The Almighty

Every day, I practice a kind of homemade propitiatory magic to ward off catastrophes: little obsessive rituals that help me cultivate the illusion that I actually have some control, some purchase on my life. When I close a door, I must make sure to think good thoughts… When I touch one of my wife’s breasts, it’s important that I also, symmetrically, touch the other. When I leave the house, I must check the taps once, twice, three times - sometimes more… I conjure make-believe force fields to protect my loved ones. Before I can fall asleep, I must utter enigmatic words of power... Tirelessly, I insist on inventing private superstitions: they are the makeshift hoops I jump through to appease my ordinary anguish.

The British pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott thought that there was a short, crucially important period in a newborn’s life when it could feel all-powerful - provided its needs were met by “good-enough” caretakers. If, when it was hungry, it was soon fed; when it was soiled, it was soon changed; when it was worried, it was assuaged; when it was tired, it was allowed to rest; when it sought connection, it found welcoming love and attention… The child could actually believe that it was its own sheer will that caused all these needs to be met. For Winnicott, this illusion of almighty power is an essential developmental moment. He was convinced that this fleeting, extraordinary satisfaction experienced by the infant would shine on throughout its life as a kind of glow:  a secret buoyancy,  quietly underlying the bustle of experience - a vital, warm, inviting sense that life really is worth living, and that fulfillment is possible. Of course, soon enough, even with the best care, small failures, miscommunications, discrepancies inevitably end up shattering the child’s illusion - and it comes to discover that, all along, it had been dependent on its parents’ assiduous care. This confrontation with reality is always deflating, but also salutary: it helps nurture a healthy sense of selfhood, adapted to the world - but without spoiling the deep satisfaction and security that the initial illusion provided. 

In a similar vein, another famous psychoanalyst, Erik Erikson (who also famously invented his own name…), came up with the notion of “basic trust” to describe the emotional stability that an infant is able to develop in the first months of its life, provided it be given stable, constant care - especially by its mother. He thought that if this condition was met, the baby would come to believe that the world is fundamentally welcoming, predictable and orderly: in other words, that early security is the necessary basis for a confident, reliable sense of identity. If anything were to seriously disturb the initial connection between the mother and child, then, according to Erikson, it could compromise the child’s basic trust, and give rise to often intense, pernicious feelings of anxiety. This, in turn, would likely undermine a healthy emotional development: finding itself adrift in a dangerously inconsistent and inhospitable world, the child would experience life with a low-key but constant and ultimately debilitating state of alarm.

For me, “basic trust” seems to be in rather short supply, and I’m not sure why. I keep apprehending terrible catastrophes: calamities that need, over and over, to be exorcised by my leery, tiresome, repetitive, obdurate casting of spells. I seldom dare to walk out in the open, and instead cower uneasily under this myriad of paltry, improvised shields. What short circuits must have occurred? What slight, nameless, but also somehow cataclysmic maternal unavailabilities? My parents were both very loving. They cared for me as best they could, which, as far as I can tell, was quite well indeed. And yet, for as long as I remember, a cold fog of melancholy and anguish was ever ready to engulf me in its noisome pollution. And I wonder, did I simply never enjoy my measure of almighty power? And could these looming, ominous disasters I keep anticipating not have already, for me, long ago, taken place? 

If they did, perhaps - sweetly, lovingly, with deep fellow-feeling - now that I am grown, I could suggest to the unconsolable baby they must have so afflicted - to that insecure, forlorn child within - that it might finally rest; that it has been seen, and will be tended to; that its wail has been heard and its truth recognised; that it need not forever trap me in repetition - so that today the golden, the solar, the manly, the bountiful, the magnanimous, the invincible part of myself may freely, at long last, find expression.