Abstract
We see symptoms in our restless and disconnected youth and in the aging baby-boom generation indicating that many people are having difficulty experiencing meaning in their lives. One way to address this is to restore and create continuity in the lives of individuals beginning from the time of birth and proceeding throughout the passages of life. The components of continuity are consistent and coherent child care, a sense of realness, a sense of control, a sense of past, present, and future, availability of spaces without fear, childrearing consistent with the socio-economic environment, experiential marking comprised of historical-cultural narrative and ongoing ritual, and communion. While it is often impossible to have all aspects of continuity present at any one time, the successful intertwining of continuity's threads during one's lifetime can help reestablish purpose and meaning where it may have been lost.
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References
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment. Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1965, pp. 43–46.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 10.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, pp. 139–142.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 141.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, pp. 148–149. “Purposeful misattunements,” on the other hand, are often used by the mother to affect the child's behavior, either to increase or decrease activity or affect.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 149.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 148.
Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant. New York: Basic Books, 1985, p. 151.
Otto Kernberg, “Hatred as a Core Affect of Aggression,” in The Birth of Hatred, ed. Salman Akhtar, Selma Kramer, and Henri Parens. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995, p. 61.
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, p. 52 and Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers. New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1992 [1975], p. 303.
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, p. 54. Winnicott believes that there is a primary state of ego unintegration during the time just after birth and that there is an inherited potential, which is really the individual's central self, that is attempting at this point to come into being. Because the individual's self does not really exist yet, there is no way for the infant to differentiate between good and bad maternal care, between self and other. This is a different perspective from Stern's, since Stern believes that the self exists from the beginning and is capable of discerning impulses coming from the self or from others outside the self. However, for Stern, at this early stage, the infant is organizing experience, there is an emergent sense of self. The failure of environment is the inability for the self to organize experience. See Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant, pp. 45, 67.
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, p. 47, and, Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis, p. 303.
D.W. Winnicott, The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, p. 24 (a summary of Melanie Klein's theories), and p. 76.
Klein states "...from early days onwards the mother's unconscious attitude strongly affectsthe infant's unconscious processes."Melanie Klein,Envy and Gratitude and Other Works:1946-1963,vol.3 of The Writings of Melanie Klein,ed.Roger Money-Kyrle,New York:TheFree Press,1975,p.116.Stern also says that "...the parents'intersubjective responsivityacts as a template to shape and create corresponding intrapsychic experiences in the child.Itis in this way that the parents'desires,fears,prohibitions,and fantasies contour the psychicexperiences of the child."The Interpersonal World of the Infant,208.
Alice Miller, Prisoners of Childhood: The Drama of the Gifted Child and the Search for the True Self, trans. Ruth Ward. New York, Basic Books, 1981, p. 34.
Madeleine J. Nash, “Fertile Minds,” Time magazine, 3 February 1997, p. 51.
Madeleine J. Nash, “Fertile Minds,” Time magazine, 3 February 1997, p. 52.
According to Kohut,"What a child needs is neither continuous,perfect empathic responsesfrom the side of the self-object nor unrealistic admiration.What creates the matrix for thedevelopment of a healthy self in the child is the self-object's capacity to respond with propermirroring at least some of the time;what is pathogenic is not the occasional failure of theself-object,but his or her chronic incapacity to respond appropriately,which,in turn,is dueto his or her own psychopathology in the realm of the self."Heinz Kohut,The Restoration ofthe Self (New York,NY:International Universities Press,1997,p.187 fn.8.
This discussion is related, although not identical, to Winnicott's concept of the True and False Self. See The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, especially Chapter 12, “Ego Distortions in Terms of True and False Self.”
May discusses the results of studies he performed to determine the degree of anxiety inindividuals who had been rejected by their mothers.He had theorized that the greater de-gree of rejection,the greater the anxiety.However,he found that while the middle-class girls,unwed mothers,fit his theory nicely,the lower-class girls did not.What he discovered wasthat the "middle-class young women were always lied to in their families.They were rejectedby mothers who pretended to love them."The "proletarian girls"were rejected by motherswho let them know they were rejected.Therefore,these girls found other companions andsources of security.He concluded:"it is not rejection by the mother that is the originaltrauma which is the source of anxiety;it is rather rejection that is lied about [May's italics ]."Rollo May,Courage to Create.New York:Norton,1975,p.58.
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge, 1991, [1971], p. 9.
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality. New York: Routledge, 1991, [1971], p. 9.
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Frankl, The Will to Meaning. New York: New American Library, 1969, p. 17.
Summary notes to a video produced by Joel Barker called “The Power of Vision.” Barker uses research published by Benjamin Singer in the book The Future Focused Role Image.
Summary notes to a video produced by Joel Barker called “The Power of Vision.” Barker uses research published by Benjamin Singer in the book The Future Focused Role Image.
Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 82.
Summary notes to a video produced by Joel Barker called “The Power of Vision.” Barker uses research published by Benjamin Singer in the book The Future Focused Role Image, p. 109.
D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, p. 54.
The starting point for this particular discussion comes from Erikson's ideas on child training and culture. See Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1985, pp. 95, 138, 237–238, 245.
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The idea of bridging securities came from Prof. Donald Shriver, Union Theological Seminary in a conversation on 2/13/97.
For the notion of rituals at places of perceived crisis, see Erich Neumann, “Creative Man and Transformation,” in Art and the Creative Unconscious, trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Bollingen Foundation, 1959, pp. 153–154. The physiological effect of ritual is described in Richard Schechner's “Ritual, Violence, and Creativity,” in Creativity/Anthropology, ed. Lavie, Smadar, Kirin Narayan, and Renato Rosaldo. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, p. 301.
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Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p. 49.
Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991, p. 159.
Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, p. 160.
Neumann, “Creative Man and Transformation,” p. 154.
Neumann,"Creative Man and Transformation,"p.154.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980 [1951], p. 23.
Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980 [1951], p. 39.
Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 104.
In 1995, for the first time in seven years, the juvenile arrest rate for violent crime (defined by the FBI as murder, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault) dropped 2.9% and the juvenile arrest rate for homicides declined for the second year in a row. However, if we examine other crime categories, a different picture comes into focus. Since 1990, the number of juvenile arrests for offenses against family and children has grown each year, resulting in a 94 percent increase during that time. Arrests for drug violations has risen each year since 1992—arrests for juvenile drug violations between 1990 and 1995 increased 34 percent. Juvenile weapons violations and gambling arrests showed their first decline in 1995, however, compared to 1990, they grew 227 and 63 percent respectively. These are enormous changes, and not only do they reflect a high rate of increase, but they show a much higher rate of increase than for the general population. See the analysis in the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 1990–1995, and preliminary statistics for 1996. Not recorded in the crime reports is violence perpetrated against the self. This includes suicide and various behavior disorders and addictions. From 1980 to 1992, the rate of suicide among persons aged 15–19 years increased by 28.3%, and among persons aged 10–14 years by 120% (Suicide in the United States, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Division of Violence Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Wide Web address: http//www.cdc.gov/ncipc/dvp/suifacts.htm, obtained 2/23/97). Behavior such as self-mutilation, anorexia, and bulimia is reported more frequently in therapists' offices, some of which could be due to a greater willingness to get help for these problems, but an unmistakable rise in occurrence is the foundation for the increase.
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Lewis, L.C. Continuity and Meaning. Journal of Religion and Health 37, 143–158 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022982932498
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022982932498