Mother/Infant Bond: the primal relationship

If you are a mother and want to give your baby a good start in life, ensuring the psychological health and strength that will protect against the future dangers of drug addiction, marriage breakup, and other problems of modern life, or if you're having difficulties breast-feeding, or with postnatal depression, and suchlike, I think you may find this site useful. It provides information about the primal relationship on which all our lives are based. First, some explanations: --

The Dyad: the mother and nursing infant. The essence of what I am putting forward on this site is that the success of our species rests on the evolution of mutuality in that primal relationship, the mother/infant bond. Although nowadays quite a lot of lip service is paid to the importance of bonding between mother and baby, the evolutionary significance is studiously avoided by palaeoanthropologists. Elaine Morgan raised the issue of the extreme vulnerability of the early Homo mother/infant dyad nearly 40 years ago in her book The Descent of Woman and it has been largely ignored ever since. From the start, complex, wealth producing cultures have tended to stress or distort the bond and from this, I suggest, stem many of the ills that beset such lifestyles, contributing to the downfall of previous empires and now threatening to undermine the stability and progress of humanity worldwide. Religious fundamentalism, child pornography, suicide bombing, all receive their initial impetus from damage to the primal relationship. (See under Hominin Psyche Makes Headlines)
In other words, understanding the evolution of the human dyad can provide an understanding of how to reconfigure our cultural practices (such as childcare), to improve the prospects of happier lives for individuals, and so reduce the threat and enhance our security and well-being

This is the core of the website, this is what drives me.

Mutuality: the maternal instinct is highly evolved in the higher primates; in Homo sapiens the infant has evolved an instinct to support and care for its mother. Our modern affluent life style frustrates the expression of this instinct. All mammalian infants co-operate with their mothers to the extent necessary for their own survival. A kitten does not struggle as it dangles from its mother's jaws, and the chimpanzee infant riding on its mother's back does not jump off to investigate something that has caught its interest. If you do not experience even that degree of co-operation it is because our cultural norms are inimical or perhaps because you do not recognize it. For example, babies usually stop crying and go to sleep if they are carried because being carried as mother walks along signifies that she is at work looking for food. Silence and sleep are the encoded responses.

But mutuality has moved beyond this.

The Anti-Libidinal Capability: The capacity for self-sacrifice evolved in the early Homo infant as a necessary survival strategy. Such an infant, being carried by a mother growing weak from lack of food in the dry season, would have a better chance of surviving if it limited, or excepted limitations on, its intake of milk even when starving and so avoided becoming so burdensome that it merited abandonment. Today we have an epidemic of anorexia nervosa because, I suggest, we have a lot of mothers under stress and the genetically encoded response to a mother's stress is to eat less. This is the simple root cause underlying the phenomena of babies who won't feed and teenagers who won't eat.

Way in: -- I recommend reading the paper The First Year of Life as the Foundation of Evolved Human Nature to start with, skating over the psychotherapeutic theory if it does not interest you, to get an understanding of the ideas I'm putting forward. Chapter 10 contains a section detailing my fantasy notions about integrating babies into society and so allowing the primal relationship to develop and flourish naturally, as was once the case, instead of the modern practice of ghettoising babies(I know I'm exaggerating but think about it) and splitting up the mother/infant dyad. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 contain much information about the mother/baby relationship revealed in my work with clients, and I think you will find many of the transcripts of image work interesting. For example, Tara's re-experiencing, as a two-year-old, spoon feeding (use in the search facility) by her angry mother, or Rosita's inner toddler imaged as a milk float. Under Updates and Critiques I shall add information and suggestions with the prefix M/I to guide you. Here I will make suggestions about how to protect your child's future. There will also be topics that may be of interest under Hominin Psyche Makes Headlines.

I am not a mother, my experience lies entirely in working to help heal my clients' relationships with their inner babies, damaged in infancy.