CONSTRUCTION BEGINS

 For years I’ve been following the stories about how the brain works, the molecular/electrochemical tiny reactions contained in cells and swirled among them by blood and plasma carrying molecular messages from reacting organs.  Recently this complex of complexes has had to be reconciled with the psychological  and philosophical theories of old men, usually white, European, legitimated by semi-religious power centers like universities, and obsessed with sex.  My father hoarded their books in his sock drawer and when I was alone in the house, I read them.  Not a lot of help.

Now I’m alone in my own house with shelves of books about the talking cure with their schematics about how minds work and how that fits with what we tell each other.  Most were written in the Seventies just as I staggered out of a divorce that was irrelevant to what happened.  They were wonderfully helpful.

The reconciliation between what we thought we knew and what we know now has begun.  So far it is more in journals than in books, but those journal articles are available on the Internet.  This one has become invaluable, a summary of what Erik Erikson was struggling towards through observation.

To find it yourself, it is in the Journal of Infant, Child, and Adolescent Psychotherapy, entitled “Identity Narrative and its Role in Biological Survival: Implications for the Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy.”  The three authors are Andrei Novac, Margaret C. Tuttle and Barton J. Blinder.  I’m going to try restating and quoting them, both for you to have access and for me to make sure I understand.  I’ll start with the timeline of human development as it connects with the world through sensory ability and inner growth.

Let’s begin with a vernacular version of their Latinate words.  This metaphor will assume that a person unfolding is like building a house, an abode, but instead of talking about muscle and bone, it will discuss development in two ways that are biologically separated systems.  One they call “intrinsic” which I’ll call “scaffolding” and one they call “procedural”, which are the things learned and skills acquired as the builder goes along.  They call this house “Identity.”  The tools are stories.  But first comes attachment, before birth umbilically and after birth through care-giving.

This theory system begins with defining the method, the choices in descriptions and assumptions. Everything is dynamic, in process, and formlessness, chaos, gradually becomes shaped by what is called “attractors” which reward adaptations to support them.  That is, one senses something and being drawn to it forms it into what becomes organs.  The first is sound.  It’s not that sound directly affects the new life, but that the dreaming life “hears” and listens for more.  The rhythms of the mother’s body and then her voice.  Theories of gestation in bottles of fluid, like the novel "Brave New World", are simply wrong because bottles have no sound nor do they speak.

The key to gestation is not a matter of obeying some blueprint but rather an ability to respond chemically to the mother’s sound, blood contents, movements or temperature.  Growth is a partnered dance pushing against the womb as embedded in a particular woman.  The fetus affects the mother, even sending new DNA into her blood stream that can be detected years later.  All these capacities are evolutionary, that is, what is helpful and sustaining will persist while what is a blind alley or actively destructive will end the process.  We call it death.  Estimates are that one fifth of conceptions fail.

The ability of the fetus to move begins between the 10th and 20th week.  The list of what they do when they can:

1.  Bending and stretching

2.  Pushing against the wall of the uterus

3.  Turning the head

4.  Twisting, yawning and stretching

5.  Scratching what must be itches

6.  Sucking the thumb

7.  Responding to sounds

Eyes begin to move between the 28th and 30th weeks, and appear to be related to the kind of roving under eyelids that we know from REM sleep.  The fetus is now able register displeasure and pleasure — making faces.  Personality is forming.

After birth continuity of exploration and reaction continue.  Dreaming becomes interacting with the reality outside the mother’s body, which the infant is aware of leaving.  By the second month, the baby knows where it is in terms of orientation and gravity.  By the fourth month they can reach and grasp.  By the 18th month, if you stick a Post-It note to their forehead, they know it’s there and can remove it.  They know the image in a mirror might be them.

Though much of development is response to environment through growth in capacity, there are general patterns of development in the brain, following the historical evolutionary additive structures in the order that they happened.  Scientists like this sequence and for years proposed that a gestating mammal will go through the species-evolution from fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal to primate to human, but this is one of those story-telling impulses that help us keep order.  It’s not strictly scientifically true.  Generally, evolution began at the brain stem and moved up through the tissues to the frontal lobe over the eyes.

Another general movement of brain development is from the sides so as to cluster along the division between the two halves of the brain.  It used to be thought that the carapace of skull made the top of the head a “safe” place to strike someone, but clearly reality is opposite.  If we think of the baby’s soft spot on the top of the head, it must be there to allow this accumulation of special cells to have room to expand.  The accumulation of hair as a cushion and sun-screen seems reasonable, if sometimes unfashionable.

Attachment, a crucial mammal phenomenon, begins in these years through the olfactory system.  If the mother is missing, the growth of speech and relationships to others are addled or missing.  Even a familiar caregiver may not smell quite right.  Attachment, language, meaning and identity form in these early years and carry over through adulthood as the nearly unchangeable scaffolding of a person.  

There exists a questionnaire called the Adult Attachment Interview that takes on this template from a psychotherapy point of view, a set of standard questions about one’s past. It's on the internet.  It is regarded by that community of thought as very important to the point of being dangerous without a supportive guide, the therapist.  They do not mention using it in a group and forbid handing it around innocently.  But it doesn’t strike me as being that far from common knowledge.

In fact, it is the spine of many a fictional narrative, common stories that record and illustrate the concept.  Less talked about is the impact of creating the story on the author.  Something similar happens when exploring one’s generational history, perhaps prompted by DNA research, though one’s grandparents were shaped as much by national events like economic forces as their innate scaffolding and later learned strategies about how to survive.