The Unconscious Mind Anxiety

With the poetic insight and in a poet's lan­guage William Wordsworth captured in the passage quoted on this page one essential secret of normal personality development — step-by-step constriction of the innate im­pulses of the newborn infant.

Personality has been aptly described as "the sum total of our ways of behaving, espe­cially toward other people.'' Our behavior is controlled not only by apparently conscious thought and decision in the here and now but also by our emotions, which have roots in the past. To put it in another way, we are al­ways influenced more or less by our uncon­scious mind, which is the dwelling place of our emotions and the matrix of our personality structure.

PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT

"As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines." "The child is father to the man." In these old proverbs also is summed up a great deal of the best present-day knowledge of normal personality development. This development begins at birth. The behavior patterns of later life are established in the cradle, the nursery, and the elementary school room.

Despite individual differences, personality development follows a fairly consistent and universal pattern. It normally proceeds step by step, stage by stage toward the elusive, relative, and rarely attained goal of "emotional maturity." Physical growth and biolog­ical readiness precede the emotional develop­ment. Each intermediate stage in personality development must be worked through before a person can go on to the next stage. No one can leap from infancy to adulthood. Arrested and distorted development, however, is all too common. The relationship of the individual with his own family, from earliest infancy onward, is a crucial factor in personality de­velopment

The Stages of Love

The newborn infant is small and helpless, utterly dependent on his mother or her sub­stitutes for very survival, yet he is born with the divine spark of life in him the will to live and love. The innate will to survive, to grow up and enjoy life is the basic font of vital human energy, it has been given the name of libido. As personality development progresses, a large part of the libido evolves into more directed and controlled feelings, which we call love. Fully developed, the libido repre­sents all those inner strivings which tend to preserve and extend life to "heal, cultivate, protect, and inspire" the human personality. But in the infant this love force appears in a crude, undifferentiated, untutored form.

The infant begins by loving himself. This is called narcissistic love, after the Greek legend of Narcissus, the handsome lad who fell in love with his own image in a pool. The infant "loves" and finds pleasurable gratification in different parts of his own body in a regularly observed succession. His first libidinal at­tachment is to his mouth (he puts everything into it), then to his anus, then to his genital organs.

As he becomes increasingly aware of the difference between himself and other people, the infant gradually shifts his love to objects outside himself. The first libidinal shift is to his mother, then to other members of the household. The young child identifies himself closely with his parents, idealizes them, and seeks to imitate them. This is imitative love.