The necessary dishonesty of the resigned mind

On the subject of humanity’s historic denial of critical truths, in particular the truth of the significance of nurturing in human life, Winnicott says: ‘Mothers do, of course, tend to feel guilty; they tend to feel responsible, quite apart from logic, for every defect that manifests itself in their children. They feel guilty before the baby is born, and they so strongly expect to give birth to a monster that they must always be shown the baby the very moment he or she is born, however exhausted they may be. And the father too. Nevertheless, most people are rational beings in their best moments, and they can then discuss the relationship between autism developing in a child and (in some cases) a relative failure in infant care. What is much more difficult is to deal with this problem in social terms, in terms of the public and the public’s attitude to the parents. Collectively people are less rational than individually…we cannot hold back our statements for fear of hurting someone…In fact, if I could, this would be tantamount to saying that parents play no part when things go well [with the nurturing of their offspring]’ (p.213 of 343).

Winnicott continues: ‘expect resistance to the idea of an aetiology [cause] that points to the innate processes of the emotional development of the individual in the given environment. In other words, there will be those who prefer to find a physical, genetic, biochemical, or endocrine cause, both for autism and for schizophrenia’ (p.219).

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Print Edition In light of Winnicott’s warning it is significant that in the television program Uncommon Genius, the narrator says at one point that Robyn Young ‘discovers some controversial new theories in San Diego. Dr Bernard Rimland is a world expert on autism. Some years ago he dispelled the myth that autism is caused by cold-hearted parenting, so-called “refrigerator mothers”. Dr Rimland’s latest theory is that when children are genetically predisposed autism may be triggered by antibiotics and vaccines.’

To return to Winnicott’s observations about nurturing, ‘It is not good to distort the truth in order to avoid hurting the feelings of clients…Such ideas [ie that lack of nurturing is the cause of autism] call for courage on the part of those who discuss them, and yet without these ideas there is no hope, in my opinion, that any body of scientists will move towards an understanding of the aetiology of autism’ (pp.220,222).

The dilemma of the human condition was such that until the human condition was resolved, humans had to lie, they had to resign themselves to a life of evasion and denial of the truths that bring the human condition into focus—because the alternative could be madness or suicidal depression. Winnicott’s capacity to be relatively unevasive or denial-free in his thinking was a measure of his soundness of self. For people with less nurtured and thus less secure upbringings a great deal more evasion and denial was needed. It follows that, with alienation rapidly increasing everywhere in the western world—and we can see where the human race is heading from looking at California’s Silicon Valley, the place in the forefront of our development, which as was mentioned, ‘is home to more autistic children than anywhere in America’—Dr Rimland’s evasive excuse was tragically necessary and timely. Only with the human condition explained is it finally safe to confront people with the truth about themselves, because it is possible to do so in the context of the greater truth of their goodness. Dr Winnicott and myself are not clever to have put forward these truths about the significance of nurturing, because they are in fact truths that everyone intrinsically knows but which the great majority of people have had to evade. In order to evade something you first had to know it existed.

The truth is there is no real ‘nature versus nurture’ or ‘hereditary versus environment’ argument, only a necessary avoidance of the significance of the role of nurturing in our upbringing. This quote from an article about parenting shows just how insecure parents have been about their inability to nurture their offspring: ‘The biggest crime you can commit in our society is to be a failure as a parent…people would Page 279 of
Print Edition rather admit to being an axe murderer than being a bad father or mother’ (Sun-Herald, Sunday Life mag. 7 July 2002). This demonstrates how much parents want to avoid the truth that, as R.D. Laing recognised, ‘families cause madness’ (Adrian Laing, R.D. Laing A Biography, 1994, p.175 of 248). Blaming ‘nature’, in the form of genes or chemicals, for humans’ alienated condition has been a necessarily contrived evasion of the role nurturing played in the upbringing of humans. Similarly, while humans were unable to explain their corrupted state they were left feeling that it was a bad, flawed, evil, worthless condition. So being able to label a failing or weakness that was a result of self-corruption and alienation as a disease or illness was greatly relieving. As Andrew Solomon says in The Noonday Demon, his 2001 book about severe depression, ‘Being told you are sick is infinitely more cheering than being told you are worthless.’ The writings of Olive Schreiner were quoted earlier, including a reference to the vulnerability of children from her 1883 book, The Story of an African Farm. Olive Schreiner is famous for her unevasive honesty and it is worth including more of that particular quote as another example of a person who has bravely admitted the significance of nurturing in human life: ‘They say women have one great and noble work left them, and they do it ill…We bear the world and we make it. The souls of little children are marvellously delicate and tender things, and keep for ever the shadow that first falls on them, and that is the mother’s or at best a woman’s. There was never a great man who had not a great mother—it is hardly an exaggeration. The first six years of our life make us; all that is added later is veneer…The mightiest and noblest work is given to us, and we do it ill’ (p.193 of 300).

In reality the situation is much more serious than even Schreiner described it. The truth is, nurturing rules the world; the amount of nurturing children receive dictates whether or not the world they control as adults is operational.

Winnicott’s writings on the subject of autism have been extensively quoted. The following summary from the preface of his book offers his views on the more general relationship between mother and infant: ‘Winnicott held that the innate potential for growth in a baby (and he was aware of the damage to innate potential, or the restrictions of potential in the baby, too) expressed itself in spontaneous gestures. If the mother responds appropriately to these gestures, the quality of adaptation provides a growing nucleus of experience in the baby, which results in a sense of wholeness, strength, and confidence that he calls the “true self”…If a mother is unable to meet her baby’s gestures appropriately, the baby develops Page 280 of
Print Edition a capacity to adapt to and comply with the mother’s “impingements”—that is, with the mother’s initiatives and demands—and the baby’s spontaneity is gradually lost. Winnicott called such a defensive development the “false self”. The greater the “mis-fit” between mother and baby, the greater the distortion and stunting of the baby’s personality…the decisive phase in the infant’s development is the achievement of a unitary self capable of objectivity and creative activity’ (Thinking About Children, 1996, p.xvi of 343).

The 1993 film House of Cards, quoted earlier, contains a number of insightful comments, including the following two that are relevant here. The first one emphasises just how much sensitivity, potential and capacity resigned humans have lost access to: ‘Tell me a story—the one about the great grandmother of light who made the first few people out of white and yellow corn?—Yes, well, she gave them the power to see everything, they could see through walls, they could even see through rocks, they could even see inside each other. Today we can do this only in our dreams.’

The second quote acknowledges the denial that infants employ to cope with the trauma of encountering life under the duress of the human condition: ‘People say about the following categories that these kids have a problem or are disabled, or psychologically dumb, etc, but really they are children, through hurt or some kind of trauma, that have held onto soul, and not wanted to partake in reality—retarded, autistic, insane, schizophrenic, epileptic, brain-damaged, possessed by devils, crocked babies’ (ibid).

Only with the human condition explained, with the biological reason for why humans unavoidably became corrupted, does it finally become safe to acknowledge the truth about the significance of nurturing in human life—and the many other immensely confronting truths such as the current extent of alienation amongst humans. Humans’ necessary lies/ denials can now end and at last they can speak truthfully about their condition. New generations can have explained to them the real reason the world has not been ideal and instead of having to cope with the ‘wrongness’ of the world by blocking it all out they will be able to understand the corruption, and through understanding begin to cope with it. Instead of becoming more and more alienated, humanity can at last turn back towards innocence and head for home.

The march towards total insanity has ended—and only just in time. From humanity’s innocent heritage 2 million years ago, each successive generation has, overall, become more alienated. The exponential Page 281 of
Print Edition rate of alienation is increasing at such a rapid pace that were there a graph charting the extent of alienation, its curve would now be almost vertical. In fact alienation has now reached such extreme levels that new generations find the level of falseness and denial almost unbearable. Health workers are reporting that the incidence of depression and ADD (attention deficit disorder) is approaching epidemic proportions amongst young people with whole generations growing up on anti-depressants and tranquillising medications. A recent article in the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, titled ‘Epidemic of autism mystifies experts’, referred to a study which showed that in California autism had ‘more than tripled from 1987 to 1998’ (19 Oct. 2002). Interestingly the article, which was first published in the New York Times, made the point that ‘You can’t explain an increase of this magnitude on genetics. Something else is happening.’ Recent generations have been revealingly labelled the ‘X generation’, the ‘XX generation’, and more recently the ‘ACES generation’—the ‘alienated, cynical, experimental and savvy’ generation (Sydney Morning Herald, 8 Aug. 1996). The Canadian writer Douglas Coupland defined Generation X as one who ‘lives an X sort of life—cerebral, alienated, seriously concerned with cool’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 22 Aug. 1994). All of these qualities attributed to X and ACES generations are qualities associated with having had to adjust to an extremely corrupt world. Silicon Valley, with its 273 percent increase in autism, is just a microcosm of where humanity was headed.

Children exposed to the current world of extreme alienation simply cannot cope with it, hence the occurrence of childhood madness, evasively referred to as attention deficit disorder. (Again, it has to be appreciated here that alienation cannot recognise or see its alienation—if it could it would not be alienated—but new generations can see it and have to attempt to adjust to it.) An article about the alarming increase in childhood disorders emphasised that avoiding the real problem of nurturing, or lack thereof, and the level of alienation in society has led to the dangerous over-medication of children: ‘Because it is so convenient and guilt-relieving to be able to attribute a child’s difficult behaviour to a neurochemical problem rather than a parenting or broader social one, there is a risk that this problem will become dangerously over-medicalised’ (The Australian, 8 Dec. 1997).

The only measure that could stop the march towards total madness was understanding of the human condition; the real treatment humanity desperately required.