Born Aliens Part I

Author: Sam Vaknin

Neonates have no psychology. If operated upon, for instance,

they are not supposed to show signs of trauma later on in life.

Birth, according to this school of thought is of no

psychological consequence to the newborn baby. It is

immeasurably more important to his "primary caregiver" (mother)

and to her supporters (read: father and other members of the

family). It is through them that the baby is, supposedly,

effected. This effect is evident in his (I will use the male

form only for convenience's sake) ability to bond. The late Karl

Sagan professed to possess the diametrically opposed view when

he compared the process of death to that of being born. He was

commenting upon the numerous testimonies of people brought back

to life following their confirmed, clinical death. Most of them

shared an experience of traversing a dark tunnel. A combination

of soft light and soothing voices and the figures of their

deceased nearest and dearest awaited them at the end of this

tunnel. All those who experienced it described the light as the

manifestation of an omnipotent, benevolent being. The tunnel -

suggested Sagan - is a rendition of the mother's tract. The

process of birth involves gradual exposure to light and to the

figures of humans. Clinical death experiences only recreate

birth experiences.

The womb is a self-contained though open (not self-sufficient)

ecosystem. The Baby's Planet is spatially confined, almost

devoid of light and homeostatic. The fetus breathes liquid

oxygen, rather than the gaseous variant. He is subjected to an

unending barrage of noises, most of them rhythmical. Otherwise,

there are very few stimuli to elicit any of his fixed action

responses. There, dependent and protected, his world lacks the

most evident features of ours. There are no dimensions where

there is no light. There is no "inside" and "outside", "self"

and "others", "extension" and "main body", "here" and "there".

Our Planet is exactly converse. There could be no greater

disparity. In this sense - and it is not a restricted sense at

all - the baby is an alien. He has to train himself and to learn

to become human. Kittens, whose eyes were tied immediately after

birth - could not "see" straight lines and kept tumbling over

tightly strung cords. Even sense data involve some modicum and

modes of conceptualization (see: "Appendix 5 - The Manifold of

Sense").

Even lower animals (worms) avoid unpleasant corners in mazes in

the wake of nasty experiences. To suggest that a human neonate,

equipped with hundreds of neural cubic feet does not recall

migrating from one planet to another, from one extreme to its

total opposition - stretches credulity. Babies may be asleep

16-20 hours a day because they are shocked and depressed. These

abnormal spans of sleep are more typical of major depressive

episodes than of vigorous, vivacious, vibrant growth. Taking

into consideration the mind-boggling amounts of information that

the baby has to absorb just in order to stay alive - sleeping

through most of it seems like an inordinately inane strategy.

The baby seems to be awake in the womb more than he is outside

it. Cast into the outer light, the baby tries, at first, to

ignore reality. This is our first defence line. It stays with us

as we grow up.

It has long been noted that pregnancy continues outside the

womb. The brain develops and reaches 75% of adult size by the

age of 2 years. It is completed only by the age of 10. It takes,

therefore, ten years to complete the development of this

indispensable organ - almost wholly outside the womb. And this

"external pregnancy" is not limited to the brain only. The baby

grows by 25 cm and by 6 kilos in the first year alone. He

doubles his weight by his fourth month and triples it by his

first birthday. The development process is not smooth but by

fits and starts. Not only do the parameters of the body change -

but its proportions do as well. In the first two years, for

instance, the head is larger in order to accommodate the rapid

growth of the Central Nervous System. This changes drastically

later on as the growth of the head is dwarfed by the growth of

the extremities of the body. The transformation is so

fundamental, the plasticity of the body so pronounced - that in

most likelihood this is the reason why no operative sense of

identity emerges until after the fourth year of childhood. It

calls to mind Kafka's Gregor Samsa (who woke up to find that he

is a giant cockroach). It is identity shattering. It must

engender in the baby a sense of self-estrangement and loss of

control over who is and what he is.

The motor development of the baby is heavily influenced both by

the lack of sufficient neural equipment and by the ever-changing

dimensions and proportions of the body. While all other animal

cubs are fully motoric in their first few weeks of life - the

human baby is woefully slow and hesitant. The motor development

is proximodistal. The baby moves in ever widening concentric

circles from itself to the outside world. First the whole arm,

grasping, then the useful fingers (especially the thumb and

forefinger combination), first batting at random, then reaching

accurately. The inflation of its body must give the baby the

impression that he is in the process of devouring the world.

Right up to his second year the baby tries to assimilate the

world through his mouth (which is the prima causa of his own

growth). He divides the world into "suckable" and "insuckable"

(as well as to "stimuli-generating" and "not generating

stimuli"). His mind expands even faster than his body. He must

feel that he is all-encompassing, all-inclusive, all-engulfing,

all-pervasive. This is why a baby has no object permanence. In

other words, a baby finds it hard to believe the existence of

other objects if he does not see them (=if they are not IN his

eyes). They all exist in his outlandishly exploding mind and

only there. The universe cannot accommodate a creature, which

doubles itself physically every 4 months as well as objects

outside the perimeter of such an inflationary being, the baby

"believes". The inflation of the body has a correlate in the

inflation of consciousness. These two processes overwhelm the

baby into a passive absorption and inclusion mode.

To assume that the child is born a "tabula rasa" is

superstition. Cerebral processes and responses have been

observed in utero. Sounds condition the EEG of fetuses. They

startle at loud, sudden noises. This means that they can hear

and interpret what they hear. Fetuses even remember stories read

to them while in the womb. They prefer these stories to others

after they are born. This means that they can tell auditory

patterns and parameters apart. They tilt their head at the

direction sounds are coming from. They do so even in the absence

of visual cues (e.g., in a dark room). They can tell the

mother's voice apart (perhaps because it is high pitched and

thus recalled by them). In general, babies are tuned to human

speech and can distinguish sounds better than adults do. Chinese

and Japanese babies react differently to "pa" and to "ba", to

"ra" and to "la". Adults do not - which is the source of

numerous jokes.

The equipment of the newborn is not limited to the auditory. He

has clear smell and taste preferences (he likes sweet things a

lot). He sees the world in three dimensions with a perspective

(a skill which he could not have acquired in the dark womb).

Depth perception is well developed by the sixth month of life.

(continued)

About the author:

Sam Vaknin is the author of Malignant Self Love - Narcissism

Revisited and After the Rain - How the West Lost the East. He is

a columnist for Central Europe Review, United Press

International (UPI) and eBookWeb and the editor of mental health

and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory,

Suite101 and searcheurope.com.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com

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Born Aliens Part I

Article : Born Aliens Part I