The Stages of Life

Personalities and Patterns in Human Emotional Development

Hugh Crago

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317409953
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Is personality "in the genes"?

Do our infant experiences matter, even though we can't remember them?

Why do patterns repeat within the lives of individuals and families?

The Stages of Life provides answers to these and other intriguing questions, and presents a refreshingly readable introduction to human development from birth to death. The book synthesises those theories and research findings that are most helpful in explaining the paradoxes and complexities of human personality and human problems.

The book provides a thought-provoking discussion of several important topics, including:

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• how personality evolves in response to both genetic and social influences

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• how individuals differ and what this means for them

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• how some problems tend to develop at particular stages of the life course, from early childhood through to midlife and old age.

Throughout the book, Hugh Crago relates both 'nature' and 'nurture' to the challenges individuals must face from early childhood through to old age. He draws attention to often-ignored clinical findings about 'cross generational repetition' in families, and shows how recent developments in epigenetics may supply an explanation for such mysterious phenomena.

Written without jargon, and full of new and provocative ideas, the book will be of great interest to students of counselling and psychotherapy, and it is also has much to offer the general reader. With its engaging examples from history, literature and the author's own life, readers will find that The Stages of Life illuminates puzzles in their own lives and opens a road to self-acceptance.

1
The End and the Beginning

‘A sleep and a forgetting’

Birth is life’s first great journey, its first great transition, yet we remember nothing of it. ‘Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting’, wrote the English poet William Wordsworth¹: he meant that we ‘forget’ or blot out, as in sleep, the (heavenly) experiences that preceded our birth. Human life is full of paradoxes, but there is none more dramatic than this one, that the epic of our journey from the womb to the world is a story we cannot tell, because we did not possess language when it happened. Medicine and developmental psychology tell us only what can be observed and monitored from the outside. On the great subject of what birth might actually have felt like for the baby, the textbooks fall silent because no baby has ever been able to tell us.² We must rely on reconstructions – attempts to sense through the mind and body of an adult what a wordless, selfless being might once have felt. Some have attempted to reconstruct birth experiences intellectually – arguing backwards from the dreams and fantasies of adults as reported in psychoanalysis. Others have claimed to simulate the bodily experiences of birth – or something like them – through special breathing or even the use of hallucinogenic drugs.³ Either way, though, we can never be sure where memory ends and fantasy begins. But we have another potential source of information about the experience of birth, perhaps more trustworthy because it does not claim to be about birth at all. This source can be found in music, literature and art. Creative artists are, among other things, abnormally sensitive to the world around them, and retain vivid memories of childhood experiences that most of us have forgotten. In the terminology we’ll introduce in Chapter 2, they have ‘thin boundaries’. They, if anyone, ought to be able to draw from the depths of the well, even though they may not realise what they are doing.

In the prelude to his opera Rheingold, Richard Wagner thought he was composing a musical portrait of the river Rhine, a hymn to the primeval force of Nature. But what I hear in his music is a re-creation of birth: deep, throbbing bass notes, barely audible at first, slow, quiet arpeggios that begin to ripple upwards through the serene darkness, gradually gaining speed and increasing to full force in a great orchestral crescendo, after which the music falls away, and in the sudden silence can be heard the lilting of women’s voices. For Wagner, three river-spirits called Rhinemaidens are singing a hymn of praise to the watery world in which they live, but for me, the chorus of their song sounds like a lullaby. Is this how a baby named Richard once experienced his coming into the world, 39 years before he wrote those notes? We can never know, we can never prove it, yet it is possible. What we are dealing with are sense impressions only, felt by the body and registered in the infant’s brain at birth. A newborn has no verbal language, and consequently no ‘thought’ as we understand it, so these memories are not like later memories, which we reflect upon, talk to ourselves about, deliberately conjure up and elaborate upon. They are simply there, somehow. It is these sensory memories – of increasing urgency, of sudden relief from pressure, of comforting, high-pitched sounds – that Wagner’s prelude re-creates. And research shows us that a newborn baby responds to its mother’s voice, and to her smell, even before it can recognise her face.⁴ Indeed, we know that babies respond to voices while still in the womb.

Enid Blyton, who was the most popular British children’s author of her time (for very good reasons, which we shall explore later), once confessed that she had experienced a vision while in the dentist’s chair, under the influence of laughing gas:

I found myself (apparently bodiless but still firmly myself) being drawn through space at a speed so great that I thought I must be going at the pace of light itself. I seemed to be going through vibrating waves of light, and thought I must be passing many suns and many universes … Finally, after a long, incredibly long journey in an incredibly short time, I arrived somewhere. This Somewhere was, as far as I could make out, in my dazed and amazed state, a place of wonderful light (not daylight or sunlight) – and I saw, or knew, that there were Beings there – no shape, nothing tangible – but I knew they were great and holy and ineffable. Then I knew that I was going to hear the secret of Everything – and Everything was going to be explained to me, simply, and with the utmost lucidity. I was overjoyed – filled with wonder and delight. I knew the reasons behind existence, time, space, evil, goodness, pain – and I rejoiced, and marvelled that no-one had guessed such things before …⁵

Blyton describes this as a sort of mystic vision, but does it not remind us of something else? ‘Being drawn through space’ at a great speed, ‘going through vibrating waves’, emerging into a ‘place of wonderful light’ inhabited by huge creatures who seem all-knowing and all-powerful? Many other descriptions of out-of-body experiences, some drug-induced, some not, resemble Blyton’s. In many of them there is a journey through vast spaces, a sense of being pulled along or carried along by a force outside oneself, an emergence into a place of light. Intriguingly, a similar (though not identical) pattern typifies descriptions of the so-called Near Death Experience (NDE).⁶

In 1918, Lt Colonel George Patton, under murderous enemy fire in France, looked up and ‘saw’ in the clouds above him images of his Patton ancestors, many of whom had fought in the Civil War 50 years before. He felt that he knew what was required of him. He charged forward with a few volunteers, and was wounded. While lying waiting to be evacuated, he wrote later that he was:

overwhelmed by a deep feeling of warmth and peace and comfort, and of love. I knew profoundly death was related to life; how unimportant the change-over was; how ever-lasting the soul – and the love was all around me, like a subdued light.⁷

Like Blyton’s vision, NDEs are normally construed in spiritual terms – passing through the ‘shadow of death’, reaching heaven, meeting angels or departed loved ones – yet could it be that the experience of passing from life somehow triggers buried memories of that other great passage which hardly any of us can remember? Such speculations cannot ever be proved, yet, as we will see, human emotional life is so pattern-governed, so mysteriously circular and self-echoing, that the end may well resonate with the beginning.

The first migration

The Genesis story of the Garden of Eden distils some of the impressions human-kind may have unconsciously stored about the experience of birth. Adam and Eve live in mindless bliss, in total harmony with the rest of Creation. There is no strife, no work, no pain, no sex and no procreation. When the first woman and the first man eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge (consciousness?), they lose their paradise. They must clothe their nakedness in order to endure the heat and cold of the world outside the Garden (outside the womb?); they must work hard in order to feed themselves (as a baby must learn to breathe through its lungs and suck with its mouth, instead of being nourished automatically through the umbilical cord?); they can reproduce themselves, but now Eve must bleed monthly as the price of being fertile, and suffer pain in order to bear children. Conflict, suffering and struggle enter the world when humankind becomes conscious of death.

The Genesis story helps us to isolate the key elements that make birth both similar to, and different from, the transitions that we will all experience later in life. First, birth is involuntary. A baby does not decide to be born, or instigate the process (although no doubt its biochemistry participates in the ‘decision’, signaling to its mother’s body that it is time for parturition to begin). When musicians like Wagner and writers like Blyton conjure up a powerful sense of being carried along on rippling, endless waves, I suspect they are reflecting their early experience of being totally under the control of the muscular contractions that propel a baby down the birth canal. That first experience will reproduce itself many times later in life. It recurs when a child is placed in the car seat and driven to a totally new place, or is carried effortlessly in an elevator up or down a great department store or shopping mall. It is re-created in the sense of euphoria and freedom adults often experience as their plane lifts off, or their train gathers speed towards a distant destination. Maybe all of our excitement (and fear?) about travel has its roots here. And perhaps it is significant that so many human stories – from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh to The Lord of the Rings – involve the hero or heroine in a long, hard, frightening journey on the way to the fulfilment of a quest.⁸

Birth marks the end of the phase of human life that is (so far as we know) totally involuntary, and begins that part of life where we must, like Adam, work to live – the part of life where we must, like Eve, feel unpleasure as part of knowing that we live. In the womb, we are nourished, contained and protected without having to ask for it. With our birth, gaps appear in the seamless walls of our world: discomfort, frustration and longing enter our lives. A baby learns to want only by not having; deprivation is how we learn about desire. For most of us, then, birth is the beginning of the great lesson of lack and loss, the first great mourning, with which all later losses must surely reverberate. And it is the first of many migrations, large and small.

What else can we say about the first migration? It involves a movement from a largely unchanging world to one that is constantly changing. Of course, a baby in the womb is not shielded from all change: its own body is growing and developing; minute chemical variations in its mother’s blood impact upon it. It is affected by her panic, and perhaps her joy, as extra adrenalin reaches its own veins from hers⁹; for at least the final three months, the baby can hear sounds from beyond the walls of the womb; it can sense gross motions and can make its own presence felt forcibly with kicks and shoves as it adjusts to a more comfortable position, and gradually outgrows its warm, fluid world. But all of these changes, real as they are, are nothing compared with the rate and magnitude of the changes that a baby will encounter as soon as it emerges from its mother’s body.

Relative to that, the world of the womb seems (at least to us adults) one of endless sameness. Perhaps that is why the folklore of many peoples contains stories of a Fairy Hill or some other underground (or underwater) world, where the light is neither that of sun nor moon, where there are no seasons to mark the passing of time, where a thousand years are as a day. It may be significant, too, that in the tales, these magical worlds are places of endless feasting and dancing – effortless gratification, eternal holiday. For when we emerge from the womb, pleasure becomes less predictable, and gratification something that we often have to strive for rather than something that is simply there. And there is yet another paradox, for if there is only pleasure, then pleasure has no meaning: we recognise joy only by contrast with pain. Life involves pain, and so pleasure becomes possible: what came before in that safe, warm, unchanging world may seem bliss by contrast with the uncertainty of now, but it was not experienced as bliss then. We were not ‘happy’ in the womb: we simply were. To become conscious of pleasure or pain, we have to acquire a capacity to examine, to think about our own experience – and this capacity has not yet developed. We are in a state akin to that of an animal. In myths and the folktales, humans who find themselves visitors in the Otherworld are not usually tempted to stay there. The timeless realm strikes them as alien, boring or even frightening. If, like Persephone in the Greek myth, they are foolish enough to eat the food of the Underworld, they may be trapped there, but most mortals manage to escape. Having left the womb, they know that they cannot go back, ever. In Peter Pan, Wendy realises what Peter never does: that to stay in Neverland is to condemn herself to an enthralling, endless game which simply goes round and round in a circle, and leads nowhere.

So it is not that life in the womb is really as changeless as we imagine it to have been; rather, what seems to happen is that, having been forced out of the womb into something very different, we idealise our first world, now forgotten, into a Paradise, a Fairy Realm, a Neverland, and magnify the dangers and difficulties of our new life by comparison. Human beings tend to remember most vividly whatever happens right at the beginning of any new experience, something that psychologists call the ‘primacy effect’: why would birth be an exception? Those first impressions can shape our view of all that happens after. So perhaps what happens as a result of birth is that we begin to register difference, and once having done so, we do not stop, ever. All of human knowledge is constructed by noticing differences: between black and white, hot and cold, pleasure and pain, ‘us’ and ‘them’. And on these simple foundations we erect our complex, sophisticated structures of thought and belief.

But the noticing of difference is also the bane of human existence. Our thought-world is founded upon a tendency to see things as polar opposites and to attach a moral value to each – either you are a ‘good person’ or a ‘bad person’ – and our gradually developing capacity to modify stark black and white into shades of grey never fully catches up. Even highly intelligent, highly rational scientists and philosophers are as much governed as the rest of us by either/or thinking, at least in their intimate relationships and deep assumptions. It is either/or thinking which produces the idealisation of life in the womb as contrasted with what comes after; which convinces us of ‘my country, right or wrong’; which feeds the heroin addict’s conviction that life without daily hits would be grey, depressing and purposeless. It is either/or thinking which persuades some men that if their partner is temporarily absorbed in a new baby, then she cannot any longer love them. It is either/or thinking which persuades some mothers that if their son is serious about his fiancée, then he cannot have any love left for her. And, as we shall see in the next chapter, it is either/or thinking which results in human beings insisting that babies are either hard wired for a given personality (which they can never change) or born as blank slates to be written on by life (and will therefore be totally the product of the chances of their upbringing). Neither is true. When human life is the subject, then either/or must always yield to both/and. In our next chapter, we’ll see how the actual structure of the human brain gives us ‘either-or thinking’, while also permitting us a more unified, holistic way of understanding the world.

Oneness and separateness

Conventionally, we think of birth as the beginning of life: of course sentient life exists long before birth, that nobody would deny, but when we are born, when we physically separate from our mothers, we begin to live in a new way, a way which forces on us the potential for emotional as well as physical separateness. Having grown, for nine long months, within another body, we must now start to experience ourselves as apart, alone, cut off. Because baby humans will take long years to reach the maturity that puppies and kittens reach in a matter of months, human evolution arranges for us to continue to feel part of our mothers even after birth – psychoanalytic researcher Margaret Mahler called this ‘normal symbiosis’.¹⁰ At least, so we hypothesise, since nobody can tell us for sure that it was so. Again, our best evidence for that infant feeling of oneness with mother comes from certain types of experience in adulthood, which we do not normally think of in connection with infancy, although once we do, the connection is blindingly obvious.

The early stages of sexual love often involve, for short spaces of time, a sense of intense oneness between the lovers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• 1 The end and the beginning
• 2 ‘Not in utter nakedness’: temperament and attachment
• 3 ‘Heaven lies about us in our infancy’: the pre-school years
• 4 Widening horizons: pre-school to high school
• 5 Discovering self and sex: adolescence
• 6 ‘The tide is high’: young adulthood
• 7 ‘The maker and the made’: committed relationship and parenthood
• 8 ‘The middle of the journey of our lives’
• 9 Legacies: midlife to late adulthood
• 10 ‘The clouds that gather round the setting sun’
• Further reading
• Index