Through the eyes of an 18-month-old; granted an unexpected wish
I was granted my wish to see the world through the eyes of an 18-month-old, without knowing why I asked for it or why exploring it would be so healing. This was not literally or through age regression, but through a dream. I decided to write about my heroes and passions. The heroes bit is easy, as it's about people who are bigger than themselves. In that case, here's my list, Leo Kanner, Bernard Rimland, Friederich Nietzsche, and all those who worked together for a common cause during the Warsaw Uprising and Solidarity. Much less self-revealing, whereas my life at 18 months old must be of immense personal and scientific interest both, which I've always avoided giving because babies, toddlers and children need a private headspace to do their growing and developing in. One that no psychiatrist of any stripe is going in his whole life to step on.
If the psychiatrist who played such a pivotal role in the events of April 6 1995:
asked us, "Tell us about the world as you saw it when you were 18 months.'
and began then to decide when and where we were screwed up, I'd just say to him:
"Look, mate ..."
for I'm arrogant enough now to consider him my mate, an effect most people only achieve by Kahlua and vodka if ever.
"Where you ought to have been is 1984-85 What are you doing in this time, in this place, sir?"
having regained my usual moral and psychological composure, and really sorry i've called him "MAte", waiting for the big rain a gunna fall, to quote Bob Dylan, who has seen enough psychiatrists for a lifetime. As have Ricky Gervais and the makers of Little Britain, judging by the cringe factor and quality of their comedy, which makes me forget for half an hour that my job is to crusade for intolerance of all sorts. but then half the intolerance I see if my hippocampus and amaglydia competing to see who could be the best Billy Connolly or Ali G. Sorry Because it's all a delusion. There are plenty of real demons about, like those caused by Mercury retrograde, but who's to say they're any less real than the ones caused by thermasoul?*
Sorry. You now know the consequences of calling a psychiatrist mate, specifically one you've never met. Know what a true double-bind is?
Knowing that a man is responsible directly for the worst day of your life and never being able to tell him so?
You: Someone is responsible for the worst day of my life and they are going to pay!
(Really crocky. Like the attitude. Can be got rid of with cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behavioural therapy, medication and new age grounding. Take your poison.)
Psychiatrist: I'm a perfectly nice chap, and what I did was right.
You: Mate, we don't know that.
See how I'm putting the ball in his court? That's perfectly reasonable and humanistic scepticism. We believe in personal responsibility along with our insurance packet. This isn't Soviet Russia or Communist Poland after that priest* died. This is an ordinary first world country.
Jerzy Popielesko? died 11/84
We've antagonised the poor guy enough with our evil ways. Sorry, mate. This is only the third time in my life I've called a psychiatrist mate. what is wrong with me. My resistance - and my standards - are slipping. When I was a child, everyone called each other sir and madame. Children were called cutesy-wootsy, but the system wasn't perfect.
There was none of this carte blanche about calling psychiatrists doctors. What a way to peeve a woman all these years. Call things by their proper names, please. It's a basic principle of systematic psycholinguistics. As it is in philosophy where it has a name. Nominalism.
Now most psycholinguists (especially those trained under Piaget, Bruner, Cambridge university textbook - the honest and well-written parts - because you know quality and I don't namely 'cos I didn't go to that class, albeit in dribs and drabs as girl and young adult) know that there is a kind of language explosion which happens. Now some people's brains act as if language is a weapon of mass destruction (yes, really. This is tragic - this is unfortunate - this is caused by Mercury retrograde - or a near-drowning hypnoxia in my case) and retain special abilities such as memory and picture thinking. Their thinking is associative rather than logical, and if you are blessed with that sort of mind, which many with dyspraxia and dyslexia are. really and truly, it is how most of us used to think.
My passion for contained water and how it got me into trouble
Guess what got me into trouble? My passion for contained water. The experiences from which I have got into the most trouble - and from which I have learnt the most - have been the ones in which I was passionately involved in. I don't think passion is restricted to a mode of being or a stage in human development. I think it drives human life and underpins human experience. It always has and always will. That is my opinion only.
Right ...
My first passion
The first passion that I had which I can remember is the wheel. This proved I was human. I liked the wheel because it was shiny, round and rubbery and it went places.
My second passion
My second passion was a hat. it was a wooly, stripy hat and it lived either on the ground - like the wheel - or the obvious location - my head.
My natural passions
My first natural passion was air. Really and absolutely. I had this passion from the time I could reach my hand out. Marvellously clear stuff that I couldn't touch or grab in any sense of the word. The air felt cold. I had no real sense of clothes other than hats so I went naked all the time even outside.
My other natural passion was the sky. Interestingly, my first spontaneous question (a Great moment in human development) was not an inquiry into the nature of its blueness. Rather I wondered why it was so big and why it was all around us. It was then that I developed my first concept of inside and outside.
Where I learnt about clothes and the power of imagination and narrative
My first favourite colours were red and orange. It was red, I am sure, which attracted me to the hat. They are so different to the pastel-coloured parents even in our time insist children wear. I first conceived as clothes more for dolls than for myself, as were most of the accoutrements of being human (albeit a minature human). No I did not think that dolls were human: this was my first possibility of imagining and controlling lives other than my own. A heady power to give the human mind and heart at eighteen months, I feel. I imagine some are not particularly careful with their live dolls, whcih is to say their parents and siblings.
Shakespeare said:
Life is a stage
.
I say with Ibsen's Nora and agree with Strindberg and Miller that this is very limiting in our socialisation of girls and women.
The symbolic and concrete in my world - and why I'm not in PR or somebody's tea lady
My world in summary was a concrete and symbolic world. I suppose my first concept of identification was entwined within the hat, before any doll or cane chair came into my life. The first 2 passions of which I spoke are functional passions, and I understood them on that level. They may or may not have been part of a social or co-active activity. I cannot remember any conversation or dialogue about them apart from the standard master-apprentice thing*.
*A concept which is important in the work of Steven Gutstein, where he says no child chooses to not be master-apprentice. I tend to think of it more in the world of the Guild days. Master-apprentice in this case means experiential two-word (and possibly two-step) commands like 'Go get' ...
When most people (most boys really - we are socialised to be caring and nurturing) talk about working with their dads, mine had a much less concrete job. I could not talk about the world of public relations without becoming a manipulative swine without concept of relationship or connection to something bigger. Thank God he worked with Local Government, by which time the object of identification had become a suit and bag. They were new touches, new texures which transformed the creature he had been.
Ann Dowker, professor of mathematical development at Oxford University, said to her Dad when she was 4;
I hope you never have to seek your fortune
because lots of people in stories were always doing that.
How interesting and revelatory.
By the way Human Nature (not the abstract propositional part) is like that too:
http://human-nature.com/
And so is Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive which in english is a journal of cognitive psychology. Maybe they have some ideas on what I discuss below!
And Dan Sperber is really cool too: read his texts in English and French and see what you think! Here is at least one interesting paper of his. (I think he is talking about moral relativism and anthropology in his first paper.)
The controversy about whether there are pre-verbal memories
In the main, too, these were pre-verbal and pre-linguistic memories; possessed well before I could envisage two-way dialogue on any level. This is extremely debateable within the field and outside it too. Some people do think visually-spatially and others grow to be the music makers and the weavers of dreams. Briefly: what I think.
Yes, there are such things.
No, they are not many
I think the mind makes this seismic shift from paradigmatic to narrative - I know I have my Bruner not quite right. He did say that the first and best where memories were concerened was the narrative. And these memories are more or less categorical. Shaping and controlling my world. A world without words or people - on the surface - or at first glance - is no less a world for all that. Though it may be less accessible or made comprehensible/sensible to narrative. Sacks does talk about the proper therapeutic and developmentally appropriate use of the concrete. I think this is evident in literature - it was and is the only way I can approach it. I think Blake expressed it so beautifully with his Songs of Innocence and Experience, and you can quite clearly see the shift. And I do not think it is primarily or principally memory that makes the experience - it is as I said earlier what you make an ddo with it - see Aristotle's Poetics for an exemplification in the dramatic form ...
If the psychiatrist who played such a pivotal role in the events of April 6 1995:
asked us, "Tell us about the world as you saw it when you were 18 months.'
and began then to decide when and where we were screwed up, I'd just say to him:
"Look, mate ..."
for I'm arrogant enough now to consider him my mate, an effect most people only achieve by Kahlua and vodka if ever.
"Where you ought to have been is 1984-85 What are you doing in this time, in this place, sir?"
having regained my usual moral and psychological composure, and really sorry i've called him "MAte", waiting for the big rain a gunna fall, to quote Bob Dylan, who has seen enough psychiatrists for a lifetime. As have Ricky Gervais and the makers of Little Britain, judging by the cringe factor and quality of their comedy, which makes me forget for half an hour that my job is to crusade for intolerance of all sorts. but then half the intolerance I see if my hippocampus and amaglydia competing to see who could be the best Billy Connolly or Ali G. Sorry Because it's all a delusion. There are plenty of real demons about, like those caused by Mercury retrograde, but who's to say they're any less real than the ones caused by thermasoul?*
Sorry. You now know the consequences of calling a psychiatrist mate, specifically one you've never met. Know what a true double-bind is?
Knowing that a man is responsible directly for the worst day of your life and never being able to tell him so?
You: Someone is responsible for the worst day of my life and they are going to pay!
(Really crocky. Like the attitude. Can be got rid of with cognitive behavioural therapy, dialectical behavioural therapy, medication and new age grounding. Take your poison.)
Psychiatrist: I'm a perfectly nice chap, and what I did was right.
You: Mate, we don't know that.
See how I'm putting the ball in his court? That's perfectly reasonable and humanistic scepticism. We believe in personal responsibility along with our insurance packet. This isn't Soviet Russia or Communist Poland after that priest* died. This is an ordinary first world country.
Jerzy Popielesko? died 11/84
We've antagonised the poor guy enough with our evil ways. Sorry, mate. This is only the third time in my life I've called a psychiatrist mate. what is wrong with me. My resistance - and my standards - are slipping. When I was a child, everyone called each other sir and madame. Children were called cutesy-wootsy, but the system wasn't perfect.
There was none of this carte blanche about calling psychiatrists doctors. What a way to peeve a woman all these years. Call things by their proper names, please. It's a basic principle of systematic psycholinguistics. As it is in philosophy where it has a name. Nominalism.
Now most psycholinguists (especially those trained under Piaget, Bruner, Cambridge university textbook - the honest and well-written parts - because you know quality and I don't namely 'cos I didn't go to that class, albeit in dribs and drabs as girl and young adult) know that there is a kind of language explosion which happens. Now some people's brains act as if language is a weapon of mass destruction (yes, really. This is tragic - this is unfortunate - this is caused by Mercury retrograde - or a near-drowning hypnoxia in my case) and retain special abilities such as memory and picture thinking. Their thinking is associative rather than logical, and if you are blessed with that sort of mind, which many with dyspraxia and dyslexia are. really and truly, it is how most of us used to think.
My passion for contained water and how it got me into trouble
Guess what got me into trouble? My passion for contained water. The experiences from which I have got into the most trouble - and from which I have learnt the most - have been the ones in which I was passionately involved in. I don't think passion is restricted to a mode of being or a stage in human development. I think it drives human life and underpins human experience. It always has and always will. That is my opinion only.
Right ...
My first passion
The first passion that I had which I can remember is the wheel. This proved I was human. I liked the wheel because it was shiny, round and rubbery and it went places.
My second passion
My second passion was a hat. it was a wooly, stripy hat and it lived either on the ground - like the wheel - or the obvious location - my head.
My natural passions
My first natural passion was air. Really and absolutely. I had this passion from the time I could reach my hand out. Marvellously clear stuff that I couldn't touch or grab in any sense of the word. The air felt cold. I had no real sense of clothes other than hats so I went naked all the time even outside.
My other natural passion was the sky. Interestingly, my first spontaneous question (a Great moment in human development) was not an inquiry into the nature of its blueness. Rather I wondered why it was so big and why it was all around us. It was then that I developed my first concept of inside and outside.
Where I learnt about clothes and the power of imagination and narrative
My first favourite colours were red and orange. It was red, I am sure, which attracted me to the hat. They are so different to the pastel-coloured parents even in our time insist children wear. I first conceived as clothes more for dolls than for myself, as were most of the accoutrements of being human (albeit a minature human). No I did not think that dolls were human: this was my first possibility of imagining and controlling lives other than my own. A heady power to give the human mind and heart at eighteen months, I feel. I imagine some are not particularly careful with their live dolls, whcih is to say their parents and siblings.
Shakespeare said:
Life is a stage
.
I say with Ibsen's Nora and agree with Strindberg and Miller that this is very limiting in our socialisation of girls and women.
The symbolic and concrete in my world - and why I'm not in PR or somebody's tea lady
My world in summary was a concrete and symbolic world. I suppose my first concept of identification was entwined within the hat, before any doll or cane chair came into my life. The first 2 passions of which I spoke are functional passions, and I understood them on that level. They may or may not have been part of a social or co-active activity. I cannot remember any conversation or dialogue about them apart from the standard master-apprentice thing*.
*A concept which is important in the work of Steven Gutstein, where he says no child chooses to not be master-apprentice. I tend to think of it more in the world of the Guild days. Master-apprentice in this case means experiential two-word (and possibly two-step) commands like 'Go get' ...
When most people (most boys really - we are socialised to be caring and nurturing) talk about working with their dads, mine had a much less concrete job. I could not talk about the world of public relations without becoming a manipulative swine without concept of relationship or connection to something bigger. Thank God he worked with Local Government, by which time the object of identification had become a suit and bag. They were new touches, new texures which transformed the creature he had been.
Ann Dowker, professor of mathematical development at Oxford University, said to her Dad when she was 4;
I hope you never have to seek your fortune
because lots of people in stories were always doing that.
How interesting and revelatory.
By the way Human Nature (not the abstract propositional part) is like that too:
http://human-nature.com/
And so is Cahiers de Psychologie Cognitive which in english is a journal of cognitive psychology. Maybe they have some ideas on what I discuss below!
And Dan Sperber is really cool too: read his texts in English and French and see what you think! Here is at least one interesting paper of his. (I think he is talking about moral relativism and anthropology in his first paper.)
The controversy about whether there are pre-verbal memories
In the main, too, these were pre-verbal and pre-linguistic memories; possessed well before I could envisage two-way dialogue on any level. This is extremely debateable within the field and outside it too. Some people do think visually-spatially and others grow to be the music makers and the weavers of dreams. Briefly: what I think.
Yes, there are such things.
No, they are not many
I think the mind makes this seismic shift from paradigmatic to narrative - I know I have my Bruner not quite right. He did say that the first and best where memories were concerened was the narrative. And these memories are more or less categorical. Shaping and controlling my world. A world without words or people - on the surface - or at first glance - is no less a world for all that. Though it may be less accessible or made comprehensible/sensible to narrative. Sacks does talk about the proper therapeutic and developmentally appropriate use of the concrete. I think this is evident in literature - it was and is the only way I can approach it. I think Blake expressed it so beautifully with his Songs of Innocence and Experience, and you can quite clearly see the shift. And I do not think it is primarily or principally memory that makes the experience - it is as I said earlier what you make an ddo with it - see Aristotle's Poetics for an exemplification in the dramatic form ...