I think of the forms of vitality in infancy as the felt physiological rhythms of a baby’s aliveness in herself and in her interactions with other people, which gain meaning through repetition and which through that repetition become pattern and then the anticipation of pattern. Crying brings comforting arms. A smile is answered with a smile, babble with words. The baby does not represent these exchanges symbolically, but as they occur, they are neurobiologically coded in her and are vital to the development of her nervous system. They are part of a temporal, bodily music that begins in infancy but that never vanishes. Freud referred to “the pain pleasure series,” a spectrum of experienced feelings from bad to good.344 Damasio refers to “somatic markers,” feelings associated with earlier perceptions and situations that help us make decisions in the present.345 Could any person guide himself through life without feeling? The baby does not use words or semantics as such, but there are emotional meanings or valences conveyed by sensations of cold and warm, distress and comfort, a bodily motor-sensory-emotional dynamic that becomes pattern over time. Well before a child is manipulating symbols, talking, or reading, she is immersed in a meaningful world of movement, sensation, and emotion.
Babies are now regarded as socially precocious rather than socially inept. Both Freud and Piaget viewed the newborn as someone who was unable to distinguish himself from what was around him. Although controversy remains about what capacities babies have at birth and what they acquire as they grow, the new idea is that newborns are not reflexive blobs but arrive in the world as social beings. Trevarthen’s “primary intersubjectivity,” embraced by Cynthia Breazeal, is the ground for all further social growth, but it is growth that can occur only in a sensing, feeling, experiencing infant. Kismet can’t learn because although Kismet can simulate feeling, it can’t feel. The back-and-forth exchanges between parent and infant are known as “proto dialogues” or “proto conversations.”346 Philippe Rochat argues that these early social relations are the vehicles through which babies come to have knowledge about themselves, which he calls a “deep mirror,” one that opens the child to self-awareness, to a concept of himself as an object for others.347 This is similar to the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott’s view of the mother’s expressive face as a reflective zone for her baby, through which he finds himself.348 It also reverberates with what the American sociologist George Herbert Mead referred to as the social self. “The ‘I’ of introspection,” he wrote, “is the self which enters into social relations with other selves.”349 Without others, a person cannot begin to reflect on himself. Rochat believes that a form of self-objectification comes about long before the child recognizes himself in an actual mirror, which he does not believe reveals the emergence of self-consciousness in the child so much as his confrontation with the illusory strangeness of the specular image.
The still-face experiment was designed by a group of researchers in the late 1970s, but the name most commonly associated with it is Edward Tronick. Anyone with access to the Internet can watch films of this brief experiment. After playing normally with her child, a mother is instructed to look at her baby with a still, neutral, unresponsive face and not touch or interact with him at all. At first the infant does everything possible to reengage the parent, but as the seconds tick by and the parent does not reciprocate, the child becomes more and more distressed, looks away, and finally withdraws altogether. In one film, I watched the baby collapse in his chair, as if his muscle tone had suddenly vanished. Countless further studies have been done, and several interpretations have been offered about what the “still-face paradigm” means. Research has demonstrated that babies do not have the same response to parents who turn away to speak to others or even to parents who cover their faces with masks and continue to engage them. Most parents intuitively grasp that not responding to a child is cruel. It is also notable that when an adult turns to another adult with a blank or dead face, it is often a form of punishment—a withdrawal of reflective acknowledgment.
Tronick has advanced an idea called “the dyadic expansion of consciousness.” He defines his hypothesis this way: “Each individual self is a self-organizing system that creates its own states of consciousness—states of brain organization, if you will—which can be expanded into more coherent and complex states in collaboration with another self-organizing system, another person.”350 We grow in and through other people. Merleau-Ponty typically articulates a more complex relation, in which he elucidates how one self system in relation to another self system form something beyond either one, a kind of mirroring whole, in which one person is nevertheless distinguished from the other: “I say that it is another person, a second self, and this I know in the first place because this living body has the same structure as mine. I experience my own body as the power of adopting certain forms of behavior and a certain world, and I am given to myself merely as a certain hold upon the world: now, it is precisely my body which perceives the body of another, and discovers in that other body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other person’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.”351
Part of what the philosopher describes as a prolongation of his own intentions includes an imaginative participation in the other person’s actions that is not purely imitative. Stein Bråten describes what he calls the “altercentric” view. By this he means that from early on in life, human beings have an ability to take the other person’s position, to participate in an action from the other’s point of view. They do not just mirror him or her but enact a perceptual reversal. He points to shared spoon-feeding as a good example. Anyone who has fed a baby will recognize the following narrative. A mother unwittingly opens her mouth as she steers the spoon of mashed spinach into her one-year-old’s mouth and says, “Open wide.” After the baby has eaten happily for a while, the mother gives him the spoon, which he can now manipulate, albeit awkwardly. Rather than feed himself, he reverses the action and feeds his parent, opening his own mouth as he does it and closing it the moment his mother’s lips come together over the spoon. For Bråten, this coauthoring of an action is more than imitation. It becomes a means for further development, which includes the later ability to listen to and tell stories, to leap into the shoes of a fairy-tale hero or heroine and participate in his or her journey.352
These are theories that investigate human development through a self-other dynamic that moves from social newborn to storytelling three-year-old and onward. Although I have tried to make it clear that none of these ideas is free of debate or controversy, it is easy to see how far removed they are from the notion that a person’s life is largely determined at the moment of conception. It is not that evolutionary psychology does not acknowledge that babies are born and grow up, but rather that its proponents feel little need to pay much attention to that story as a story. Change happened in evolution. Individual change and growth is mostly ignored. Human development is subsumed under two categories, “environment” and genetic “heredity.” In effect, this binary eliminates tracking all the changes that take place in a person between the time of her birth and the moment she is registered as a statistic. It is conveniently static. A number representing one side of the pole or the other takes the place of a developmental narrative.
During a break at a neuropsychoanalysis conference in Berlin, I eavesdropped on an exchange between two men that has stayed with me because it represents a gulf between two points of view on infancy. A prominent neuroscientist was in a heated conversation with a psychoanalyst. The neuroscientist was aggressively insisting that babies are “not conscious.” The befuddled psychoanalyst calmly said he simply didn’t understand how that could be. The two men obviously subscribed to different definitions of and ideas about consciousness. There are people in analytical philosophy and in cognit
ive science who argue that babies are not conscious. Like all animals, infants lack consciousness, because consciousness is linked to “higher order thought,” or HOT for short. A person is conscious only when a higher order thought is directed at a mental state. In other words, when a person can think about thinking or know that he knows, he is conscious. If not, the lights are out.353
When babies are awake, they interact with other people and objects around them and certainly seem to be having conscious experiences. Isn’t sensation conscious by definition? How can a baby’s sensual experiences be unconscious? When an infant sucks on a breast or a bottle or kicks a mobile that tickles her foot, is she unconscious? In such a theory there is no room for prereflective consciousness, for Merleau-Ponty’s immediate or naïve consciousness, for a consciousness without reflection, for animal consciousness. The idea of the unconscious baby is possible only by applying a logic that divorces mind from body and is deeply suspicious of the senses. It also relies on a theory of mind that does not involve a relational or dyadic model to explain development.
And yet, there is now an enormous literature on the importance of a baby’s attachment to his caretaker. Attachment research began with John Bowlby (1907–90), who studied both children and monkeys. His three-volume work, Attachment and Loss, examines the early bond established in primates between an infant and an attachment figure, which he understood as an evolved trait because an infant’s survival depends on others caring for and protecting him.354 Mary Ainsworth (1913–99) codified particular styles of human attachment as secure or as insecure in different ways and inaugurated a rich legacy of empirical research on the subject and its effects on people in later life.355 Others have linked the quality of early care to the infant’s growing brain and nervous system.356
Bowlby’s attachment theory is derived from several disciplines, including psychoanalysis, ethology, evolutionary biology, developmental psychology, and even control theory in cybernetics. Bowlby argued that children cannot thrive without an attachment to another person, if not a mother, then a “mother substitute.” Tronick’s still-face paradigm may be seen as Bowlby’s theory in miniature. Attachment, separation, and loss are enacted in a single brief interval: at first the child protests, then he despairs, and finally he denies the attachment altogether by withdrawing. To put it simply, children need to love and be loved in a dependable way. If they are deprived of this stable affection by accident or because the parent is ill or depressed, it will affect their emotional stability later in life.
Most of the studies over the years on human attachment have been focused on mothers and infants for obvious reasons. Infants are still mostly cared for by their mothers, although since my childhood the involvement of fathers in my middle-class milieu has increased enormously. In upper-class and aristocratic families in the West, wet nurses, baby nurses, and nannies have been commonplaces for centuries. In Caribbean families, various modes of collective parenting are the norm. I have any number of friends from the islands who were raised by grandparents, aunts and uncles, or other relatives. During my childhood in the rural Midwest, where the nuclear family reigned supreme, I never saw fathers pushing baby carriages or walking about with an infant strapped to their chests. No one had a nanny. Babysitters were teenagers, usually girls, paid fifty cents an hour for their pains. In Park Slope, Brooklyn, where I now live, fathers with babies attached to their bodies in one way or another are a routine sight. Families with adopted children have long been with us, and now families with two fathers or two mothers are increasingly common. And social changes affect research. There is growing interest in the effects, for example, of fatherhood on human men and other mammals.
Social neuroscience is a burgeoning field. Scientists are busy studying how social encounters in animals with other “conspecifics” (the name for other animals of the same species) have an impact on a creature’s neurophysiology. For example, a number of studies have shown that social and sexual encounters among animals spur neurogenesis, the formation of new neurons in the brain, and isolation and/or being tormented by another animal stops neurogenesis. The prairie vole has been of particular interest to researchers because the animal is purportedly monogamous. The voles mate and stick to each other and, except for nursing, mother and father prairie voles display similar behaviors in relation to their offspring. Having children takes a physiological toll on both mothers and fathers in the prairie-vole world, a finding that should not come as a surprise to the exhausted human parents of a newborn. A paper called “The Social Environment and Neurogenesis in the Adult Mammalian Brain” (2012) may stand as exemplary. Prairie voles, lemurs, and tamarins are all “bi-parental” mammals. Both mothers and fathers care for their offspring, and that experience affects neurogenesis in both. The authors report another interesting fact from prairie-vole research: nurturing fathers lose weight.357
The mammalian brain is not a uniform entity, and people are not prairie voles. I want to show that garnering “substantial scientific evidence,” to quote the man who wrote to the New York Times to argue that women are innately uninterested in technology, depends on where you look for your evidence. It depends on which science you read and on the paradigm that lies hidden beneath that particular science. The idea that a person’s fate is determined at the moment of conception flies in the face of vast amounts of data gathered on the relations between parents and infants, especially in the first years of life. Attachment styles affect development.
In a long-term study (2007), Ruth Feldman, the first author of the correlated heartbeat paper, studied temporal synchrony between mothers and their infants and its effect on the child’s empathy later in life. Feldman found a correlation between synchrony in infancy and empathy in the same child at ages three, nine, and thirteen.358 The way parents talk to their children about emotions also affects how empathetic they become. Through dialogues with their parents, children develop narratives for understanding other people and what they do and feel.
Of course, empathy has to be defined before it can be measured and, as with so many words, this one is slippery. Although empathy is normally thought of as a positive quality, too much empathy can be crippling. Physicians learn to protect themselves from an excess of empathy. How could they do their jobs if they didn’t? Living a moral life is probably a complicated mélange of empathetic feeling, an abstract sense of social justice, and guilt. In order to avoid the miserable pangs of guilt, many people do their best to steer clear of the situations that will produce the unpleasant feeling. Guilt is a social emotion that develops in children as they negotiate their way through their relations with other people and increasingly understand that they are responsible for their own actions. Infants are not guilty. Guilt seems to emerge sometime in the second year of life and is, not surprisingly, linked to a capacity for empathy. It is easy to understand that a subtle view of morality must take development into account. Although human beings may well be born social, to reduce the complexity of human relations to a “moral compass” in the brain or to a simplistic notion of morality as “hardwired” in the brain are modes of thinking that use a hammer when a tweezers is the instrument needed.
Moral life is probably not possible without empathy, and to have empathy is also to have guilt. Although too much guilt can be pathological, no guilt or very little of it is a characteristic of the psychopath, a person whose lack of both empathy and guilt may lead to criminal behavior. Psychopaths are also famously incapable of controlling their impulses. Something is missing or fails to develop in the psychopath, although no one knows how to explain these deficits. A reasonable hypothesis is that they are related to the prefrontal cortex, often called the executive part of the brain, which develops over time.359 It is now generally agreed that experience affects how it develops. A paper by Bryan Kolb and colleagues summarizes the story: “Pre- and postnatal environmental events, such as sensory stimuli, hormones, parent-child relationships, stress, and psychoactive drugs, modify cerebral development and, ultimately,
adult behavior.”360 There is always a story.
Parents of more than one child often testify to visible differences between siblings that appear shortly after birth. Some newborns are highly sensitive to stimuli while others are sleepy and placid. An infant’s temperament can be understood as a product of epigenetic factors. A baby’s highly sensitive temperament can be exacerbated or dampened depending on what happens to him in his relations with important people as his life unfolds, relations that literally become part of his body and brain and therefore what we call character. As McGraw understood so well, however, asking what is experience and what is constitution in that growing person may be impossible to answer. It is probably also the wrong question to ask.
Memory, Placebo, and Weird Body Symbolism
The placebo effect—that mysterious mind-body or psychosomatic phenomenon—may begin to look somewhat less bizarre when understood from an embodied, relational perspective. Richard Kradin argues that the placebo response is linked directly to attachment. The physiological effects of placebo are in his words “a developmental achievement,” born of the dynamic interactions a person had with a caretaker, which are unconscious memories. In other words, certain encounters call on “somatic markers” or old bodily melodies, a soothing relational state that returns involuntarily when, for example, the kindly doctor hands you a bottle of promising pink or purple pills.361 Kradin is a research physician and a psychoanalyst. He moves easily from references to the works of Freud, Jung, Bowlby, and Winnicott to studies in neurobiology. According to Kradin, the placebo effect is a nervous system response triggered by behaviors in others that mimic those of attachment figures. His argument shifts the emphasis from a lone human being magically healing himself through “positive thinking” to a human being with a developmental history intimately connected to and dependent on other people, which is now part of his internal bodily reality. Placebo becomes a form of self-regulation through unconscious memory rather than the magical properties of the mental acting on the physical.