Anna Abbiate Fubini
Childhood: times of mutability
Internal index:
#foreword, #rythms and phases, #life_cycle, #sleeping_reason, #embryogenesis' biological "organizers", #genoma, #petit prince, #complexes(*), #Adler, #sociological problem(*), #hopes, #childish tantrums, #rhinos, #references
(*) improved by new - basic - adds
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Any way since people has to lament hindrances on looking through this site not only asking to be better orientated, to favour this need the site's map can begin from a simplified page opening wide the whole indexed files, both the Italian and the English and plurilingual ones, eventually before looking at the file prefacing the English pages, first chapter of the English book From children of YESTERDAY to adults of TOMORROW.
After the file/chapter prefacing the English pages the file/chapter ... from today's adults -> to adults of Tomorrow... should be considered another introduction to and beginning of the whole site: or better it sets up the essential meaning of the whole work - site and books -, followed and consolidated by the files/chapters evidencing this Author's personal Introduction together with My guides... my roots..., showing preliminary excerpts of the whole message and the sources of the teaching references.
But just after book published, further considerations suggested to better and more precisely complete the personal sources of knowledge: so the files My guides... my roots and Opinion, fact, complaint are so much amplified to occasion a latest, minor book to support the major one, a booklet dedicated only to explanatory data rather than to detailed descriptions. To be added the suggestion to read and consider with them the files/chapters SUBLIMATIONS: VISUAL SCHEMES AND SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION since syntetizing the main concepts of this whole work in not usual but impressive terms, and consolidate as well the message coming from Anamnesis? A way for healing... and from Consciousness and memory.
Rhythms and phases
engaged in fundamental experiences
according to rhythms and phases
unique to him/herself
Each of
us, however even good, prepared, cultured
parents, doctors and
teachers
can commit continual disastrous violence
on the helpless psyche of the
child,
believing for
his/her own good
in an immature, insensible way
or endorsing fashionable schools of thought.
Once deprived of real experience,
children elaborate empty fancies
and artificial compensations,
which either block or deform their growth.
Thus they are turned into
immature,
unformed or badly shaped adults
engraving a mark on generations to come.
But yet to enter the imperfectly known times of mutability
is
however
not
so difficult.
It is sufficient to be sympathetic,
to cooperate with respect,
to participate with curiosity and pleasure.
In short it is sufficient to take children's evolution in earnest
and at the same time reawaken one's own
evolution.
Life cycle and society: forward and backward
But human life and - therefore - human growth do not abstract from a very ample and differentiate surrounding: at the same time every human life is always subjected to environmental - ambient, milieu, sociology, politics - variations. But not only space, people, natural and cultural factors act in a fix time: the long and complicated human existence undergoes a complete variability furthermore in terms of TIME, as forward and as backward passages.
Childhood
and Society: by Erik
Homburger Erikson is depicted as a landmark work on the social significance
of childhood. (Winner
of the Pulitzer
Prize and the National Book Award)
Identity
and the Life Cycle goes
deeply into the relationship
of life history, relates to each other observations on groups studied
on field researches and on children observed longitudinally and
clinically, also beyond adolescence, into the critical stages of the
whole life cycle, to join then The Problem of Ego
Identity from biographical, clinical, and social points
of view.
After beginning and wholeness, the conclusive denouement is
also the subject of other books till
the rounding off The
Life Cycle Completed by Erik Homburger Erikson and his wife Joan
Mowat
Erikson (Paperback - June 1998)
To Léon
Werth,
I ask the
indulgence
of the children who may read this book for dedicating it to a grown-up.
I have a serious
reason:
he is the best friend I have in the world. I have another reason: this
grown-up understands
everything,
even books about children. I have a third reason: he lives in France
where
he is hungry and cold. He needs cheering up. If all these reasons are
not
enough, I will dedicate the book to the child from whom this grown-up
grew. All
grown-ups
were once children -- although few of them
remember
it.
TO LEON WERTH
WHEN HE WAS A LITTLE BOY
Quand il était petit garçon
Antoine de Saint Exupéry: Le petit prince
Is
childhood a time when
the path
of one's life is influenced and perhaps the course sets a vital time in
the life of ever? Putting the Skinned
Knees Back Into Playtime.Articles for the Brussels Conference - October 2000 Edited by C. Clouder, S. Jenkinson and M. Large and published by Hawthorn Press:This lively collection of articles by Conference presenters offers stimulating insight for dialogue about how we can give due respect to children. Here are Cathy Nutbrown's 20 Questions for Childhoods in the 21st Century, a shortened UN Charter of Children's Rights and Childhood by the Alliance. There are useful references, contacts and resources for networking This lively collection of articles by Conference presenters offers stimulating insight for dialogue about how we can give due respect to children. There are useful references, contacts and resources for networking.
Look also at UNICEF's Convention on the Rights of the Child.
El sueño de la razon produce monstruos...
according to rhythms and phases all of his/her own...
Some quotes written by an unhappy adopted child
Affection and understanding? Certainly not!!!! Fed up, senseless conversations, unsolicited advice, humiliation, wearisome situations and so much, so much NOTHING! NOTHING covered the walls of the house, emerged from their mouths under the form of unknown words, NOTHING lunched and dined with us and always at the same time. NOTHING existed in a caress never given, existed in their hearts and their mind. When there is “nothing” to give, when adults lack the experience of emotions and of living, then truly there in nothing to be done and nothing to say.
How to take children's evolution in earnest? How can children be helped to follow their fundamental expansion in respect of their natural and personal established times and ways?
However evident is that growing, developing children are mighty marks of "running" times and then disconcerting "advices" of slipping away generations: then what should do a grown-up if immature, unformed or badly shaped? Tangled memory, faulty early ages result in further abandonment feeling: with such refusal of total reality of origins also oneself childhood should be disparaged if not rejected. What should people do when an unbearable pain condemns to worship a fake reassuring security, a self-centered security stiffened on a present that one would like to pass slowly in order to let savor the pleasure of living? On the aim not to feel such "terrible" emptiness and despair, why does not be preferable to hinder these "tokens of running times" if not really hate them?
Forward and backward? How can get a person grew from a denied childhood? Is it so strange at least to block them, wishing to portray and shelter static, everlasting babies? Is it so strange that if all grown-ups were once children -- although few of them remember it?
Notwithstanding there are - even if ever painful - ways to recover infancy's sense: for example discovering the true message endorsed on to feel "terribly afraid" for that child no longer with us, that child who won’t come back anymore and who in a certain sense slipped away, causing a pain so terrible to be alike a real mourning as for a death.
| At
my sister’s house this evening I saw some photos of my niece and nephew
when they were little. There was one of F. at four years old and it
made my stomach churn…. It seemed
almost impossible that he has grown up so much and at the same
time the baby he was isn’t here anymore: for my feeling the "baby" now
is "dead". I had a sensation of being blocked, something which makes me feel terribly afraid and that I worry I can’t bear. The pain for that child no longer with us, that child who won’t come back anymore and who in a certain sense slipped away from me. How I didn’t experience him enough, how many things I missed in him and missed in myself. It’s a pain which brings a feeling of emptiness, a pain which opens an abyss – a kind of black hole in into which I fear I will fall. I cling so much to the present that it gives me security, a present that I would like to pass slowly in order to let me savour the pleasure of living, yet runs so fast and the more it runs the more I feel that I am moving towards that abyss of finding myself at the end of my life with only regrets. It’s a kind of grief, like that of losing the really passed away Aunt A., like that of when K. began to go out with P., it’s a kind of grief and an abandonment. You can’t imagine (or maybe you can) how difficult it is to make part of me understand that you can’t revive ghosts: that part of me doesn’t want to hear reason. It would like to see just one time the face of that child, embrace him again. It is obstinate and doesn’t want to accept things as they are. At this point it’s difficult for me to understand who I am, I’m really confused. But maybe it was time because I’ve been feeling empty for too long. I said to K. too this morning that I felt like a “had my balls cut off"(°) almost in the anatomical sense of the word. (°) On regard of this situation, is it more offensive the term "had my balls cut off"? or the deceiving, fake-protective words offering guarantees for a - fake - "security"? "Reassurance" as well as "protection"...: any way alike words recall something "against", recall "defence", evoke "safety measures"... |
El sueño de la razon produce monstruos.... is written in the Cervantes' Don Qijote and again by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes in his more famed table - 43- of the Caprichos 43 1797 (El Prado Madrid) Sueños y Discursos de verdades descubridoras de abusos, vicios y engaños en todos los oficos y estados del mundo: this quote comes from the full autographical title in this preparatory drawing.
The bending figure is surrounded by eight owls, numberless bats, a lynx and a camouflaged black cat symbolizing idleness and lust. Only the lynx at the feet of the artist stand for positiveness: Goya warns us to be on the look-out like the lynx, whose excellent sight sees through the darkness, for when asleep we cannot defend ourselves from vices symbolized by the surrounding animals. (See 119 Galleria Salamon Catalogue, p. 43.).
Does the sleep of reason generate monsters?
Only in the silence of monsters can
the evolution of children and adults become real.
Another very effective metaphorical representation is the analogy between humans and trees, development and basic elements. Roots of trees grow and intermingle themselves underground; earth feeds or obstructs their growth and their function: this analogy can represent the materialisation of the less tangible human "oral complex". Tree trunk and its structure of successive concentric circles becomes increasingly robust over time: and alike humans' skill to experience participation in successive concentric circles gets more and more tough the basics of "anal complex". At its end the Oedipus one can flourish: but only "can" and not often "flourish". This phase can mirror also in the etymological sense the incredibly varied and almost infinite possibilities of opening - also generative - of branches, twigs, leaves and fruits: can be compared to the human evolutary possibility of the "genital complex"; but as when roots and trunk of trees are damaged or weak also the potential human creativity can stay and perform on a secure and adequate way.
Genoma:
uniqueness
and environmentTogether with the absolutely, obliged uniform basis of every body's development, the humankind has an INNER, genetic very individual uniqueness: The scientists of TCAG a Canadian centre for human genome and diseases -research Aug 1 2004 - TCAG supports discovery of large-scale genome variation (Nature Genetics) and launches 'Genome Variation Database'. Large-scale variation in the human genome- Letter by John Iafrate et al. - Charles Lee and colleagues report thatlarge-scale copy number variations (LCVs) are common in the human population. This previously unappreciated heterogeneity may underlie some of the phenotypic variation seen among individuals.
In full analogy - not only as metaphor - with the embryogenesis' biological "organizers", each unfulfilled need (NEED not "wish"), each violation, perhaps each even apparently "small" trauma, which can perturb a crucial developmental phase.... can worsen up to the point of sweeping away the whole life in a vicious circle coiling in itself, even beyond the suffering person until many existences are overwhelmed: one's own and other peoples' life.
(Look at the embryogenesis' biological "organizers": In 1901, Curt Herbst wrote that he thought it possible "to establish the occurrence of formative stimuli which are exerted from one part of the embryo to another, and to demonstrate eventually the possibility of a complete resolution of the entire ontogenesis into a sequence of such inductions." This prediction of inductive cascades was a bold statement, given that no sequence of events had yet been observed (1, 2). But that was soon to change. That same year, HANS SPEMANN (3) published "one of the most significant and seminal papers in the history of embryology" (4), his experimental analysis of lens formation in the frog.... In 1924, while working on the relatively large eggs of amphibians he discovered, together with Hilde Mangold, the existence of an area in the embryo, the portions of which, upon transplantation into a different part of a second embryo, induced the secondary embryonic primordia. The name "organizer centre" or "organizer" was given to those parts by him. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1935 for this discovery of the organizer effect in embryonic development.
A Selective History of Induction II. Spemann's induction experiments
The Spemann-Mangold organizer
VOLUME 45, NUMBER 1, SPECIAL ISSUE 2001 THE SPEMANN MANGOLD ORGANIZER 75 Years on Edited by E.M. De Robertis and J. Aréchaga
Various issues, symbols, COMPLEXES
As quoted on a Summary Chart presented on the file/chapter my guides... my roots... also another very important Author focused his attention on life's developmental stages: Jean Piaget whose studies tend to define how in all fields of life (organic, mental, social) exist ‘totalities’ qualitatively distinct from their parts and imposing on them an organization, and then on developmental stages. But his interests on Psychology preferred to choose not pathological field:
Not only grounding on patients' care, not only advancing
abstract theories: impossible is to equate those at least at any rate
ill-timed
descriptions or all-embracing abstractions with the compelling
basics brought up by SIGMUND
FREUD, who committed his discoveries putting forward a
developmental pedestal as a solid foundation on which to establish
every further
research. No way to compare the unilaterality, and staticity of all
other schools
with the strong and wide load-bearing
concrete,
stimulant science brought forth by him: primarily on
postulating the "complexes"
as
necessary, successive
phases
of human development.
The first use of the term complex
in the psychological field came notwithstanding from Jung and his The
Association
Method for detecting unconscious problems when free words
association
stops or changes direction: unfortunately this - pejorative - meaning
has
been the most popularly used till now. Instead if precisely accepted
this word can't be easily changed since Freud's
complexes describe
real "journeys", real precisely
timed
occurrences, not only bare explanatory
concepts: "to
develop"
isn't only "to grow...", and then not only on a clinical test,
not only as pejorative term, but such essential designation could have
used
this simple easy word - on its own ethimology: com-plexus - to better
ground crucial studies on human nature.
Freud proposed
descriptions established on fixed deeds NOT
only static pathological data, NOT only abstractions, NOT mere
descriptive
metaphor: as school subjects the
existing
natural "complexes" can be performed with care or negligence, could be
well carried out or messed up at wrong or at least inappropriate times.
Like subjects of study, they are real powerful items determining
growth
of potentialities, or instead mortifying personal whole
life by rejection: both cases also affecting groups they belong to. Any
way -
luckily as
happens for school rejected
classes - after all some willing "rebuffed" people can recover
better if with a redeeming
external aid.
First of all, life has to begin in the unabridged atmosphere of the oral complex, which can be briefly summed up in entries: "acquisitions", "holdings" and by a series of verbs, nouns and adjectives containing the concept of TOGETHERNESS expressed by typical prefixes - “con…”: as “concord”, “communication”, “complaisant”, "comprehensive"; “fusion”: like “diffusion”, “suffused”, “effusions”; “syn…” like “synergy”, “sympathy”, “syntony” and even by terms and ideas regarding something wide, indefinite all-embracing as "symbols".
The MOUTH is the centre propulsion of the complex, the mouth with its difficult characteristics, functions and developments, bestowed as it is with complex organs, sensibility and instinct: to it has been devolved the main function of feeding but also the certainly not secondary task of transmitting intelligible signals. But the term INFANCY with all its derivatives indicates a “defective” characteristic: in fact indicates the very characteristic of the as yet unattained capacity to transform into transmissible and intelligible words the internal language on common senses and communications, or better: the as yet unattained competence to GIVE A NAME to things in order to be able to dispose of them in a synthetic and abstract way.
Living bodies have however so many languages, moreover "cubs" should be provided by peculiar
call releasing stimuli: all this in fact considerably more numerous and powerful even than those Hundred languages of the poetry of Malaguzzi. Here below a sympathetic paradigm of these concepts is offered by this “strange couple” of rhinoceros, a mother and baby couple which succeeds only through genuine facial expressions in manifesting intense emotions and spreading them everywhere: from Zoo of Cincinatti one can worldwide via Internet be involved in this pleasant and unusual example of what should be a TRUE oral complex and how the circularity can take place – certainly not the symbiosis(!!) nor even the identification(!) nor a complimentary relationship – in a shared worldwide oral relationship daughter- mother in its continuous evolution
The personal subjectivity by its internal "compliance" can express itself on the powerful reality of I like it: for ever and for a lot of situations the better imprint to a good-companionship life-style, the main stimulus to improve agreeable and friendly behavior. Nevertheless just if sane and accepted, this I like it whereupon should quit to let a new entry: I take it comes and goes on, followed by another powerful reality: the it is ENOUGH one, the wholeness of satisfaction giving and input to other, more ample aims.
At
this turning point the Eden garden
stops. In a life lived at its full,
this INITIAL
basic
complex - relating to communication, belonging, Nature, “diffused”
vitality
etc. with all this "completeness" - has to give up, for being followed
in time by its almost opposite anal
complex: centered on distinguishing, sectorialising, defining,
MAKING, i.e. also "artificiality", dividing and specifying,
CHOOSING
- therefore also meaning DENYING and rejecting. It develops its
intrinsic
potentialities in terms of precision and
of temporal
and spatial PROGRESSION: concepts to be summarized by words
beginning
with
the prefix "pro" and "pre" - “produce”, “prosecute”, “preside”,
“presence”,
"provide" etc. The
normal, effectual
trend of "anal complex" is to handle -
also really exploiting hands - onto
every "outside" and "after",
onto every
matter concerning specifically "outputs" including also every TO DO. So
its sublimations open
towards "facts", actions, duties, every "outer"
even figurative and abstract. Thus, since money, work and every other
subject regarding "to do", "to earn" and "to preserve", and so on are
essential
parts of the sublimated "anal complex", this trend has also to regard equality:
things and words, "things" and money, persons and functions. All
this REGARDS every
LIVING
BEING and not only every human person: the anal complex as well as the
oral one are real
factual occurrences at the core of inner
body/external world interaction; as the material inner
body's
openings are parts of a whole living TO BE and
then:
to personal health or even lack
of
health.In the Italian language - more directly derived from Latin - an old-fashioned word exists to indicate by an unique faculty the change from babies to grown children: the by now speaking: "fanciulli", as the mainstream contrary of the previuosly unable "infants". However if for human beings the first complex is “wordless” (from the Latin in-fans, therefore generic and in-fandum), the next is very punctilious and talkative and so - as ever for “active” centrifugal complexes directed outwards - names, things, syntheses, abstractions, relations are cardinal points: just about to better utter this fact the paragraphs dedicated to the anal complex are very eloquent, whilst the verbal explanations of the oral complex are expressed in a very concise form: in fact better illustrated by pictures for example by the already quoted unusual visual explanations of animal life.
The oral complex hints to wholeness, till the risk of
indistinctness
ignoring parameters of space and moreover of TIME. But an oral
complex well "upgraded" MUST BE the founding ground of a really
lived existence since a true physiology of the being
in action cannot disregard the multiple texture of
present correlations
nor
the various past
modalities in which the essence of a real human being
should have concretized
itself. Emotions,
relationships, feelings, affection and subjective
experiences give consistency at every moment to actual reality
of the whole
body
condition, but each of them cannot disavow their previous passages. The
word "complex" indicates just something into which
many
various
elements
are harmonized together and so the anal complex with its
embodied
"making"
and "separating" contains also "aggressiveness": different from the
greedy non-destructive "aggressive-oral" one. For Latin
language, ad-gredi
means
to go "towards" and not only "against": instead the "anal" dynamism
with
its "denying" and "rejecting" hints not only towards how to
MANAGE; already by itself it implies not only disconnection, but also destruction.
This "to wipe out" conducts towards ends,
towards emptiness,
towards loss and solitude,
with
their correlated fear and dismay. (Look
at Freud's book Beyond
the pleasure principle the beginning of his theory of death
instinct).
But all this doesn't be an only sad situation:
this mainstay developmental step gradually opens to every consciousness,
growing into a founding way to the myself
feeling and consequently of a true awareness of
other's
reality and feelings, as well as ownership
allows to agree to other ones' belongings, whilst it expands also
towards the we,
the "to be member" of a
defined Society. No doubt how difficult its pathway
could go on, but how worse if deprived of the
energetic
support of a well-lived warm oral complex. Such occurence
freezes its activity, each element transforms
either into inhibition or in contraposition: performing in always limited
way, in most cases becomes merely contrary and
opposed.
Worst of all it tends to come back statically "aping" a parody of what
should have performed before: it does not proceed since spreads a
confuse atmosphere of a false,
malignant,
hidden and fake oral complex. Thus it replaces its generalized
benevolence
with strict borders between a pampered "we" and excluded "deceptive"
others;
it replaces the "oral" instinctive farsighted (as that of the alchemic,
symbolic
lynx in Goya's picture above) with exaggerated precautions;
counterfeits
the oral quiet "to hold" with a mean avarice... Substituting the
unconfined,
broad-minded oral complex invades pervasively the whole world,
borrowing
its con-
terms it takes for only merely aggressive, if not merely destructive
meanings
- competition, contraposition.... By establishing itself as
basic,
in order to avoid Nature and/or "diffusion" it can turn into mere
confusion
when it scorns or ignores the preceding phase's contributions: but
flooding beyond any border it
intervenes
also OUTSIDE to stop each oral-complex aspect, despised as too
imprecise. Instead of guiding the harmonizing of several
analogous
factors, it takes on a myopic and single-handed "reasonableness" as the
only perspective on life. Deprived of real roots of orality, it
turns
into a poor, narrow and narrowing copy of the rich and vital oral
complex: so it neglects to follow and drive on its profound, mighty
potentialities; its "we together" then becomes eager to violate the
other's well-being: acting as a persecutory to exclude every
"other-nesss" or to include
other people into strict cult-like worshipness.
The human anal complex
can after all reach a state of very valuable powers, unfortunately
regardless
if not well
developed:
using its powers whensoever deprived of real basics it performs
limited ways, in most cases becoming merely a bunch of contraries
and
oppositions,
of static, ill-timed ritualized orders, if not a needy striving for - abusive
- dependency
and/or abusive destructive overcoming.
Then what to say on regard of a narrowed thinking
which works in terms only of contradictions,
only of very strict either/or else, of ill-disposed disregarding
"aut-aut"? As for
a main example rational/irrational
where not only "rationality" does
not be considered to come
from Latin ratio
- which is only the name of the measurement ruler - but used instead as
a Jolly counterfeiting
more appropriate terms disdaining times and circumstances - as a
far-sighted "to provide" stiffed
on a "to supply" from "superiors to "inferiors". But the situation
worsen when its misled opposite - "irrational" - taints with its
contempt the simple "not yet conscious" and
moreover the bodily "emotional", showing the
total unawareness of the vital, lively widespread
emotional world, in sum
up promoting an active oblivion
of everyone INNER
basic to
be.
Only after well fulfilled previous complexes the innate,
latent third one can unfold its real happening to ripen its
possibilities and values. The Oedipus
complex well lived and overcome
gives
a better, more open view of a personalized, free, promising start
towards
all knowledge and possibility, of true humanity and true love. At about
the fourth year of life
normal
development
can (or unfortunately only "could") reach an extraordinary experience:
the child can know deep, tremendous feelings pertaining
to
the "adult world" and, if all is favorable, he/she can share these deep
but also really CONSCIOUS feelings with his/her significant adults. But
this
intense "love-affair" isn't only a static selfish episode: at the same
time the Oedipus-child can profoundly understand, by his/her intense
involvement who
people individually are, what their feelings are, and can have a
deep,
albeit brief, feeling for the highest sentiments
and the sources of
well-built creativity
(not to be confused with a longing for fanciful caprices
and/or unreal "goals" and/or "fictions")
As
occurs not only in the main Chinese philosophy and religion, but also
in
human life everywhere, TWO CRUCIAL WAYS illustrate how every times and
modes alternate together: one way, as Yin, quiet, broad, filling,
resting...
and one, as Yang, emptying, moving, tightening and coming out. The
first
can offer the chance to enjoy or at least to feel, the second the
channel
to master, to control, to change...: oral complex and the Oedipus' are
of course aspects of Yin life, each followed by its symmetric Yang
opposite.
The value of a well performed anal complex could even improve the oral
one, and correspondingly, in order to complete the "genital", gifted
Oedipus' complex, comes forward
what
Freud summarized with a very skillful intuition as castration
complex.
Here it would take too long to explain all its capacities, functions
and
offers of possibility when it take place in the right manner and is
based
on sure roots. When unprepared, as also does the anal
complex, it can proceed but too more often
on the ruins and wreck of previous life, acting only as compensation,
behaving
in detrimental ways all the time beyond all ages, lasting unceasingly
for
one's whole life like a school subject never upgraded.Sociological problem
Individuals strive in this direction because of the "creative power of life", which expresses itself in the desire to develop, to strive, to achieve, and even to COMPENSATE for defeats in ONE direction by striving for success in ANOTHER. This power is teleological, it expresses itself in the striving after a goal, and, in this striving, every bodily and psychological movement is made to cooperate.
|
Once deprived of real experience, children
elaborate empty fancies and artificial compensations,
which either block or deform their growth.
Thus they are turned into
and that leaves a mark on generations to come. |
How can get someone deprived of the SPECIFICITY and values proper to infantile development? How can feel forever “complete” someone, who has never known the absolute values TYPICAL of successive developments, leading ownself conscious existence to expand in the alternating of developing phases - from childhood to maturity and eventually old age? How can someone promote, cultivate and preserve curiosity, openness and a “participating” capacity, if he/she was already as a small baby - with all the derogatory burden smallness implies - considered just a burden, a mouth to feed, not a bud to unfold but an imperfect being hurriedly awaited to growup? How can he/she live through an interesting time, made of COMPLETE MOMENTS of being in a richly lived experience when he/she is spurred to hurry to join his/her - or worse: his/her parents' - compensatory final goal? How can someone not continually confront himself/herself with the ”more” and the “less"? Someone who instead of developing has only GROWN, who underwent NOT fruitful developing stages, but the painful waiting time when he/she was a small, weak, INCONVENIENT, malformed adult? How to care persons whose development was so needy that they haven't have a "true" childhood; people who were only allowed to spend time on growing up - not on DEVELOPING - during a sickly, lonely, frail, "small" infancy; people who were for many years not only CHILDREN but awkward, short and weak persons... How could these short and weak fake-adults not feel themselves inferior? how could this deprivation not make them aware of being badly "different" and cause an angry longing to soon join what one believes to be "normal"? How could a lack of oneself's trust not be presumed as "spoiled" and so authorizing to try to overcome the considered well-off, hated and envied "spoilers"? How can Freud's patients compare their "Oedipus' mishaps" with the "inferiority's complex" of the discarded ones?
The child has a hundred languages
(and a hundred, hundred, hundred more)
but we steal ninety nine
we tell the child
that work and play
reality and fantasy
science and imagination
sky and earth
reason and dream
are things
that do not belong together ...
No way. The hundred is there....
Or instead as tells Adler the physician and Adler the rickety child who knew first hand the bleakness of suburbia rendered more squalid than ever by the terrible 1918 post-war time:
Notwithstanding - ... we steal ninety nine - : it would be totally misleading to think that only economic POVERTY and lack of CULTURE deprive a large majority of children of a true childhood and of the exalting, truly maturing experience of the Oedipus complex. All small and noisy creatures: all “not-children”, but IMPERFECT ADULTS, all these “little ones” - opposed not to wiser “adults” (ripeness is all) but to bigger threatening already grown - do not know and cannot even imagine what is the peace and the strong power springing from "oral complex", nor the sharp widening of the mind and sensibility, the self assurance gained during the Oedipus complex, well founded also on the second more personalized support of "anal one".
Alike historically it is moreover NOT true that the ways of children rearing are improving, that civilization times and behaviors are getting better and better...; it is worse faulty to think that only distress due to need and poverty, ignorance and stupidity could destroy the wealth of childhood
An extremely persuasive description to extend the concepts of complexes on the direction to existential openings proper to each phase in human development and of realizations to their sociological consequences are properly presented on a basic book (Italian not translated): Né leggere, né scrivere (Neither reading nor writing) where the very spirit of the anal and oral complex shows very clearly:
a scandal book which forces life-enjoying Italy to mirror itself in the first anthropological inquiry on illiteracy. A scandal and a Cassandra book, Né leggere, né scrivere is a work that looks out into the future. (from the blurb, Callari Galli Matilde, Harrison Gualtiero, Né leggere, né scrivere, Meltemi1997 ISBN 8886479263).
As shared above as presentation of Né leggere, né scrivere, we must neither think that a greater communal affluence - rather pseudo-affluence is certain to bring about changes for the best, nor that we live in a historical phase of sure progress. We are still surrounded by a large majority of incomplete adults and bad parents (perhaps even in crescendo with a continuous increase in damages). What to think on regard of the Authors mocked on the Etiology & Treatment of Childhood surely wealthy scholars and then neither illiterate nor poor. It is not so true that just a precise evil will and purposes are wherever acting to damage the normal children's development and rearing: not so total but furthermore a powerful "gang" exists trying to overcome the most worldwide people, beginning to damage infants. It is not a total world order but a "gang" bad crowded by more evil scholars and VIPs even plans conscious wicked purposes: at first to make children and young people their primary target. If the scholars mocked on the Etiology & Treatment of Childhood are not illiterate, it is absolutely imperative to point out that even worse ways exist to consider children and their rearing: not illiterate but powerful and very rich scholars and politicians can teach, train, master disciples and whole peoples; can silence the children's hundred languages, for them very unwelcome; can subdue and pull towards their way of thinking a lot of authors, doctors, parents, teachers... Thus it is commonplace to find powerful authors fighting to switch off with drugs the attention deficit and hyperactivity syndrome of suffering, perhaps abused, children; or to find professionals willing to give to everyone - obviously also to parents - an artificial silence of unawareness... Everywhere it is commonplace to be surrounded by convincing professionals able to frighten, to intimidate, to disconcert and tame and to make followers of a lot of ill-believers no matter how cultivate and literate: authors, doctors, teachers, parents... And this is not yet the worse: there are even leaders who strive towards very devilish aims, presented not only as academic reasoning as in A psychocivilized society and in many other books and teachings, but also actually made operative in facts.
In the absence of deep roots plunging into a "fertile soil" the oral complex tries to reactivate into a confused substitute, into an unstable "genital complex" rootless and trunkless which, like cut flowers, has skipped all intermediate stages. Acquisition and consciousness, emotional enrichments and solid feelings, learning and assimilated knowledge...: placing even the future at risk, how true and terrible can manifest itself this inconsistency not only in terminology but also in existential vicissitudes !
reached Oedipical moments and emotions. As in the case of the previous complexes, a poor preparation, personal and environmental unfavourable situations turn the "values" of this founding stage into false and grotesque forms. But how many are the peoples whose childhood have been full only of the sense of desertion, privation, non-recognition, lack of acceptance converted on envy and inferiority! How many individuals and groups can't even imagine the existence of another universe: warm, full of sturdy and responsible powerful affections and passions! And so, from their early infancy, suffered wants accompanied by a more or less conscious grudge can turn into ever increasing harmfulness and deliberate wickedness instead of learning skill and raising sensibilities and participation! How much turns into furious attempts and rancorous efforts towards future compensations! How much affection degenerates into coercive possession! How much envy and misrecognition can protract for generations and generations the idea of childhood as a mere troublesome burden!
Hopes and
reference
The aim to better fix up the consequential and entire "texture" of human growth hinted many considerations also from reworking an impromptu open letter – without an answer ! – in opposition to another book with a too much analogous title Tempo di mutamenti (Times of mutability): not to prosecute "plagiarism" but, what is worse, to defy a book seemingly similar instead in sharp contrast for the incongruity of the content with basic facts expressed and not only theoretical opinions supported. At a superficial glance the plan of this work contests the tendency to dependency: but this assumption comes from totally confusing this - pathologic - condition with the whole realm of emotional life, spread on the whole wording on praising everywhere the desire to a self-assurance rooted on a frigid, obstinate and immobile "rationality" and "instruction". A typical quote is sufficient for summarizing its whole belief - irrational has to