Crying is one of the primary affective/emotional signals in the oral stage, indicating “minor or major differences” in the baby’s emotional/physical state (for example, hunger, pain, distress, panic). Crying is a kind of alarm bell that triggers an immediate emotional response in the parent and a need to urgently decode the significance of the crying and respond accordingly. Eventually, the baby grasps the emotional feedback evoked by his message of crying. It is as if he obtains approval, a kind of amplification or mirroring of his sensations, legitimization for his having alarmed the caretaker, and confirmation that his message was received and acknowledged, and will hopefully be acted upon.
Progressively, the caregiver becomes familiar with the emotional messages being conveyed in the tones of the crying and the baby’s various pleas for help when feeling hunger or pain or a need for pampering, and learns to respond appropriately to his separateness. A parent who is able to decode the messages being conveyed in her baby’s crying, and to relate to her need for separateness, is less likely to become a victim of the crying.
In her psychotherapy session, Stacy expresses her helplessness and even rage toward her four-month-old baby, who cries constantly. She acknowledges that she never tries to understand why he is crying, especially between feedings; rather, she immediately picks him up and holds him in her arms for hours. She is exhausted, and feels desperate. He calms down in her arms but when she places him in his bed he starts crying again. Slowly, in parallel to her working through these feelings in therapy, she begins to recognise his separateness and to decode the reasons for his crying, until she reaches the point of joyfully taking him in her arms for coddling when he doesn’t cry, finding other ways of resolving his various signs of distress. She is amazed that she was so blind to his needs.
Our narcissism (that processes as an Emotional Immune System) retains memory traces of crying as a means of alerting the object. Therefore, even as adults we often feel we are about to burst into tears in states of distress, pain or even excitement; this may be seen as an archaic call for a familiar figure to comfort, support and share our emotional state. Crying appears to be a universal human signal of distress and pain.
Diana, a mother of two daughters, complains in her session that she easily bursts into tears “at any nonsense,” for as long as she can remember: “Yesterday I went to visit my mother, and, as usual, I burst into tears and was ashamed—but this time I understood why. I realized that mother is always alerted to comfort me or my girls when we cry…but she shares only my distress, not my joys.”
From about two months the baby uses grimaces to attract his parents’ attention, in order to connect with them or frown and withdraw from them. Smiling in general and a baby’s smile in particular, has a magic effect on other people, causing them to respond sympathetically. The smile is not an inborn characteristic. Rather, it develops gradually, starting as a muscular spasm manifested as grimacing (up to two months), and develops into a smiling response signifying recognition of the familiar (healthy narcissism: see my book The Enigma of Childhood www.ronniesolan.com/EnigmaOfChildhood )
From five months onward the smile becomes a clear, positive signal of rapprochement; the baby smiles at a familiar human face and recoil at the sight of an unfamiliar one (healthy narcissism). Then he selectively smiles at those he or she wants to, as an expression of communication, and reacts with stranger anxiety and distress to an unfamiliar face. I suggest viewing stranger anxiety as a normal developmental continuation of the baby’s primal narcissistic resistance to the unfamiliar.
The significance of the smile is similar to other signals of contact that evoke a sense of closeness, such as a hug, a kiss, and expressions of tenderness and affection.
Ella (at four months) places her mouth on her mother’s cheek in a kiss position and conveys a warm positive emotion to her. The mother “melts with pleasure.” She feels a strong affection toward Ella and responds by embracing and kissing her. At around eight months Ella is able to control her facial muscles and to give affectionate kisses to her mother, father and brother.
At fifteen months the baby can almost pronounce: “I love mommy.” Smiling and verbal expressions like “I love” can arouse closeness despite physical distance, whereas hugging and kissing obviously require physical proximity.
Kissing and biting signify opposing drives and emotions, even though the same organ—the mouth, expresses them both. Biting is easier, as it is an automatic physiological response to gum pain, and a step toward the expression of aggression. The kiss develops chronologically later than the bite; it requires emotional intent, deliberate effort and the activation of several facial muscles. It is therefore not surprising that aggressive expressions erupt more easily than expressions of love.
Facial expressions are crucial for refining affective attachment signals between the baby and his caregivers and others throughout life.
The baby generally reacts to the unfamiliar with anxiety, as the stranger or the encountered strangeness, or both, trigger his sense of vulnerability, which is accompanied by crying and the need for flight, evidenced by head turning. At the same time he seeks out his mother’s eyes to comfort him and signal she can protect him from the unfamiliar. A-Mrie Sandler (1977) elaborates this sequence as “an attempt to replace dissonance by consonance, to gain the security of the experience of the dialogue with what is known and recognised—above all, to be as close as possible to mother” (p 197). Moreover, “the child constantly and automatically also scans and has a dialogue with his own self to get refuelling and affirmation, through the perception of cues, that his self is his old familiar self, that it is no stranger to him” (ibid, italics in the original). Here Sandler is attesting to what I conceptualize as the attempts of the baby’s healthy narcissism to restore his self-familiarity or rediscover the familiar following injury (e.g., the unexpected appearance of the stranger) or trauma.
During his therapy session, Clem says: “My parents came over for a visit, and as they cheerfully approached Jonathan (seven months old) to pick him up, he burst into tears. They were hurt and gave him back to me. I felt ashamed. I wouldn’t dare reject them in this way…I felt as if Jonathan wasn’t my son, but rather a strange baby…. Without thinking, I put him straight back into my mom’s arms and he cried out in terror. I certainly did it not from affection for my mother but rather from anger toward and disappointment in my son.” The boundaries between the mature Clem and baby Jonathan became momentarily blurred, and Clem felt as though he himself were rejecting his parents. He was unable to see his baby as a separate entity, one allowed to feel a sense of strangeness toward his grandpa and grandma, still relative strangers.
Clem the father is angry with his son Jonathan for daring to act in this way towards his dear ones and “embarrassing his father.” In this emotional turmoil, the anxiety of Clem the son about losing his parents’ love prevails over his partnership with his child as a father, and his ability to contain his baby son’s stranger anxiety. Hence, he needs his infant to be nice towards the unfamiliar (stranger) grandparents. In parallel, baby Jonathan’s anxiety of losing his dad increases, due to the message that it is not okay to adhere to the familiar or to reject the strange, unexpected response he has just received from his father. The result: Jonathan the baby finds himself in the eye of a storm, surrenders to the imposition and falsifies his own self-expression. Instead of externalising the stranger anxiety that he’s feeling, he expresses a “false” affection he doesn’t feel towards the grandparents, in order to please his dad.
Conflicting interests press upon the parents: the separate needs of their baby and his vigilance toward and rejection of strangers, and their opposing need (and that of their relatives) to be recognised by him as familiar. The closer emotionally the “strangers” are to the parents, the greater the difficulty of accepting the alienation and the strangeness the infant feels. We may feel positive affection and a sense of familiarity with either parent (or both) and wish to preserve our self-familiarity. At the same time, one of our children may sense strangeness and resistance toward the same person, given his own need to preserve his self-familiarity, and we may respond with intolerance toward his reaction. Conversely, we may sense a lack of proximity and affection with either or both of our parents while he/she finds affectionate communication with one of our children: To our astonishment, delight or jealousy, they may exchange warm smiles. We need to be aware of this dilemma and be empathic to the opposing mixed feelings, and the otherness and separateness of our dearest.
The significance of the smile is similar to other signals of contact that evoke a sense of closeness, such as a hug, a kiss, and expressions of tenderness and affection.
Ella (at four months) places her mouth on her mother’s cheek in a kiss position and conveys a warm positive emotion to her. The mother “melts with pleasure.” She feels a strong affection toward Ella and responds by embracing and kissing her. At around eight months Ella is able to control her facial muscles and to give affectionate kisses to her mother, father and brother.
At fifteen months the baby can almost pronounce: “I love mommy.” Smiling and verbal expressions like “I love” can arouse closeness despite physical distance, whereas hugging and kissing obviously require physical proximity.
Kissing and biting signify opposing drives and emotions, even though the same organ—the mouth, expresses them both. Biting is easier, as it is an automatic physiological response to gum pain, and a step toward the expression of aggression. The kiss develops chronologically later than the bite; it requires emotional intent, deliberate effort and the activation of several facial muscles. It is therefore not surprising that aggressive expressions erupt more easily than expressions of love.
Gradually, as object relations progress, the baby is able to differentiate between his smiling and kissing, which evoke a tender emotional reaction on the part of his parents, and his biting and hitting, which evoke negative reactions. Slowly, he regulates (ego functions of adaptation) his libidinal and aggressive affective expressions so his bite will not be too hard, his kiss not too limp.
The biological motivation for survival gives rise to two separate psychological channels for emotional proximity with the object: a channel for emotional expressions of soothing, signaling the need for intimacy or wish for mutually pleasurable proximity between individuals, and a channel for the expression of distress, signaling the need for the sharing of suffering as a means for relieving the distress. Gradually, baby and caregiver jointly weave a unique pattern of attachment for each of these channels, based on increasingly coordinated affective attunement. Each partner transmits a sensory thrill that profoundly influences the other to participate in the joining along both channels (Solan, 1991). Some parents, however, are capable of emotional sharing in only one of these channels (like the above example of Dianna).
From the age of three months Leo grasps his mother’s hand, no longer as a reflexive response, but rather, as a controlled expression of bonding. At this age he is already able to connect sensory and motor systems, and he tries to direct his movements toward the objects and people he desires. From five months Leo and his mother signal signs of bonding to each other by means of familiar yet differentiated body language, affective expression, smiling and gazing, all of which make it possible to confidently communicate in both channels. When one of them feels that his object-relation signals are not motivating the partner to respond according to his needs, he intensifies the message or activates distress signals. When, for example, the mother doesn’t know where Leo is crawling, she calls out loudly with a concerned intonation, “Where’s my darling Leo?” Leo receives the “plight signal” and immediately returns to her. When he bangs against a table, he responds with heightened distress signals, such as crying, and he knows that his mother will come to his rescue and calm him.
In everyday life, we are not sufficiently aware of the significance of a smile, a handshake, a hug or a kiss, and its power as a magic tool for conveying affection to others. These affective expressions initiate openness and emotional rapprochement among people, as well as a sense of well-being which follows the alleviation of tension.
A very close friend shares with me an emotional experience that conveys the continuing significance of affective expressions of body language for adults. In the wake of an illness her immune system has been weakened. As a result, she has to temporarily avoid any hand contact, hugging or kissing in order to reduce the risk of contagion. She expresses her feelings via e-mail: “When we met I felt your instinctive desire to hug me, which as close friends we usually do, and I also felt my desire to embrace. The fact that I had to stop you allowed a strange, icy barrier to invade our warm, close feelings. It was painful for me. Fortunately, we still have our smiles and our gaze, which were strong enough to maintain our usual emotional dialogue. I suppose you felt it too. I feel the same with my close family. It hurts us all so much, even though we know the reason for avoiding touching, and that it is temporary. This painful experience has made me realize how much a handshake, a hug or a kiss might mean for everyone, and how much they link us, even when we feel so close to each other. Their impact goes far beyond the act of politeness.”
These rapprochement processes indicate the progress of object relations between separate individuals. Each of us tries to restore and re-experience closeness while concomitantly avoiding the threat of invasion of strangeness into the self-space and shared space of proximity. Unfortunately, because of its otherness, the object repeatedly and often inevitably arouses in us an experience of strangeness and injury. Consequently, we constantly attempt to improve the proximity and the channels of communication with the otherness of those nearest and dearest to us. Relationship and communication in their various forms have always had the same goal, namely, to re-experience a sense of love, closeness and security with a familiar affectionate figure.
(This post is cited from my book: The Enigma of Childhood- The Profound Impact of the First Years of Life on Adults as Couples and Parents (p.109)