Space Baby
A baby’s psyche is terra incognita: an unknown realm. And yet, weirdly enough, we’ve all been there. A sense of vertigo may overtake you as you realize just how near your infancy is to your psyche—having stamped you with an indelible structure—even while remaining impossibly remote in time, inaccessible to memory and to thought. It is likely that we do not remember early experience because of its sheer intensity; we use words to register such limits, and the baby has none. Having no language and no concepts with which to organize their experience, the infant is awash in the deluge of oceanic sensation, rotating from the heights of bliss, love and oneness, to a depraved and sadistic hell of abandonment and annihilation. No baby told me these things: I am imagining the baby’s experience with the aid of Melanie Klein’s fantasy-horror metaphors. Metaphor, as it turns out, is one of the more useful tools in the psychoanalytic toolkit; perhaps it is the only tool. Psychoanalyst Esther Bick, for example, follows this tradition and, borrowing an array of science-fiction metaphors deployed by her patients, applies them retroactively to the terrors of infancy. The baby has a “catastrophic anxiety of spilling out.” The baby’s sense of self is “two-dimensional, a so called ‘flat earth’ for whom the dead-end meant falling into space.” This is due to the skin-ego’s lack of development. Arriving from the weightless compression of in-utero the baby is “an astronaut who has been shot out into outer space without a spacesuit…. the predominant terror of the baby is of falling to pieces or liquefying.” In order to hang on, the baby uses their hands, mouth and senses as “suction pads for adhesion;” the clinging infant is hanging on to the mother as if she were the planet itself.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
