Civilisations: their rise and fall, the schizoid condition, the mother/infant bond and pathological splits.

In this update I am putting forward the proposition that the tendency of "civilisation" to adversely affect the situation of the mother/infant dyad produces an increasing pathology of the schizoid condition, with recognisable similarities across different civilisations, that contributes eventually to the fall of civilisation into a violent chaos. An increasingly strong schizoid condition can also of course contribute to the rise of civilisation; the schizoid condition being an evolved one it naturally has advantages, and the tipping of the balance towards the negative may be one of those Gaian long-term feedback adjustment mechanisms. (The devastating plagues that from time to time are promoted by overcrowded living are obviously another.)

My first interest in the schizoid underpinnings of civilizations arose in the years when I was still struggling with my own deep schizoid splits, my training years when I was discovering what it was really like being the infant of my mother. While writing my first essay on anxiety and thinking of Guntrip's identification of the schizoid condition of some notable philosophers, my mind turned naturally to Plato and the Greek philosophers that he had not mentioned. It seemed to me that one could see the gradually increasing influence of a pathological schizoid condition, or perhaps I should say of an increasingly pathological schizoid condition, on the civilisation of classical Greece. The increasing seclusion of "respectable" women from the public sphere, or rather from public view, is one obvious strand; the novels of the academician Margaret Doody featuring Aristotle Detective informed me that by the time of Alexander's conquests women of the higher ranks were so excluded that they could not even do the marketing! She makes her hero's attempt to get some shopping in a comic event, which puts one rather in mind of the situation of Saudi women having to buy their underwear from male shop assistants; they are fine examples of the idiocies to which neuroses give rise. The split between the respectable, and therefore uneducated, private wives and the well-educated, admired, courted and even loved public hetaerae is an obvious giveaway.

Another stand of course is the development of asceticism: though much associated with Christianity it originates in the Western world with later Hellenistic thinking, a far cry from the earlier concern with the body beautiful. A problem with sex and with the body, especially it's more distasteful excretory aspects, are a feature of the pathological schizoid condition (see Chapter 6 on Judge Schreber). It is interesting to note the difference between the aristocrat Plato, proponent of Platonic love between men and the rarefied philosophy of Ideal Forms, and the more down-to-earth plebeian Aristotle with his interest in nature and who, Doody tells us, loved his wife. The child reared, or at least partly reared, by slaves, in a more affluent home but in difficult times is more likely to show some schizoid pathology.

Saturday 14th July. I haven't got time to go on writing like this; I must just stick to the main points.

The environment in which classical Greek culture evolved was a mountainous region where agricultural land began fairly soon to be in too short supply to sustain the population of individual city states; warfare became endemic and life would have been quite stressful for the mother and infant dyad. Population control was by infanticide, fathers having the right to expose any baby that didn't take their fancy, and this would be a regular stressor on mothers throughout pregnancy. The development of abstract thinking to a high level would be the up-side of the intensification of schizoid pathology. Of course civilisation also works in some respects to reduce stress on the dyad so that varying combinations of circumstances serve to increase individuality to the extent that significant individuals can have a major impact on society.

When considering impressed behaviour patterns of conflict (see chapters 8 and 9) I consider important the natural environment which also required from the Greeks a behaviour pattern of opposition, attack and conquest; this is in stark contrast to the natural environment in which the Egyptian civilisation developed, one which promoted patterns of trust, patience, and grateful acceptance. One could say that the one was an essentially masculine, tough and demanding habitat and the other a remarkably feminine, nurturing and supportive one. (Stereotypes also have an evolutionary history).

Egyptian civilisation has left us a marvellous record of happy family life in the many statues of couples with their arms around each other, and many wall paintings of husband and wife accompanied by their children enjoying leisure activities together. Although of course men had most of the power in society there is no sense that women were excluded and there were in fact a surprising number of female pharaohs. The culture had a sky goddess, very unusual, and in contrast to warrior cultures with their sky gods; the river Nile which nurtured the civilisation was represented as the hermaphrodite deity Hapi. The pharaoh's crowns featured the symbols of the two protective goddesses of Upper and Lower Egypt, the cobra and the vulture. There is no indication that I've come across that female infants were not valued. There is a really impressive indication that physical disability was not the barrier to a full life that it has been in our more patriarchal "civilisation". I'm speaking of the statue of an official suffering from dwarfism seated beside his full-size wife with two children standing against the base where the legs of a normal sized man would have been carved; the representation of a loving, successful family. All of this indicates a situation where bonding in the mother/infant dyad could proceed as nature intended in all levels of society. So too does the general absence of torture, brutality, and even slavery, in the first Old Kingdom flowering of civilisation. Compared even to the present day, perhaps especially to the present day with its videos of the headings and torture victims disinterred, the ancient Egyptians seem truly civilised.

(Thurs 26th July) I must put in a couple of sentences from volume 1 of J.M. Roberts' Illustrated History of the World, page 131.

"the history of old Egypt goes on for thousands of years, virtually a function of the remorseless, beneficent flooding and subsidence of the Nile. On its banks a grateful and passive people gathers the richness it bestows. From it could be set aside what they thought necessary for the real business of living: the proper preparation for death."

Roberts' whole conclusions about Egyptian civilisation, that it contributed little to the civilisations that followed it and was principally obsessed with death, are so totally the results of blind prejudice in favour of Greek civilisation and its western successor that it's worth putting this in for that reason alone: it's such a good example of the hominin psyche triumphing over the intellect. This is the book, incidentally, that supplies useful illustrations to confirm the opposite conclusions! The Egyptians were in love with life not with death; their concept of the afterlife demonstrates this, it is all about continuing the life they loved and not at all, as with Christianity, about some superior or transformed life. The Egyptians did of course contribute a great deal to the Greek culture that succeeded them, and it follows naturally from my interpretation that medicine should be one of their greatest areas of development, for which they were renowned in the ancient world before Greeks copped the credit. It's typical for a First World alpha male to choose the pejorative term "passive" in place of my choice of "patience". He almost manages to turn  BOOKMARK  "grateful" into a negative! The Egyptian love of life proves the prevalence of good experience for the mother/infant dyad: it does not arise of itself; it has to be loved into the baby in the crucial first year. Don't I know it who never had it!

My reading in the last couple of years (see Updates on Ian Hodder's books, on The Archaeology of Warfare, After the Ice, and The Cambridge Illustrated History of China) has provided me with far more evidence on this topic. I have uploaded copious notes in those updates to confirm my proposition. Currently the rise of fundamentalism in Islam, Christianity, and even Hinduism and Buddhism shows the effect is as powerful today as it ever was. Occasions when the Catholic Church and Muslim leaders conspired together to exert pressure against the welfare of women, as happened at the major population conferences, I forget all the correct labels, but it frightened me. News items about Orthodox Jews trying to introduce segregation on buses in Israel, women at the back men at the front, balance the rise of Hezbollah with its restrictive tendencies towards women. Of course fundamentalism controls men also and I will point out the evolutionary underpinnings of two distinct types of control. In both Jewish and Islamic extremism men must not cut their hair: as an evolved symbol of sexual potency and virility its power must be flaunted (see Chapter 9 under Hair-raising). Again for extremists on both religions female hair must be concealed, either by a veil (as for the orthodox Catholics until fairly recently and in mediaeval Christian Europe all married women) or for Orthodox Jewish women by shaving it and wearing a wig. Female sexuality can be a real bogey for the pathologically schizoid male psyche and linked with the equally pathologised control impulse leads to real horrors such as fathers murdering their daughters and female genital mutilation. Mothers collude in these abuses because of course mothers have also received stressed and disrupted mothering in infancy; cultural impressions build on the same templates. (I have already said much on these sorts of topics in entries under Homininpsyche Makes Headlines.)

Sat 21st July. I will deal with two more examples, China and the Jewish nation.

Reading The Cambridge Illustrated History of China I began making comparisons with the survival of the Jews as a nation and the longevity of the idea of China as one nation with a continuing civilisation. The book deals with the contrast in ideas in the Western world of the rise and fall of civilisations, and in the east with civilisation as essentially continuous but passing through periods of disruption, conquest and chaos. Jews and Chinese both held founding and formative directive beliefs which gave profound weight to the family and in particular mother as well as father. Ancestor worship was an enduring protection for mothers who in maturity and old age could acquire authority and status at variance with the oppressed condition of girl children and young women. Psychologically the mother supervising the binding of her little girl's feet would be identifying with behaviour of rejecting object/negative mother and by doing so would avoid the pain of her own inner child. (A modern mother who can tell her child that the dentist or doctor won't hurt her in the knowledge that, in fact, he probably will, disguises the same with the modern rationalisation "it's for your own good" which does not in fact justify the untruth that she tells for her own not her child's benefit. My guess is that Chinese mothers in the past told the truth about the requirements of husbands!)

In the same way the fourth commandment to "honour thy father and thy mother" gave women a secured position, and Yahweh's ban on sacrificing babies, as practiced for other deities in the region, was a tremendous boost for the mother/infant dyad. Reading Proverbs chapter 31, "the words of Lemuel, which his mother taught him", and other Wisdom books in the Bible one gets a very clear idea of the high status and economic importance of the mother as head of the domestic enterprise, and of course of the other half of the split, the stereotypical prostitute ensnaring young men to their ruin. Naturally the Catholic Church in its daily readings only quotes chapter 31 in such items as "she puts her hands to the distaff and her hands hold the spindle", "she opens her hand to the poor" and "Charm is deceitful…." leaving out such interesting lines as "she considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands she planted a vineyard.", "she makes linen garments and sells them; she delivers girdles to the merchant. She perceives that per merchandise is profitable. She girds her loins with strength and makes her arms strong." All of which do not quite meet the image once promulgated by a Pope who said husbands liked their wives to be "queens of the shining floors". In other words patriarchal reporting gives us a false idea of women's position in past cultures and this is colluded with by feminists who devalue what they wish to escape. But I'm getting off the point and beginning to write as if this was an entry under Saltpetre.

The point I've been making here is that a positive and powerful belief system can work to counter effectively some of the damage that the affluence of civilisation can do to the mother/infant bond. If we take this indication from Proverbs and ally it with the situation in the mediaeval marriage in town or country, one might describe the wife as the junior business partner in a joint enterprise: often with the death of the husband the wife would take over and run the business very competently by herself. Work and domestic life were not separate; mother and infant experienced both together and the bond between them would be strengthened as they coped using their evolved capacity for mutual support. Impressed behaviour patterns thus acquired would provide templates for the social interactions of mutual support and giving between adults that are becoming noticeable by their absence too often these days. (Not in any way reaching a total absence, as the flood stories that I hear on the news in these days of flooding downpour prove, but still at a disturbing level. The media comment on how people seem to be in almost cheerful good spirits in the present adversity: the trivia and falsity of "civilisation" has been stripped away for many people and working with the evolved grain of our human nature is a positive experience. But the looting demonstrates the prevalence of damaged bonding in the mother/infant dyad.)

I hope I've sketched out enough of the book I might have written if I had another, able-bodied, life ahead of me. It would have made in the proper academic style the case for allowing babies to experience their first year of life as nature intended, in mutual support of, and enjoyment of life with, their own mother. Today's mothers are forced to lose much of what makes having a baby rewarding, I remember one client who deeply regretted that the need to work meant she missed so much of her child's early growing. I heard with horror the item on the news awhile ago about a man who earned a living as a dog walker, taking out perhaps half a dozen dogs at a time on a daily basis. It's all of a piece; people have no idea of commitment in relationship with dog, child etc. They don't understand that there is no enjoyment, real deep enjoyment of a relationship if part of it is farmed out to others. The bond is damaged and the result is breakup between partners, between parent and child, and in the case of dogs may be one of the causes why a child being savaged is a more frequent news story. I will repeat again what I think I have said several times elsewhere, I am talking of the need for strong foundations for the developing psyche. We are, through our affluent consumerism, incorporating serious cracks in the first psychic structure that even years of depth psychotherapy cannot eliminate in later life if too much confirmed by later experience.

I must draw to an end. I'll just add in here paragraphs I first dictated months ago.

 BOOKMARK  size="3">Sun 9^th April. I'll try a few notes on this subject and hope exhaustion after Sunday chores will not turn them into gobbledygook (Dragon can't hear me accurately when I'm tired)

I have already made the point in Catalhoyuk Reflections that town or village living puts new stressors on mothers. Civilization tends to be defined by close packed urban living; in a sense we can only know that a people were civilised by finding the remains of cities.

In the absence of such remains we talk of cultures.

An understanding of the evolutionary importance of the uniquely developed mutuality in the Mother/Infant bond in Homo sapiens could and should lead to cultural change. Until a relatively recent date the majority of Homo sapiens females followed the normal primate practice of working for their own and their children's ' survival in company with their current infant. The breaking of the close association of infant and working mother seems to me to be nothing short of a catastrophe being set up for the future in willful blindness exactly on a par with global warming and the hole in the ozone layer: multivalent, creepingly imperceptible, inexorably gathering pace. We found alternatives to ozone depleting chemicals. We are finding, almost too late, ways to combat our destructive effect on global temperature. It is a nonsense to suggest that we could not find ways to accommodate the Dyad in the workplace. My guess is that this would ultimately lead to improved productivity and efficiency as well as to a happier and more truly civilised society.

This week's (11th March 2006) New Scientist asked the question "are we still evolving".

Yes, into a less socially competent primate because we are destroying the foundations of our social nature. The article talked of a future in which genetic engineering selected for human beings with more beauty, intelligence, health, and emotional stability. Our current, first world, baby-care practices are selecting for selfishness, greed, resentment, hostility, antisocial behaviour and emotional instability. It's not therefore surprising that deliberately selecting for kindness, compassion, generosity, self-denial and unconditional love did not get a look in: they were selected for on the Pleistocene savanna by nature, red in tooth and claw; we won't enjoy our affluent lifestyle for long without them.

For example, mother sitting relaxed and at ease indicates that she has eaten enough for the time being to satisfy both her needs and those of her nursing infant, and that no detectable danger threatens. This, I suggest, is the encoded signal that it is safe for the toddler to engage in its own important work of play, exploring its world and practising physical skills to the top of its bent. A chimpanzee mother in such a situation responds to her infant by enjoying its antics or joining in the play. It is not the modern toddler's fault if mother prefers watching her favourite soap on TV. "Punishing" the child by separating it from mother into another room, or regularly into the care of an unrelated adult is exactly calculated to bring the sort of retribution in terms of antisocial behaviour that we experience all around us.