Earl Biddle’s description of
childhood anxiety, imagination, and omnipotence offers deep insight into the
inner life of a child, and into adult psychological development. His theories
offer an interesting way to understand the recent phenomenon in popular culture
called, ‘Tebomania’. Before applying some of Biddle’s and Swedenborg’s insights
to this phenomenon lets first look into Biddle’s theories. I believe Biddle’s
ideas meld well with Swedenborg’s. I hope that in studying these elements of
how psychology integrates with religion we will learn something about our own
souls. Personaly, I study these things for the sake of self healing, not to be
an intellectual.
Biddle describes the inner life of the child and the importance of the child’s
phantasies. ‘Phantasy’ emphasizes creative imagination, whereas, ‘fantasy’,
implies more an element of illusory day dreaming:
Childhood is usually regarded
as a period of life which is normally happy and carefree…But it is difficult to
appreciate the extremes of anxiety and joy which the small child experiences
throughout his everyday life. The small child dies a thousand deaths. Equally
often he reaches the pinnacle of bliss…(These experiences) are very real to the
child, but the adult says they are imaginary (Biddle, p. 32).
The small child under the age
of three views his parents and other adults as gigantic, all-powerful people.
They can do infinite good or infinite harm to him. But according to the logic
of the child, a good person cannot do any bad, and a bad person can do no good…
The child does not regard the gratifying father and the frustrating father as
the same person. The same is true with the mother. Besides being real people
the parents represent phantastic, illusory, or imaginary persons. The small
child, then, has, in addition to his real parents, a phantastic father and
mother who are preposterously good, and a phastastic father and mother who are
preposterously bad.
Emotionally the child under
age three experiences only extremes. When someone pleases him he does not
simply like that person, but loves him with every fiber of his being. When
someone displeases him he does not dislike him, but hates with murderous
intensity.
These feelings remain latent within
us throughout life, but are worked out, and refined and gradually become
unconscious as we mature. When we react to people and circumstances we tend to
regress to these feelings. Biddle describes how the child learns to process and
work out these feelings in his or her imagination:
The child cannot physically
handle the parents. He cannot defend himself against them when they appear to
threaten him. The problem is worked out by a natural process whereby the child
makes inanimate objects, which he can handle, represent symbols of the parent. A
match stick may become an imaginary bad father who can be chewed, broken into
bits, and thrown away…By this process of imagination the child “really’ gets
rid of the bad parents because he destroys a real object which symbolizes a
parent to him. The child can also change his inanimate objects from bad to
good, and thereby improve the phantastic parents, which the objects represent.
The imaginary threats are thereby relieved. The child never attacks the
phantastic parent with the intention of doing harm. He may do so simply to
assure himself that he is not really causing harm. He may in imagination harm
the parent he has clothed in destructive phantasies only to find the real
parent does something good. When this happens the child must in imagination
repair the phantastic damage he has done.
Paiget (30-33) has done a
great deal of work concerning the child’s conception of real objects. He
confirms the psychoanalytic observation that the child animates and personifies
all material objects. When a leaf is blown the child does not think of the wind
moving it. To the child the leaf is a little person who walks, runs and
flies…All objects when reduced to their primary symbolic meaning represent
father and mother figures. Freud’s “phallic symbols” then can be interpreted
more correctly as father symbols, and receptive objects as mother symbols.
The imagination of the child
is so vivid that he cannot distinguish clearly between what is real and what is
imaginary (43, Biddle).
The child uses the functions
inherent in his own body as the means by which he exercises his imaginary
omnipotence. In imagination he can annihilate the world by simply closing his
eyes. Then he can recreate the world by opening them…His words have magic
power. By calling Mama he can make his mother appear from ‘nowhere’. His tears,
saliva, and bodily excrement are given phantastic destructive and creative
power.
The child’s omnipotent phantasies are of tremendous
importance in his psychic development. One need not fear that the child will
continue to believe himself omnipotent if his phantasies are not disputed. A
brutal assault upon the phantasies of the child renders him helpless and
insecure in a gigantic real world with which he cannot cope…The entire life of
every individual is shaped by the impact which the real world makes upon the
imaginary world of the child. The adult helps the child to distinguish between
reality and phantasy, but the phantasies cannot be eliminated. Strangely
enough, the desire for omnipotence, which caused man to lose paradise, is
essential to him in early childhood if he is to regain heaven. Only the genius
of the creator could change what appears to be intrinsically evil desire into
an essential good.
The phantasies of omnipotence
do not continuously sustain the child. The child constantly fluctuates between
feeling omnipotent and annihilated. There are many times too, when he is afraid
of his omnipotent destructiveness. For instance if he ‘blows up the world’ he
will have no place to stand.
The child’s omnipotence is relinquished
not because of the threat of reality, as the psychoanalysts claim, but because
of the safety of reality.
When reality is not safe, when
parents are consumed with their own survival and cannot fairly perceive the
child, the child is in danger of growing up to be self-centered, and have
delusions about their personal power. If the child is made to feel overly
fearful of his omnipotent power, then she grows up passive, shying away from
life. This kind passiveness is not peaceful, but full of tension, and fear of
conflict and anger, because the unresolved phantasies are stymied, and such a
person feels diminished and destructive. As a chaplain one of my primary
objectives when working with a person who suffered trauma and loss is to
cultivate the kind of care and presence that helps people to feel safe.
Appropriately, only when a person feels safe and can trust will they share
their deepest issues, otherwise the conversation remains on the surface.
In the child ‘omnipotence’ is
appropriate, because she is innocent and helpless. Objectively the child is
born in ignorance, knowing nothing, can do nothing for her self, and must learn
gradually. Swedenborg writes that all humans at birth have hereditary evil, but
that it is latent. The creator clothes the child in innocence so that it is
adored and taken care of; and the child’s actual experiences of love and loving
are stored as remains in her soul. These remains of love connect her to God,
and temper the hereditary evil in her as she grows. These remains are an
essential means of reception of good from the Lord. Evil is latent because a
baby has not developed an identity yet that is self-willing. The ‘omnipotence’
of the child is a reflection of the creator who is omnipotent and seeds us with
this feeling for the sake of our protection and freedom. Remains are gifts of
innocence and love married into the soul of the child from real feeling and
experience. They are stored from experiences of pure love for parents,
caretakers and playmates, and from utter enthusiasm for phantasy play with
objects. Omnipotence is an appearance, but it is real to the child, just as
every person that has lived appears to have life and freedom from themselves,
but internally these are gifts from God. In the development of the child
omnipotence is the seed that yields creativity and strength, if healthy; if
held on to into older ages out of survival, it becomes the cause of delusion,
self-centeredness, and mental disorders.
Recently I went to eat out with my
seven-year-old daughter. I had some books and other objects with me and she had
some toys. She spent time organizing everything on the table the way she wanted
it. This was her way of working out and taking charge of her feelings – a
healthy phantasy impulse. On the other hand when she is upset she has an
extreme emotional reaction like the world is ending.
‘Omnipotence’ is the image of the
creator in the child, because the creator is omnipotent. This is a
psychological way of perceiving the spiritual truth that the Lord is intrinsic
in the human soul. This psychological condition parallels the fact that freedom
is the Lord’s nature, and the freedom we enjoy is entirely a gift from the
creator. In Him it is true and infinite, in us it is an appearance and finite. (The appearance of) Omnipotence is the only form freedom can be expressed in an infant.
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