Anxiety and the socialization of the child
As I see it, our fundamental problem in regards to knowledge is that our society, which focuses on maximizing production and consumption, has ignored the importance of synthesizing knowledge. The fixation on specialization leads to a society that fragments; a cleverly synthesized knowledge can facilitate social unity. Such a synthesis cannot be static but must be dynamic; it must constantly integrate new understanding into a new and thus living synthesis. We cannot arrive at absolute knowledge but we can maintain a dynamic synthesis.
Becker provides this synthesis in his book The Birth and Death of Meaning. In this post I shall try to provide an abstraction of a small portion of this synthesis regarding the fundamental role of anxiety in a childs development.
Our educational system trains us to become proficient producers and consumers with little serious regard for the problems inherent in developing a moral understanding for constructing and dealing with our social environment.
Anyone who attempts a synthesis utilizing the theories of the worlds great thinkers is always faced with the fact that the thoughts of many great thinkers are constantly being criticized and new ideas supplementing or replacing the theories of these thinkers. Because this is true, every synthesis becomes quickly dated. However, it is important to recognize that we all require a platform upon which to judge the knowledge that is being created and this platform can only come from a comprehensive study of someones synthesis.
It is my judgment that we should find those thinkers who are capable of synthesizing and carefully examine their thoughts without regard to criticism of some of the pillars that support the synthesis.
Anxiety is a feeling that I assume is familiar to all of us. It is a sense of helplessness: when the throat constricts, the heart races, and chaos appears. The ability to stand upright against anxiety is considered to be heroic behavior.
What is the source and nature of anxiety? Kierkegaard saw it as a basic response to the human condition of impotence, finitude, and death. Thinkers since Darwin saw it as a stimulus to intellectual growth because only with this adaptation could humans survive. We can see in animal responses that it is the key to survival. Anxiety is the universal response of the organism to danger.
For the child, anxiety becomes second nature when there is the slightest hint of separation from or abandonment by the mother. William James said that solitude is the greatest terror of childhood. Children are midgets in a world filled with giants. The child is dependent upon these giants and feels itself as a helpless object without control. The child sees helpless objects being run over with the car or being flushed or flattened and, as another object, fears equal forms of treatment by the giants. The principal childhood adaptation is to master anxiety by controlling the situations which threaten to awaken it.
Freuds whole psychoanalytic theory of neurosis is basically a study of how children control anxiety. Human reaction to the environment is delayed and controlled by the ego. Unlike all other animals the human can take some time to analyze and choose a response. It is obvious that the first concern for the developing ego is to learn how to control this ever present and overwhelming stimulus-response that can result from anxiety. The ego does this by housing this anxiety within the ego, thus, no longer does the human organism respond directly to anxiety but the ego controls the response by taking over this anxiety.
Freud considered this taking over of the anxiety impulse as being a form of vaccination of the total organism. The growing identity I must feel comfortable in its world, and the only way it can do this is to experimentally make the anxieties of its world its own The anxieties of the egos world are at first the anxieties the child feels with its handlers. A good many of them are the anxieties of its trainers. And so we see in microcosm how a child owns his own control, his own central perceptions, his own humanness, by a fundamental adaptation to his social world.
Becker associates with the work of Alfred Adler who has developed a major revision of Freudian Oedipus Complex theory regarding the postulation by Freud of a hypothetical event that happened way back in the dim recesses of time. This postulated event has been given the name the Primal-Horde theory: this was the theory about the crises in the humanoid horde, when the young males, tired of being deprived of females by the dominant male, turn on him and kill him, and take possession of the femalestheir own mothers.
Freud was clear regarding the nature of anxiety in a child. One source of this anxiety was the trauma of birth, the childs initiation into utter helplessness and dependence; and the fear of castration that was awakened by the childs own sexual urges Thus his major anxiety, over the loss of the protective and loving mother, is a problem stemming from his relentless search for pleasure.
Post-Freudian scientists pinpoint where Freud went astray. There is general agreement that the infant is not driven by instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression. There is absolutely no evidence that this new type of animal carries over viciously competitive instincts of the subhuman primates. He has phased them out, and replaced them with a new nature: pliable, instinct-free.
A major revision of Freudian theory finds that while the childs anxiety is based on helplessness; it is not based upon genetic instincts but is based upon the childs life situation and in his social world. Becker concludes that Alfred Adlers theories are still current in the mid and late twentieth century because the child does not bring to his relationship with his mother any basic innate desires but he brings a generalized need for physical closeness and support.
It is technically correct to say that the child is object-oriented rather than pleasure-oriented. The anxieties of life are communicated to him not because of the strictly scheduled toilet-training or bodily cleanliness but because of the lack of joy and spontaneity in the childs environment. This causes him to shut up within himself and makes him try extra-hard for basic security. The adaptation is a kind of confusion about what the world wants of him.
The childs confusion centers on the comprehension that he is only a body not yet fully a symbolic animal. The more his confusion with the adult world the more he falls back on his body as a way of getting along. This affirmation of body is his question does the mother value his bodyhim or not?
A loveless training regime deprives him of his first and only secure footing; he is obliged to feel secondary to symbols. He develops a symbolic style of achieving his sense of self, without having had a secure sense of him the crucial question of early training is whether the child will make the switch from body-modes to symbol-modes of behavior without losing his secure sense of value. The child is a museum of antiquities of nervous conditionings and archaic messages that are unrelated to the straightforward experience of the adult world.
As I see it, our fundamental problem in regards to knowledge is that our society, which focuses on maximizing production and consumption, has ignored the importance of synthesizing knowledge. The fixation on specialization leads to a society that fragments; a cleverly synthesized knowledge can facilitate social unity. Such a synthesis cannot be static but must be dynamic; it must constantly integrate new understanding into a new and thus living synthesis. We cannot arrive at absolute knowledge but we can maintain a dynamic synthesis.
Becker provides this synthesis in his book The Birth and Death of Meaning. In this post I shall try to provide an abstraction of a small portion of this synthesis regarding the fundamental role of anxiety in a childs development.
Our educational system trains us to become proficient producers and consumers with little serious regard for the problems inherent in developing a moral understanding for constructing and dealing with our social environment.
Anyone who attempts a synthesis utilizing the theories of the worlds great thinkers is always faced with the fact that the thoughts of many great thinkers are constantly being criticized and new ideas supplementing or replacing the theories of these thinkers. Because this is true, every synthesis becomes quickly dated. However, it is important to recognize that we all require a platform upon which to judge the knowledge that is being created and this platform can only come from a comprehensive study of someones synthesis.
It is my judgment that we should find those thinkers who are capable of synthesizing and carefully examine their thoughts without regard to criticism of some of the pillars that support the synthesis.
Anxiety is a feeling that I assume is familiar to all of us. It is a sense of helplessness: when the throat constricts, the heart races, and chaos appears. The ability to stand upright against anxiety is considered to be heroic behavior.
What is the source and nature of anxiety? Kierkegaard saw it as a basic response to the human condition of impotence, finitude, and death. Thinkers since Darwin saw it as a stimulus to intellectual growth because only with this adaptation could humans survive. We can see in animal responses that it is the key to survival. Anxiety is the universal response of the organism to danger.
For the child, anxiety becomes second nature when there is the slightest hint of separation from or abandonment by the mother. William James said that solitude is the greatest terror of childhood. Children are midgets in a world filled with giants. The child is dependent upon these giants and feels itself as a helpless object without control. The child sees helpless objects being run over with the car or being flushed or flattened and, as another object, fears equal forms of treatment by the giants. The principal childhood adaptation is to master anxiety by controlling the situations which threaten to awaken it.
Freuds whole psychoanalytic theory of neurosis is basically a study of how children control anxiety. Human reaction to the environment is delayed and controlled by the ego. Unlike all other animals the human can take some time to analyze and choose a response. It is obvious that the first concern for the developing ego is to learn how to control this ever present and overwhelming stimulus-response that can result from anxiety. The ego does this by housing this anxiety within the ego, thus, no longer does the human organism respond directly to anxiety but the ego controls the response by taking over this anxiety.
Freud considered this taking over of the anxiety impulse as being a form of vaccination of the total organism. The growing identity I must feel comfortable in its world, and the only way it can do this is to experimentally make the anxieties of its world its own The anxieties of the egos world are at first the anxieties the child feels with its handlers. A good many of them are the anxieties of its trainers. And so we see in microcosm how a child owns his own control, his own central perceptions, his own humanness, by a fundamental adaptation to his social world.
Becker associates with the work of Alfred Adler who has developed a major revision of Freudian Oedipus Complex theory regarding the postulation by Freud of a hypothetical event that happened way back in the dim recesses of time. This postulated event has been given the name the Primal-Horde theory: this was the theory about the crises in the humanoid horde, when the young males, tired of being deprived of females by the dominant male, turn on him and kill him, and take possession of the femalestheir own mothers.
Freud was clear regarding the nature of anxiety in a child. One source of this anxiety was the trauma of birth, the childs initiation into utter helplessness and dependence; and the fear of castration that was awakened by the childs own sexual urges Thus his major anxiety, over the loss of the protective and loving mother, is a problem stemming from his relentless search for pleasure.
Post-Freudian scientists pinpoint where Freud went astray. There is general agreement that the infant is not driven by instincts of sexuality and destructive aggression. There is absolutely no evidence that this new type of animal carries over viciously competitive instincts of the subhuman primates. He has phased them out, and replaced them with a new nature: pliable, instinct-free.
A major revision of Freudian theory finds that while the childs anxiety is based on helplessness; it is not based upon genetic instincts but is based upon the childs life situation and in his social world. Becker concludes that Alfred Adlers theories are still current in the mid and late twentieth century because the child does not bring to his relationship with his mother any basic innate desires but he brings a generalized need for physical closeness and support.
It is technically correct to say that the child is object-oriented rather than pleasure-oriented. The anxieties of life are communicated to him not because of the strictly scheduled toilet-training or bodily cleanliness but because of the lack of joy and spontaneity in the childs environment. This causes him to shut up within himself and makes him try extra-hard for basic security. The adaptation is a kind of confusion about what the world wants of him.
The childs confusion centers on the comprehension that he is only a body not yet fully a symbolic animal. The more his confusion with the adult world the more he falls back on his body as a way of getting along. This affirmation of body is his question does the mother value his bodyhim or not?
A loveless training regime deprives him of his first and only secure footing; he is obliged to feel secondary to symbols. He develops a symbolic style of achieving his sense of self, without having had a secure sense of him the crucial question of early training is whether the child will make the switch from body-modes to symbol-modes of behavior without losing his secure sense of value. The child is a museum of antiquities of nervous conditionings and archaic messages that are unrelated to the straightforward experience of the adult world.
