Boundaries and Knowing

The relationship between mother and infant has come up in a discussion over at Crooked Timber, so I decided to boost this 2011 post to the top of the queue.

The Ontogenetic Roots of Animism?

Here’s an incident that I think about from time to time. It’s about boundaries, between mother and infant, and about knowing the world: What is the infant’s world like and how does she come to know it?

My starting point is the truism that an infant’s mother is an extraordinarily ‘large’ (if that’s the word) part of the infant’s world. The younger the infant, the more encompassing is the mother. Prenatally, of course, she is all. And the infant, we know, is active and sentient prenatally. Psychoanalytic theory, but not only psychoanalytic, makes much of this.

The point is simply that, phenomenologically, experientially, ontogenetically, the external world is a living being that is, in reasonable circumstances, extraordinarily response to the infant’s actions and needs. How does this infant experience this externality?

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A few years ago I was sitting in a departure lounge at Newark International Airport and happened to observe a mother and her infant playing together. She was seated in one of the chairs and had her infant on her lap. The infant was, say, nine months old and was playing with some cup-like object, perhaps a plastic container for storing food in a refrigerator. She was turning it around in her hands, looking inside, grabbing it and waving it, and so forth.

Then she dropped it and it fell to the floor. She had been following it with her eyes, of course, and so followed it to the floor. At the same time she leaned over and reached down for it. As she did so her mother smoothly lowered her to the point where she could grab the container and thus retrieve the dropped object—dropped deliberately, in exploration? Once she’d grabbed on and started pulling it toward her, her mother pulled her up and back to her lap. This happened quickly and smoothly, as though mother and infant were not two, but one: motherandchild.

Biomechanically, I suggest, they WERE one. They’d spent many hours thus playing together. They knew one another’s moves. Mother knew what baby wanted and how it would move; baby was secure in mother’s grasp.

* * * * *

So, how did this infant experience the mother’s action of lowering and then raising? Did she experience her mother's movement as her own, as answering to HER will? After all, when she reached for the dropped object, she was intending to reach it and the (mother's) move was correlative with that intention.

And when mother carries her infant from one place to another, how does the infant experience that movement? Say, for example, that the infant spots something across the room and looks right at it, with interest. Mother carries the infant toward the object and then places the infant on the floor a few feet from the object and the infant than crawls to the object and begins playing with it. How does the infant experience that? How much of that movement is within the compass of the infant’s will? All of it? What distinction does the infant make between the carry portion and the crawl portion? And, if the infant is attending to one thing, and mother moves her away from that thing, against her (the infant's) will, how does the infant experience THAT movement? Note that, in neither case (this or the departure lounge), does the infant herself propel the movement from one place to the other.

* * * * *

With that in mind, think of camera movement in motion pictures. The camera moves here and there, but you don’t move at all, you just see the scene shift. When the film cuts from one shot to another, the scene shift is abrupt.

More specifically, I’ve sometimes speculated that the world of The Nutcracker Suite in Disney’s Fantasia is that of an infant being carried around from place to place within a fairly small outdoor place.

And so . . .