p. 52). Miller (1990) states “Self feeling is simply the certainty that the feelings and wishes one experiences are a part of one’s self...This natural contact with one’s own emotions and wishes is what gives one a sense of strength and esteem” (p. 33).

The development of the self is an interactive process (Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1991). The developing individual’s sense of well-being and identity as exquisitely related to the shaping and growth of his still-plastic neural system. One absorbs the modeled lessons of one’s care figures without discrimination because of the unique plasticized brain learning of infancy and early childhood called neoteny (Hebb, 1949; Rosenzweig & Bennett 1996) that allows for the incredible neural development that, at times in the new brain, synapses form “at the incredible rate of three billion a second…[such that] at eight months, a baby’s brain has about 1000 trillion connections” (Kotulak, 1996/1997, p. xiv). Because, at that point, one has yet nothing to alter one’s utter vulnerability, one may be imprinted with the essential emotional tone of these lessons like black ink on the white paper of one’s consciousness. One has, without any conscious thought or volition, been introduced to expectations – certain ways of thinking, acting, being, as preferences. There may be an actual physical substrate to this. Springer (1994) speaks of this as the “well-marked neural pathways (built up myelin sheaths) of the brain” (p. 14).

Between 18-36 months, one begins to differentiate between self and other; begins to first recognize that all is not the self; that there is a world, totally unknown, beyond the reach of one’s senses. The caregivers’ responses to the nascent effort of the developing individual are extremely critical to the development of a firm and solid self-image in the child (Laing, 1969), programmed to some great extent by the responses of the caregiver to the infant.

A key quality of this feedback is the recognition of the infant’s needs, the soothing of and attendance to those needs by the appropriate adults. This is absorbed as non-verbal neural data that may very likely become the model of self-care that the individual adopts later in his or her life. I believe that damage inflicted on the developing individual will result in the later development of disorganization of the personality in a variety of ways, addictions as a pseudo-bonding attempt and aberrant self-soothing measure, and quite possibly severe mental illnesses of every sort. The manner and quality practiced upon one will be absorbed without discrimination, again since the brain of the developing child is extremely plastic and impressionable (Hebb, 1949; Rosensweig & Bennett, 1996). As a result, one is early tuned to a process of response and feedback, a cybernetic feedback loop (Maltz, 1970) with what becomes called other.

The further process of socialization then begins to include some level of focus on the external as a source of fulfillment of/for one’s needs. From the age of approximately 36 months, one increasingly gives importance and focus to the external because one is taught and expected to obey authorities of all stripe; to manipulate, appease or cajole those external to the self for one’s own appeasement and satisfaction. One is, in effect, conditioned by the whole history of one’s caregivers and their acquired life experience, habits, faults, etc.