The Child in the World: Embodiment, Time, and Language in Early Childhood

Notes

N O T E S CHAPTER ONE 1. Bachelard continues: “From my viewpoint, from the phenomenologist’s viewpoint, the conscious metaphysics that starts from the moment when the being is ‘cast into the world’ is a secondary metaphysics. It passes over the preliminaries , when being is well-being, when the human being is deposited in a being-well, in the well-being originally associated with being.” 2. “Being body means being I, and being body means being you. But being body means also: to have a world and to be in the world and to be a body for others. Being body means to be in the world, but also to be with the world, to reach, see, and serve with and toward things” (Langeveld 1968, 130). CHAPTER TWO 1. “My personal existence must be the resumption of a pre-personal tradition . There is, therefore, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am here, and who marks out my place in it. This captive or natural spirit is my body, not that momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens on this or that world, but the system of anonymous ‘functions’ which draw every particular focus into a general project. Nor does this blind adherence to the world, this prejudice in favor of being, occur only at the beginning of my life. It endows every subsequent perception of space with its meaning and it is resumed at every instant. Space and perception generally represent, at the core of the subject, the fact of his birth, the perpetual contribution of his bodily being, a communication with the world more ancient than thought. That is why they saturate consciousness and are impenetrable to reflection” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 254). 2. Perhaps people find swimming so pleasurable because it allows for the touch of the water all over the skin. Temple Grandin, an autistic animalbehavior researcher, developed a pressure chute that is effective in calming cattle and that also seems to work with autistic people. The pressure chute applies even pressure all over the person’s body, and Grandin found it very helpful in relieving anxiety (Saks 1996). I wonder if it works because it reassembles the 223 patchy and varied perceptions of the skin into a sensory whole: the world is no longer fragmented but comes to the patient as a unified field of experience. 3. It is interesting to note that young children often sleep with their arms outstretched and their hands resting above their heads. I always thought that this was a sign of full abandonment to sleep because the child felt completely safe. In middle childhood the sleep gesture changes and the arms are held in and under the covers, as if the child is more separate now and has to hold in the protective space by him- or herself. 4. The limbs are probably the first region of the body to come to awareness because they are the most immersed in action space. I discover my will when my limbs move into and change the world—and are changed by it. Adult punishment techniques often focus on restraining movement of feet and hands: the limbs are the body’s organs of willing, which have transgressed the adult-set boundaries and need to be controlled. Erikson (1968, 114) saw the achievement of the second year as the walking toddler’s struggle for autonomy and experience of him- or herself as a willing being: “I am what I can will freely.” The “I can body” in its action space becomes the matrix for the child’s sense of agency and identity. 5. “But the morbid world does not only spread around the individual, surrounding him on all sides. A much more intimate contact seems to be established between the two, a contact so intimate that the boundaries are almost obliterated. The morbid world penetrates the individual and robs him of everything intimate and personal, so that he becomes dissolved in the mysterious environment which envelops him and becomes one with it. And it is this diminution of the intimacy, of the personal character of the ego, which our patient’s complaints seem to express—complaints related to the deprivation of his freedom , the smiles imposed upon him, the drawings executed against his will, the ‘directive’ character of the voices, and to the impression that everything he reads, everything he writes, everything he does and thinks is repeated outside or accompanied...