Until we talked about these events in her childhood and uncovered the meaning they had for her, Lorna had not seen the connection between these childhood experiences and her drive for perfection, her fear of hospitals and the terrible panics which came whenever she felt that she was completely and absolutely alone. Buried farther was her anger towards her parents, who had abandoned her in the hospital, and towards her family, who expected her to give up being herself and to be what they wanted her to be. She had not acknowledged this anger, lest it burst forth and her family, who would not tolerate anger, reject her.
In the womb we were securely held. Being born brings us the first experience of being abandoned. We are no longer confined within secure limits, and instead a limitless world stretches around us. This uncertainty is frightening but necessary. All through our lives we cannot change anything about ourselves unless we go through a period of uncertainty. If we are wise we teach ourselves to tolerate the uncertainty of change, but, even as we do this, we retain the longing for the comfort and security of being securely held.
The ways in which this need can be met range from being physically held to knowing ourselves to be an accepted and loved member of our group. Important though this need is to all of us, there is no word for it in English. The closest word is ‘dependence’, from the Latin ‘to hang from’, but in our society to be dependent is not an admirable quality. Only weak, despicable people are dependent; strong, admirable people are independent. So we have to keep hidden our longing to be held secure in loving arms.
Not so in Japan. The Japanese language contains an important word, amae, which has the root ‘sweet’.10 Sweet it is to rest secure in loving arms. Sweet it is to amaeru, to presume upon the secure and indulgent love given by another person. It is that sense of snuggling up, of coming home, not to shouts and yells and coldness and criticism, but to welcome, allowed to be yourself and knowing that the people around you accept you as you are. The toddler who climbs on to an adult’s lap, confident of a cuddle, the teenager who throws his dirty football shorts on the bathroom floor, confident that they will reappear in his drawer, clean and pressed, the wife who snuggles up to her husband in bed and confidently places her cold feet on his - all amaeru. We all long to amaeru, but so often we cannot do this. Sometimes we have no one to hold us, and sometimes the people who hold us do so too tightly and threaten to smother us.
Adults who care for babies need to find a balance between keeping the baby securely held and allowing the baby the freedom to stretch, kick and act upon the environment by exploring it. In western Europe until the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries and to this day in eastern Europe, babies were wrapped tightly from birth in swaddling sheets to form a rigid bundle and left tightly held, but not in human arms, for the first six to eight months of their life. The theory behind swaddling was, according to the historian Lloyd de Mause, ‘If it [the baby] were left free it would scratch its eyes out, tear its ears off, break its legs, distort its bones, be terrified at the sight of its own limbs, and even crawl on all fours like an animal.’11
Nowadays good mothering practice includes both tucking the baby securely in a cot or carrying him in a sling held firmly against the adult’s body and freeing the baby from all physical restraints in a warm, safe environment. These two kinds of condition are necessary for the baby, not just to encourage physical growth and health but to help him develop as a person who can tolerate the closeness of being in a secure group and the uncertainty of being an individual acting upon the world.
Unfortunately, some parents believe that they must teach the baby that they and not the baby are in charge, and so they do not respond to cries of hunger or distress. Some parents are too tired, or too busy, or too depressed to play with or talk to the baby. To learn, to develop our intelligence, we need to be able to act upon the world. Doing this, we develop the idea that ‘I am the kind of person who can act successfully upon the world’.
The idea ‘I am the kind of person who can act successfully upon the world’ is one of the possibilities that can be contained in an individual’s sense of being a person. If I asked you, ‘Who are you?’, you could list your gender, your age, nationality, religion, race, occupation and family connections. If I asked you, ‘What kind of a person are you?’, you could list your virtues and vices, strengths and weaknesses, alliances and enmities, your interests, wishes, needs, passions and beliefs, and all the things you know about yourself but find hard to put into mere words, but everything that you could tell me about yourself is made up of ideas. The sum total of these ideas is you, what you call I, me, myself. There is no little you sitting inside you, adding to and maintaining this sum total of ideas. You are your sum total of ideas, or what I call your meaning structure, because this sum total of ideas has a structure where every part is connected to every other part.
Your meaning structure is not a static structure but a feedback process in constant movement. Nowadays we are all familiar with feedback processes in objects like refrigerators and heating systems. Many refrigerators freeze and defrost themselves, and many heating systems change themselves with changes in outside temperature. There is no little engineer sitting in your refrigerator or heating system pressing the right buttons as needed. The process processes itself. It is the same with you. Denis Noble, Emeritus Professor of Cardiovascular Physiology at Oxford University, calls the self ‘an integrative process’.12 If you happen to speak Japanese or Korean you will have no difficulty in understanding this because, as Denis Noble said, ‘What these languages do is to emphasise the “doing-ness” of things, the processes that occur, that is, the verb rather than the subject who is the possessor of the being-ness or doing-ness.’ If Descartes had been Japanese or Korean he would not have said ‘cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think, therefore I am’, but ‘thinking, therefore being’.13
Thinking of yourself as an active process can be somewhat disturbing, but think about it a bit more. Isn’t that how you experience yourself, with thoughts that come and go, memories bobbing to the surface, along with ideas, images, wishes and needs? The feedback in your process operates all the time as you see the results of what you have done, and you modify what you do next time. The process which is you reflects upon itself and so it can change. If you had been born with a bit of your brain marked ME, a bit that just sits there unchanging, you would have been stuck with you for the rest of your life.
Feedback processes like those in our refrigerator and heating system and in us, our meaning structure which gives us a sense of being a person, do not operate in a vacuum. These three kinds of processes operate in relation to their environment. Deprive us of our environment, and our sense of being a person begins to disintegrate. Sensory-deprivation experiments, where an individual is deprived of sight, sound, movement, smell and touch, have shown that, under these conditions, people begin to lose the ability to distinguish what is around them from what is inside them, their thoughts and feelings. These become increasingly bizarre. There is no lack of evidence of what happens to babies and children who are deprived of loving care, while all gaolers know that the quickest way to break the toughest man is to put him in solitary confinement for an indefinite period.
Our meaning structure starts to take shape while we are still in the womb, where babies hear sounds and experience pleasure and pain. A newborn baby looks around at the world with intense interest, and so his meaning structure grows and changes. Our meaning structure grows out of the functioning of our brain, and so, like all living things, its first purpose is to stay alive.
‘Staying alive’ for a meaning structure means staying as one coherent whole. The aim of all the functions of the meaning structure is to keep the structure whole and not let it fall apart. If the meaning structure starts to fall apart the sense of being a person will start to dissipate. We experience this whenever we discover that we are mistaken in our judgement. Mislaying our house keys makes us anxious; discovering that the world is not what we thought it was can threaten to annihilate us as a person. Whenever we discover that we have made a serious error of judgement