16. Victim vs Psychic Agent
Make no bones about it, you have psychic agency
Infants are indeed fed or not fed, carried about nestled against mothers’ chest or propped up in an infant seat*. They are wrapped too loosely, too tight or just enough. Infants may sleep in cradles or in ‘mothers’ bed. As noted, during their first few weeks infants cannot direct physical movement. They do communicate however, with whimpers, loud crying, flailing about and settling down.
Mother, father and caretakers having complete control of external events, take communications of their infant into account to varying degrees.
Parents do not control internal psychic events. Parents influence internal events. Your own pattern recognition system builds the foundation for what will subsequently be called your personality. Your own pattern recognition system makes qualitative ‘judgements.’ Parents think you will not remember events. Well, you do and you don’t.
Innumerable problems may follow as a result of experience of life during the first year. The driver of these developments is the legacy of schemas mapping events by you within your own ‘mind space.’
This is profoundly significant. Exclusive focus upon the ‘they did and they didn’t dos’ of parents and caretakers denies the reality of your own mental wherewithal. The shift of focus to the ever-active self organizing processes occurring within you, even as we speak, brings into view one of the most powerful information management systems in the world. It’s yours. You own it. It is within you.
Exploration of your mind system, psychoanalysis, permits you to well know this system. As a result, some characteristics of the system will simply self correct. Some characteristics of the system, those that well serve you, will amaze you. All of this behind-the-scenes activity enables you to thrive. Some characteristics of the system will make you laugh ie; ‘ I concluded that at the ripe old age of six?! Silly me.’ Some characteristics of the system will require some effort to modify.
I must point out that the system does have defenses. The ability of the system to change, to help or enable us to improve ourselves, varies with patterns of defenses deployed.
The point here is that the victim mindset, ‘my mother did or didn’t do X,’ ‘my father did or didn’t ever do Y,’ fails to recognize psychic agency. Only with recognition of psychic agency can it be mobilised to ‘alter and refresh’ the mind system.
*Plastic infant seats are popular in some countries. Swaddling and propping babies up with some other frame is a well known practice historically and cross culturally.