a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

In  my last blog (#57), where I presented some of D.W. Winnicott’s post war reflections on the word “democracy” and what he called the “innate democratic tendency” in societies, I indicated that he thought in terms of a basic analogy between individuals and societies. Both have developmental courses, growing –if they are lucky and well-supported—into maturity or adulthood. Mature individuals want to feel free,  be free,  live in freedom, and democratic societies permit that, or even — the best of them– foster it. He offered some examples of people living in adolescent societies where they could not be free and were actively prevented from coming to any consciousness of what they were doing. So many, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, acted without thinking. thoughtless; they lived like adolescents in an ultra-peer-pressure gang or peer cult with a charismatic adolescent leader; a formula for commiting atrocities. This was Winnicott’s assessment of the Nazi-dominated, Hitler-led German society Britain was fighting against in 1940, when he wrote his “Discussion on War Aims.” He was imploring the British to be more mature than their enemies, and not to block themselves from acting maturely by self-righteously embracing an image of themselves as better, or as good people facing off against  people who were just evil.

The analogy Winnicott was working with –a very important one, in my view—contains the danger that people might use it to think self-righteously, as though they held the position of  “good,” mature  persons already. But it could also be used dangerously by anyone harboring a prejudice against adolescents. Such a person might unknowingly hold a prejudice that adolescents are bad, wild, or rebellious beings, not-good or no good, by nature thoughtless or capable of atrocities. They could opine that adults have every reason to fear and ought to control adolescents by any means necessary. Disciplining them requires a firm hand –even firmer than the hand used with children because adolescents are bigger and stronger and closer to being able to take over than children are. (In terms I have introduced in earlier blogs, this would be childism against adolescents.)

Winnicott was not prejudiced in this way. For him, an adolescent was an older child en route by some route to adulthood, and not someone intrinsically fearsome or somehow of less value than an adult. He was concerned in his sociopolitical analyses with adolescent adults who had not gotten through the transition to adulthood, but remained stuck en route.  Adolescence is a phase, a universal phase, different in one cultural location or another, but neither good nor bad. Winnicott was analyzing not the phase itself, but the phenomena of fixation –stuckness–in that stage or regression into it.  Every adult is to some degree susceptible to regression into adolescence, but not everyone experiences such a regression or, once regressed, cannot get back on progressive course. On the social side of the analogy, he was concerned with societies where a significant portion of the population gets stuck in the adolescent developmental phase or regressed into it, and thus blocks the “innate democratic tendency” from flourishing, thinking and acting maturely.

The analogy is of no help in assessing an individual or a society if the person using the analogy, or thinking with its help, has no clear, carefully developed and researched idea what maturity or mature adulthood is. By “researched,” I do not mean in a laboratory or through the application of a ‘maturity questionnaire’ of some sort: ‘have you ever done or thought X [immature deed or thought]?’ or ‘do you consider X a mature way of behaving in this circumstance?’ or ‘do you consider yourself a mature person?’  I am referencing the kind of research Winnicott did: working clinically with children and adolescents and adults suffering from varieties of stuckness and thinking about why they could not move (by their own accounts), what they were prevented by themselves or by others from attaining developmentally. And thinking, too, about the stuckness in himself, by being analyzed and analyzing himself.   There is no one-size-fits-all definition of maturity, within a culture or across cultures.

But there is, it seems to me, a key –perhaps the key—ingredient of maturity or manifestation of it that is the same across cultures and in different historical circumstances (although the expression of this ingredient varies from place to place, time to time). Winnicott pointed to it. A mature person is able to take on the responsibility of parenting or caretaking (not necessarily as a biological parent or an adoptive one) a child  or children, and thus raising the next generation, as every child is a member of a next generation and also a representative of the next generation. Winnicott’s many papers and articles about the person he called “the ordinary devoted mother” –who could be a father, a grandparent, a caretaker, a teacher, any adult taking responsibility for a child—were all about how she is a person with the maturity to be devoted, meaning to be able to put the child’s needs and developmental requirements before her own needs. When, exhausted or frustrated in the unsatisfaction of her own needs or thwarted in her efforts to satisfy her child’s needs, she temporarily feels hatred for her child her capacity is (as he wrote in the 1947 piece called “Hate in the Transference” that I cited in blog #56) “able to tolerate hating her baby without doing anything about it.”  She does not have a rigid, unfree, self-referenced emotional life.

A society cannot be healthy, and it cannot be democratic, if many of the people who make it up are not other-oriented and future-oriented in this way. Self-sacrificing, if that is what is required, but under happier circumstances, self-restrained and far-sighted for the sake of the children. The higher animals obviously understand this (at least in the span of a generation if not through the generations with a human time-sense). So do all people who have not become denatured –not just dehumanized, but denatured–in some way. People of completely different political visions can share this idea. In all kinds of cultures, there will be people who step up to speak about their responsibility for providing their children (or at least some of them) and grandchildren with a better world or at least with a world (sometimes represented by an inheritance of place or things).

I think that this feeling for children and their meaning, this devotion to children, underlies that Rule that is (in the West) called The Golden Rule, which says: do unto others as you would have them do unto you; or (in the Confucian variant), do not do unto others what you would not have them do unto you.  Underneath or behind these formulations, it seems to me,  is a thought that goes: do unto the children as you would have had done unto you when you were a dependent child by your parents and your society and as you would have your children and society do unto you when you are old and need their help in your return to dependency in its old age form. It is a feeling for the cycle of life.  For the “Seven Ages of Man,” to note just one image-system known from ancient times in various cultural traditions, which tracks human life from dependency in infancy to dependency in old age, from new beginnings to deterioration, from dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

These reflections have to do with maturation, not morality. The Golden Rule is so basic and so universal because it formulates a universal maturational principle, not a culture-specific moral principle. The adults must care for the young and they must do so according to their best understanding of what the young need not what they themselves need, for if they do not act this way their young will not survive and flourish and grow into adulthood so that they can carry their society forward, freely, and care for the next generation.  When people get around to moral and religious pronouncements, they very often lose their clear, basic footing in the maturational principle, which has an imperative in it but not a moral imperative. Generally, moralizing, they fall into self-interest, which they do their best to disguise as not really self-interest –indeed, they often do their best to describe their moral ideas as self-less or self-sacrificing and devoted to the interests of others or selected others. No wonder it has been so difficult for thinkers to describe or analyze altruism  –what they so often end up talking about is how self-interest can be served by altruism. It seems to me that if you hear adults saying ‘we must take good care of  the children or we will die out (or so we won’t die out),’ you are not hearing altrusism speaking, but narcissism.

I have been thinking about these things this week while reading, day after day, about the many adolescents (and a few frustrated adults) going to meetings in Washington where they discuss our society’s “debt crisis” (a misnomer) and then go  posture before the news media on the topic of how we must think about the world we will leave to our children and grandchildren. There was John McCain yesterday saying we must not “mortgage our children’s future” or saddle them with the debt now accumulating.  We must scale down our government and its expenditures. Others over in his neck of the woods go on about how we must repair the deteriorated social fabric with all its horrifying promotion of perversion, abortion, lack of family values, or our children will inherit this chaos!  Across the aisle are those who say we must maintain the programs and safety nets and environmental protections without which our children have not a prayer of a good life, or perhaps even of survival in a world overheating in every possible way from temperature to new arms races.

And this debt and debt ceiling matter must be decided before August 2^nd, people of both persuasions say, for that is when the United States of America could do something unprecedented: default on its debt, to who knows what consequence for the country and the interconnected economic world. That this is, in all seriousness, the way the rhetoric is flowing in Washington and that this is our situation, is simply appalling. And I think the vast majority of Americans find it appalling –even if they join in the pseudo-argument on one side or the other, finding these to be the only sides staked out and not wanting to feel completely powerless or lonely, without a team to play for.  In the last several days, as the debt ceiling deadline day approaches, more voices appear in the news saying this is a stupid adolescent game of chicken or an adolescent display of bullying vs. bullying. This morning in the Times, columnist Paul Krugman went further and said that the extremist Republicans, which includes now almost all the Republicans, are crazy.

The diagnosticians are searching for the right diagnosis.  And many are realizing how frightening it is to say, as the old Pogo cartoon from Earth Day, 1971 put it:  “we have met the enemy and he is us.”  It is always psychologically easier, as Winnicott pointed out, to have the enemy be flying toward you in airplanes, dropping bombs in your backyards, sheerly evil, than it is to say something like: we do not know how to care for our children.

A two tier society of the ultra wealthy and the rest, with the ultra wealthy paying ridiculously little in taxes or none at all, supported in their privilege by a party that says “there will be no new taxes, period” is an adolescent society that attacks children, cuts off the prospects and the growth of the next generation. And that party is a party that transparently rationalizes its no tax policy with appeal to the future of children. So it is setting up the conditions for a youth rebellion, should the party last long enough to be saved by a youth rebellion. Listening to the Republicans, one feels we are in the United States of Saudi Arabia, minus the super-rich hereditary monarchy.

But those in Washington who argue on the progressive side, although they are not directly attacking children for the sake of adult privilege, adult “individualism” and the freedom to be narcissistic, are not articulating the principle they ought to be following.

You cannot just say you stand for the future and give priority to the needs of the young; you have to, in detail, concretely, articulate programs and policies that do that. It will not do, for example, to say all children must have health insurance if there are no “good enough” enough health services, even for a child who has insurance, and you are willing, further, to chop away at medical insurance programs to placate your political opponents in “the debt crisis.”  Too many of the progressives are rationalizing their bids to stay in Congress or the White House with appeals to the future of our children. But, really, the thinking needs to go in the other direction: start with the principle, and then find ways to follow it, really, realistically. The audacity of maturity.