Alienation in the Post Cold War Era
Chapter 4
How Alienation Affects
Our Basic Psyche
(page 7)
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The Little Child Behind the Need for Conformity
Behind the facade of rationalizations of the packaged ego hides a child. The child looks for symbiotic relationships with people and things (the constant consumption of things and food, for example) the same way a child would seek the warm security of the mother. In the last analysis the emotional world of most adults in our society does not develop beyond that of a child:
“The infant after birth is still in many ways part and parcel of the mother, and its birth as an independent person is a process which takes many years — which, in fact takes a whole life. To cut through the navel string, not in the physical but in the psychological sense, is the great challenge to human development and also its most difficult task. As long as man is related by these primary ties to mother, father, family, he feels protested and safe. He is still a fetus, someone else is responsible for him. He avoids the disquieting experience of seeing himself as a separate entity charged with the responsibility for his own actions, with the task of making his own judgments, ‘of taking his life in his hands.’ By remaining a child man not only avoids the fundamental anxiety necessarily connected with full awareness of one’s self as a separate entity, he also enjoys the satisfactions of protection, warmth, and of unquestioned belonging which he once enjoyed as a child; but he pays a high price. He fails to become a full human being, to develop his powers of reason and of love; he remains dependent and retains a feelings of insecurity which becomes manifest at any moment when these primary ties are threatened. All his mental and emotional activities are geared to the authority of his primary group; hence his beliefs and insights are not his own. He can feel affection but it is animal affection, the warmth of the stable, and not human love which has freedom and separateness as its condition.”[11]
Most people remain emotionally dependent and needy children. They reflect in relating to others their unfulfilled need for love and security from the parents. The problem is, of course, that the parents themselves were emotionally children, that is, incapable to give their children full human love that only come from a person who can fully love. I believe that the fact that most parents are incapable to give their children full human love plays a critical role in the development of an alienated personality later on. Crippled parents who are anxious and stagnated, stun the emotional growth of their children. Such children cannot develop as independent emotional beings, for they do not experience the basic essentials for such development.
Parents who did not achieve their own independence, are driven by insecurities and anxieties of the crippled person. As parents they develop a dependent relationship with their children that reflects their past dependency on their own parents and the antagonistic and stressful relations with society in general. Many parents have a dependent relations with each other and their own social group. Children of such parents cannot experience genuine love that encourage independent emotional and intellectual development. Such children remain anxious about their separateness. As children they do not know that it is not their fault to feel that way. Many times they internalize deep feelings of guilt, shame, and anxieties in their semi-consciousness or unconsciousness. These are feelings of a child who tried to overcome separateness and failed, since he/she did not receive a positive warmth from the parents and a human culture that is based on love and independence. Consequently the grown adults develop relationships with other people that are governed by guilt, constant anxiety, suppressed anger, etc. These are the feelings of an insecure child who is constantly seeking the full human love he/she did not receive from the parents and other key people in the childhood. As long as the adult remains emotionally a child, the “child” blames him/herself for the lack of love. That normally reinforces in the adult the feelings of guilt and shame which are associated with the self blame of a child; this only deepens the feelings of separateness and anxiety — thus there is a sad circle of anxiety, shame and separateness. The only kind of “love” these adults know is love that is deeply mixed with such social negative feelings. The grown adults seek the same pattern of “love” in their relationship with other adults. This is the source of the typical cycles of couples’ passionate “love” and fights.
As long as such children do not grow around parents and other people who are full humans — that is, who are able to give them love by the aliveness of a continually growing person — the emotional growth of such children does not steer toward independence but dependence. Only a person who is fully alive — that is, a person who can experience love with the full range of human feelings such as joy, the excitement of spontaneity, as well as compassion and sadness — can give positive love to the child that encourages the child to develop emotional independence later on. The unconditional love from such parents, and in particularly from the mother, creates in the child the inner ability to relate to the self and the world with the deep feelings of love and trust. This permits the growing person to experience the basic feeling of “I” as a non alienated entity — by a person who can love and connect. When the parents and their close circles are people who love life and the spontaneity of life, they encourage the child to express his/her own feelings and thoughts even if they negative; the person who loves life is not intimidated by occasional negatives feelings such as anger from misunderstanding, because a genuine dialog about what is behind such feelings generates independence and growth on both sides. An empathic loving adult would support the young person to explore his/her full range of feelings and independent reasoning through supportive love and dialog. A child who is raised by such people, can develop the ability to experience him/her self as an independent person who does not need the constant approval of his/her group. With such parents and support by others, children learn to overcome separateness with other people through the genuine unity of the growing love: unity that allows the growing person to develop their full range of potential emotions and experience their ability for reasoning without the disruptive emotional dependency that the average person experiences in our society.
The fact that most of us remain insecure children, can be easily seen in many adults. Take for example, the typical person that we call a controlling freak. This is a typical personality for bosses and managers. Such persons cannot relax unless they are in control of the situation, people around them, and, of course, things that they use. Such people normally like positions in which they are in charge of controlling other people. They normally have some sadistic features to their personality. They enjoy (sometimes unconsciously) controlling people and even inflicting some pain on them . Under routine conditions such a person appear “normal” for most people — perhaps with some aggressive and overbearing features that can be a pain in the ass. But when such a person is put in an environment in which they lose the control, they fall into pieces. Their belly is tied in knots, and they sometimes display a full show of a three years old tantrum. When the routines of the compensatory mechanism (of controlling people) stopped functioning, the frightened and insecure child bust into the open and “take over” our controlling freak. There are many variations of this personality and other “normal” type personalities that are governed by the insecure child. It is, however, outside the scope of this book to deal with them and children’s development in general.
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[11] Eric Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion, pages 79-80.