The first year of life - YOUNG CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS

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Before we examine the baby’s dramatic physical and psychological developments and his budding relationship to the parents, we should take a look at some of the tumult a baby causes in his immediate and extended environment. The birth of their first baby turns a couple into parents; it also turns their parents into grand-parents. If the new baby already has older siblings, he will increase his family’s size, with those siblings reconfigured into new positions. The reconfiguration of a family with its several generations and the new roles and tasks awaiting its members all pose real challenges for eve-ryday life—but also spur a range of emotional transformations. Room must be made for all the things a baby requires in our modern soci-ety, such as a pram, crib, nappy-changing table and baby bathtub. It is astonishing and also confusing how many new objects are necessary in order to transport the baby from one place to another, keep him warm, and care for him. These objects are usually acquired before the baby’s birth, often when the baby would already be able to survive outside his mother’s body: symbolically, space is being made for the new liv-ing beliv-ing. Even more crucial than these external preparations are the

psychological adjustments various generations of the baby’s family have to make, in order to create mental space for him.

Changes in the family through the birth of a baby

The new baby makes his parents’ parents into grandparents. As evi-dent in this phrase, the new grandparents are not active participants in the process, instead simply waiting for their children’s decision to have children of their own. Even if they have long wished for grandchildren, it is surprising what intense and contradictory feelings are elicited in grandparents when their wish is fulfilled. Realisation of that expansive, narcissistic wish to see their family perpetuated, attended by desires for immortality—to live on through their children and grandchildren—

are accompanied by feelings that can seem quite threatening to grand-parents. They must accept the fact that they are past the reproductive age, surrendering this position to their children. A grandmother’s often unconscious wish of having a baby herself can be manifested in var-ious ways, and so can her unconscvar-ious rivalry with her daughter or daughter-in-law. Grandmothers-to-be frequently describe menacing dreams where their daughter or daughter-in-law falls prey to some vio-lent crime, and they must then adopt the orphaned baby themselves.

I believe this and similar dreams, where grandparents must assume care of the baby, express their envy and unconscious rivalry with the mother, who is in their fantasy robbed of her baby. Here, we see an inner conflict delineated, with one side of the grandmother seeking to protect the mother, and another side begrudging her the joys of mother-hood. Many people harbour the fear that when aggressive or shameful feelings become conscious, all positive feelings and the power to love will be annulled. In fact, the opposite is true. The more grandparents become aware of their unconscious desires for parenthood and their grief at the end of this creative faculty, the less they will be blocked in supporting their children as new parents. Enacting rivalry through dreams, or discussing it with a trusted person, usually is a welcome relief, also enabling the grandparents to reflect on the birth of their own children. Possibly there are things they now would like to have done differently or better. Connecting to earlier experiences makes grand-parents more open towards helping their children with the multitude of new tasks now facing them. If feelings of rivalry and envy are sup-pressed, they are often transformed into actions meant to demonstrate

that the “grand”-father or -mother are not yet “over the hill”. New grandfathers occasionally remarry a younger woman, have a baby with her, or throw themselves so vehemently into their work or other duties that they cannot find time for their child’s new family. Such men typi-cally have great difficulty accepting the fact of their own age and are blind to the potential satisfaction their new role as grandfather could bring.

Similar turbulent emotions are often elicited in friends of a newly childbearing couple. Friends who themselves wish for a baby will feel a connection with the parents-to-be, sharing in their joyful anticipa-tion and hoping to thus learn from their experience; their unconscious envy and rivalry are diminished by the hope of later having this same experience themselves. For friends who have already given up any hope of becoming parents, any participation at all in the approaching parenthood is often so painful that they might even break off contact with the parents-to-be.

Since we wish to examine more closely the feelings of parents and baby in various developmental stages of the baby’s first year, his sib-lings’ emotions are now described only briefly.

Emotional reaction of siblings

The newborn baby’s siblings must deal with just as tumultuous feel-ings as their parents and grandparents. The younger a sibling is, the more painful it is to be ejected from his/her position and to surrender fantasised possession of the mother and the special status of youngest child. Children with other siblings have already had this experience, learning to share their territory, but earlier feelings of rivalry are once again activated. When children are still very young—under two years of age—they often cannot formulate their fears in words or in play, or cannot make themselves adequately understood. Anger, disappoint-ment, uncertainty as to the future, and the conviction that their parents have created a new, superior baby all make for great inner tension in an older sibling—occasionally leading to the child running a fever shortly after the new baby’s birth, with no somatic cause found. In this case, if the sibling happens to be staying with relatives at the time of the birth, he will likely be taken home immediately and thus recovers, with loving parental attention conquering the child’s unconscious fears of being unloved and being excluded. The child learns that he will not

lose his parents’ love and that there is now room for all the children in the family. Objectively, this constitutes an inordinately difficult period, where any support from relatives or friends can be helpful. If parents are able to understand sibling fears and jealousy and to discuss them with the older child, he will feel accepted with his “bad” feelings. If allowed to participate in caring for the new baby—holding a bottle filled with tea or observing the mother changing nappies—and if the mother dis-cusses the baby with him, the sibling can then identify with his parents, slowly building a positive relationship to the baby. Small babies begin very early to take interest in and react to their older siblings, observing them closely, soon smiling and becoming joyful when the older child draws near. The intensity of sibling jealousy certainly depends on the quality of the sibling’s relationship to his parents—but it is nevertheless important to realise that every child is to some extent jealous and fears being superseded by the new baby.

The emotional relationship between baby and parents

The first year of life is of enormous significance for the baby’s subse-quent physical and psychic development. During this time, the foun-dations of the personality are laid, akin to the founfoun-dations of a house and of equal importance for its stability and structure. In the child’s first months and years, his perception of the real world, his separation between inner and outer sensations, his thinking, and his relationship to the parents are all evolving out of raw, unintegrated feelings and perceptions. The parents or caregiver must aid the infant as he copes with his raw, primitive, and archaic feelings and somatic perceptions.

Even though an infant already possesses a far greater range of abilities than was assumed for centuries, he still remains dependent on adults for his survival. He cannot feed himself or move from place to place, but instead is dependent on others to keep him warm, nourish him, and guarantee his bodily well-being. This physical care corresponds to emotional succour that, in bonding the infant to a love object, helps him orient himself within his own body and in the world at large. In the first three months, a “social birth” follows the baby’s physical birth, where he builds a relationship to the world via his relationship to his mother or caregiver (primary object). In these dramatic first months, the infant can establish elements of structure and inner order if his mother succeeds in containing and comprehending his archaic fears and returning

them in a modified form. We can compare this process to Egyptian mythology, where chaos and darkness are averted by turning towards order and light. We can say that the baby—who if unattended would starve and expire, a victim of his own overwhelming needs and fears—

experiences himself as threatened by chaos. Esther Bick expressed this needfulness and vulnerability in an evocative image: “When the baby is born, it finds itself in the position of an astronaut who has been shot into space without a spacesuit … the baby’s overriding fear is that it will either disintegrate or dissolve. We can observe this in the trembling of an infant when the nipple is removed from its mouth or when it is undressed” (1986, p. 296).

The astronaut’s spacesuit, supplying oxygen and warmth, corre-sponds to the loving, emotional care the parents provide, with their physical and emotional containment of the infant. The oxygen an astro-naut needs to survive and maintain his physical position in the atmos-phere can be compared to a mother’s capacity for registering her infant’s feelings and demonstrating her understanding. It is important to real-ise that this phenomenon does not primarily involve physical care, but emotional responsiveness. By internalising his mother’s nurturing, pro-tective faculties, the baby develops a positive core in its psyche, a “good inner object”, back to which he can constantly refer. At the same time, the infant’s first encounters with chaotic forces remain embedded in the deepest levels of his personality, constituting a “psychotic core” that is normally subordinated by positive experiences.

It is of great importance that mother (and father or other caretaker) is able to be receptive to the infant’s distress, including the fear of being attacked and dying, can take it in, contain it and by giving it meaning modulate it, making it possible for the baby to take it back into himself. Parents will be able to contain their baby’s pain-ful emotional states if they are in touch with powerpain-ful infantile anxieties within themselves, yet able to maintain a spirit of hope-fulness, having faith in their own and the child’s life-force to put against fear, terror and despair. Such emotional-spiritual strength conveys to the infant, on a feeling level, that there is something like a mental-emotional space within mother/father/caretaker that allows painful emotional states to be held, contained with-out going to pieces—they can be thought abwith-out … If, on the other hand he finds his fright terror, despair, misery are not received, not

understood by his caretakers, it leaves him with what Bion calls

“nameless dread”, unspecified, unthinkable thoughts which have continually to be expelled/projected into others. Some mothers/

fathers/caretakers may receive the infant’s communications but become so terrified that they feed back to the baby their own ter-ror and despair, adding to his own. This is likely to cause him to be wary about what he takes in, physically and emotionally.

(Salzberger-Wittenberg, 2013, p. 7)

René Spitz (1945), observing infants in orphanages who were optimally cared for physically but had no constant, emotionally accessible persons to form a relationship with, described a situation he termed

“hospitalism”, where this deficiency can actually lead to a child’s death.

The baby’s fear of disintegration is paralleled by his parents’ anxi-eties that their child could die, or that they cannot possibly live up to their task as parents. Even though mortal dangers for mother and baby and mortality rates for both infants and mothers during or after birth have been greatly reduced through modern medicine, the first period of life nevertheless remains a highly vulnerable one. The newborn baby’s body cannot yet master the tasks he faces, and the infant’s initial fears are intense ones, including fear of death. The first three months of life are particularly sensitive. As the baby grows and if his development and emotional relationship with the parents proceed auspiciously, he enters a different stage of development. Therefore, we shall first exam-ine his development during these first three months.

The first three months

The first days after birth are a difficult time for mother and baby;

both must come to terms with their final corporal separation and loss of unity. The birth constitutes the first experience of separation for baby and mother. Being born, leaving the mother’s body and begin-ning to live in the outer world is both an ending and a beginbegin-ning.

“The infant is likely to experience it as a ‘catastrophic change’ [Bion, 1962] which evokes catastrophic anxiety (terror) when separated from mother’s body and coming into this so very different, unfamiliar outer environment” (Salzberger-Wittenberg, 2013, p. 17). Each new phase of life entails leave-taking from the situation preceding it, since new

contingencies must be mastered. Even though this new phase offers more possibilities and potential for development, mother and baby alike must come to terms with the dissolution of their secure corporal bond, and alongside the joy attending a birth, this creates unconscious feelings of grief. This is what is meant by maternal post-partum “blues”, since the mother—in spite of her joy over the new baby’s arrival—is grieving for the loss of the total, definitive corporal bond she previ-ously had with her child. This post-partum emotional instability occurs in the first three to seven days with 60–70% of all mothers (Herz et al., 1997, p. 284).

In its first three months of life, the newborn baby—if supported by a constant love object (mother, father, or other caregiver)—succeeds in employing his senses and distinguishing between his perception of inner and outer by developing a love relationship, an emotional bond.

This undertaking may seem simple, but anybody who has had a baby knows that the first few months are enormously strenuous. This is not only because the newborn baby must be constantly fed, changed, washed, and carried. In truth, what makes this first phase so particu-larly strenuous is that the parents are exposed to the baby’s raw, con-tradictory feelings and projections. The baby oscillates from moments of happiness, relaxation, and satiation to bouts of desperate crying that seem to engage his entire physical being and are often impossi-ble to subdue. These oscillations between states of alert inactivity or calm sleep to desperate howling often occur without any buffer zone.

Just as the reader might ask if such a tiny creature can truly be so des-perate, unhappy, and full of destructivity, parents will ask themselves what they could have done to elicit such a sudden shift in the baby’s mood. Here it is important to understand that each infant alternates to a greater or lesser extent between feelings of safety and the fear of dis-integration. Just as in later life we are afraid of the “ceiling caving in”, that we could lose the “ground under our feet” or our feeling of self-worth, a hungry, thirsty, sick, cold, or fatigued baby feels surrounded by persecuting forces both inside and outside himself. As long as he is unable to differentiate between inner and outer, he can quickly per-ceive himself as threatened. Phases of tranquillity, activity, and even deep sleep are unstable and can swiftly segue into anxiety. Dependence on love and care from a stable person is of central significance for the baby’s physical and psychic development. Parents must understand that even with the most ideal care and devotion, the baby’s swings

between happiness and desperation, security and persecution will still occur; their response should be to offer the child a chance to overcome his disappointments, fears, and frustrations through consistent encour-agement and love. Since the child is immediately confronted by a need to differentiate himself from his mother and master his fear of losing her, phases of desperation and fear are unavoidable. If good experi-ences have the upper hand, the child can internalise these and learn to calm himself.

Parents reading the above might infer that their mission is to supply unwavering love, caring, and understanding for the child. That would be a misunderstanding, particularly since parents are also subject to enormous shifts in mood during this same phase. They must not only manage their new situation, fraught with their own hopes and fears of inadequacy, but they are also containing the baby’s fears and emotions.

When parents succeed in calming a crying baby or feeding him, cap-turing his attention or coaxing him to sleep, this constitutes a reward for them, a “narcissistic gratification”, confirming to them that they are adequate parents. However, when they fail to promptly calm their baby or guide him out of his desperation and fear, parents can quickly feel themselves desperate and helpless. This sense of helplessness can then easily proceed into rage, hate, self-reproach, and demoralisation. Par-ents who wish their baby never to cry, to be constantly happy and satis-fied, swiftly find themselves at an impasse. The panicked screams of a recalcitrant baby have a penetrating quality that, without further ado, can subliminally endanger the parents’ “adult” psyche: suddenly, they see themselves as helpless and attacked in a threatening situation. When a baby proves difficult to calm, almost every parent feels the impulse to scream—or scream at the baby. Losing control and screaming “I can’t stand it any more, just be quiet”, a parent may see a frightened baby cease crying for a second or two—only to resume with even greater desperation. Psychologically, it is easy to understand how the baby awakes such primitive feelings in each of us; the essential point here is for parents to discover a positive and calming agent in themselves, in order to pacify not only the baby but themselves. When parents scream back at their baby, they show he has destructively succeeded in making his (ostensibly) powerful parents feel helpless—and this only increases

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