The (Im)Permanence of Objects
Once in a while, I get to hold a newborn. Most recently, it was an emergency visit at the end of my day - but as the miraculous baby girl was placed in my arms, all my tiredness fell away. As our hour together went on, twilight turned to darkness – yet it seemed that the room was increasingly filled with light. But the time the family left, my whole office was humming.
When they are only a day or two old, babies are still mostly in that other place they lived before they were born. It is a non-dual place. There is no self, there is no other, there is only the vibration of that original energy we all came from, and that we all return to. And for about three to four months, that place is still, most of all, a baby’s home.
But around the fourth month, something happens in the baby’s mind. It splits. Instead of living in an eternal, undifferentiated NOW, the baby is able to hold an image of something that used to be. We know this developmental split has happened when a baby can play peekaboo. If there is no memory of the face that was just there a moment ago, there is nothing to compare to the emptiness. And when the face pops up again, there is no relief.
“Object permanence,” first coined and described by Jean Piaget, is sort of a contradiction in terms. It is not the object that has permanence – the object in question has in fact disappeared! It is the image of the object that persists.
And because that image remains in the mind, the child experiences the thing itself differently. It may be something that disappears and miraculously returns! It may be something to long for, to search for, to triumphantly find! But this developmental step forever changes the child’s perception of the world. The uni-verse has become di-verse.
There is compensation for this loss of unity. This is usually the time babies begin to laugh. It is funny to see Papa’s head go away – and pop right back up! A sense of humor helps us to become safe with this new and potentially terrifying phase of development. Separation becomes something we begin to perceive, and, eventually, that leads to our searching for it. Laughter helps us keep our equilibrium when our world feels shaky.
Robert Kegan, in his book The Evolving Self, creates a whole developmental model based on the way we change and grow in respect to this loss of unity. The different stages of growth are seen in terms of the way we proportion the kind of duality of experience. How much of the world do we perceive as subject, our “self?” And how much as object, or “other?”
The newborn is all subject; the entire world is an indivisible experience of what is, an experience almost too nascent to even be called “self.” As the baby begins to feel want – hunger, thirst, lack of touch, pain – something “other” needs to be added to the mix for the baby to return to a contented state. The less lack the infant feels, the more safe the infant feels.
In time, the cracks in the non-dual world of the baby widen. Object permanence is a huge crack.
And, interestingly enough, with object permanence, the world is not merely divided into two. It becomes a trinity. There is the object, and the memory of the object. But there is also a third thing that holds the other two. The Self is born, the self that holds consciousness of both the object and the memory of the object.
Yet the baby does not know this; its Self is, as yet, unconscious of itself.
Consciousness of self develops incrementally, over many years. In the usual course of things, self-consciousness comes in at adolescence – that time when the subject/object pie becomes more evenly divided. Looking across the lunchroom table, Romeo’s eyes meet Juliet’s. If object permanence is the beginning of humor, self-consciousness is the beginning of romance.
As adults, we tend to forget the way the world looked to us when we were children - and that is a normal aspect of human development. One of the hallmarks of an integrated developmental stage is the feeling that things have always been this way!
But when we project our self-conscious way of looking at the world upon the minds of children, confusion results. We may mis-read the signals of the child, interpreting the child’s expressions as if they were our own. This can cause two related problems in communication:
1. Our message has probably not been understood in the way we intended it to be.
2. We probably have no idea of the meaning the child has actually drawn from our message.
It is refreshing, at least once a day, to remember the feeling of holding a newborn. To return to the mind before it was a mind - before objects, or memories of objects - into that place of undifferentiated magic from which all minds spring. The more we are able to drop the filters of association and expectation that color our encounters with children, the more possible it becomes to see them as they are.
And if we truly want to communicate with children, that is the place to begin.