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Aug. 11, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:53
1124 Attacking Mothers

An article reading...

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Hi it's Steph.
Later in this conference call I talk about going back to read part of an article that set me to this way of thinking or at least set me down the path of this way of thinking.
So this is the article from this fellow that I've become Quite interested in his thinking.
It dovetails a lot with mine, but he's got much more empirical evidence, and he goes to some pretty wider contexts, which I think are really fascinating.
He's messed about the state, but, you know, perfection is damn hard in thought.
So, this is the formation of the mind and brain through attachments.
The mind and therefore the emotional content of the brain are created in the first few years of life through the attachment bond between the infant and the primary caregiver.
Fathers can be perfectly effective primary caretakers too, of course, although few historically have chosen to do so.
From the very beginning, the mother's emotionally expressive face and eyes are the most important objects in the infant's world, and the infant's wide pupils evoke the mother's gaze and increase her oxytocin, stimulating her attachment, and especially her empathy as registered in her mirror neurons.
As we will soon see, the loss of the ability of mirror neurons to feel empathy is crucial to the formation of violence in the brain.
A mother who is too depressed or too busy or too angry to respond to her child's emotionally expressive face is laying down the foundation of all later violence.
Quote, The baby sees his own self when he looks at the mother's face, and what he sees there is vital for the feeling of, I am seen, so I exist, I feel real, and my existence has been proved.
It is mainly the right hemisphere of both mother and infant that regulates early emotional states and copes with stress.
Romanian orphans put in cribs at birth and fed regularly but not smiled at or sung to usually die since they have black holes in their brain scans rather than healthy, functioning right hemispheres.
Even rhesus monkeys who are separated at birth from their mother's gaze grow up fearful and violently attack other monkeys.
Insecurely attached children actually display nine times as much aggression as their securely attached peers.
Obviously the degree of infant maternal attachment crucially affects the amount of violence later acted out in adults.
In the first two months, the infant who is properly cared for experiences what Stern calls an emergent sense of self, during which the looking into the eyes that are looking back into his is a central event around which everything turns.
The baby's brain is literally tuned by the caregiver's brain to produce the correct neurotransmitters and hormones.
The infant discovers that he or she has a mind and that other people have minds as well.
Experiments showing how depressed or angry mothers regularly produce insecurely attached infants who grow up to be violent adults, the so-called Ainsworth studies of emotional neglect in childhood, now run into the hundreds worldwide.
Severe maternal neglect can be seen in most mothers who are postpartum depressed or who drink alcohol daily or smoke a lot or are maritally dissatisfied or who are lone caretakers.
Only one in six children see their father once or more a week in America.
And the majority of American children today live their lives in homes without fathers.
Insecure slash disorganized attachments are, quote, attempts by the child to resolve the paradox presented by a frightened, frightening attachment figure by assuming the role of the caregiver.
When the caregiver's actions are designed to humiliate him or her into submission, the child seems motivated to protect the parent by being excessively cheery, polite, or helpful.
It is this reaction to authoritarian abandoning parenting, which has been the rule during most of history that gets repeated so often in political behavior, where insecurely parented nations cling to punitive parent leaders in response to their demands for submission.
The infanticide, tying up, starving, battering, torture, and rape of children that has been routine in history will be examined in more detail in later chapters of this book.
Even today, however, most children in most nations are badly abused and neglected in their early years.
This is denied by most people.
A recent survey of British doctors, for instance, said they believed the child sexual abuse rate was probably less than 1%, while careful studies of UK childhood sexual assault showed two-thirds of girls and one-third of boys had been used sexually.
The figures for the US are about the same.
Physical abuse is even more prevalent.
Two-thirds of British mothers said they routinely hit their infants in their first year of life.
And in the next two years, 97% they hit their children at least once a week, most a good deal more often, using straps, belts, canes, and sticks on the boys.
Figures for less advanced societies are even higher, where, for instance, many Islamic societies still rape the majority of both girls and boys and, quote, infanticide, abandonment of babies to beating, shaking, burning, cutting, poisoning are found to be common.
Since Islamic females traditionally have had their genitals painfully cut off as young girls, it is hard to be surprised that they grow up to be less than effective mothers.
Most mothers in history, and a majority of mothers even today, experience postpartum depression, which badly affects their ability to take care of and show love and empathy for their babies.
It is bad enough that childcare itself is so demanding.
A study of 900 American mothers found that they most enjoyed, quote,"...socializing, praying, eating, exercising, watching TV, and cooking, more than taking care of my children." Even more crucial are the studies that show that 80% of mothers experience either 1.
mild baby blues for months after birth 2.
postpartum depression for up to several years or 3.
puerperal psychosis They feel low, anxious, tearful, and irritable.
They have rapid mood swings, feel hopeless, experience panic attacks, feel worthless, inadequate, have suicidal thoughts, and thoughts of harming or killing their children.
They regularly think, quote, I had Holly in a carriage going onto the escalator, and I remember thinking, if I let go of this carriage...
She'll probably be dead at the end.
Or, I could drop Jamie right in the lake and he'd be drowned.
They confess that they are, quote, afraid to be alone with my baby.
Depressed mothers are, quote, about 40% of the time unresponsive or disengaged, while much of the rest of the time they are angry, intrusive, and rough with their babies.
Some psychiatrists call postpartum mood disorders the biggest complication of birth today, yet despite the epidemic proportions of such illnesses, they fail to receive the attention they deserve.
It is understandable that careful studies have found that those children whose mothers had been depressed in the months after childbirth were more violent than other children.
And since mothers are the main caretakers in the family, it is not surprising that mothers, or mother substitutes, are still today responsible for more of the cases of violent physical abuse of children than fathers, or father substitutes.
Although depression is recognized as usually caused by an overexcited amygdala and fear network and a reduction of the calming hormone serotonin, postpartum depression is not in fact caused by maternal hormone changes after birth.
Abusive mothers are either depressed or angry, and the cortisol levels of both depressed and angry mothers are elevated both in the mother and in her child.
There are two sources of depression, child abuse and neglect by parents.
One, the kind of parenting the parents themselves received in their own childhood, and two, the lack of assistance they receive as parents from their families and societies in caring for the child.
The parents of the caretaker are still present as, quote, ghosts in the nursery when the child is born, in the form of dissociated persecutory alter-egos, or alters, alternative personalities, internal objects and voices that repeat the traumas and fears the caretaker experienced as a child, since, quote, the hurtful parent was once a hurt child.
Parents often believe that when their babies cry, they, quote, sound just like my mother complaining all the time, or just like my father a real tyrant.
They themselves repeat exactly the same words and feelings their own mothers always yelled at them.
You're so selfish. You never think of me.
The mother experiences herself as the good, persecuted mother, while the baby is seen as a primarily bad, utterly persecuting, and justifiable object of hatred.
The helpless, vulnerable child experiences this reenactment of maternal fear and hatred as ending in abandonment or death.
As Joseph Rheingold says, most mothers do not murder or totally reject their children, but death pervades the relationship between mother and child.
These death fears become the basis for all later violence, both personal and social.
Faye Weldon puts it succinctly, once you have children, you realize how wars start.
The second source of postpartum fear, anger, and depression in the mother is the lack of assistance that they get in caring for their children.
When the mother must work and gets no help in caring for her children, when the father is violent toward her or demands constant attention, when there are deaths or severe illnesses in the family, when economic or military disruptions or dozens of other sources of paternal stress that are the norm in families throughout history occur, Caretakers simply cannot offer the time and energy and love that are required to form secure attachments to their infants.
So they grow up to be insecure, disorganized children who are irrational, out of control, and violent later on.
In European nations today, like Austria, where the government provides mothers three years of paid leave for each child plus other daycare help, mothers are far more able to be effective caretakers and rates of youth homicide and suicide and drug abuse have declined dramatically.
The Fear of Being Killed by Your Mother Whether the mother is depressed and withdrawn or dominating and angry, the extremely vulnerable baby and young child fears being killed or abandoned by her.
And this fear of imminent death is embedded in the brain in a dissociated alter ego in its right hemisphere, where it is unavailable for correction as the child grows up.
Beginning with two path-breaking psychiatrist writings in the 1970s, Joseph Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety and Death, the Catastrophic Death Complex, and Dorothy Block, So the Witch Won't Eat Me?
Fantasy and the Child's Fear of Infanticide.
Psychoanalysts have begun to address the fact that many of their patients continue to fear and defend against early death-dealing killer mother alter-egos that remain in a cut-off, dissociated state within their psyches.
Rheingold emphasizes the child's terror of being violently killed by the mother who wishes him dead and shows that he concludes that it must be because he is bad and that by dying he appeases her and hopes to gain her affection.
Reingold sees this as not only the source of suicide and other self-destructive behavior, but as the ultimate source of religion in rebirth fantasies such as the Christian and Islamic wish to die, and be merged with God slash Allah, shouting, Allahu Akbar, God is great, and the killer mother is great, where mother's love is the prize of death.
Rheingold reports on desperate studies of the dreams of preschool children, which are, quote, almost always sadistic and concerned being chased, bitten, and devoured by beasts identified with the mother.
Never pushed, hit, scratched, or kicked all hostile acts that he might have actually encountered.
Even when Sylvia Anthony, quote, asked normal children of two to five years of age to tell a story, of any kind, they told once of aggression, death, and destruction and fears, of wild animals like lions, wolves, and gorillas, of ghosts and witches.
Rheingold's work backed an earlier statement by Freud that he found a, quote, surprising yet regular dread of being killed by the mother in patients, a clinical finding that he soon explained away by positing an inherited death instinct rather than destructive mothering.
Since children have little fear of normal dying of old age, Rheingold emphasizes that, quote, the child does not fear to die.
He fears being murdered.
Thoughts of punishment and death come readily to the minds of children.
Being unloved means being killed for being bad.
Dorothy Block is one of the first psychiatrists actually treating young children, and she was startled to find that her little patients constantly feared that she might kill them.
Thank you.
That the fear of infanticide might be their central preoccupation?
Absurd! As one child after another admitted me to his world of fantasy, however, I witnessed a terror of being killed that varied only in its intensity.
As she discovered that the world of little children abounded in beasts of terrifying mien, in cruel witches and monsters who pursued their victims with unrelenting savagery, She became convinced that, quote, the identities behind these imaginary terrifying figures are the child's own parents.
Although children's fantasies appeared to concentrate on the fear of being killed, the displacement of terror onto monsters was obviously designed to preserve an idealized image of the parents.
And when the displacement onto Monsters is investigated further, she found they picked up the mother doll and stated, with deep feeling, she wants her child to die.
And, of course, she regularly found that the mother was violent towards the child, or constantly said things like, I wish I'd never had you, or even that the parents were violent toward each other with the intensity of their fear depending upon the degree of violence they have experienced.
Even maternal depression alone convinced the child that he or she was worthless.
Indeed, maternal withdrawal regularly produces more insecure attachments than maternal domination and anger.
Bloch constantly found that her patient, quote, idealized his parents and convinced himself that his parents wanted to and were capable of loving him, but that it was his worthlessness that made them hate and even want to destroy him.
The investment in this distortion seemed universal.
After the child is convinced he is bad and deserving to be destroyed, every incident in his life becomes proof of his responsibility for unhappy events.
Is there a death in the family?
He's a murderer. An accident?
He's the secret perpetrator.
His, quote, badness causes his mother to leave him for a job, and drives his father to absent himself on business trips.
He is the subject of every quarrel, and the author of every disaster, even of divorce.
And when boys regularly draw and play soldiers and warfare, they reveal their, quote, concern with murder and annihilation as their response to their fear of infanticide.
Other psychoanalysts have picked up on the themes of Rheingold and Bloch and shown by careful statistical studies that, quote, securely attached individuals report less fear of death than insecurely attached individuals.
And that the expectation of death as punishment for being, quote, bad, is caused by insecure or disorganized attachments.
Stern, Anthony, and others have confirmed that dreams are full of death symbolism, beginning at eight months of age when babies begin to experience Pavor Nocturne's attacks and nightmares when, quote, sleep is interrupted by intense terror personified by an attacking monster.
Various Jungians have written on the child's fears of the terrible mother or devouring dragon mother.
Dozier's book, entitled Fear Itself, the Origin and Nature of the Powerful Emotion that Shapes Our Lives and Our World, concludes, quote, From ages 4 to 6, the fear of death and imaginary threats come to dominate the child's mind, including fears of monsters, ghosts, murderers, tigers, lions, or other predatory animals.
Roshash and Thematica, a perception test, found that, quote, children consistently identify death itself with punishment and violence.
Carr found his patients in a British psychiatric hospital, all told him their parents wanted to kill them, and that furthermore he, quote,"...soon discovered that many of my patients had experienced profound death threats and attempts on their lives in childhood and adolescence.
The bodies of these patients remained alive, but the souls had suffered untold destruction." And Masterson found children of borderline mothers, borderline is a, just, this is Steph, borderline is a psychiatric diagnosis that's pretty bad.
It's one step short of psychotic.
And Masterson found children of borderline mothers felt that, quote, the only way that they could please their own mothers was to kill themselves, and that their mothers actually often told them, I'd be better off without you, and I could kill you.
Lest it be objected that most of these studies are from clinical populations, further studies must be cited to show that even in an advanced population, an upper-middle-class New York City area, most of the preschool children are full of fears of being killed by their parents.
One study was conducted for several years by Stephen Joseph and shows convincingly that, quote, Young children are afraid most of the time, so afraid that they find it difficult to learn, to think, and to grow.
Joseph simply sat on a chair on one side of a nursery school and told the children that he was just there to talk to them, not supervise them.
He found that although they generally tried to hide their real feelings, they were hourly preoccupied with death and death games.
Monsters, ghosts, and witches were constantly out to kill them.
And when they weren't actually fighting between themselves, quote, they played war games or cops and robbers.
Most were battles between the good guys and the bad guys with constant ordering of alliances and coalitions.
They seemed more like governments in world politics than children in nursery school.
They constantly looked for the answer to the question, quote,"'Will you dead me or kill me if I act bad enough?' When Joseph spoke privately to each of the children, they told him of their obsession with their fears.
When I tell people, someday I'm going to be dead, they say, now look kids, stop making jokes.
I know you won't die. You see, I can't tell anyone what I think about dying because no one will listen to me.
Talking about death with parents or teachers was taboo.
They revealed that they dreamed about being killed hundreds of times.
They concluded that even thinking about death would make them crazy, or even make them dead.
No one wants a, quote, morbid, disturbed child.
So when Joseph told them, if you're thinking about death, I can try to answer some of your questions, they responded softly, I think about it a lot.
He found that whether the incidents children react to in their daily life with death fears consist of being hid at home or watching endless deaths on TV, they told him it raised the question.
If they punish me for something small, will they kill me for something big?
They were, quote,"...obsessed with death as a punishment for not conforming, for daring to think, for asking questions, and for not obeying the authorities." The children asked Joseph, Why do grown-ups make up stories to scare kids if they aren't real?
They ganged up, teased, tormented, and fought other children in games they called The Monsters Kill the Children.
They told of nightmares of being killed, that they had, similar to the games that they played, God played a major role as a killer monster, and those that went to church told him the wafer tasted like a real body when they ate it.
Their parents and their society convinced them that death was not only real, it was imminent, and it was because they were bad.
This, this stuff again, this totally struck me as entirely valid.
Just based on my own personal experience and the experience of others, I talked about it with Christina, this fear of death, this fear of being killed, this fear of being attacked, and this general all-pervasive fear that floats around being a child was the case for me.
I absolutely completely remember the fantasies Of being killed.
When I was in boarding school at the age of six, I remember flipping around in my bed, putting my head against the foot of the bed where there was an iron railing, and pretending that Nazis were, Nazi soldiers, were sort of stomping through, looking for children to bayonet, and I was hiding, and I remember that very clearly.
Of course, there was a lot of violence in boarding school as well.
So, this is something that I've been really mulling over.
I think it's really powerful insights, and I did have a conversation, and I'm sure that we'll have more.
It's a big topic.
It feels like I'm trying to swallow a watermelon whole and attempting to ingest this topic and apply it not just to my own life, it lies to those around me and of society as a whole, the world.
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