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The Imaginary Infant
By James Kimmel
"There is no such thing as a baby, there is
a baby and someone."1
D. Winnicott
We live in a society in which all are perceived,
from the moment of birth, as separate individuals. This perception
governs the ways in which we care for our newborn. We treat the infant
as a separate person, when he is not.
The conception of the infant as a separate person
is an abstraction and a product of human imagination. The infant is a
structurally separate organism, but he evolved to develop in relation to
another person. The other person, in terms of our reproductive biology
and genetics, is supposed to be the infant's mother.
Infant and mother did not evolve separately, but
together. Both are involved in the same organic process - the creation
and development of a new human being. They are a functional unit with
the same purpose. In our society, however, they are viewed, from the
moment of birth, as two distinct and disconnected entities. Their
interaction is based on each satisfying their separate needs. They are
not perceived as participants in a process, but as two separate
individuals whose needs are sometimes compatible and are sometimes not.
The anthropologist Dorothy Lee has indicated how
the value of individualism in our culture influences mothering behavior.
She states:
In our own culture, the value of individualism
is axiomatically assumed... On this assumption of individualism, a
mother has need for individual self-expression. She has to have time
for and by herself; and since she values individualism, the mother in
our culture usually does have this need for a private life. We also
believe that a newborn infant must become individuated, must be taught
physical and emotional self-dependence; we assume, in fact, that he
has a separate identity which he must be helped to recognize. We
believe he has distinct rights, and sociologists urge us to reconcile
the needs of the child to those of the adults in the family, on the
assumption, of course, that needs and ends are individual, not social.2
The emphasis on individuation and the value placed
on individuality in our infant care practices violates the innate
sociability of the infant and the socialization process natural to our
species. Mothering is the first social event for new human life. It sets
the stage for living and developing in relationship to others, rather
than in separateness.
The nature and pattern of human mothering is laid
out in the womb. Prior to birth, both fetus and mother are subject to a
nurturing process that occurs spontaneously after conception. The
process follows its own natural biological course, and in its tenacity
can only be stopped by miscarriage or abortion. The mother's body
automatically accommodates to the requirements of the developing life
within her. Although mother and infant are separate organisms with
separate physical structures, they function as a unit. They activate and
respond to the biology of the other. In this regard, it is of interest
that the mother's body would reject and throw off a grafted patch of
skin from her unborn baby, yet her body allows the fetus to root into
the wall of her womb and to develop there for nine months.3
Mother and embryo become a functional unit because they are participants
in the same process, not because they are of the same skin.
The mother's body continues to function for her
infant after birth by producing milk, which will continue to be produced
as long as the infant nurses. The nursing necessity maintains their
functional unity. The biological nurturing process after birth is a
continuation of the first stage of nurturing in the womb. Although there
are major differences between the two stages in the response required of
infant and mother, the pattern of their interaction remains the same.
The mother continues to accommodate to and to function for her baby in
many of the same areas as she did prior to birth. She provides
sustenance, temperature control, protection from danger, and immunity to
certain diseases through antibodies in her milk. The mother also offers
continuity to the infant in that her heartbeat and movements are
sensations with which the infant is familiar. Through physical closeness
and by holding and carrying her infant, she provides tactile,
kinesthetic, and sensory stimulation and aids the baby in adjusting from
a weightless world to the pull of gravity. Through her presence to her
infant, the mother eases the transition from life inside her body to
life outside her body. Although our culture does not recognize it as
such, gestation does not end with birth. For the human mammal, it
continues for many years after birth.
The physical, intellectual, emotional, and social
development of the infant did not evolve to take place in isolation, but
in relation to a nurturing mother. If the mother is removed from the
process or is not nurturing in her response to her infant, development
in all of these areas become different. The child becomes a different
kind of human being than he might have been.
Human inventiveness and technology have found ways
to keep infants alive through artificial means and have eliminated the
necessity for natural mothering. This does not mean that the infant is a
separate individual. He only looks that way - sleeping alone in his
warming device in the hospital or in his crib at home. He is still
totally dependent for survival and development on another human, even if
that person merely prepares his bottle or turns on the caretaking
apparatus. In the natural world in which we evolved, the mammalian
infant is in contact with his mother at virtually all times. In the
modern world the human infant is, more often than not, separated from
his mother. Consequently, he must learn to adapt to a nurturing source
which is frequently absent.
We view and understand the infant in separateness,
which is his most frequent place in our society. Child development
experts believe that all infants are endowed at birth with certain
needs. Infant care involves satisfying the infant's basic needs. The
concept of need and need satisfaction implies that the infant is a
separate individual who is complete or incomplete within himself. From
this concept comes the assumption that merely providing the infant with
that which he lacks will lead to satisfaction and satiation of all of
his needs. Thus it is assumed that the need of hunger can be satisfied
by milk, whether it comes from the mother's breast, a bottle, or a tube
into the stomach; it is assumed that the need for sucking can be
satisfied by a breast, the nipple on a bottle, or a pacifier; it is
assumed that the need for love can be satisfied by affection or the
words "I love you"; it is assumed that the need for attention
can be satisfied by a certain minimum of attention or "quality
time."
But the human infant is not made up of a set of
fragmented basic needs that are unrelated to each other or to his
nurturing source. He is a total living organism, dependent for life on
that which keeps him alive. He cannot be understood separate from his
source of nurturing because he is not separate from this source. By
conceiving of the infant as a separate individual, we are able to view
all infants as having basic needs unrelated to their care. We can avoid
recognizing that we, the nurturing source (mother, father, caretaker,
society), impose on infants the needs in which we believe. The needs of
infants are reflections of that which a society values or gives
priority. We do not believe that infants have a need for the continual
presence of their mothers or that their crying should necessitate an
immediate response, although these are the beliefs in other cultures.
Infants who are continuously carried, are nursed whenever they cry, and
sleep with their mothers do not develop the same needs as infants who
are left alone for long periods of time, are fed milk from a bottle at
four hour intervals, and sleep alone. The latter will develop a need for
food, a need for attention, and a need for security that the former will
not develop. The former will develop a healthy need for mutually
enjoyable contact with other humans.
Dorothy Lee has postulated that we pass on to
children, by the way we care for them, our own needs....in maintaining
our individual integrity and passing on our value of individualism to
the infant, we create needs for food, for security, for emotional
response, phrasing these as distinct and separate. We force the infant
to go hungry, and we see suckling as merely a matter of nutrition, so
that we can then feel free to substitute a bottle for the breast and a
mechanical bottle-holder for the mother's arms; thus we ensure privacy
for the mother and teach the child self-dependence. We create needs in
the infant by withholding affection and then presenting it as a series
of approval for an inventory of achievements or attributes. On the
assumption that there is no emotional continuum, we withdraw ourselves,
thus forcing the child to strive for emotional response and security.
And thus, through habituation and teaching, the mother reproduces in the
child her own needs.4
Within the assumption of basic needs, we can avoid
a total response to the total infant. We can identify that which the
infant needs as being that which we provide. We can decide before the
infant is born what he needs and what he does not need and assume,
because he continues to live and develop, that we are satisfying his
needs. We can regulate the infant's life by knowing how often his needs
must be satisfied and by deciding which of his needs are most important.
Rather than letting the infant and mother establish their own unique and
special relationship, it is decided beforehand that the infant needs
nourishment at certain intervals, a certain amount of sleep, privacy,
and a schedule for his well-being. Having satisfied, in our minds, all
the infant's imagined needs, we can then put him aside until his needs
need to be satisfied again. We do not have to relate to the infant, but
instead to his needs, which allows those who care for him to be separate
from him, both physically and emotionally. We can then assign others to
take care of his needs (nursemaid, nanny, day care center) and believe
we are taking good care of him, blinding ourselves to the fact that normal
infant development requires more than care; it requires attachment,
caring, and commitment. Care keeps us alive, but the other three
establish our human connection. We grow "as human," meaning to
identify with the human species, through the connection of another human
to us, not by another human's attending to the needs he or she
cultivates in us.
In the nurturing process natural to our species
both mother and infant grow. As a child grows in humanness from being
mothered, a mother grows in her humanness by participating in, and by
affirming, the life she has created. She becomes more than herself. In a
culture such as our own, the interaction of mother and infant is
perceived as an unfair exchange - the mother gives and the infant
receives; (a situation to be temporarily tolerated but changed as soon
as possible).
The human infant has only one need after he is
born. He needs a nurturing mother (or her equivalent) who is there for
him. That is what he evolved to have in order to continue his
development after he leaves the womb. His mother has everything he
needs. Mothering is intrinsic to normal human development. By removing
the mother from the nurturing process, or by altering her role in the
process, we change the process. Our substitutes for the nurturing mother
allow the infant to live, but they are unable to match the totality of
her humanness. The consequence of our unnatural ways of caring for the
infant is that he becomes the person we imagined him to be, someone who
is separate in the world. Our pervasive perception of life in individual
separateness prevents us from seeing and experiencing that nurturing our
children is not a diminishment of self, but an expansion and enhancement
of who we are.
1 Winnicott, D.W. The
Child, the Family, and the Outside World. Reading, MA:
Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1987, p. 88.
2 Lee, Dorothy, "Are Basic
Needs Ultimate?," in Kluckhohn, C. and Murray, H. A., Editors,
Personality in Nature, Society and Culture. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf. 1954, pp. 335-341.
3 Guttmacher, Alan F, Pregnancy
and Birth. New York: The Viking Press, 1962.
4 Lee, op. cit. |
