Hiya. Well, I am doing some weird research, sort of looking at different theories and historical constructions of the notion of love and what it "means". I've run across some interesting texts, by the way, if anyone is interested. But in any case, I read a book that takes a kind of interesting perspective . . . in the end, it's an argument about psychotheraphy and why it still sometimes *seems* to work, despite all of the different theories and practices and so on. [It's the book cited at the end of this email.] Its argument, essentially, is that a lot of what goes on is involving "limbic" resonances -- that people kind of have to retune their memories and the way those memories affect their emotional lives, but they can't do this by force of will. The most powerful way to change one's emotional habitations is in a relationship, but to "hack" your emotions in this way is something that is difficult to do in a kludging manner; someone who can attune his or her self to your emotionscape but not get fully drawn into it is the best helper, and that takes practice and so on. Anyway, the book has some painful moments as far as rhetorical devices (love gets brought up over and over overtly as a unifying theme when it's latently there already), but it's entertaining as a quick read nonetheless. Anyway, the above is an interesting argument, and I am misrepresenting it here, but there's a quote in the book that I found interesting because it seems to me rather logical, yet completely unheeded. The context is a discussion of early-childhood rearing practices and their possible effects on children. Someone named Richard Ferber is discussed, who uses a Freudian-based argument to say that under no circusmstances should children -- including infants -- sleep in the same room as the parents. An evolutionary psychologist named Robert Wright replies: <<According to Ferber, the trouble with letting a young child who fears sleeping alone into your bed is that "you are not really solving the problem. There must be a reason why he is so fearful." Yes, there must. Here's one candidate. Maybe your child's brain was designed by natural selection over millions of years during which mothers slept with their babies. Maybe back then if babies found themselves completely alone at night it often meant that something horrific had happened -- the mother has been eaten by a beast, say. Maybe the young brain is designed to respond to this situation by screaming frantically so that any relatives within earshot will discover the child. Maybe, in short, the reason that kids left alone sound terrified is that kids left alone get terrified. Just a theory.>> [1] Now, this follows after an extensive discussion of the kinds of relations that seem to exist between interaction with parents -- especially mothers, says the book -- and psychological/developmental health. And what follows after is a note mentioning that SIDS -- Sudden Infant Death Syndrome -- is highest in the USA, and lower by far in many countries, in some places almost completely unknown. Synchronicities that appear to occur in breathing and other physiological patterns between mother and child sleeping together seem to be important not only for stability in the present but also developmentally. As one author puts it, there is a great deal of "sensory communication" going on between sleeping mother and sleeping child. It makes sense to correlate this to the fact that the countries with the highest levels of co-sleeping have the lowest incidence of SIDS. What strikes me as odd here is that we are supposedly very "advanced" as a culture. When we "develop" other countries, we often assume that they will gladly opt to adopt more aspects of our culture than just the economic factors, and sometimes this is something we hope for (such as say the case of female genital mutilation -- if we could consumerize it away, I'd be happy because it was away, regardless of my problems with consumerizing everything). But if we *are* thus equipped with something so powerful as science, why are we so irrational in what we choose to accept or use from the insights gleaned from it? Why is there such inertia in resisting a finding like this, where there wasn't in the proliferation of something like the Net? Warning! Rhetorical question coming up: please don't answer onlist, and no this isn't directed at anyone in particular despite the recent joyous announcement here -- the point of the question isn't a survey, it's more to incite reflection: How many people who have not had children yet considered, "Gee, maybe it would be a good idea to co-sleep with a kid for whatever period of time is deemed healthy, or seems to be healthy?" How many of us, reading this, realized that the basically arbitrary convention of sleep-separation between kids and parents IS arbitrary and maybe not present for any good reason? Or maybe that it isn't arbitrary, but is based on certain conceptions of family life, of the function of families, the psychology of humans, the ways in which people negotiate the demands of domestic and public responsibilities (such as participating in industrial production, service-positions, and consumption), and the conception of what comprises us as people? A couple of points I'd raise from my own response to this as I read it: 1. I was struck by the notion that "communication" was going on between two sleeping people. Of course it makes sense, and I've even experienced it as recently a few years ago, but still I was struck by the word. When we say "communication", we tend to mean "conscious communication". [By saying "conscious" I mean not to invoke the psychoanalytic binary of the conscious and the unconscious with all the baggage that entails, but rather to note that something non-conscious or pre-conscious or extra-conscious could be important and communicative between two human beings.] This sounds like a little of the same thing Richard Cytowic argues in _The Man Who Tasted Shapes_: that our priviledging of the neocortical over the limbic really is a mistaken thing,and that we miss out on a lot of what makes us human by acting as if human is only reason and logic and somehow the emotional is, let's say, "the savage within" that must be tamed to our conscious will and volition and discipline and duty and (ahem) obeisance. Talk about external models being internalized, it's the same kind of dynamic used on whole segments of a population where there is not only no conception of civil rights but even an assimilation by the oppressed of the models and arguments of the oppressor (ie. slaves or women or people of sexualities which were not in vogue at the time or other "others" affirming that they are indeed inferior . . . as has happened historically in many different contexts). This kind of internalized dismissal of the emotional and otherwise extra-conscious element which is obviously important in many ways (only a few of the most obvious of which are illustrated in this very email) seems downright dangerous and harmful, and when it's imposed on a whole culture, well . . . 2. Ah, and this one I ask with more clear reference to our techieheads. If we DO choose to maintain the "arbitrary" and "unnatural" priorities which are structured into things like our houses and furniture -- and which through those technologies also re-affirm the values in us -- what's the solution to this problem? An example of a study in the book I mentioned used a standard teddy bear and a teddy bear rigged to "breathe". Perhaps people will kludge together a type of synthetic dynamic-feedback object like a doll that could serve some or many of the *apparent* communicative capacities of a mother sleeping with child -- thus freeing mom and dad to the older nuclear family model once again, which is great because seeing as they both work, they have very little private time, right? Ahem. Okay, we're not bound to the "natural", heck we ARE natural so even our most apparently "unnatural" acts are natural. BUT it seems to me that this idea we can commodify and worse *kludge* together technological workarounds for everything will reach a limit. I use the word "kludge" on purpose, because the last time I checked its meaning it was a computer-programmer's term for a "sloppy workaround" in a piece of computer code. It kinda works, but it's not stable and it's not really fully tested and fully thought-out. Unforseen consequences ensue, which in software means crasheds and a patch a little while down the line. In human cultures I'm not sure what it means or may mean. 3. Finally: the view from a critical feminist perspective on this issue (or text) is one I'd like to hear. One thing that struck me continually was a focus on the relationship between mother and child in the limbic-development studies. I can see some people maybe asking if there is a crypto-conservative agenda going on in such studies, but I think there may also be something to that kind of intuitively directed attention -- considering that younger children seem often to be associated with mothers in many cultures, where as the patterns of association differ somewhat more between cultures for somewhat older children and younger adults, and so forth. While we must be wary of sexist and romanticized essentialisms of "motherhood" and "maternal instinct" and so on, we also would need to recognize if there *were* some kind of biological link that is closer or more crucial between mother and child than the child and others in the environment. I wonder what the feminist response to various versions of this kind of scientific extrapolation would be -- especially when one must be wary to (a) not refute possibly valid scientific observation in the name of ideology or agendas, and (b) be wary of those who wish to exploit scientific observations in the name of their own ideologies or agendas (such as the crypto-conservatives to whom I alluded earlier). Anyway . . . it seems to me that anyone can make an argument for the rationality of anything if they feel *motivated* to do so . . . someone (I don't remember who) here once posted about how "rational" and "functional" the business suit is, and I balked, of course thinking to myself that jeans and good t-shirt (and a decent jacket if necessary) are *far* more functional. Our society can have us valorize the business suit as "functional" when I can tell you that in my perspective it's clumsy and silly and decadent and ugly. Seems that both of those responses have to do with a personal aesthetics and a move to valorize what that aesthetic values, rather than any *real* observation of functionality -- in the end, what matters to us seems to be the ability to make an argument when we feel we want to. Being confronted with something that starkly contradicts all kinds of assumptions, though, seems to urge a rethinking of this whole system by which we naturalize so many things, and seems not only to provide the cue for some kind of deconstruction but also a useful guide to what direction to take once we have done so. I'm not sure if that's correct or not, though, and how dangerous it can be. Interpretation is interpretation, but . . . well, Bertrand Russel still kicked the rock, didn't he? (It was him wasn't it?) Kant's right, we can't know the world perfectly, but it is out there and we can bloody well look at it. My question is why and how we choose to pay attention to parts of that big picture that becomes available to us, and how we feel about that process itself from our various perspectives. Anyway, just some random thoughts. I think this is tip-of-iceberg stuff for a larger discussion about the ways in which Western culture seems to value science only selectively and to be rather *irrational* in its valuation of the supposedly rational, its self-definition, and its understanding of possible roles for technology. But anyway, that's probably book-length stuff. [1] pg. 194, _A General Theory of Love_ by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini, and Richard Lannon, (MDs); Random House, 2000.
