Transcription
Complex, and the different constellations you remember for the boy and for the girl, and the positive, negative, complex, and the inverted one, and all that.
There are things that I will mention to you because they are important, I think, and at least you should have heard about them because you will come across them in your practices.
As children move through the phases that we were describing, the phases of development, obviously babies are interested in things that happen in the mouth. That's what the most developed part of their anatomy is, the mouth. Nothing else is under willful control. The mouth is, and, um, obviously their interest is around food, breast, what comes in, warm things, breast, sweet things, you know, things that are a little acidic, or activities around the mouth.
I told you that all these erotogenic zones do have a function that is a vital function for survival, that is associated with most of them, nearly all of them. And because conflicts can arise in the emotional sense of the word with some of the activities with your mouth, sometimes some problems do develop as a result of the conflict and the compromise formation that creates major, major problems.
I mentioned to you a moment ago that Dr. P is going to talk here about eating disturbances, which includes anorexia and bulimia, and this patient had major problems in the oral erotogenic zone development and had massive fixations at that stage. It may have certain predispositions to it, which may have some genetic components to it, but essentially there are a lot of problems in those areas that need to be attended to.
As they move from the oral phase to the anal stage, then the interest in the mouth disappears. The interest is smoothly moved to the back end of the body, and what comes out of there, and when it comes out of there, and how much it comes out of there, and what do you do with that, and where do you put it, where is it?
We describe the conflicts that children have in this regard with the environment because the environment has to train them to, you know, do their bodily functions in the right place, little by little, and not to eat them or smear them or offer them to you or whatever it may be that they are inclined to do at some point. And this happens automatically with development, partly because these areas of the body which were silent before because your spinal cord was not myelinated for them to be relevant. You don't have control over your sphincter at least until you are 14 months old because it does require myelination of the pyramidal tract so that you can control your sphincter as well. Just like the control of your legs requires a certain number of months, at least 11, and more frequently enough between 12 and 15 months for children to work. And the reason for that is the same. They have to myelinate that, otherwise, otherwise you cannot acquire willful control, conscious control of this part of your body.
Now, that's interesting for many reasons because it does mean, doesn't it, that part of the body of the child that for a while only played a partial role. For example, in the legs, a six-month-old child will have feelings. If you pinch him or, you know, something happens that hurts, you will feel the pain. So that's part of the body scheme that he's developing of himself. What is not part of it is the fact that he can walk and control the legs at will because at that point he cannot. So that's not part of the scheme. So the first scheme will only contain sensory feelings. Doesn't know anything about motoric abilities. But once he gets to the right age, you know, then that has to be included because now he finds that he can. The same is true with the hands. At some point the hands open and he can grab things and bring it to the mouth. But it takes three months to do that. Before that, he can't do it. And so it's not part of the scheme of his development of himself. It will be acquired later when that gets myelinated and under his willful control. He will add that piece to the body scheme, yeah, of himself or the concept of the self. We are talking about that because we are going to talk about the self some today.
Now, once that happened, the children's interest moves to the front of the body, as I told you, and now they are very curious about how everybody looks, how they look. They watch other people, they make comparisons, they are very bustled, you know, as they see children of the opposite sex that are different from them, and they start to build fantasies as to why the difference. You and I know that there are two sexes and they are different, and we know what the difference in the genitals is. For a three-year-old or two-and-a-half-year-old or a four-year-old, doesn't know anything about it. What he knows is what he sees, and he looks and says, "That's not me. What happened?" You know, if he's seen a little better, he's a boy. He wonders what happened to her. Whiddler, to use an expression of a little boy that Frey analyzed many, many years ago. And little girls, when they look at boys, they get very confused because the assumption is that everybody is the way you are. Why would you assume anything different at that age? So when they see the difference, they get very, uh, rather about it and try to develop explanations for it.
Now, if you are three or four years old, your cognitive development is limited, and the amount of information that reaches you is even more limited. So your theories are going to be very primitive. But they are theories. These kids are behaving like scientists. They are getting the data, observing it, and trying to process it, and trying to process it on the basis of what they know. They can't process this on the basis of knowledge that they don't have. So they use very concrete, you know, models. So if you pull something out of this wall, there is a hole, right? You pull these knobs there that are protruding. What you leave behind is a hole. What do you think people thinks? They develop fantasy. They say, "Well, I should have one like that. Where is it? If it isn't there, somebody took it away. Why did they take it away?" She doesn't know. Most children, which are very egocentric and think that the world revolves about around them, think that they did something bad and that was a punishment. Or, you know, sometimes parents help with that because if children play with a genital, be that a boy or a girl, if it is a boy, you say, "Well, it will fall off or we will cut it off." Who gave me an example the other day that was very interesting. Oh, you did. Tell us. Tell us. The little boy. The little boy went into a party his mother and father were having, and he was, he took off his shirt and pulled down his pants and he ran to the room. He was probably two and a half. And he just did a little dance for them so that they could see his. Exactly. And the, and one of the adults, an aunt or an uncle, said, "Come on back in here. We'll put that off for you." That's not uncommon. That's absolutely not uncommon, and people don't think anything about it because you think like an adult. If you were in the brain of that child, that's a real threat because that is a good explanation for what he has seen before, and that's why he would say, "Oh, that's how they lost it," you know.
Now, little girls develop all kinds of other, and that's called castration anxiety, and it's an incredible form of anxiety that children have, and that later as they grow, gets displaced as fear of damage of any part of the body. And so they wouldn't tell you, "Oh, I'm frightened something is going to happen to my penis," but they may be very concerned about their eyes, something happening to it, or the hands, or whatever. The fear is displayed, the concern is displayed to some other part of the anatomy, and is expressed in that way. In fact, not all, but many hypochondrical concerns are related to this in one form or another. People are always watching the body, and is there anything wrong, and things of that kind. So it can be displaced from the genitals to any other part of the body.
Little girls develop all kinds of fantasies. They go from, "I had one, but it fell off," and then the problem is how did it fall off. And of course, if they had masturbated, which they do once they find themselves in the genital stage of developing, because then libido is active at that point, then they may think that they brought it about. And adults may comment like this, even for little girls. You know, in any case, some of the girls will develop the fantasy that it is there, but it's inside and hasn't grown yet, but it will grow out. And when I was in London, I had a very, very intelligent patient who once told me that she had made that observation and was incredibly concerned about the difference between her and she. In fact, she had only a baby sister. So she and her sister were fine. The band. She never had any problems until somewhat later when suddenly a cousin came and did something like what you described, because little boys have a lot of exhibitionism. They do that. They, you know, when you see these adults that you see that go somewhere and pull their pants down and show you their genitals, which is mostly males that do it, but occasionally very rarely females, do so because they have a fixation at the exhibitionistic stage that they have never mastered, and it has become an important part of their sexual excitement, and so they do that, which is an absurd behavior. And some of the people that do that may be lawyers, physicians, teachers, priests, and things of that kind. I'm not trying to excuse them. They have a responsibility for what they do. But you can understand where it is coming from in many, many cases.
So, little girls frequently think, "Well, it's in there and it will come out later on." And this patient of mine said, "When I saw my cousin, that was terrible. I didn't know what to make out of that, but I remember being very worried as to what happened to mine." Remember, children think that everybody else is the same way they are. You know, you're a boy, you think everybody has opinions. You are a girl, you think everybody is the way you are. You see somebody has something else, you wonder what the hell that is. And where it came from, and what happened to yours. So this one said, "I used to, I developed a fantasy, and I think she was three and a half, that it was in there but it couldn't be seen, but it will grow out." And so when any visitors came to the house, she came with her picture as three and a half or four years of age and showed them and said, "This is the way I look now." And then she had a picture of that cousin and said, "This is the way I would look when I grow up." She had a fantasy that it was hidden in there and it would grow up, and it was a big problem for her. You know why? Because one of the problems that she has was this dyspareunia, which means she had incredible discomfort during sexual intercourse. And the reason was very simple. She had a fantasy that she had a penis in there, and it was being damaged by the male penis going inside where she had her own hidden penis, which is still, she was expecting somewhere that it will come out because time never goes, time doesn't pass in the unconscious system. So you believe as a child, they never die, they get superseded by other beliefs. But if they were conflictual and anxiety-provoking and well-rooted, they are there and they were influencing behavior.
For girls, that's called penis envy, and people raise holy hell with that, particularly feminists say, "By you mean, what do we have to envy?" Well, you have nothing to envy, obviously. In fact, you are better now than men are in many ways because you can produce babies. Men can't do that. So you are creative in a way that men can never be. And obviously, women have many attributes that men lack. The problem is that the way the mind works, and let me give you an example of that, is very interesting and has a lot to do with this concept that some people don't like to hear about. All right? So I have to tell you, you do with them whatever you like.
You take a four-and-a-half-year-old or four-year-old, and you get five M&Ms. And you put one here, the other one here, the other one here, the other one here, and the other one there. And that child can count to 20 and has some concept of numbers. And then you get 10 M&Ms and you put one here, one here, one here, one here, one here, until you have 10. And you tell him, "Which one do you want?" Which one do you think he will choose? He will choose the five. Why? Because it's, it's longer, bigger. It's more. The concept of more is different at four and a half years old. So he can count, and you tell, "But you can count, can you? You know which number is bigger than which number?" And you say, "Oh, yeah, yeah, I know." Said, "Well, count for me." One, two, three, four, five. Depends how well he counts. You say, "Well, count the other." He counts 10. You said, "Which is the bigger number?" And he said, "10." You said, "Which one do you want?" This one. The concept of what is more is different in children. It's an abstraction and is not made until much later. So if you have something that is visible and somebody doesn't have it, you want it because it's more, right? You say, "Well, that's crazy." Well, I give you another example. We had, remember, remember this. We had a nursery school at the University of Michigan many years ago, 25 years ago. That's why we want to reconvene here. And we had, obviously, one in the hamster clinic because you learn an enormous amount, well, baby clinic, infants, and then a nursery school. Well, I give you two examples from that nursery school.
One day, a little boy came, and he had an anomaly. He had two thumbs on each hand. In other words, you saw his thumbs. Another thumb was coming out of here, and another thumb was coming out of here. The adults that looked at him said, "Jesus Christ, look at that poor little boy." The kids, all of them, wanted a six-finger. Some of them started to cry because they did not have one. You understand what I mean? You say, "Well, that's crazy." Well, maybe it's crazy for those adults. For children, that's the way they think. They don't think the way you and I think. They don't have a knowledge of what that means. They don't know that that's a genetic anomaly. They don't know that that doesn't do that child any good, but they know that he has something that they don't have, so he wants it. And that never fails. That was a very illustrative phenomenon. I don't know, you remember that kid. It was horrendous to see him. It broke your heart because you even feared giving him your hands or holding his hand because it's as if that finger, you know, will get damaged or fall or hurt him or something. He was happy like a heart, like he had six fingers and everybody wanted one, you know.
Now, I give you another example. We had a nursery teacher that was a black lady. She was wonderful, beautiful woman. Or Daily was her name. I will never forget it. She was so wonderful. Or Daily had a special gift to treat children of that age. She understood them mostly by intuition. She didn't have a lot of training. She was trained as a nursery school assistant, but that was it. But she, you know, had a gift to relate to children. She knew how to relate to children. In fact, when we opened the nursery, I brought from England the woman by the name of Mona Friedman, that had been the nursery school head teacher at the HMS clinic, Anna Freud Clinic, since the beginning of times. I brought her to Ann Arbor for a month to teach the nursery school teachers that I have some of the things that are special skills that only somebody who had talents and experience in the analytic understanding of children's development could have. And she told me, "Your best teacher is Ola." I said, "I know, I know she is." Well, Ola was black, but black like that, really black. And the children that got attached to her, which were men, will rub her skin because they wanted to be black, and because they couldn't get her color, they will cry, "I want to be black." And you said, "What is this?" I mean, a year and a half or two years later, they will have developed prejudice, and of course, they wouldn't want to be black because in this society, that's not very good according to prejudice, you know.
Now, what does it tell you? What somebody else has, you want to have. If you have children, let me get there, and you have two boys or two girls, doesn't matter, of a certain age, four or five years of age, and you go out and you buy two balls for the kids, and you say, "Well, I buy a blue one for Peter and a red one for John." And you say, "Peter, you like blue, don't you?" He says, "Oh, yeah, I like blue." He takes the ball. You give the red one to John. What happens immediately? I want that boy's one, the one who is asking. The other one doesn't want to give it because then immediately there is sibling rivalry. But when that part is over, that one wants his ball too. So next time you say, "Hell, I buy two identical balls, same color. No problem. One blue and one blue." You go and say, "Here you have your blue ball and you have your blue ball. Don't play with me with it. The same ball." You think I will take with them in five minutes. They will be fighting because they want the other person's ball.
What does it mean? It means that they think differently than you and I. That the concept of values is different. That the envy that they experience is different. What they think is important to have is very different from what you and I think is important to have, and things of that kind. What? So that's called penis envy, and it shows it shows real good. If you are an analyst, you have to be there to see because it's all over the place. It's a natural phenomenon. It has to happen. If you are in a litter with boys and girls, obviously that will exacerbate the phenomenon because unfortunately in our cultures, as I have told you now many times, boys have a preference. You know, they still do. Males do have a distinct preference in this society. In time past, it was even worse. The important child in many families, and particularly in some cultures and religions, is the firstborn, and they want it always to be a boy. If it is not a boy, there is an incredible disappointment. They have seen now, you know, I don't see that as much, but I have seen fathers get enraged because they had the second or the third girl and not a boy, and blame the wives. "You can't even give me a damn boy." In fact, he's responsible for the determination of the sex. She's producing the girls. You know, he doesn't know anything about genetics and embryology, and so he brings a wife, and that was quite common.
So, if you associate the fact that culturally, boys are allowed since they are very young to do things that girls are not allowed to do, it kind of increases the kind of, you know, this primitive way of thinking in a very dramatic manner. You don't like it, leave it alone. You've been making a big mistake because you've been missing a lot of problems of women with men is based on that from early on. A lot of problems that women have in their marriages or with their boyfriends or maybe never can really get together with anybody permanently may have a lot to do with that. A lot of competitive feelings that women have with men as to who is better, and who can drive better, or who is more intelligent, or who earns more money, or whatever it is that they are doing. It's based on these primitive things. When it is very strong, it may well destroy your ability to relate to a male and enjoy his company.
You had a question. Listen, how's about breasts? If kids want everything they see, they want to be black like a black woman. Why would little boys and little girls want breasts? Well, because that comes on much later. You see the breast, these are zones, they come and get affected, and people put their attention in it. Breasts don't play a role until much later when people are 12, 13, 14, 15, and by then children know a lot about the sexes and the difference and who does what and so on. So it's not common for men to have breasts, to want to have breasts, you know, but it's only for that reason because it's not visible at the age in which you think that way. It's like the six-finger. If that happened at 15, no, this case will be interested in the six-finger. It's a matter of where your cognitive development and your erotogenic zones that get affected and where the attention is concentrated by you and by the objects around you gets concentrated.
But many men are envious of women's ability to produce children. They are later on. That doesn't happen when you have little ones, but it happens later on. Many men, by the same token, are frightened of women. What is the reason for that? Well, women have a hole in the form of the vagina in their minds, and they don't know what is inside it. And men suffer from castration anxiety. And you want to know what happens when you put that in there. And some men have fantasies of vagina dentata. They are teasing that they may eat you up. You think it's funny. These people have a lot of trouble in their sexual life. They have kind of variations to these things. You know, obviously, the other reason why men have tried to control women is that women are better endowed physiologically than men are in the sense of their sexuality. Many women can have repeated orgasms one after the other. Many women can. Men can't do that at all. Even young men have a refractory period that at the very least, when you are at your best, which is 17, 16 years of age, takes between half an hour and an hour to recover. In that space of time, a woman may have five or six or seven orgasms. And that's why men, many men and many societies are frightened of women because they feel that they are hypersexual. You know what I mean? And if you don't believe me, in the medieval age, they developed all kinds of contraptions to make sure that women could have intercourse with anybody else because no man believed that they could satisfy them. You understand what I mean? You haven't seen these contraptions of the Middle Ages. They are very interesting.
So that's penis envy and that's castration anxiety and the role that it plays. And it comes from this stage that we were discussing the other day, only that then it manifests itself in the language of adults and it may be displaced here, there, to the other place, and rationalized in this way, that way, and so on. But all of that is coming from. That's why as much knowledge as human beings develop in the psychoanalytic sense of the word is incredibly important for the treatment of adults because that's where all these things are coming from. They have an antecedent very early on in childhood. They don't come from your adulthood. You don't get into this trouble as an adult to acquire this when your thinking is different and where you know the values are different. That's what I was telling you that really the best therapists come from well-trained analysts, no two ways about it, can be no other way.
Now let's talk about once you have, we were talking about libido, you remember libido phases of development and so on. Now we are on a section that says libido distribution. How much time we have till 6:00? Okay. When we will start this, and we will continue next time. I recommend that you read on page 12, you read very carefully the next few pages because they are self-explanatory and much of what I otherwise I will have to explain to you about this, you could read and very easily grasp.
So, this is regarding the libido distribution. You see page 12, you know, and then it should divide it regarding the libido distribution, and then it should divide it into cathexes of the self and later cathexes of objects. Now, that then means that you need to know what is the self. What do you mean by self, and how does it get there? And what do you mean by objects? Because if you think that an object is somebody outside of your mind or your lover or whatever it may be, your friend, yeah, they are objects, but that's not the only objects that analysts are concerned about. Think of many, you can take your own body as an object, you can take part of your body as an object, you can take part of other people as an object, you can take animals as an object. So there are animate objects, which may be animal or human. And there are inanimate objects, which are things that become objects, and at times very important objects. Okay. In fact, they can even become sexual objects, and we will talk about that a little later on.
Do read that section that will talk, particularly this one about primary narcissism and secondary narcissism, and what role that plays in the cathexis of the self, and how and what kind of pathology gets derived from it, depending on at what stage came the failure. There are certain stages that the self has to go through that will determine whether there is a good primary narcissistic stage, or you have a basic fault starting in the first year of life that we never remedy. You will have to deal with a handicap, or whether it is a secondary narcissistic cathexis, which we will talk a little more about next time.
I will tell you too, a little bit about how the self gets put together. We talked a little bit about it today when I told you that you are not born with an idea how your body looks, is, or works. But you have some kind of representation. That representation increases as you acquire more and more skills, you know, and you add kind of schemes to your body, your primitive body scheme. And we will talk superficially about it, but enough so that you understand the concept, and so that you understand that some people that are stuck in here have very strange perceptions of their own body. Okay? And that includes all kinds of people, including anorectics, which may weigh 60 pounds and be about to die and think they are fat, and running and dieting and jumping up and down and things of that kind.
So, and then we will look at cathexes of objects, and I will give you a scheme of what Suttan is meaning by objects, and that will help you because again, you see, you don't know these things. Your patient will be telling you about it, but you, it's like having an elephant in the living room and you're not being able to see because you are blind to elephants. And so we are going to talk a little bit about it. If you want to, you can read in the things that I distributed today. It tells you under that section what it is that you have to read and where that is found. Objects, for example, is four pages in one of these books. It's a book of mental psychology, conflicts and anxiety, and it's four pages. It describes all you need to know as an analyst about objects. It's very condensed, but it's very handy because you read it very quickly, otherwise you have to read miles and miles and miles of paper and then try to integrate it. So it's very, it has been known for you by 25 or 30 other people through 10 or 12 years of work. So, all right, we continue next time.