Psycho-Ecology
No moment in human life is more mysterious nor more charmed than that of the newborn infant. How strange that even though we have all been there it is as remote as the dark side of the moon. Psychoanalysts tend to direct a great deal of imagination towards this moment. One common theme I’ve noticed among these many accounts is that of space, whether that is the boundless space of oceanic feeling, where the infant’s self includes everything; or the bounded void-space of Lacan’s concept The Thing, in which preverbal experience is conceived as a kind of hermetically-sealed vessel from which proceeds the entire mythological and religious universe; or Esther Bick’s descriptions of the new born infant, feeling as if they had been shot from their space ship (the womb) into empty space and so may be consumed with terrors of spilling out, or of falling forever.
The jist here is that if we imagine the ego as a kind of leaky container (some egos are more leaky than others) by which one projects necessary limits (the world) onto the universe, and if the infant, in a very literal sense, has no ego, then the greater part of infantile helplessness is being cast adrift in an endless cosmos. That this endless void happens to be the nursery matters little to the infant, for whom, like a quantum particle, all limits are functionally non-existent. The infant has no conception of walls, floors, or ceilings, nor inside/outside. Here we can see how the ancient practice of swaddling provides the infant with a tightly confined limit by contiguous pressure and the constriction of movement. It is the mother finally who, with a great deal of love and affection, puts the ground under baby—and so no wonder that we so often call the earth mother—Pachamama, as they say in the Amazon rain-forest, our little patch of earth, falling through the cosmos.
Not least among these visions of infantile space is that of Donald W. Winnicott who, with the flourish of a Zen master, offers us two weird koans with which to be able to think—or un-think—the becoming-infant of this extraordinary moment. These two koans are:
The infant does not exist.
Mother is an environment.
With these the famous dyad of mother and infant evaporates into pure environment. Both ambient mother, and non-existent infant dissolve into a magic zone. If we add to that zone a libidinal economy—all that love and affection—mixed with the vital needs of the infant—the need to eat, to sleep, to be warm—then we can reasonably conclude that the dissolute infant and ambient mother coalesce to form an entire ecology. It may be more precise to refer, not to the mind of an infant, but rather the environment of an infant, an environment that is mother.
Thinking of the infant less psychologically than ecologically, or at least as a combination of the two—a psycho-ecology—we can apply the laws of ecology to the environment of the mother/infant dyad. These laws are:
Everything is connected.
Nothing comes from nothing.
Everything must go somewhere.
Notice that these laws are not so different than the logic governing Freud’s economic model of mind, as they are both ultimately derived from the same source: Lucretius’s year zero poem of Late Roman materialism: De Rerum Natura. Adapting these laws to the psycho-ecology of early childhood runs as follows:
Everything is connected: there is no fissure between mother and infant, they are functionally the same, nor is there any separation between the infant and their immediate environment, what happens in the environment happens in the infant.
Nothing comes from nothing: Just as the child has been made from the mother’s body, so the child’s libido is given to them by their mother alone; or at least from that person who gives them the most love and attention. Whatever is in the environment eventually winds up in the child; even and especially the unconscious desire of the parent.
Everything must go somewhere: Nothing is lost on the infant; whatever happens to the infant, even projections of their own fantasy (or the parents fantasies) for better or worse, becomes the foundations of psyche.
The subject never grows out of this psycho-ecology but rather barricades themselves against it in their rickety castle, the ego. The laws of ecology, while they are most applicable and obvious in the preverbal environment, are applicable throughout life, particularly in moments of trauma and ecstasy.
The metabolic flows of the psycho-ecology are neither abandoned nor replaced, but always remains the greater environment against which the subject maintains an identity. That the self is autonomous and individual, that thoughts are isolated inside of heads, is the principle fantasy of our era. But it is only one fantasy amongst an ecology of fantasies as when Freud depicts unconscious fantasy as a nature preserve like Yellowstone national park.
Just as we become the environment by eating it, so our psycho-ecology is transversal to and inside of the greater ecology of the planet. In the last analysis, we are this ecology.
The Forest Spirit, Hiroo Isono
