THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER
IN asserting that the seat of consciousness in a young infant is in the abdomen, we do not pretend to suggest that all the other conscious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral system comes awake, even the brain’s memories begin to glimmer, recognition and cognition soon begin to take place. But the spontaneous control and all the prime developing activity derive from the great affective centers of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness. There, beneath the navel, lies the active human first-mind, the prime unconscious. From the moment of conception, when the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of death, when this same nucleus breaks again, the first great active center of human consciousness lies in the solar plexus.
The movement of development in any creature is, however, towards a florescent individuality. The ample, mature, unfolded individual stands perfect, perfect in himself, but also perfect in his harmonious relation to those nearest him and to all the universe. Whilst only the one great center of consciousness is awake, in the abdomen, the infant has no separate existence, his whole nature is contained in the conjunction with the parent. As soon as the complementary negative pole arouses the voluntary center of the lumbar ganglion, there is at once a retraction into independence and an assertion of singleness. The back strengthens itself.
But still the circuit of polarity, dual as it is, positive and negative from the positive-sympathetic and the negative-voluntary poles, still depends on the duality of two beings — it is still extra-individual. Each individual is vitally dependent on the other, for the life circuit.
Let us consider for a moment the kind of consciousness manifested at the two great primary centers. At the solar plexus the new psyche acts in a mode of attractive vitalism, drawing its objective unto itself as by vital magnetism. Here it drinks in, as it were, the contiguous universe, as during the womb-period it drank from the living continuum of the mother. It is darkly self-centered, exultant and positive in its own existence. It is all-in-all to itself, its own great subject. It knows no objective. It only knows its own vital potency, which potency draws the external object unto itself, subjectively, as the blood-stream was drawn into the foetus, by subjective attraction. Here the psyche is to itself the All. Blindly self-positive.
This is the first mode of consciousness for every living thing — fascinating in all young things. The second half of the same mode commences as soon as direct activity sets up in the lumbar ganglion. Then the psyche recoils upon itself, in its first reaction against continuity with the outer universe. It recoils even against its own mode of assimilatory unison. Even it must break off, interrupt the great psychic-assimilation process which goes on at the sympathic center. It must recoil clean upon itself, break loose from.any attachment whatsoever. And then it must try its power, often playfully.
This reaction is still subjective. When a child stiffens and draws away, when it screams with pure temper, it takes no note of that from which it recoils. It has no objective consciousness of that from which it reacts, the mother principally. It is like a swimmer endlessly kicking the water away behind him, with strong legs vividly active from the spinal ganglia. Like a man in a boat pushing off from the shore, it merely thrusts away, in order to ride free, ever more free. It is a purely subjective motion, in the negative direction.
After our long training in objectivation, and our epoch of worship of the objective mode, it is perhaps difficult for us to realize the strong, blind power of the unconscious on its first plane of activity. It is something quite different from what we call egoism — which is really mentally derived — for the ego is merely the sum-total of what we conceive ourselves to be. The powerful pristine subjectivity of the unconscious on its first plane is, on the other hand, the root of all our consciousness and being, darkly tenacious. Here we are grounded, say what we may. And if we break the spell of this first subjective mode, we break our own main root and live rootless, shiftless, groundless.
So that the powerful subjectivity of the unconscious, where the self is all-in-all unto itself, active in strong desirous psychic assimilation or in direct repudiation of the contiguous universe; this first plane of psychic activity, polarized in the solar plexus and the lumbar ganglion of each individual but established in a circuit with the corresponding poles of another individual: this is the first scope of life and being for every human individual, and is beyond question. But we must again remark that the whole circuit is established between two individuals — that neither is a free thing-unto-itself — and that the very fact of estab lished polarity between the two maintains that correspondence between the individual entity and the external universe which is the clue to all growth and development. The pure subjectivity of the first plane of consciousness is no more selfish than the pure objectivity of any other plane. How can it be? How can any form of pure, balanced polarity between two vital individuals be in any sense selfish on the part of one individual? We have got our moral values all wrong.
Save for healthy instinct, the moralistic human race would have exterminated itself long ago. And yet man must be moral, at the very root moral. The essence of morality is the basic desire to preserve the perfect correspondence between the self and the object, to have no trespass and no breach of integrity, nor yet any refaulture in the vitalistic interchange.
As yet we see the unconscious active on one plane only and entirely dependent on two individuals. But immediately following the establishment of the circuit of the powerful, subjective, abdominal plane comes the quivering of the whole system into a new degree of consciousness. And two great upper centers are awake.
The diaphragm really divides the human body, psychically as well as organically. The two centers beneath the diaphragm are centers of dark subjectivity, centripetal, assimilative. Once these are established, in the thorax the two first centers of objective consciousness become active, with ever-increasing intensity. The great thoracic sympathetic plexus rouses like a sun in the breast, the thoracic ganglion fills the shoulders with strength. There are now two planes of primary consciousness — the first, the lower, the subjective unconscious, active beneath the diaphragm, and the second upper, objective plane, active above the diaphragm, in the breast.
Let us realize that the subjective ana objective of the unconscious are not the same as the subjective and the objective of the mind. Here we have no concepts to deal with, no static objects in the shape of ideas. We have none of that tiresome business of establishing the relation between the mind and its own ideal object, or the discriminating between the ideal thing-in-itself and the mind of which it is the content. We are spared that hateful thing-in-itself, the idea, which is at once so all-important and so nothing. We are on straightforward solid ground; there is no abstraction.
The unconscious subjectivity is, in its positive manifestation, a great imbibing, and in its negative, a definite blind rejection. What we call an unconscious rejection. This subjec tivity embraces alike creative emotion and physical function. It includes alike the sweet and untellable communion of love between the mother and child, the irrational reaction into separation between the two, and also the physical functioning of sucking and urination. Psychic and physical development run parallel, though they are forever distinct. The child sucking, the child urinating, this is the child acting from the great subjective centers, positive and negative. When the child sucks, there is a sympathetic circuit between it and the mother, in which the sympathetic plexus in the mother acts as negative or submissive pole to the corresponding plexus in the child. In urination there is a corresponding circuit in the voluntary centers, so that a mother seems gratified, and is gratified, inevitably, by the excremental functioning of her child. She experiences a true polar reaction.
Child and mother have, in the first place, no objective consciousness of each other, and certainly no idea of each other. Each is a blind desideratum to the other. The strong love between them is effectual in the great abdominal centers, where all love, real love, is primarily based. Of that reflected or moon-love, derived from the head, that spurious form of love which predominates to-day, we do not speak here. It has its root in the idea: the beloved is a mental objective, endlessly appreciated, criticized, scrutinized, exhausted. This has nothing to do with the active unconscious.
Having realized that the unconscious sparkles, vibrates, travels in a strong subjective stream from the abdominal centers, connecting the child directly with the mother at corresponding poles of vitalism, we realize that the unconscious contains nothing ideal,
nothing in the least conceptual, and hence nothing in the least personal, since personality, like the ego, belongs to the conscious or mental-subjective self. So the first analyses are, or should be, so impersonal that the so-called human relations are not involved. The first relationship is neither personal nor biological — a fact which psychoanalysis has not succeeded in grasping.
For example. A child screams with terror at the touch of fur; another child loves the touch of fur, and purrs with pleasure. How now? Is it a complex? Did the father have a beard?
It is possible. But all-too-human. The physical result of rubbing fur is to set up a certain amount of frictional electricity. Frictional electricity is one of the sundering forces. It corresponds to the voluntary forces exerted at the lower spinal ganglia, the forces of anger and retraction into independence and power. An over-sympathetic child will scream with fear at the touch of fur; a refractory child will purr with pleasure. It is a reaction which involves even deeper things than sex — the primal constitution of the elementary psyche. A sympathetically overbalanced child has a horror of the electric-fric-tional force such as is emitted from the fur of a black cat, creature of rapacity. The same delights a fierce-willed child.
But we must admit at the same time that from earliest days a child is subject to the definite conscious psychic influences of its surroundings and will react almost automatically to a conscious-passional suggestion from the mother. In this way personal sex is prematurely evoked, and real complexes are set up. But these derive not from the spontaneous unconscious. They are in a way dictated from the deliberate, mental consciousness, even if involuntarily. Again they are a result of mental subjectivity, self-consciousness — so different from the primal subjectivity of the unconscious.
To return, however, to the pure unconscious. When the upper centers flash awake, a whole new field of consciousness and spontaneous activity is opened out. The great sympathetic plexus of the breast is the heart’s mind. This thoracic plexus corresponds directly in the upper man to the solar plexus in the lower. But it is a correspondence in creative opposition. From the sympathetic center of the breast as from a window the unconscious goes forth seeking its object, to dwell upon it. When a child leans its breast against its mother it becomes filled with a primal awareness of her — not of itself desiring her or partaking of her — but of her as she is in her self. This is the first great acquisition of primal objective knowledge, the objective content of the unconscious. Such knowledge we call the treasure of the heart. When the ancients located the first seat of consciousness in the heart, they were neither misguided nor playing with metaphor. For by consciousness they meant, as usual, objective consciousness only. And from the cardiac plexus goes forth that strange effluence of the self which seeks and dwells upon the beloved, lovingly roving like the fingers of an infant or a blind man over the face of the treasured object, gathering her mould into itself and transferring her mould forever into its own deep unconscious psyche. This is the first acquiring of objective knowledge, sightless, unspeakably direct. It is a dwelling of the child’s unconscious within the form of the mother, the gathering of a pure, eternal impression. So the soul stores itself with dynamic treasures; it verily builds its own tissue of such treasure, the tissue of the developing body, each cell stored with creative dynamic content. ^
The breasts themselves are as two eyes. We do not know how much the nipples of the breast, both in man and woman, serve primarily as poles of vital conscious effluence and connection. We do not know how the nipples of the breast are as fountains leaping into the universe, or as little lamps irradiating the contiguous world, to the soul in quest.
But certainly from the passional conscious-center of the breast goes forth the first joyous discovery of the beloved, the first objective discovery of the contiguous universe, the first ministration of the self to that which is beyond the self. So, functionally, the mother ministers with the milk of her breast. But this is a yielding to the great lower plexus, the basic solar plexus. It is the breast as part also of the alimentary system — a special thing.
In sucking the hands also come awake. It is strange to notice the pictures by the old masters of the Madonna and Child. Sometimes the strange round belly of the Infant seems the predominant mystery-center, and sometimes from the tiny breast it is as if a delicate light glowed, the light of love. As if the breast should illumine the outer world in its seeking administering love. As if the breast of the Infant glimmered its light of discovery on the adoring Mother, and she bowed, submissive to the revelation.
The little hands and arms wave, circulate, trying to touch, to grasp, to know. To grasp in caress, not to reive. To grasp in order to identify themselves with the cherished discovery, to realize the beloved. To cherish, to realize the beloved. To administer the out ward-seeking self to the beloved. We give this the exclusive name of love. But it is indeed only the one direction of love, the outgoing from the lovely center of the breast — the nipple0 seeking, the hands delicately, caressively exploring, the eyes at last waking to perception. The eyes, the hands, these wake and are alert from the center of the breast. But the ears and feet move from the deep lower centers — the recipient ears, imbibing vibrations, the feet which press the resistant earth, controlled from the powerful lower ganglia of the spine. And thus great scope of activity opens, in the hands that wave and explore, the eyes that try to perceive, the legs, the little knees that thrust, thrust away, the small feet that curl and twinkle upon themselves, ready for the obstinate earth.
And so, also a wholeness is established within the individual. The two fields of conscious ness, the first upper and the first lower, are based upon a correspondence of polarity. The first great complex circuit is now set up within the individual, between the upper and lower centers. The individual consciousness has now its own integral independent existence and activity, apart from external connection. It has its right to be alone.