a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Well, the internet’s astonishing capacity to generate social phenomena was on display again  as “a children’s book for adults” hit the number one spot on Amazon. com’s bestseller list and stayed there  for a month until it was  published on June 14^th. Yes, it hit the bestseller spot through advance sales, before it was published. The first printing of 150,000 was sold out and the book is now in its second printing from a little outfit in New York called Akashic. Meanwhile,  Canongate has acquired the UK and Commonwealth  rights, and Fox 2000 has optioned it for a film.

It’s hard to imagine how this book, which has but thirteen quatrains of text and as many  double page illustrations,  could become a film, but, commerce is commerce.  Each quatrain  follows the same parody of a lullaby formula: two lines lyrically invoke the world of animals, birds, flowers,  all creatures that  go to sleep without a fuss, without a peep, often in a harmonious huddle. Then a third line expresses some degree of irritation that a little girl of about two years old, whose father has the speaking role,  will not go thus easily to sleep. Finally, the fourth line, where the parody of a lullaby grows thickest,  is spoken by her father to himself as he tries to deal with his little girl’s sleeplessness.  Dad mutters thirteen variations on “Go the fuck to sleep,” which is also the title of the book.

At  the beginning of bed-time, for example, we read:

The cats nestle close to their kittens,

The lambs have laid down with the sheep.

You’re cozy and warm in your bed, my dear,

Please go the fuck to sleep.

From there the plot, rendered in the text but also by the illustrations, heads off in the direction of pure irritation. The child does not nod off as desired after being read a book by her father, or another book, or another. She prolongs the bedtime drama by asking for a glass of water when she is not really thirsty; she says she needs to go to the bathroom when she doesn’t; she chatters and asks questions; she wants her stuffed bear;  she cajoles and wins a glass of milk; she gets up and runs down the hall. (Strangely, in each illustration, she has a different appearance and a different set of pajamas.  At first, she is pale-skinned, blond and blue-eyed; then brunette and dark-eyed; and then, when she runs down the hall, she is suddenly naked, dark-skinned and black-haired,  a Little Black Samba—or maybe Sambo. You can’t tell, and you don’t  know the meaning of the racial shift.)  After she has finally nodded off so Dad can go join Mom to watch a movie in their living room, the girl is waked up by the Beep of the microwave   oven that has popped their popcorn. She appears at their door (white and brown-haired , and in yet another set of pajamas). This last act of defiance triggers her father’s parting lines:

Oh shit. Goddamn it. You’ve gotta be kidding.

Come on, Go the fuck back to sleep.

Great literature –or great parody–this is not.  No Peabody Award  deserved.  But it has won the author,  novelist and essayist Adam  Mansbach,  his friend Ricardo Cortes,  the illustrator,  and their publisher many more than fifteen minutes of fame and a huge windfall.  Apparently, booksellers created the sensation by circulating a pre-publication pdf. of the book to friends; someone, of course,  put the pdf. on the web,  and there it “went viral.”

Judging from the intense discussion of Go the Fuck To Sleep now in course on social networking sites,  readers fall into basically two camps.  The vast majority –90% by Adam Mansbach’s own estimate,  offered in an interview—think the book is hilarious or even “fucking hilarious”(as one of its blurbs says). It is praised for offering young parents a welcome  feeling of camaraderie in the often frustrating business of trying to control their little children without losing control of themselves.  These readers feel understood and sympathized with,  and the guilt they have often felt for being in a rage at bed-time is assuaged: miserable guilt loves company.  Mansbach has told it like it is to people with Good Parenting Seals of Approval in their minds which  they have failed, repeatedly, to deserve.  So the book is a stand-up comedian for the sleep-deprived:  it helps keep things in perspective  and provides a little straight-to-the-gut  mockery for those who incline to take themselves too seriously and want trophy children too much.  Thank you, Adam!

On the other hand, there is a smaller group of readers,  the other 10% (as minorities are, you will  have noticed,  always said to be 10%),  who are critical for various reasons.  Some resent the profanity, and find the book a sign of the vulgarization of our culture.  They think “the f-bomb” should not be dropped in public.  Some find the Dad callous and all about himself, even though he does not act out by yelling or bashing his child or committing “shaken child syndrome.” There he is, those of culture critical inclination say, grandchild of the Baby Boomers, child of Generation Xers,  turning a new  generation  into “children of the self-absorbed.” (That is the title of a 2001 self-help book by Nina Brown, an aid for children and adults trying to live with narcissistic parents. I came to know of it when a patient of mine brought her copy to our first session and told me that it captured her situation perfectly but that she had not,  even after conscientiously doing the exercises it recommends, been able to learn to live with her  narcissistic parents –maybe I could help?)

Like an argument at a summertime picnic involving alcohol,  the discussion about this book will undoubtedly escalate  further and then disappear when everyone  has had their vent and  gone home to SLEEP the sleep of the relieved,  the sleep of catharsis. It resembles the difference of opinion that clogged the web last winter when Amy Chua’s best-seller Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother was published (see blog # 36) and the camps were  drawn similarly although in opposite proportions: a huge majority of bloggers and commenters found the Tiger Mother frighteningly narcissistic as she described how she had molded and shaped her perfect children; a minority thought she was a heroine growling at the rising hoards of  undisciplined, distracted, underachieving children out there in America,  the country of crumbling economic power and  dysfunctional public schools. She was a Good Tiger or she was a Bad Tiger.  Mansbach has made a Good Dad who admits his frustration honestly –thank god somebody was honest enough to do so!—or a Bad Dad who can think only of his own frustration and, like an adolescent,  flaunt it in compulsively repeated  purilities.

Noticeably absent from both the more political Tiger Mother debate and the more domestic Go the Fuck To Sleep debate,  however,  is any real concern for the children involved.  Or any attention to Child Development,  the field that is supposed to be concerned with the children involved.  It was not Adam Mansbach’s purpose as a writer or a jokster,  of course, to get the Dad character  (or the Mom character, who is waiting in the living room to watch the movie with the Dad) to ask: why is my daughter taking two hours to get to sleep?  What is my child communicating  to me with her inability to go to sleep?  (One can imagine her book as it hits the best-seller list in, let’s say, 2021: Pay The Fuck Attention to Me! )

As I read around in the web discussion of Go the Fuck to Sleep I found myself wishing that some of the basics of Child Development were  better known  to the young parents who express such gratitude to Adam Mansbach for his ‘tell it like it is’ intention.  His pointed joking.  Wouldn’t they, if they were better informed, those weary people,  not need his cathartic guilt-relief so much?  Wouldn’t they take it for granted –and trust that they were not alone in doing so—that parents sometimes feel hatred toward  their children? And take it for granted that children sometimes feel hatred toward their parents.  Trouble and conflict between  parents and children are unavoidable,  they would know,  and what matters is how both handle the hatred.  In the handling, of course, the parents have to take primary responsibility –for they are the parents,  that’s their job and their privilege.  To handle the hatred lovingly: not deny it, disavow it,  put it onto other people; but understand it, see it for what it is, talk about it.

As readers of this blog know (see posts #54, #55), over  recent weeks  I have had my head mostly in the writings of the pediatrician and psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.  So Winnicott of course came to mind as part of  my wish that the basics of  psychoanalytic  Child Development were better known.  Specifically, I wish his radio broadcasts to parents over the BBC just after the Second World War were  better  known,  and even more specifically his paper “Hate in the Countertransference,” published in 1949 (to no viral effect).  That paper, which has a joking style in the manner of Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious,  ends with a humorous list of nineteen reasons why mothers –ordinary “good enough” mothers who love their babies—might “from the word go” hate their babies.  Let me quote a few of the reasons (retaining the generic “he” pronoun Winnicott used):

The baby is an interference with her private life, a challenge to preoccupation.

He is ruthless, treats her as scum, an unpaid servant,  a slave.

She has to love him, excretions and all, at any rate at the beginning, ‘til he has doubts about himself.

He tries to hurt her, periodically bites her, all in love.

He shows disillusionment about her.

The baby at first must dominate, he must be protected from coincidences, his life must unfold at the baby’s rate and all this needs his mother’s continuous and detailed study.

At first he does not know at all what she does or what she sacrifices for him. Especially he cannot allow for her hate.

If she fails him at the start she knows he will pay her out for ever.

After presenting the whole list, Winnicott concludes with the remark: “A mother has to be able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it.” Perhaps, he suggests, mothers are finding help in their restraint when they sing nursery rhyme quatrains –the traditional pre-internet means of guilt-free commiseration–which  the baby does not, fortunately, understand:

Rockabye Baby, on the tree top,

When the wind blows the cradle will rock,

When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall,

Down will come baby, cradle and all.

There is frank acknowledgement  here of the criss-crossed needs and desires of parents and children, which are there “from the word go” and which get ever more complicated as children grow. The child wants to eat; the mother needs to sleep. The child wants attention; the parents need to snuggle quietly with each other and watch a movie.  The parents resent giving the child the loving parenting they never got themselves; he suffers from feeling the bow broke for him; she suffers from feeling someone else, not her, got the good cradling, the secure sleep.

The second year of a child’s life is full of desires and tasks that  can bring her into open conflict with her parents. In an indoor-toilet culture, she’ll be learning to shit in the toilet –or first a potty and then a toilet—and wipe her own little ass. She’s graduating from being diapered,  cleaned and wiped by her mother or father or caretaker  into being in charge of  her own  mysterious body-productions, as earlier  she had graduated from nursing (or being bottle-fed) to using her hands to tip her sippy cup and put solid food in her own little mouth. She is acquiring words,  and she can do whatever she wants with  them. Be loving, be hurtful.  As everyone knows,  these stations on life’s way can be relatively smooth or very fraught, and everything in between.  Children can relish their accomplishments on a “developmental line” or experience every requirement as a loss –and every  attitude  or mix of attitudes in between.  But not everyone  knows how much hate can be directed at the adults for what t he child can experience as neglect or withholding or not enough attention.  And then there is the famous Oedipus Complex: the child wants the Mommy or the Daddy or the Caretaker  and has to handle the fact that others have claim on the loved one –other siblings do, the parent or caretaker  less loved at the moment does. Children protest, and find ways to sabotage any love relation that excludes –so they feel—them.  Their arsenal of sabotage weapons being limited,  they use whatever  is to hand. For example,  they keep Dad in his chair, reading yet another bedtime story, being close by, so he  cannot go watch a movie and snuggle with Mom.

I assume that an adult who  is familiar with and frank about all these ordinary clashes and conflicts has a lot better chance of controlling the hate they can arouse than an adult who is ignorant, willfully or not. The Child Development literature is, in this respect, a lot more helpful, I think, than “Rockabye Baby.” It can help you know what you are up against,  so you can be kinder to yourself and more relaxed: I’m doing the best I can in a no-win or half-win situation.  Or, if you feel you are really in trouble, it can help you ask yourself ‘why is my hate so intense today?’ ‘is it just plain old fatigue, or is there something in my own story that makes me intolerant today?’  ‘what am I afraid of?’

If showing concern for the child had been Adam Mansbach’s central concern in his book, which it was not,  the Dad would not have sent the message: look, kid, baby animals just curl up against  their parents’ warm bodies and go to sleep, even birds in flight are resting,  even the flowers are dozing  without difficulty, all your good little daycare friends are fast asleep by now, so what is the matter with you?  But he does have his Dad, a modern Dad, send the “what’s your fucking problem?” message to the child in the usual manner of enlightened, well-intentioned  modern parents –that is, his Dad blames himself while projecting his self-blame onto the child:

The flowers doze low in the meadows

And high on the mountains so steep.

My life is a failure, I’m a shitty-ass parent.

Stop fucking with me, please, and sleep.

In that quatrain, we can infer (if so psychoanalytically inclined) that the Dad unconsciously expects his child to take care of him in his weakness,  but she does not –so he feels that she spots his weakness and fucks with him, she messes with his mind, she taunts him and lies to him. “I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying,” the Dad says to himself about her as his irritation grows  hotter. The Dad has no thought that a child of two is perfectly capable of  “hearing” and understanding what he is saying to himself. He thinks she does not know what he is thinking.  Little does he know.

At the risk of seeming to have no sense of humor and no appreciation for what a labor it is to attend to children’s needs — particularly in our world,  in which distracted exhaustion is a normal adult state— I  am pointing to a phenomenon that I think we would all be better off for acknowledging  as ordinary and ubiquitous. People project their  “bad” feelings about themselves (gained in their own experience) onto other people and find those people bad; they project their angry feelings onto others and then experience those others as hostile to them.  I am a shitty-ass parent and you are taking advantage of me, you little shit child.

Pressing on, and now at the risk of sounding like one of those psychoanalysts who can make a Freudian melodrama out of anything,  I want to say that I find it easy to imagine that the Dad,  all tangled up in his projection,  was calling  himself  “shitty-assed” for good reason. That is, I imagine him speaking to himself out of the two year old self in himself who  was  or felt like a shitty-assed kid and had some pretty violent feelings about that.  Perhaps “I am a shit” or “I am an angry little shit” or “You made me shitty.” The kind of feeling anyone would want to get right out of himself in the form of a projection –“you are a shit”—as soon as possible.

Within the history of psychoanalysis, the idea that projections are the seeds of prejudices has been accepted  and explored since Freud first advanced it in 1911, writing about a really extreme case.  His subject was a judge named Daniel Schreber , who published an autobiography after he had  done quite a lot of time in a psychiatric hospital wracked with paranoid delusions. Freud’s idea was that Schreber projected  his feelings of hurt and abandonment  outward  –onto his doctor,  first and foremost—and experienced the doctor, then, as an attacker.  All doctors became attackers.  Eventually  everyone became a potential attacker.

A process like this can get directed at children—usually, thank god,  in much less extreme forms, as a kind of prejudice against children. (In a book I am finishing up now,  I call that childism.) All children,  then, are hostile little beings, persecuting their parents.  Or not giving their parents what their parents need, which often turns out to be parenting by their children.  Why does the little fucker not appreciate  that I am tired,  that I have had a hard day at work, that I just want to rest. Children ought to be considerate,  they should honor their fathers and their mothers.  They owe obedience to adults, who own them  and pay for them.  They should be seen and not heard. Go the fuck to sleep!

It’s not a bad thing that Go The Fuck To Sleep is having a viral success and provoking a lot of commentary and discussion. Every culture needs some form of comics to cast a spotlight on its practices and its prejudices.  Think what a boon the Monty Python approach to parenting was. But it would be a good thing if interpretations of jokes were  the main course after such hors d’oeuvres.  Something as nutritious as Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is unlikely, however,   to be served up on an app in your phone.