JANET BACHANT'S PERSONAL WEB SITE

Children face many dangers in the course of growing up. Some are more threatening than others. Our minds are organized so that associations to danger are remembered so that we are able to anticipate danger. We cannot protect our children from every danger they face, but we can be aware of which dangers, to the child, are of most concern.

Freud was the first to point out that our long period of helplessness and dependence on others has psychological consequences for mental development. Major consequences. He described the development of anxiety as related to what he called the traumatic and danger situations of childhood, experiences in which the child is overwhelmed, unable to master the situation. In the course of growth and maturation, the young child learns to anticipate the advent of a traumatic situation and to react to it with anxiety before it becomes traumatic. This type of anxiety Freud called signal anxiety: a specific situation or cue provides the person with a signal that danger is coming. Signal anxiety serves to mobilize the person’s resources to meet or avoid the impending trauma. Anxiety, therefore, serves a purpose: it helps people to anticipate impending danger.

What are the typical danger situations of childhood?

Although the child faces many dangers in the course of growing up, they can be organized developmentally. The infant, for example, doesn’t worry about getting injured – this concern grows with time and the child’s investment in her or her own body an experience of self. Charles Brenner (1982) has referred to the prototypical danger situations of childhood as the “calamities of childhood.” They occur within a developmental sequence and they affect each and every one of us. They are as follows:

• Loss of the object
• Loss of love
• Loss of bodily integrity (castration anxiety)
• Guilt: loss of the superego’s love (loss of self esteem)

Loss of the object. The earliest calamity the child faces is loss of the object. By this we mean the loss of the object of the child’s love, usually the parent or other significant caretaker. Infants are utterly dependent on their caretakers, and can be considerably distressed when the parent is even out of sight for an extended period of time. This is because the infant has not developed the idea of permanence, what psychologists call object constancy. For the infant, out of sight is not only out of mind, but disappeared, gone, lost forever. When we put this together with the utter dependence the infant experiences in relation to the parents, we can begin to understand why the infant wants so much to be with the caregiver, and why the loss of the parent is so distressing. Children that have to cope at an early age with parental or caretaker loss, the loss of the object, often experience what Erik Erikson has described as a problem with the development of basic trust. Often their minds become organized around this loss, which can affect their experience throughout life.

Loss of love. At around 7 or 8 months, the parent becomes an individual, unique person to the child. The child is no longer content with having his or her needs met, but develops particular and very powerful attachment to his primary caretakers. Just being held no longer does it for the child. Now, who is holding the child matters -- a lot. Stranger anxiety, which develops at this time, is less a fear of strangers than it is a testament to the powerful bond and need the child feels for the primary caregiver, usually the mother. Loss of love is a danger situation that extends through life in some ways (we often get anxious and uneasy when others are angry with us – this anxiety derives from our earliest encounters with loss of love), but children are most vulnerable to it before they establish a firm sense of self, through age 7. Issues with loss of love are often organized by sibling rivalries.

Loss of bodily integrity (castration anxiety). Our bodies are very important to us. As infants we learn first through our bodies. Piaget talks about the first stage of cognitive development being the sensory-motor stage, a period of development in which learning takes place through movement and contact with our bodies. Increasingly, as we build up pleasurable feelings from physical, mental and emotional experiences, our bodies become the “home” of our “selves.” Injury or damage to the body is symbolically experienced as a violation of the self. This is particularly true of the genital area, which is the center of a very pervasive and special kind of bodily pleasure: sexual pleasure. Castration anxiety refers to the anxiety that emanates from a threat to the genitals or to the pleasure and power symbolized by this very special bodily feeling. Physical or sexual abuse involves a threat to the body’s integrity and arouses therefore intense levels of anxiety.

Guilt: loss of the superego’s love; loss of self-esteem. Infants do not experience guilt. But as children mature, they internalize certain moral attributes of their parents and culture, and develop what we call conscience, a sense of right and wrong. Each person’s superego/ conscience, is built from bio/psycho/social determinants. The child takes from different sources of experience and creates his own amalgam. It’s a recipe in which many of the ingredients are familiar, we can identify certain flavors, but it is also a recipe that is uniquely his or her own. We can think of the superego as existing on a continuum between severe/critical and loving/nuturing. We have experiences all along this continuum although there may be a tendency to drift toward one side or the other of this continuum. Guilt is a factor not to be underestimated. By blaming the self, the child gets to keep the parents (and the world they represent) as good. It is a powerful motivator in psychic life.

Brenner (1982) maintains that the experience of what he calls depressive affect (misery) is just as important in terms of development as is the experience of anxiety. Misery, like anxiety, consists of sensations of unpleasure, which are more or less intense, plus ideas of calamity…ideas having to do with object loss, loss of love and with castration. Ex. (from child’ perspective): “My mother turned away from me and devoted herself to my little brother because I am bad, or because I am a girl.” Anxiety has to do with impending calamity, with danger, with a calamity in the near or distant future, while misery (the feeling of misery/depression) has to do with the perception of a calamity that has already occurred, with a calamity that is a fact of life (Brenner, 1982, 162-179).

All children face these calamities. There is no escaping them. Understanding the calamities is important because it gives us a window to how the child’s personality becomes organized. Children confront these calamities with immature cognitive functions (their brains are only partially developed). Nevertheless, they generate the best possible solutions for themselves given their understanding of the complexity of their situation. These “solutions,” childhood ideas and beliefs associated with powerful emotional feelings, become part of the individual’s personality. Sometimes these childhood solutions become a strength. Other times, what worked for the child is a problem for the adult. Because these early, childhood solutions are so deeply structured into our mental organization, changing them can be difficult and may require professional help.

Brenner, C. (1982). The Mind in conflict. New York: International Universities Press.