In my book Magical Child, I described an American mother, Jean Mc-Kellar, who observed newborn Ugandan babies being carried in a sling next to the mother’s breast. No diapers were used and, since the infants were always clean, Jean asked the mothers how they managed bowel and bladder movements. “We just go to the bushes,” answered the mothers. But how, Jean asked, do you know when a tiny infant needs to go to the bushes? The astonished mothers replied: “But how do you know when you have to go to the bushes?”1 In Guatemala, mothers also carry their new infants in that manner, and if a newborn should still soil a mother after two or three days, the woman is considered stupid and a poor mother.2 Colin Turnbull, in his book The Forest People, tells how the mother anticipates the infant’s needs and responds before the infant gives any detectable signs of being in need.3 And in that statement lies the heart of the issue of bonding.
These mothers have bonded with their infants. Delivery practices vary widely among cultures and it is hard to find a standard we can call natural, other than a minimum of interference. A natural birth, though, is one that allows bonding to take place. Bonding is an instinctual function directed from or through our mid-brain, following essentially the same form in all societies, and, like breathing, will manifest if allowed to do so.
Bonding gives an intuitive, extrasensory kind of relationship between mother and child. Bonding is a felt process, not available to discursive thought, language, or intellect. It is a communion that bypasses our ordinary reasoning mind. The mother senses the infant’s need to evacuate the same way she recognizes her own bodily needs, but the communion of bonding goes beyond just physical processes.
Bonding, however, is biological. It involves a direct, physical connection we have between our mid-brains and our thumping hearts.4 Bonded persons connect on intuitive levels that operate below the level of ordinary awareness; the awareness resulting from the bonded state is qualitatively different from the awareness of attachment behavior. The bonded person’s center of operations is in the heart,
the mid-brain emotional center. In terms of physics, we can say the bonded person’s awareness is rooted in a wave-form energy that underlies and gives rise to physical states. From such a precursive and intuitive position, the bonded person responds to physical stimuli in a qualitatively different way than does the attached person.
Attachment occurs when bonding fails to take place at birth. It can also occur at any point where there is a breakdown in the ongoing sequence of bondings that make up our development. Attachment arises from processes in the old brain and the lowest levels of the mid-brain, and thus the attached person can only relate through specific, overt physical signals.
He cannot perceive subtle or intuitive signals that are the precursors of physical experience and is always aware only after the fact. He is, you might say, locked into hindsight. He reacts to stimuli, since by the time he has registered and processed an event, the time for response to that moment is gone. He compensates by trying to anticipate, predict, and control events in the outer world.
The physical energies of the old brain are weaker than the powers of the emotional mid-brain with its heart connections. This means that the attached person is left unaware of an inner power, has no trust that his needs will be met, and so moves aggressively to seize and possess. Vulnerable to an unpredictable physical world, the attached person attempts to incorporate into his ego defense the events, persons, and objects of his outer world. He treats the other person as an object for domination or as a device in his protective strategems. The attached person lives like an armed crustacean eternally on the alert.
Learning is a process of movement from that which is known into that which is unknown. The bonded person can make such a movement because his orientation is based on the non-physical realm of relationship that underlies and comes before all physical events. So any event fits the bonded state and can call forth a response, as opposed to a reaction. Bonding provides a capacity to flow with events on a precursive level. The attached person attempts to analyze the upcoming event ahead of time, predict the probable outcome, and try to enter into the flow to alter it on behalf of a supposedly preferable outcome. Since attachment behavior is always aware after the fact, this intellectual meddling is disruptive, always too late to alter what has taken place, and gets in the way of what should take place next. The attached person attempts to incorporate the unknown back into the known, to squeeze experience back into a tight frame of stable reference, which is always sensory-motor and tangible to the senses. The underlying, inherent essence or pattern of events is relational; it is, so to speak, wave-form rather than particle-form, abstract rather than concrete. The attached person fails to develop the ability to integrate the relational patterns into his interpretation of his world, and learning is difficult.
The bonded person can allow integration into wider circles of possibility for he has an intuitive sense of the underlying, inherent possibilities within situations. The bonded mother is in touch with the precursive, intuitive state and meets needs ahead of time. The bonded person assumes the unfolding moment will meet all needs and is thus open and receptive. This bonding function is the creative principle that holds a diverse creation together. Bonding is displayed from the appearance of the first unit of matter, the smallest subatomic particle, on up through galaxies and universes and our own brain/minds.
Bonding begins between mother and infant in utero. By birth, these bonds are well established, but they must then be confirmed and re-established after delivery, to integrate the new psyche into its new surroundings—which is the function of the bond. All bonding must be established before it is needed and confirmed at the time of need. Consider bonding to be a bridge between the known and the unknown. The bridge must be thoroughly anchored within the known ahead of time. And, before it can bear traffic, the bridge must be anchored on the other side as well. Then integration from the old into the new can take place. If this confirmation of the bond at the point of need, in the new terrain, does not take place, the new psyche will have no choice but to try to incorporate the new experience back into that which it knows. In the case of an infant’s birth, this means relating all new experience back to the uterine experience rather than bringing that experience forward into the light of day. This regression leads to attachment behavior. For instance, the attached infant’s fists will remain clenched—a delivery behavior—for many weeks after delivery. In the same way, the attached child will later cling physically to the parent, in fear of loss of contact, and will not freely explore the world. The bonded child’s relations are on the deep intuitive level not subject to time and space, and he will range far afield.
Shortly before delivery from the womb, the infant’s body releases a pituitary hormone called ACTH. When ACTH hits the infant’s brain, millions of new connecting links between the major neurons form, preparing the brain for rapid change and learning.5 ACTH also triggers a burst of adrenal hormones associated with stress or excitement.6 These hormones bring about a series of responses. They signal that departure from the womb is under way, and so the baby’s body goes into a high alert: The back arches, feet and toes point back, and fists clench to get digits out of the way. The hormone signal is carried back through the umbilical cord to the mother’s body, signaling it, too, for strong, swift muscular responses to help expel the infant. (The distance to travel is about four inches.) The right amount of adrenal hormones produces the necessary alertness and energy for a successful birth. Too much hormone for too long a time will bring on shock, as when someone faints from prolonged crisis. Minor shock retards learning and adaptation as long as the shock continues. Sustained major shock can kill.
This burst of hormones prepares the infant for delivery; a secondary burst begins at issuance into the world. The hormone production then continues until birth is completed. The fulfillment of five simple needs will complete birth after delivery: a thorough stimulation and activation of each of the five senses. These five sensory needs are automatically met through the one, universal, and spontaneous response—placing the newborn in the nursing position. From that position, nature will receive her five signals that birth is taking place, a new life is beginning.7 Until nature’s signals that birth is taking place are met, adrenal production will continue at its initial rate, awaiting those signals to shut down this output. Nature cannot program for failure, as we have seen, and unless the birth needs are met, adrenal production will continue until a critical mass builds up which sends the infant into some form of shock, which can range from minimal to severe. Statistically, if the birth needs are not met within about forty-five minutes after delivery, this critical mass level is reached,8 the infant’s sensory-motor system largely shuts down, there is a retreat to a uterine state of consciousness, and adaptation and response to the world largely cease.
The umbilical cord is some eighteen to twenty inches in length, just the right distance to permit the infant to suckle and still leave the cord intact—an important and obvious bridge between old and new. This keeps the infant’s supply of blood and oxygen linked with the mother’s, as it has been for nine months, and gives him ample time to allow the mucus in his mouth, nose, and tubes to drain, clearing them for the new task of breathing. Then, from that universal nursing position the infant’s five signals that birth is taking place will automatically be met. The inner blueprints of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell will all be given their necessary stimulus, their model-content, from the physical world, anchoring the bonding bridge in the new domain. The necessary functional structures of brain/mind and body will rapidly unfold, and birth will be complete.
We have, in our old brains, two major neural gateways called the reticular formation.9 Four of our five bodily senses are channelled through these pathways, as are our motor responses to such information. Our sensory-motor systems are, in fact, extensions of these reticular formations. These are key neural areas where sensory information is brought together, coordinated, and the coordinates sent on to other brain areas for further processing. The information coming into the old brain from its various sensors is a kind of rough accumulation of raw materials, giving only the most primitive and crude information in itself. So the old brain sends this conglomerate straight to a reticular formation in the mid-brain, which is the major gateway, probably the central nexus of all brain function.10 In the mid-brain’s gateway, the formative actions of emotion, intuition, smell, and other forces are added, all of which sort the raw material from the old brain into meaningful categories of relationship. This rich synthesis of primary action is then distributed to all parts of the brain for any further refinements and responses.
The job at birthing is to activate this sensory system in its entirety and get the processing of information functional in the shortest possible time. This means having the reticular formations of both old brain and mid-brain operative. The sensory system cannot be activated and completed in utero, for that is a dark, insulated, rather quiet water world. Our skin, with its millions of nerve endings, is coated with a fatty substance that protects us against the constant water immersion. Hearing, movement, and a response to movement develop quite well in utero. The mother’s heartbeat, its force and sound, is the major stimulus, and her visceral activity, body movements, breathing, and voice all provide a constant stimulus and a major anchor for bonding. The other senses, however, must await delivery to be activated.
The infant cannot provide himself with any of this sensory activation after delivery. All of it must be done for the newborn, and his system is designed with the expectation that this will be done. Activation of the senses takes place automatically and spontaneously simply by introducing the infant to the mother in skin-to-skin contact immediately after delivery. Millions of years of biological encoding ensure the instinctive response of each to the other from that point on.
The five parts of birth can be listed in any order, since activation of one is usually accompanied by activation of all, but I will take them in arbitrary order. First, vision. Our blueprint for vision is open-ended but is pre-structured to recognize a human face. Among all possible patterns of visual experience, a face is intended to be immediately cognized by the infant.11 At delivery the infant can recognize a face, will spend eighty percent of his visual time looking at a face, and, if given a face within a distance of six to twelve inches during the first forty-five minutes after delivery, his entire visual system will be fully functional by the end of that time. The parallax of the eyes (the muscular coordination to focus and follow movement) and long-and short-range vision will fully function. This infant will then smile every time a face is presented, and this smiling, begun usually within that first forty-five minutes, continues. Nature has had one of her signals met.
The second phase of birth, hearing, has been established in utero by the infant’s imprinting to the mother’s voice and heartbeat. Positioning the infant at that ideal distance of six to twelve inches from the mother’s face—stimulating vision—re-establishes and confirms these uterine bonds in the new surroundings. Most mothers put their newborn infants to the left breast, and the majority of infant holding takes place there. Excursions to the right breast are just that—excursions. Home base seems to be on the left side, where the heart is. Re-connecting with this well-known stimulus, and the mother’s voice (for mothers immediately begin a high-pitched kind of universal baby talk at this point), help anchor the bond, and nature checks off need number two.
The universal nursing position, which is the place where all five needs are met, triggers the third phase, nursing. The first milk (colostrum) transfers to the infant the mother’s immunities gained over her lifetime.12 This first milk may contain a hormone that counteracts any excess adrenals to bring the infant’s system back into hormonal balance, and further, nursing activates the mandibular joint (of the jaw), which is connected with the vestibular rotation factor of the inner ear, which, in turn, is vital to body balance and to orientation of sounds in space.
Human infant digestion is designed to handle only the lightest of nourishment, and human milk is the thinnest of all mammals’. That is because the human infant is designed to nurse between forty-five to sixty times a day.13 Nature could easily have designed things otherwise. Baby rabbits nurse only about once a day, for instance, and their milk is so condensed it is barely fluid. This is because mama rabbit must forage for food most of the time and may get to the nest only occasionally. Mama human is expected (in nature’s agenda) to tote her baby about, carry it along with her, and give a steady supply of that very thin milk. The reason for this weak milk, and need of a steady supply of it, is simple. The human infant must receive a constant activation of his entire sensory system to nurture his brain/mind and ensure the development of intelligence.14 Frequent nursing automatically ensures a major sensory stimulus on all levels: a constant renewal of the face at a distance of six to twelve inches; a renewal of the heartbeat connection; the familiar voice; and stimulus of the sensory endings of the skin by the continual movement of the mother in her daily routines.
We turn now to the fourth phase, touch. Cross-culturally, on skin-to-skin contact with her newborn, mothers begin an automatic, gentle palming of the infant’s body. All mammals stimulate the skin area of their newborns, mostly by constant licking. Prevent this activity and an animal infant will not survive.15 The nerve endings of our skin cannot be developed in utero, covered with that fatty coating (vernix caseus) as we are in our water world. Our mother’s gentle massaging, and the ongoing stimulus of body contact with her, bring these sensory endings to life. Then, with a majority of its sensory system activated, the reticular formation in the old brain goes into full operation. Sensory information from the outside world is channelled properly and sent on to the mid-brain for processing. And, not to be discounted, all this sensory information is benign, beneficial, and exactly what was expected, what has worked for millions of years.
The sense of smell, the last signal, is a mid-brain action. The newborn can immediately pick out his mother’s smell from among that of many other mothers and will respond to it. This plays only a part in nature’s final birth need, though, for the key to the mid-brain’s activation lies, again, in that universal nursing position. The mid-brain’s reticular formation, wherein all information is synthesized and given its complete organization, is the real key to bonding, and the bonding function enters directly into the quality of the mid-brain’s future work. Bonding is also necessary to complete the midbrain’s reticular formation just as it is for the old brain. The mid-brain’s reticular formation must have information from the old brain as the stimulus to complete this mid-brain area. And for the rest of our lives all our information from the world outside will be given its qualitative, relational pattern through this mid-brain action. This relational action is the essence of bonding itself, since bonding is that which ties things together. The mid-brain’s subtle energy is more powerful than the old brain’s material sensing, and the powerful energy modulates, shapes, and gives relational meaning to sensory information.16 Otherwise the old brain’s raw information is largely without meaning and has no coordinating pattern adaptable to the rest of the brain.
The child cannot furnish his old brain with material for its completion at birth; this must be provided by the mother. For the first seven to twelve months of the infant’s life the locus of awareness is in the old brain.17 Once the sensory-motor system is stabilized to some extent, through the mother’s nurturing, the infant can initiate his own search for sensory stimulus, and begins within weeks an aggressive exploration of his sensory world. The midbrain, though intimately involved in sensory processing, is not the locus of infant awareness during this early, essentially reptilian stage. And so emotional-relational stimuli for that mid-brain must be provided and reinforced continually by the mother, until the early sensory-motor period is complete. When nature shifts the infant’s awareness into that mid-brain as a locus, along with the locus awareness in the old brain,18 the mid-brain as a relational function can develop its autonomy as did the old brain—a process which takes two to three years. But during the first year of life the mid-brain—the “heart” of our system—must be furnished its stimulus just as the body must receive its nourishment.
A direct set of nerves connects the heart of the brain system with the heart of physical life, pumping away in our chest. The mid-brain both sends signals to that great organ and receives signals from it in an as yet unknown synchrony, but one which is the obvious core of all bonding. (See illustration on page 29.) Both organs, brain and heart, are places of high concentration of the melanin molecule, the probable interface between consciousness and matter.19 Affairs of the heart are matters of subtle, intuitive energy, matters of relationship, and melanin is almost certainly involved. Take two live heart cells, place them well separated on a microscopic slide, and you will note that they pulsate, as good heart cells should. But they pulse at random, different rates. Bring the two cells closer together, however, and at a certain critical distance, before they touch, they begin to pulsate in synchrony, functioning as a miniature heart should. They have arced the gap of separation; they are bonded.
The newborn’s consciousness is brought about through sensory stimuli that he cannot furnish for himself. Emotional stimuli, which the newborn also cannot furnish, are equally important. The emotional stimuli activate the mid-brain areas as an emotional function, that is, as the organ of relationship. As noted earlier, the mid-brain reticular formation could not be completed in utero since there was insufficient stimulus. But a major bonding stimulus did take place in utero: the heartbeat to which the infant imprints. Reinforcement of this sound after delivery is a principal bonding clue. Medical researchers found not long ago that piping a recorded heartbeat into hospital nurseries markedly reduced crying in the newborns.20 The isolated little systems were simply fooled into thinking that their principal needs were being met. (Similarly, sugar water will reduce hunger crying, but does little for nutrition.)
Consider now those two heart cells on that microscopic slide, and how they arc the gap of separation and communicate. Each is a concentration of the melanin molecule, interface between consciousness and physical process. Our hearts contain billions of those cells with their massive accumulations of melanin. If two single cells arc the gap of distance and communicate, how much more the arc between two actual hearts, if brought into proximity. So consider again that universal left-breast position of the newborn, which gives an ongoing physical proximity of the infant’s and the mother’s hearts. Through the physical proximity of the two hearts, emotional imprinting of the mid-brain and its major reticular formation does take place in utero, just as do hearing and intuitive sensing. The bond, however, must be re-established after delivery. Hearing is part of this, but the emotional imprinting through the actual proximity of physical heart systems must also be reaffirmed. Having had a literal heart-to-heart chat for many months in utero, that conversation must be resumed in the new domain to cement the bond.21
If the heart of the bonding process is established, the infant’s mid-brain receives its input both from the old brain’s reticular formation, which sends the physical-sensory information (largely provided by the mother), and from emotional-intuitive inputs from the mother’s own emotional-intuitive outputs. Furnished with both emotional and physical stimuli to activate both reticular formations and complete the birth process, the infant is now equipped to adapt to his new environment. He must, however, continue to receive these inputs until autonomy of both primary brains is well under way.
Now we can see why mothers instinctively place infants at the left breast for the majority of the time. All birthing signals are met here, and within a short time the production of adrenal hormones stops. Birth is completed; millions of years of programming have succeeded. The infant is now highly alert (though he sleeps at will), his instinctual responses are in a relaxed learning posture, his eyes are focused and taking in everything. His hands are open, exploring all within reach, and he smiles and smiles at every face in this new, rewarding environment. He has given up a limited life for a greater life, relinquished a safe warm haven for a far more exciting and nurturing place. Learning has begun on a brilliant note.
Learning, as we have seen, is movement, and if this first great movement is successful, the pattern of movement from known to unknown is well established and will be carried through in all the many subsequent shifts of knowing that must be made. Each stage of development is an extension of this birth procedure, and if the bonds with each subsequent stage are established ahead of time and re-established after each shift, that shift will be made in its entirety. There will be no splitting of ego between opposing factions: When nature moves the ego on to be integrated into a higher function, the ego has the capacity to shift. If the bond is not established, there is no bridge to the mid-brain as the intuitive center underlying both known and unknown. That ego will, of necessity, hold to its identity with the sensory-motor system even when nature, unable to program for failure, goes ahead and tries to shift that ego into its next higher stage. Ego will fragment between its old brain identity and the new and more powerful pull of the midbrain locus. The ego will stay in the sensory-motor mode, so to speak, and try to incorporate into that mode the new possibilities.
Bonding occurs when the infant is met on both physical and subtle levels by his caretaker. Anchored in the power of the subtle heart system, the infant is always anchored in the core of his life. He is rooted within the great subtle intuitive energies that power physical life, no matter how his physical situation shifts and changes. Through nursing, his continual heart connection with the mother signals well-being, the heart-to-heart relations secured, and the infant’s heart continually sends these signals of well-being on to the midbrain, which acts in that emotional grouping of sensory information that gives him his stable world.
A state of euphoric, excited, interested, and enthusiastic well-being results. Anchored in the powerful subtle energies at the core of his life, he can change his physical moorings and relations with ease and skill, encompassing ever larger horizons of experience. He will arrive at the first great shift of blueprint, the division of his conscious awareness between old and mid-brains, at an average of ten to fourteen months ahead of the unbonded child. If his future shifts of blueprint prove to be as successfully bonded, his superior intelligence, social compatibility, nurturing of his or her own offspring, and so on, are assured.
The breast-fed child is always more intelligent than the bottle-fed child, and the longer he is breast-fed, the more intelligent he is.22 The reason is the continual sensory stimulus and bonding automatically provided. The bonded mother will always (unless some major disaster intervenes) breast-feed her child and for periods up to three years. She will breast-feed against all odds and opposition. The unbonded mother, on the other hand, is virtually incapable of breast-feeding except for, perhaps, two to three weeks at best. Always some perfectly logical reason for not breast-feeding comes up. There are no moral-ethical issues involved here; these are simple biological responses. And failure to breast-feed automatically means that none of the above named processes can take place. The opposite occurs just as automatically—and that is attachment behavior.23
Since I covered what happens in the majority of technological births in Magical Child, I will give only a brief summary here. My reason for doing so is to point up the nature of attachment behavior, since only through a contrast of bonding and attachment can I clarify the issues of development. Over ninety percent of American deliveries are in hospitals. (Only thirty-four percent were before World War II.)24 The majority of these deliveries are chemically induced and take place between nine in the morning and three in the afternoon—convenience hours of obstetricians and staff. The drugs used for inducement, and the drugs used for anesthetizing the mother, transfer to the infant in utero in an average of forty-five seconds and scramble the ordinary delivery birth signals.25
Most women deliver in brilliantly lit operating amphitheatres, often strapped down to the operating table, knees in stirrups. Almost universally, delivery is attempted with the woman on her back—a most difficult position. Masked medical people use scalpels, forceps, and various machinery in the extraction of the infant. The umbilical cord is immediately cut in the majority of deliveries, creating oxygen deprivation in the newborn. Oxygen deprivation is a major mammalian fear. The infant instinctively gasps for air, prematurely. He may inhale the mucus still in his tubes and gag; suction devices are then employed to meet the emergency. In most cases he is held by the heels and given resounding swats on his backside to stop his gagging and/or to initiate those first breaths. An autopsy of silent crib-death victims showed that eighty percent had died from internal bleeding in the upper spinal column.26 The result of this type of delivery-induced damage is undetectable by an ordinary autopsy. The slow clotting that results takes some four to six weeks to build up around the major nerve plexes leading from the spinal column to the heart and lungs, at which point the infant quietly stops breathing, there in his isolated crib.
(A majority of the silent crib-death victims in the United States are black infants. A majority of the charity cases in our hospitals are blacks or other ghetto peoples, and a 1976 survey showed that these cases receive minimal care. Since charity cases are often paid for by the state, at a fraction of the ordinary fees charged, many hospitals set a limit on the delivery room and doctor’s time allotted to any patient; speed and efficiency become the rule.27 A young doctor reported to me that he had interned in a major eastern hospital where a large percentage of the ghetto population was delivered. He had been required to deliver some dozen of these charity case women. In each case, he said, the woman was drugged on entry, strapped down, the baby extricated, the umbilical cord cut, the baby spanked for air, handed to the nurse for processing, and, under the direct instructions of his supervisor, he had in every case seized the umbilical cord and jerked the placenta loose, to clear the room for the next patient. Only later did he find that many of the women hemorrhaged as a result.)
Even during more normal delivery in hospitals, the newborn’s eyes, unused to any light, open to the brilliance of the operating room. Genetically geared to search for a human face, the infant finds only masked figures. He closes his eyes against the sensory overload; his eyelids are peeled back by the medical men and a harsh chemical is dropped into them. (Seeing, and its related smiling at faces, do not develop in these infants for an average of ten to twelve weeks.) The infant is then washed, weighed, wrapped, and dispatched to the nursery. Here he undergoes two states totally unknown in nature, and for which nature has no passible machinery for compensation: silence and stillness. The infant experiences sensory deprivation, the complete and total opposite of what millennia of genetic encoding have called for.
The trauma, physical insult, and pain send the infant’s output of adrenal hormones into a life-preserving burst. Within an average of forty-five minutes, the continued outpouring of adrenalin hits a critical mass in the bloodstream and brain of the infant and the infant goes into shock, a loss of consciousness. He then exhibits two well-known states: massive crying when aroused, and a heavy torpor-like sleep which is not the ordinary rhythmic sleep-dream-wake cycle established in utero, but minimal to severe shock.28
I am leaving out here another major cause of damage in male infants, automatic circumcision, an issue covered with remarkable thoroughness in recent studies.29 Suffice it for now to say that the production of adrenal hormones continues unabated as the infant’s system awaits the needed stimuli to complete the birth process, and undergoes continual re-stimulation through trauma. This over-production of adrenal hormones remains at a critical level for an average of ten to twelve weeks—whereas in a natural delivery and birth a majority of the adrenal hormones will be gone within a maximum of twenty-four hours.30 There is no smiling in these infants for an average of ten to twelve weeks. People in infant research refer to the “smiling syndrome” which then appears, which they think indicates the first signs of consciousness. It takes that long for the sporadic physical stimuli given the infant, isolated and wrapped in blankets, fed from a bottle, and so on, finally to activate the reticular formations and achieve some compensation of the damage done.
Brain damage from oxygen deprivation will have been done in anywhere from twenty to forty percent of deliveries, with the higher percentages among ghetto children.31 Far more damaging than the obvious physical damage, however, is the absence of bonding between infant and mother. Instead of bonding, the infant will physically imprint to whatever concrete stimuli he is afforded, generally the baby blanket. The infant undergoes deprivation of the emotional-intuitive functions of the mid-brain’s reticular formation. Without the emotional-intuitive inputs from the mother, without the constant sensory stimuli and renewal of bonding functions, the basic coordinating and organizing force of the mid-brain on the old brain sensory information is lacking. Whatever sensory intake occurs in those first weeks is chaotic, without organization, and disruptive. Meaning and emotional relationship are the issues at stake.
The shift of ego-identity from the old to the mid-brain will be ten to fourteen months later in the unbonded, isolated child than in the bonded one. All future capacity to learn, to move from context to context, will be impaired. For the pattern of response to stimuli will itself remain locked into sensory-motor reactions at their most primitive level. The child will not be anchored in the deep core of the subtle processes of the mid-brain and heart, from which base all capacity to change, or to learn, is manifested.
From every point the target of damage lies in the mid-brain’s reticular formation, the heart of bonding between mother and child, child and world, child and society, eventually male and female, and so on. The result of attachment is the compulsive survival reaction to try to possess physically all phenomena occurring to or around one, to cling to phenomena as the only means of self-identity, since no other form of relationship is biologically available. Bonding uses attachment behavior (all children grasp and cling to their things at times), just as intelligence can use intellect. Attachment and possession are functional when encompassed within bonding’s powerful moorings in the emotional center—and deadly when operating only from the reptilian center. Attachment behavior cannot encompass bonding (nor substitute for it) or lead to bonding. The weaker physical energy cannot encompass the more powerful subtle one. The child locked into attachment behavior is limited to the weak physical-sensory system, with an impaired emotional system to relate and balance even physical phenomena.
The unbonded child has no choice but to try to possess his experience, as he grasps that baby blanket, his only stable source of stimuli. But human awareness can exist only through relationship. If denied the relationship given through the mid-brain and heart connection, the infant has no choice but to establish what relations he can on the shallow sensory levels afforded him. He will then treat all encounters as objects of possession, and later, of domination, since emotional bonding, the common unity of experience on the subtle levels, will not be within his capacity. Again, moral-ethical failure is not in the picture at all. We are speaking of biological functions. This inability to relate on emotional levels is widespread. The unbonded male treats the female as an object of gratification, a physical possession to be dominated. And we are now all too familiar with the battered-wife syndrome.
Now, if the ego’s first and only stable identity is sensory-motor, then at each shift of ego-awareness into a higher brain function the attached ego automatically tries, as an act of self-preservation, to incorporate the new state of consciousness back into its sensory-motor identity.
At each shift of the system a quantum-leap of possibilities and powers unfolds. Compulsively trying to incorporate the higher energy structure into the lower is impossible; biologically, it just cannot be done. At each shift we must relinquish our attachments to our earlier identity and be integrated into the higher integral structure. Nature provides for this integration automatically, beneath the level of our awareness, if we are bonded. Our egos are carried along from state to state; we have nothing to do with the process.
Attempting to incorporate the new capacities offered at each stage of development back into the sensory-motor identity splits the ego between the two states while identity remains locked in the more primitive form. We end in an internal struggle between competing systems: an old brain id at war with a mid-brain ego at war with a new brain superego and so on. More insidious is our touch-hungry system, sensorily deprived, locked into sensory-saturation which tries to ease an inner hunger that is never articulated. The compulsive consumer devours the earth, crying “More! More!” yet is never satisfied.
The result of attachment behavior is not simply emotional retardation and anxiety, but rage, the anger of impotency. Identified only with the weakest of our systems, the sensory-motor, we have no way to deal with the vast subtle forces of our lives, and thus feel victimized by the outer world. Rage is expressed in the current epidemic outbreak of battered children. In 1983 there were over a million cases of brutally beaten children, five thousand outright murders known—the average age of the victims between two weeks and two years. By 1980, sixty to seventy percent of all American children under the age of four were in day-care centers for periods up to twelve hours a day, seven days a week. A study showed the adrenal steroid levels of a majority of these children to be at near shock level, the shock coming not from the day-care situation, but from separation anxiety, the psychological abandonment suffered by the children on separation from parents.32 For the infant or child must have a continual renewal of his basic orientation, his touchstone for reality and his model: the parent. True, were it not for the buffer effect of day-care, which stands between parent and child for the major portion of the day, abuse and murder of infants would be far greater than it is. Even so, day-care as a solution breeds a far more difficult problem for the next generation: Studies show that many day-care children express marked hostility, aggression, and violence toward caretakers and peers.33
Meanwhile, parenting has become a major national issue. Institutions, foundations, forums, workshops, college courses, and a staggering output of how-to-parent books flood the market. But attempts along this line are all intellectual, and no amount of intellectual training or effort can replace the automatic bonds of the subtle system on which our surface life is based. The bonding function of the mid-brain and heart is simply not an intellectual process. In 1982, 87,000 cases of violent attacks against teachers by students were reported in American schools, while many school administrations, shielding the public against the deplorable situation, report only the most extreme cases. Fifty percent of all American marriages are now ending in divorce, including remarriages. And thirty-eight percent of all American children are in homes with only one original parent. This list could go on into volumes. I have touched only the tip of an iceberg here, simply to point out that all these effects, now breaking up technological society, are directly related to the mid-brain and its function, and that the breakdown is generated at birth.
In 1979, the state of California, facing an annual budget of four billion dollars for crime and violence (the figures have since nearly doubled), appropriated $750,000 for the first scientific study ever made of the root causes of crime and violence.34 Two years later a first paper was issued, listing the ten principal causes of crime and violence in our nation. At the top of the list was the violent way we bring our children into the world. The next five causes prove to be the direct result of the big “number one.”
A culture can destroy itself through some insignificant, thoughtless little practice. Medical childbirth in the United States is not insignificant, but almost a fifty-billion-dollar-a-year industry. I have touched on this unhappy business not with any intention of bringing the system down, or even changing it, which I doubt can be done. I want instead to contrast bonding with attachment in the hopes of making more credible some of the seemingly incredible material that follows.
The issue is that post-biological development rests on the biological. If our biological development is so damaged that a normal functioning is largely unknown, how much more difficult it will be to grasp the issues of post-biological development. The good news, however, is that post-biological development is based on an energy, a function, a power, which can heal, mend, patch up virtually any damage done in our earlier years. Nature is not easily outdone. Since this healing takes place only through integrating lower structures into higher ones, the answer for us lies not in more and more social therapy and bootstrap operations of an intellectual nature, but in the developmental plan built into our system. So, with only an occasional glance at our mounting disasters, we will move right on into development, where the action is.
