Is That All It Takes?

 

In nature, something can only give what it has received. This general principle about life holds in a special way in the personal growth of an infant. At birth the babe is hardly more than a bundle of potentialities, wholly dependent upon the environment to influence his development.

            

The ministers of the infant’s environment are indisputably the parents. The infant himself is utterly incapable of adequately satisfying his basic human needs, physically and emotionally, he must receive from others. His tiny being is simply too frail to navigate the environment in a determinable way. Psychologically, infancy may be referred to as a phase of passive dependency.

            

Because of his body, the infant possesses an emotional life: he can feel pleasure and pain. Quickly he relates himself to objects that soothe or offend his feelings, and comes to identify, almost immediately, the principal minister of his environment, the reliable resource of his feelings of well-being—mother. Mother brought him into the world and she especially continues to lead him into the world during the phase of infancy. Father’s role, of course, is indispensable, but his preponderance is less in this growth stage

            

To evolve a human being through infancy, childhood, adolescence and, finally, into adulthood requires and demands herculean efforts on the part of the parents. For some it is an unendurable task. For others it is an enticement of love, an increasing joy that is a preservation of the child’s life and growth, a family wonder which instills in the infant a zest for living.

            

Motherly love, outside the special elements that surround the intimate, spontaneous, embracing relationships between mother and child, is quite similar in substance to the love that she manifests as an adult. Love yearns to communicate itself to the beloved. The mature lover is one who experiences himself as one who can confer of his self to others. You express to another all that is vital in you, so that in discreetly sharing yourself the other person becomes that much richer. Personal love can’t be mandated; it is a quality gently offered to another, whereby the receiver may become, in response, an enlivened giver. Erich Fromm remarks that “To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person.”[1]

 

Ultimately, you can’t love the other, this individual, unless you yourself are fundamentally a person, i.e., one capable of genuine love. The power of love arises from the condition of inner freedom and independence, there being no starved compulsion to appease or become so enthralled in the beloved that one submerges his own identity. Idol worship eventually becomes fruitless.

 

Love is misunderstood so often. We aren’t born skilled lovers, but we presume the contrary. It’s easy to love food, your talents, travel, wealth, but the love for persons is the most unique of all.  People hardly realize that it is an art. It is only learned by practice. To love another, as other, is possible only when I can transcend my will-to-pleasure or self-aggrandizement. Unless I can discern the other in the pure terms of the other self, then I still have a lot to learn. My quest, as it were, is not to refashion you into my ideal but to learn how to accede to you in all your uniqueness. In this engagement, I do not lose my personality. On the contrary, love expands the personality. Just ask parents what happens to them as they learn to care and endure the joys and trials of parenting. No less for two lovers. Love is self-speaking to self. Mature love accomplishes a unique union, while preserving and fostering the other’s integrity, the other’s individuality. As old fashion as it may sound, that takes character. 

 

The ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person.[2] What matters in relation to love is the faith in one’s own love; in its ability to produce love in others, and in its reliability…[3]

It presupposes the attainment of a predominately productive orientation…has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals.[4]

 

Life is a sufficient struggle without having to cope with it in a debilitated condition. From the very beginning the pathway to reality for the child ought to be paved with love—that protective, enveloping presence which softens the starkness of reality, and gently, assuredly, beckons the child forward discovering himself and the world about him.

 

Love is the indispensable and irreplaceable medium, needed by the human being if he is to attain to full participation in life, the one and only medium that enables him to be at home in the world, despite its sinister depths, and allows him to develop the core of confidence which is always, at one and the same time, self-confidence and confidence in the world.[5]

 

Thus, the prime object of infancy is to nourish within the infant a developing sense of security, indispensable to venture forth and keep pace with life’s currents.

 

That abiding security even banishes covert fears. Those imminent hesitations that exert a retarding havoc upon the growing personality are especially found in the basic area of self-preservation: fear on the level of bodily survival and fear on the level of personal survival.

 

If the child receives too little love, it misses the warmth and security it so greatly needs and grows up lacking in self-confidence and in the courage to face life.[6]

 

The greatest and most damaging blow to his tiny sensitive ego is to be rejected, denied love and support from the mother of whom he is a part.[7]

 

Positively, emotional security reflects his sense of self-preservation, which stabilizes through time as the child tangibly senses that he is wanted and being cared for. This sense of security arises primarily from the manifestations of the parents’ sensible affection for him, and through these outward signs the child perceives the genuine moral support behind them. 

 

Children are pitifully weak and insecure. The more they can identify with, become a part of their parents, the more they borrow from them much-needed emotional strength.[8]

 

What is seldom pointed out is that, at every age, the basis of everything we do is an implicit self-love. Psychologically it can’t be otherwise. Strange as it may seem, a proper self-care is even indispensable to love others, including transcendence. Freud may have thought that self-love was selfishness, a kind of relentless narcissism, but what he did not appreciate is that unless I value myself, I cannot love others—because I do not estimate that I am worthy enough to expend myself for them. How can I gamble with my insufficiency, it’s too risky. My own self-acceptance then governs my willingness to share my person towards others. If I judge that I have little to give, how can I meaningfully touch others? Experience often corroborates that when someone struggles with insecurity, there is an overriding anxiety with the plight of his own identity and its daily protection: he cannot venture forth with an open-hearted love for others. His diffidence about himself colors everything.

 

Without the sustaining affirmation of the parents, the child’s self-love falters. Unless experiences indicate that he is loved day in and day out, he will with difficulty come to understand that he is worth something. How hard is it for either parent to realize that, before the child can go out to others joyfully and face reality under his own power, he must first have some sense that he is loveable, 

 

The experiences of the elemental love coming from the parents normally enables him to answer by himself giving love. Free from anxiety about himself he is ready to make the venture.[9]

 

Self-love, then, is the springboard for self-confidence. With love instilled, the child trusts in himself. Trust in oneself is the very definition of confidence. Now he can risk loving life, even with its occasional bruises. These tiny creatures, however, are still too impoverished to go very far on their own. Confidence will be unsteady unless the child senses the encouraging support of the parents. This expectation cheers hope, the firm anchor of his soul.

 

This confidence is the dynamic function of our life, possessing the inner power to transcend, to thrust ahead despite obstacles, and to break new ground all along the line of human life.[10]

 

Love encourages the child to advancement into life, and advancement for the child is paved with hopeful desires. Without love, no hope; without hope, advancement will wane. Remove hope and his magnanimous desires to move with life falter, for crucially he cannot long desire or love something when he loses hope of attaining it.

            

Although nature implants a strong urge of curiosity in the child to help combat the psychological defensiveness in the face of the new world, still the gentle, directed bolstering by the parents can supplement nature by continually feeding the child’s emotion of hope. Otherwise, with self-doubt plaguing him, the newness of life will loom too foreboding:

 

Anything new does not signify a tempting suggestion to venture forth, to struggle against difficulties, and finally enjoy victory, as it should do for a healthy child; it is felt as a threat, releasing a rigid, fearful reaction, driving the child back into some system of defense.[11]

 

From the parents’ side, there may emerge also a vicarious trap whereby a parent or both tacitly project onto the son or daughter their own unfilled hopes to the extent that the child is, as far as they are concerned, less an individual groping to find himself than an extension of their own egocentric goals. The morning after Christmas, the son came down to breakfast wearing one of the two sweaters he had received. Mother looked up and declared: ‘You don’t like the other sweater?’ 

 

Who doesn’t want what is best for their child. What child does not want to please the parents? Yet there can be such ambitious desires for the offspring’s well-being that the child becomes a satellite orbiting the parents’ unfulfilled dreams. The fostering of co-dependency always looms. Eminent domain over your child’s future is so tempting. Intimidating your offspring, from tears to blackmail, to follow your obviously superior wisdom is radically opposed to encouraging them to find out through trial and error how to deal with life. Without a guaranteed maintenance manual, we can’t help but humbly approach love as a learned art.

 

From the teenager’s side, the challenging environment may be met with the tendency to flee the arduousness of life and take refuge in the infantile past—withdrawn into his imaginative world, those favorite surroundings which nature encourages him to outgrow. Keeping up with the demands of parents and reality is insurmountable from a base of insecurity, and thus he may well retreat to former behavior patterns tinged with fantasies, at least there he felt a minimum of protection from life’s harshness. Now, while the bodily growth continues, the emotional development lags. Later in life, however, genuine friendship can often enable one to regain his bearings as a loveable being. 

 

Who would not affirm with Fromm: that the one choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: love of life, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom. 

 

With the parents accepting their challenging roles, the child can face the future realistically. Their gentle, consistent bolstering gives rise to the confidence and hope that he may discover his talents and the engaging world. While his potentialities are actuated through his personal love for life, he learns to value himself by witnessing his parents’ nonpossessive love. With growing confidence in his own worth, he has the staying power to take up the adventure of good living and see it through to his sovereign destiny.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] E. Fromm, The Art of Loving, p,127-8.

[2] Ibid, p.25.

[3] Ibid, p.124.

[4] Ibid, p.25.

[5] R. Herzog-Durst, Conquest of Anxiety, p.2.

[6] B.F. VonGagern, Difficulties in Married Life, p.199.

[7] E. Strecker, Their Mother’s Sons, p.41.

[8] E. Strecker, Basic Psychiatry, p. 388.

[9] B.F. VonGagern, op.cit., p.48.

[10] Herzog-Durst, op.cit, p. 16.

[11] Ibid, p.23.