Äðóãîå : Ðè÷àðä Áàõ
Ðè÷àðä Áàõ
Ìèíèñòåðñòâî îáùåãî è ïðîôåññèîíàëüíîãî
îáðàçîâàíèÿ
Ñâåðäëîâñêîé
îáëàñòè.
Ïðàâîâîé Ëèöåé èìåíè Å. Ð. Êàñòåëÿ ãîðîäà
Åêàòåðèíáóðãà.
Îáðàçîâàòåëüíàÿ îáëàñòü: Ôèëîëîãèÿ.
Ïðåäìåò: Àíãëèéñêèé ÿçûê.
Òåìà:
“I preserve his future, he
preserves
my past.” (R. Bach). We all are from the childhood.
Èñïîëíèòåëü:
Ó÷åíèöà 10 «Á» êëàññà
Ôàìèëèÿ È.
Î.: Êàëàøíèêîâà Ñ. È.
Íàó÷íûé
ðóêîâîäèòåëü: Âîðîíîâà
Ì.Â.
17 ôåâðàëÿ 2001 ãîäà
Contents.
“I preserve
his future, he preserves my past” (R. Bach).
We all are from the childhood.
1.
Introduction (part 1)………………………………………………3
2. Part
2…………………………………………………………5
3.
Conclusion (part 3)…………………………………………14
4. The
list of literature………………………………………..17
Introduction
(Part 1)
Everybody wants to know what is happening around
him or her? We hear about criminals, children’s creams and strange behaviour?
If analyse the last ten news-programmes,
we’ll understand than the kid’s problems stays on the same level with news
about gas or oil. The children’s problems are the most interesting and
important one for the majority of psychologists. They
tries to understand everything what is connected with children, because
everybody believes that we can change a kid, but we can not do the same with a
man. Frankly speaking I disagree with this statement. Is it means that a person
can not understand and solve all his problems? I think, that everybody does not
believe in this.
Really,
nowadays everyone is surround by a great number of problems. Some of them are
really easy, and we don’t need any help in their solving. However, life is not
so primitive, the majority of situations are really strange. If we want to cope
with such difficulties, we must understand the roots of them. We will never be
good at chemistry, physics and math without knowing the basic rules and laws.
The same is with the roots of human behaviour. We can not learn about men’s
conduct in different situations, else we’ll be able to claimant people’s
stresses and predict human reaction (it can be very useful from the criminal
side). Or, may be, we can ..!
There
are a lot of points of view on a problem, where the origin of this or that
conduct is. Freud came to believe that all the roots of possible complicates
are laying in the sexual life of a person, Bacon found them in the inward life,
in men’s ghosts and idols. A great group of people believes in mystic power,
which controls people’s existents. It means that everything has its own
beginning. If we know the origins, we will be able to give a right estimation
to the situation and, of course, to react in a proper way. But, if we can learn
about math rules from the special books, we can’t do the same, if we want to
find a local answer to the question:” where are the roots of human behaviour
and reaction? Of course, there are a lot of theories and conclusions, which are
connected with our topic. Nevertheless, the majority of them touch upon a
question about the childhood in any case. They are confident that all
information about our future life (precondition) we get in an early age, that
our problems are connected with childhood and the roots of good and evil are
not in the genes as commonly believe, but in the earliest days of life. This
idea is rather new and conflicting, but very popular and under discussion. In
this case it will not be only interesting but greatly important to learn such
material inside out, and define at last, is it a solid theory, because, if it
is, we’ll be able to understand and claimant the impediments after memorising
our past. This problem is really dillicate. For it solution, we should work
with an enormous quantity theories of different thinkers (like Freud or Birn)
and writers (like Bach and Coalio). The main idea is that the majority of
conclusions belong to the pen of European scientists. Considering the
importance of this question, it is easy to understand that it’s necessary to
work with English writing material, because different reports can give us
inexact information, and make incorrect opinion of situation. For this reason,
my paper is in English. I think, it is not very difficult to understand the
aim of this work, of course. It consists of consolidation the theories about
the questions that all our problems are from childhood, analysis of this
material and response to the issue of correctness of these ideas.
Part 2
Human
infants seem so weak and helpless at birth that it is hard to believe they are
capable of much interaction with their environment. In fact, not too long ago
many people still wondered whether new-born could even see or hear at all. In
the last several decades, however, research on the new-born has expanded
greatly, and a very different view has emerged. We now know that human
infants are born with sensory systems that are impressively able. They process
information and learn about their surroundings from the very moment of birth.
They learn the world and try to understand how to survive in it. Children acquire
an enormous amount of information in the twelve years of live. For Piaget’s
mind “to this age the personality is “shaped””. [1]
Everything
what children have learned during this years stays in the subconscious. Of
course, people cannot remember the experience of such early age, but they use
it, calling - intuition (instinct) or presentiment. So, our reactions and deeds
“depend on what we had put in our mind” [2]Lots of psychologists, the main
of them is Freud, “came to believe that current problems can often be traced
back to childhood experiences.” [3]
“Unfortunately,
these early experiences are not usually available to consciousness. Only
through great effort can they be coaxed into active memory,” [4]– said Freud to this problem.
The
ability to memorise depends on the development of brains. And, in each term,
the abilities a person’s brain can develop depend on experiences in the first
three years of life, the childhood. Studies on abandoned and severely
maltreated Romanian children, as an example, revealed striking lesions in
certain areas of the brain. The repeated traumatization has led to an increased
release of stress hormones which have attacked the sensitive tissue of the
brain and destroyed the new, already build-up neurones. The areas of their
brains responsible for the “management” of their emotions are 20-30% smaller
than in other children of the same age. Obviously, all children (not only
Romanian) who suffer such abandonment and maltreatment will be damaged in this
way.
The
attitude to the children always has its results. An American writer Alice
Millir tried to understand, why some people (Hitler, Stalin, Mao and common
one’s) are so aggressive. She wrote:” I found it logical that a child
beaten often and deprived of loving physical contact would quickly pick up
the language of violence. For him this language became the only effective means
of communication available. However, when I began to illustrate my thesis by
drawing on the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ceacescu, when I tried to
expose the social consequences of child maltreatment, I first encountered
strong resistance. Repeatedly I was told,” I, too, was a battered child, but
that did not make me a criminal. When I asked these people for details about their
childhood, I was always told of a person who made the difference, a sibling, a
teacher, a neighbour, just somebody who liked or even loved them but, at least
in most cases, was unable to protect them. Yet through his presence this person
gave the child a notion of trust and love. I call these persons “helping
witnesses”.”[5]
So, we see that these people became aggressive because they lack love
and protection in the childhood. It means that we depend not only from our
common surrounding, but from “the people from the past” [6]If a person lacked protection
in the childhood, he will feel himself uncomfortable and “even in a great
horror” [7]in
the company
of people, he’ll
want to protect himself and that’s why his reaction too
ordinary
things will be rude. Many have also been lucky enough to find
“enlightened” and courageous “witnesses”, people who helped them to
recognise the injustices they suffered, the significance the hurtful treatment
had for them, and its influences on their whole life. They may even suffer much
in their life, may become drug addicted, and have relationship problems, but
thanks to the few good experience in their childhood usually do not become
criminals. “The criminal outcome seems to be connected with a childhood
that didn’t provide any helping witness, that was a place of constant threat
and fear,”- [8]Miller
thought.
The parents attitude to the
kid finds its mirroring in his future personality and behaviour. It has been
observed again and again that parents who tend to maltreat and neglect their
children do it in ways which resemble the treatment they endured in their own
childhood, without any conscious memory of their early experiences. Fathers who
sexually abuse their children are usually unaware of the fact that they had
themselves suffered the same abuse. It is rather in therapy, even if ordered by
the courts, that they can discover, sometimes stupefied, their own history. And
realise thereby that for years they have attempted to act out their own
scenario, just to get rid of it. The majority of psychologists believe that the
explanation of this fact is that “information about the cruelty suffered
during childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of unconscious
memories. For a child, conscious experience of such treatment is impossible. If
children are not to break down completely under the pain and the fear, they
must repress that knowledge.[9]” But the unconscious memories of
the child who has been neglected and maltreated, even before he has learned to
speak, drive the adult to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again
in the attempt to liberate himself from the fears that cruelty has left with
him. For example, The German reformer Martin Luther was an intelligent and
educated man, but he hated all Jews and he encouraged parents to beat their
children. He was no perverted sadist like Hitler's executioners. But 400 years
before Hitler he was disseminating this kind of destructive counsel. According
to Eric Ericson's biography, Luther's mother beat him severely even before he
was treated this way by his father and his teacher. He believed this punishment
had "done him good" and was therefore justified. The conviction
stored in his body that if parents do it then it must be right. This example
shows, nothing that a child learns later about morality at home, in school or
in church will ever have the same strong and long lasting effect as the
treatment inflicted on his or her body in the first few days, weeks and months.
“The lesson learned in the first three years cannot be expunged,” –[10]
said Freud. So we can see that if a child learns from birth that
tormenting and punishing an innocent creature is the right thing to do, and
that the child's suffering must not be acknowledged, that message will always
be stronger than intellectual knowledge acquired at a later stage. Alice
Miller made really great research work and her conclusions give us, at last,
the hole picture of this situation:“ Usually away
from home either praying in church or running the priest's household. Stalin
idealized his parents right up to the end of his life and was constantly
haunted by the fear of dangers, dangers that had long since ceased to exist In
the lives of all the tyrants I analyzed, I also found without exception paranoid
trains of thought bound up with their biographies in early childhood and the
repression of the experiences they had been through. Mao had been regularly
whipped by his father and later sent 30 million people to their deaths but he
hardly ever admitted the full extent of the rage he must have felt for his own
father, a very severe teacher who had tried through beatings to "make a
man" out of his son. Stalin caused millions to suffer and die because even
at the height of his power his actions were determined by unconscious,
infantile fear of powerlessness. Apparently his father, a poor cobbler from
Georgia, attempted to drown his frustration with liquor and whipped his son
almost every day. His mother displayed psychotic traits, was completely incapable
of defending her son and was but were still present in his deranged mind. His
fear didn't even stop after he had been loved and admired by millions.” [11]
But,
what happen with people who were loved in their childhood? They have a better
live without violent and horror. There are people who grow up with loving and
protecting parents who “can later find a kind, sympathetic partner, can
organize their life and become good parents”, even “if they have to go
through the horror of a concentration camp during their adolescence” [12] after
learning about Pablo Picasso we can mention the severe trauma that the child
Pablo Picasso underwent at the age of three: the earthquake in Malaga in 1884,
the flight from the family's apartment into a cave that seemed to be more safe,
and eventually witnessing the birth of his sister in the same cave under these
very scary circumstances. However, Picasso survived these traumas without later
becoming psychotic or criminal because he was protected by his very loving parents.
They were able to give him what he most needed in this chaotic situation:
empathy, compassion, protection and the feeling of being safe in their arms.
Thanks to
the presence of his parents, the two enlightened witnesses of his fear and
pain, not only during the earthquake but also throughout his whole childhood,
he was later able to express his early, frightening experiences in a creative
way. In Picasso's famous painting "Guernica" we can see what might
have happened in the mind of the three-year-old child while he was watching the
dying people and horses and listening to the children screaming for help on the
long walk to the shelter. Small children can go unscared even through
bomb-raids if they feel safe in the arms of their parents.
It is
much more difficult for a child to overcome early traumatizations if they are
caused by their own parents. Here we have an another example. I analysed the
childhood of the writer Franz Kafka. I’ll try to show that the nightmares he
describes in his stories recount exactly what might have happened to the small,
severely neglected infant Kafka. He was born into a family in which he must
have felt like the hero of The Castle (ordered about but not needed and
constantly misled) or like K. in The Trial (charged with
incomprehensible guilt) or like The Hunger Artist who never found the
food he was so strongly longing for. Thanks to the love and the deep
comprehension of his sister Otla in his puberty, his late "helping
witness," Kafka could eventually give expression to his suffering in
writing. Does it mean that he therefore overcame his traumatic childhood? He
could indeed write his work, full of knowledge and wisdom, but why did he die
so early—in his thirties—of tuberculosis? It happened in a time when he knew
many people who loved and admired him. However, these good experiences could
not erase the unconscious emotions and memories stored in his body.
Kafka
was hardly aware of the fact that the main sources of his imagination were
deeply hidden in his early childhood. Most writers aren't. But the amnesia of
an artist or writer, though sometimes a burden for their body, doesn't have any
negative consequences for society. The readers simply admire the work and are
rarely interested in the writers' infancy . However, the amnesia of politicians
or leaders of sects does afflict countless people, and will continue to do so,
as long as society remains blind to the important connections between the
denial of traumatic experiences in early childhood and the destructive,
criminal actions of individuals.
An
American writer, Richard Bach, is well knowing by his Fantasy and Philosophy.
He solves difficult problems, which are connected with “Human psychology”.
He does not have special education, Richard is only a pilot (in any case, he
was…before he began to write). His first book was “Sea-gull”, than “breach
through the eternity”, “One”, “Plane” etc. In this stories and novels Bach
taught upon lots of different topics, and one of them is about childhood. This
man deadly believe that a person cannot live without his past. And what do we
have there, in the past? Of course, childhood! This topic glassed in one of the
latest work: “Running from the safety”. The main idea of the plot is that “Richard-men”
[13]( he prefers to write about
himself rather then to work with heroes) meat “Richard-kid”. It means
that he, the old one, meat in his own world a little boy of eight years old.
This boy is “HE”, but from the past. In this novel Richard Bach tried to
answer the the question: ”What will you do if you meat
yourself-from-the-past?” The own correct response he has able to find is “to
learn everything what you can from this kid”. What can you learn from the
little child from your past? What he can give us? This questions can appeared
in the mind of everybody… in “Running…” Bach neatly respond to them: “he
remembers all what I have forgot” Really, we have spoken about this
already, all information which people get in an early age cannot be remembered
further. But kids retain all this, cause it still in their active memory. Some
people had critical moments in their childhood, which influence their lifes,
but they cannot remember this episode – the most impotent one – and that’s why
cannot change the situation. For example, a man is a looser all his live. He
cannot do anything with this. Why? After memorising his childhood, he
remembered that he was whipped by schoolboys and after this all the school was
laughing at him…He understood everything and tried to change the attitude to
this situation at last we won for first time. Richard Bach had such critical
moments too. At first, the death of his brother and his climbing to the
water-tower. After this he understood that he was not a little boy, and “left
the family and common world” after this moment he decided to become a
pilot and “made the biggest fault” in the live: went to the army. Why
he did it? For what he left the family? Why his behaviour was such as it was?
Richard cannot understand. But after the talk with Dickey (Little Bach) he was
able to explain all this to himself and “ the desert” – Dickey’s world –
“converted in a field of green grass”. At first Richard was not able
to “survive in the dark of the mind”. But Dickey was able to return to
Bach “the part of himself”, and he did it. Now he could be “ out of
space and time”. Telling things about the live and answering to Dickey’s
questions, Bach found lots of responses for his own issues. “Dickey knows
everything about the childhood, and I knows everything about one of his
Futures”, - told Richard to his wife. So, the boy could find all the
answers in several months, and spare 50 years of had learning the live. The man
remembered the half of his life and understood the roots of all the problems.
And both took that they could not live without each other. “I
preserve his future, he preserves my past”, - said Richard Bach and he was
absolutely right.
Conclusion (Part 3).
So, we can see
that the question about the Childhood is really important. It found the glass
in many spheres of human life and men’s deeds. It is not a science theory, but
a reality. We know that every cow is an animal doesn't include the statement
that every animal is a cow. It has been proved that many adults have had the
good fortune to break the cycle of abuse. Yet I can certainly aver that I have
never come across persecutors who weren't themselves victims in their
childhood, though most of them don't know it because their feelings are
repressed. The less these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous
they are to society. So I think it is crucial to grasp the difference between
the statement, "every victim becomes a persecutor," which is wrong,
and the statement, "every persecutor was a victim in his childhood,"
which I consider true. The problem is that, feeling nothing, he remembers
nothing, realises nothing, and this is why surveys don't always reveal the
truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened witness ... therapist, social
worker, lawyer, judge ... can help the criminal unlock his repressed feelings
and restore the unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the
process of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence. Working
toward a better future cannot be done without legislation that clearly forbids
corporal punishment toward children and makes society aware of the fact that
children are people too. The whole society and its legal system can then play
the role of a reliable, enlightened and protecting witness for children at
risk, children of adolescent, drug addicted criminals who may themselves become
predators without such assistance. The only reason why a parent might smack his
children is the parent's own history. All other so-called reasons, such as
poverty and unemployment, are pure mystification. There are unemployed parents
who don't spank their children and there are many wealthy parents who maltreat
their children in the most cruel way and teach them to minimise the terror by
calling it the right education. With a law prohibiting corporal punishment
towards children, people of the next generation will not have recorded the
highly misleading information in their brain, an almost irreversible damage.
They will be able to have empathy with a child and understand what has been done
to children over millennia. It is a realistic hope to think that then (and only
then) the human mind and behaviour will change. With a law that forbids
spanking every citizen becomes an enlightened witness.
So, we see that
everything lays in ourselves. It is easy to understand that people can change
everything around themselves. The theory about personal children problems is
really correct. Now everybody can just analyse his past and remember the main
idea of his last deeds. They will help him to solve the difficulties. It is the
easiest way to survive in your own inside world, which can be a bright one. But
the main problem is that not everybody knows about this theory, and especially
such people can not be happy and live an easy life else the whole world can be
changed. People will understand all their problems and (it is important) now
how to behave and solve all the difficulties. It means – no depress, mad people
and their deaths, good social situation, at last. To my mind we should try to
use this material, because it can help us and it will be so easy to understand
each other and, at the first term, ourselves, is not it?
The list of literature
1. “People, who play in games” A.
Birn
2. “Psychology”
Camille B. Wortman
Elizabeth F. Loftus
3. “ The Childhood Trauma” Alise Miller
4. “Running
from Safty” R. Bach
5. “Interpretation
of dreams” S. Freud
[1] The list of literature. The 2nd book.
[2] The list of literature. The 1st book.
[3] The list of literature. The 2nd book
[4] The list of literature. The 5th book.
[5] The list of literature. The 3rd book.
[6] The list of literature. The 1st book.
[7] The list of literature. The 3rd book.
[8] The list of literature. The 3rd book.
[9] The list of literature. The 2nd book.
[10] The list of literature. The 5th book.
[11] The list of literature. The 3rd book.
[12] The list of literature. The 3rd book.
[13] The list of literature. The 4th book. Other quotes
are from this book.
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