Infans
One requirement for psychoanalytic candidates at the Tavistock clinic is to find a baby to observe for the first 1001 days of life. From what I know of Winnicott, I can only assume that the benefit of such observation is that a child is, in some radical sense, more human than is the typical adult. The child offers a particular view upon the psyche that can be found nowhere else. What is observed there is not the underdeveloped adult—that which is unfortunately designated primitive throughout psychoanalytic literature—but rather the supreme powers of the uninhibited psyche, powers imaginative, emotional, and libidinal.
The common slander of “the primitive” levied against children, indigenous and schizophrenics alike is one of the ultimate stupidities of psychoanalysis and that nearly everyone accepts as doctrine—even Winnicott. The fiction made by this term is that the goal of the child is to become an adult—as if the goal of the indigenous were to become modern. Clearly one may turn the near entirety of psychoanalytic theory inside-out by merely pulling the loose threads coming out of the imperial trace the primitive. Excuse my rant.
Anyways, I recently had the privilege to observe Wesley, an infant, aged one month. Wesley is a chill baby who looks like an old man and has eyes the dark blue color of the sea in a squall—this peculiar opacity seems to be particular to infants. His mother claimed that infants can only see black, white and red (no doubt the color of the areola). Wesley does not yet interact socially. Near universal among newborns, his is a phase lasting up to 12 weeks in which he will remain incommunicado, closed to nearly all stimulus but that of his own body. This functions as a kind of post-natal womb, a shell or cocoon to protect the vulnerable psyche, in the months following the trauma of birth, from an overstimulating world. Freud referred to this period as primary narcissism—and, more poetically, as oceanic feeling. Margaret Mahler would later call it the “normal autistic phase” but that Francis Tustin would soon revise to the auto-sensual phase (that autism is “abnormal” is yet another slander encoded in doctrine). The glut of jargon and theory that surrounds this mysterious phase of the recently born indicates how little we know of it and is testimony to the kind of stupefaction the baby casts upon the theorist. But all the jargon obscures the very good word we already have: Infant, from the Latin, infans: without speech. No sign passes the horizon of Wesley’s perception (not consciously at least)—except for the warmth of skin contact and that red nipple.
I say hello to Wesley and receive no response; he does not appear to be aware of me. He scrunches his face up and sucks on his gums. His eyes close one at a time. They open again. An arm comes loose from his wrappings and a fist scrapes an eyebrow; he kicks his legs. “Hello Wesley,” I say, “how are you today?” No reply. He falls asleep. I am mesmerized.
Soon however, Westley wakes up and makes grumpy noises and squirms more hurriedly. He is done sleeping. He squawks and squirms. I unbuckle Wesley from his car seat and cradle his head in the crook of my elbow. He has a very heavy, big round head, like Charlie Brown. The new-baby smell is strong and remarkable: how is it that babies smell so fresh and so clean? There is no other smell like it in the world. He fusses and keens. I begin to bob and sway and he stops fussing, his head turns side to side to the rhythm of my swaying. I stop swaying and his head stills. He blinks and crinkles his face. I begin to sway again and a serene and transfixed look comes over him; his head turns again against my motion, ticking side to side like a clock. It would appear that I have made contact with Wesley through the medium of rhythm.
In the fullness of time, after some few more weeks, Wesley will hatch from his cocoon and will come online, socially speaking. He will begin to see his mother’s smile and, mirroring her, will smile at her in return. Smiling and flirting, learning to read the complexity of his mother’s face, he will no longer be without language, but will have entered the coordinate world of signs. His mother, like a goddess out of Hindu myth, is the word-bringer.
For the time being Wesley remains uninterested and immune to the significatory cacophony of the world. His senses are tuned elsewhere. I can only speculate, wildly, that Wesley at this time is not closed, as theory commonly assumes, but rather is radically open in ways that we cannot understand. He is open to something other and older than the world, a thing indifferent and prior-to the horizon of language and meaning. Baby Wesley is open to the Dream.
Star Child, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968
