The Infant Neurotic

It all begins with pleasing warmth and comfort, with the purr of soft, indistinct voices, and with the sobbing ebb and flow of water running nearby. It is the womb, and we'll never have things quite so good again.

Because the world and all its unpleasantness can never live up to the promise of those first nine months, the sheer excellence of the womb can be blamed for almost all future neurotic complaints. Indeed, many neurotics spend a great deal of time trying to approximate the ambiance of the womb in later life. They hang around in laundromats, they become wistful and drowsy on dark autumn afternoons when a steady rain is beating against the roof and windows, they find unaccountable pleasure in the droning of a fan or dishwasher. Exceptional neurotics will go so far as to lurk quietly in dark closets (praying they don't get caught) or build houses near murmuring brooks. They would agree that the womb is wasted on the very, very young.

It is not long before the extraordinary peace and perfection of life is shattered, however. Following the unasked-for trauma of birth itself, the storm clouds begin to gather as soon as someone hangs a frightening, ominously bobbing mobile over the crib. This unsettling (and unavoidable) intrusion usually is accompanied by a parade of adults, each of whom insists upon leaving an impression that is supposed to be memorable but that more often is just puzzling (the fish face; strange trilling noises; mock scoldings). Like a succession of charmless acts in a nightmarish vaudeville show, the difficulties of life begin to reveal themselves. From here it is a mere toddle onto the fundamental building blocks of anxiety: distrust, fantasy, insecurity, persecution, and guilt.

1. Distrust. The pacifier is the first of the many great hoaxes that life holds in store for us. No sooner have we settled into the wonders of the mothering breast than we are tricked into accepting the scant fruit of this cheap, toy-like substitute. Is there anything more pitifully defenseless than the wide-eyed babe who is sucking hopefully on a pacifier? Is there ever again any reason for the child to trust anyone once the con game has been found out?

2. Fantasy. It is hard to make friends with people who are six times bigger than you are and who very rarely have anything to say that makes sense. It is much better to have a stuffed animal that you can boss around. The stuffed animal's job is to let the human call all the shots, to offer any necessary solace, to drink imaginary liquids, and to be discarded and resurrected on a nearly daily basis. All of this the animal does without question, thus assuring the child's dissatisfaction with real people and encouraging perpetual flights of fantasy.

3. Insecurity. Although it doesn't seem so to the parents, infants are left alone quite a bit of the time. During this leisure time they mainly fret and wonder if anyone ever is coming back to see them again-- feelings that neurotics carry with them well into adulthood. Usually, the last thing a parent does before departing is cover the infant with its blanket, thus the link between blanket and parent, thus the "security blanket." The blanket offers an illusion of security that, in the end, is a counterproductive and anxiety-producing. The blanket is later given up in favor of gin.

4. Persecution. The infant, knowing nothing, wishes to learn something of its world. It wishes to see, to touch, to put in its mouth. For such fledgling efforts at self-education it is thrown into jail, euphemistically known as a playpen. The playpen is not a rehabilitative facility; the word is a shortened form of playpenitentiary and it is meant to teach us early on that too much fun is a bad thing and that there always is someone who knows better than we do.

5. Guilt. Toilet training introduces us to guilt. This sudden and unseemly preoccupation with our own effluence catches us by surprise, as do the scoldings that come when we are discovered with our diapers full. We know we are doing something wrong, but we can't seem to help it. We feel guilty. Soon we will become more sophisticated, and we will learn to feel guilty even when we do things that are right.

---

Back to The Seven Ages of the Neurotic