The Child’s Magic No
No is a magic word. Magic in particular when deployed by the 2-year-old loudly and often. It is one of the first words we learn and is probably the most useful and forceful word—at any age. The omnipotent toddler uses this magic word much like a little witch (or wizard) would cast spells of opposition in the haunted labyrinth of the bourgeois family home. No to broccoli, no to a nap, no to kisses, no to the parents absolutely and no to this whole stupid world. With each no verbalized the child casts a ring of negation. They are demanding that they are not that. If the ego is a stack of defenses against oceanic feeling—both from within and without—saying no lays the groundwork for this sea-wall. Heretofore the baby had been reliant upon their parent to provide an auxiliary ego to protect themselves from the ceaseless churn of the continual yes of oceanic/cosmic sensations that would otherwise swamp their little psyche; the baby relies on the parent as a sailor relies on a ship in a hurricane (even while some of the hurricane is the parent)—oceanic feeling only says yes in the same way that the actual ocean only says yes—it is the stern law-abiding shore that says no. The symbiotic mother/infant dyad may have produced such oceanic enchantment that the toddler can only begin to break with it through a great deal of rebellion. Ambulating around the home-environment the toddler casts fiery little spells of negation at their toys, upon the cat, on siblings, at the knees of the huge lumbering adults. The screaming tantrum is a collision between the desire to say no and a storm of the oceanic; the child’s loudest no arises out of their own helplessness.
(In Jean Laplanche’s formulation, though the infant has arrived in the world innocent and free of sexuality, they are immediately irradiated by the unconscious adult sexuality of the parent. These radiant cascades of sexuality form the child’s mental topography (primary process) much as the bacteria of the birth canal forms the biome of the child. In Freud’s oedipal formulation (secondary process) the naysaying child just entering the symbolic order is, in some sense, saying no to the tidal power of unconscious adult sexuality. In other words: the magic of the word no descends from the first law of all society: the prohibition of incest)
