We settled on the moment of birth as the start of the becoming of a self because we had direct experience of that process. That came partly because most of us had heard that we learn more between zero and three years old than in any other time of life. It came partly because others factors that happen before birth were beyond our current ability to do much about in any way. Our genetic structure and our prenatal life were just set. We might be able to do something with what happened after.
We begin to learn about the world at birth. I am old enough to know my first experience of life came with cold, intensely bright lights, and a sudden whack on my buttocks. It was standard operating procedure into those days, and I can't remember or imagine how terrifying that must have felt to an entity that had existed in a kind of muted, sensory paradise. It's probably just as well that I don't remember.
What a way to come into the world. What a way to go out of the other life. What a way to begin for the becoming self.
That moment and the coming discussion about our earliest years brought me to remember a book I read in a very different context for a very different reason: Smart Love: The Compassionate Alternative to Discipline That Will Make You a Better Parent and Your Child a Better Person, by Martha Heineman Pieper and William J. Pieper. I decided to use it to center this early discussion of the becoming self. It fit.[9]
A baby is born, and we asked what it does for a living. Whatever we may assume about a baby's life, that person works as hard as or harder than any child or adult. When we consider all the brain work and confusion and discovery that baby must make to become a self, an active person, our minds recoil from the effort needed. Other than that endless learning and making sense out of the chaos of the world, giving the world form, it sleeps, it eats, it defecates, and it cries. Crying often makes for the most unhappy of times for the baby and for the caretaker.
Why does the baby cry? It feels a need, and it has no other way to communicate. Communication through crying certainly communicates need and, often, anxiety about that need. Actually, when we look at the whole idea of communication, it must start with need. Our needs may grow more complex as we age, so does our communication, but they remain needs.
What needs to does this baby feel? It needs food. It needs shelter. It needs physical care. It also feels another need which may not drive in the same way as the physical demands it feels, but in the long run, when it doesn't get this need satisfied, all the rest of the needs may come to little or nothing. When the baby does not receive what Carl Rogers calls "unconditional positive regard," what most of us call unconditional love, the child/baby's becoming self and developing person will falter to one degree or another. Such children fail to grow normally or develop generally. They may die. This was strikingly noticed in institutions that took care of all the physical needs of babies, but did not have the staff to take care of the emotional needs of these babies. They "failed to thrive" as the technical phrase goes. This need for the unconditional care, emotional warmth feels as vital as or more vital than all the others. So babies cried even when they felt no physical needs. That cry is often very hard to answer.
The students and I decided that this phenomenon does not end with babyhood. That need remains within each of always. We may not cry to get it met, but we find ways to try to express our need to others. Knowing that felt helpful in seeing how the self becomes and continues becoming. Becoming, we decided, never ends, nor does the need and desire for unconditional positive regard.