CRITICA

“He continued on the unfathomable that children are” (Hugo Mãe p. 33) 

We will start from the premise that a human being needs another human being in order to come into being, to survive the early stages of life, and to become included in the world and in the symbolic network of communication with other humans. We will call this other, who is the sustainer of early survival, the primary caregiver. A human being needs another human being attuned to them—someone who is willing to relinquish their own needs for a certain period of time in order to attune to the pressing needs of another. This condition of fine-tuned attunement, typically provided by primary caregivers, is a sine qua non for the emergence of the human self.

We must, however, define  the appropriate boundaries to this statement. Community, siblings, school, care institutions, adoptive families, child psychoanalysts and many others are entrenched in these boundaries.

The human other takes a fundamental place in human development. It is not true that this primary care can only be received within the family and, further, that a family can support itself on its own. The first few years of life  are very important in organizing a future path, often this primary other is the mother or the father, but so many times it is not. And this primary caregiver can only play that role if others are available to them and even to the baby.

Although we recognize the essential importance of early times, it is certain that human care never ends at that first period. We adults know this quite well: it is not because we may have had a good outset in life that other major problems may not await us in the future. Even if the beginnings of life have been satisfactory, nothing can guarantee that a future event may not cause a collapse in the entire foundation built in the early years. Valter Hugo Mãe says that “a child was born for the future, never just for the present [,] (…) children are for later, never just for now. (…)” (Hugo Mae, 2011, p 64), reinforcing the germinative and enigmatic nature that the future always holds.

In the book Lullaby [Canção de ninar] by Leila Slimani, we follow the description an early motherhood that, in the opposite direction to what we stated, saw itself as self-sufficient.

“Mila was a fragile, irritable baby who would not stop crying. She couldn’t gain weight, refused her mother’s breast and the feeding bottles her father prepared. Leaning over the cradle, Myriam had even forgotten about the world outside. Her ambitions were limited to making her skinny, crying daughter gain a few grams. The months passed without her realizing it. (…) Myriam didn’t even want to hear about babysitters. She was the only one capable of answering to her daughter’s needs” (Slimani, 2016, p.14).  

When her daughter was about a year and a half old, Myriam got pregnant again, of a second child named Adam, and things became unsustainable. The family’s project of sufficiency, or more specifically, the mother’s sufficiency, fell apart.

“She was not aware of what was coming. With two children, everything was far more complicated: going shopping, bathing, going to the doctor, house cleaning. The bills piled up. Myriam became gloomy. She began to hate going out to the park (…) Mila’s whims irritated her, Adam’s first babbles were indifferent to her. Each day, she felt more and more the need to be alone and wanted to scream like crazy in the street. They are eating me alive, she thought sometimes.” (Slimani, 2016, p.15) 

Finally, she decided that “that simple, silent, prison-like  happiness was not enough to console her.” (Slimani, 2016, p.18)

To give oneself to the beginnings of another involves a kind of sacrifice that flirts with the impossible, and that is why a support network is essential. A network of direct care for the baby, establishing the possibility of alternation, and a network of care directed at the caregiver. For a caretaker to be able to let go of their own egoic and narcissistic boundaries, of their own position in the world, to be able to suspend themselves for a moment and thereby attune to the needs of a human infant, of a human future, this caretaker must be supported by other circles of cultural and community care.

Daddy, mommy, and little child only exist because there is alternation, because one is not with the children all the time, because there is support from teachers, neighbors, and friends.The experience of isolation brought on by the Covid pandemic branded this truth in us like fire and iron: it’s not possible to be just a father and a mother, and father and mother cannot be alone. The condition of social isolation has brought down the fallacy of nuclear family self-sufficiency, moreover we observe that for a family to be able to raise their children, they need the street, the school, the hospital, the extended family, friends, art and so many other things. Many others besides parents are fundamental caregivers.

“The man reached the age of 40 and took on the sadness of not having a son. His name was Crisóstomo. 

He was alone, love had failed and he felt everything was half missing. (…) 

Filled with absence and silence like precipices or deep wells.  (…)

Crisóstomo started thinking that sometimes children were lost in the confusion of the road. He imagined children alone as someone’s son or daughter waiting. (…) He believed that true affection was the only enlightenment, the great way of encounter and belonging. The great way of family.

It was like that because, at the age of forty, Crisóstomo took on the sadness to reclaim hope.” (Hugo Mãe, V., 2012, p. 11-12, p.14-15)  

So many times adoption is a way of guaranteeing the initial conditions for a human life and, in general, against this solution there is a resentment discourse such as “it should be the biological family”. In Valter Hugo Mãe’s book, The Son of a Thousand Men [O filho de mil homens], which we have just quoted, we find a bet on a loving constitution going against this resentment, allowing parenthood and filiation to be considered in different ways. In the excerpt above, we follow the construction of an appeal for adoption by the character Crisóstomo, who affirms his predisposition to offer himself as a primary love object.

Crisóstomo, a 40-year-old single fisherman, wanted a son. He meets Camillo, a 14-year-old boy who had been orphaned for the second time after the death of his adoptive grandfather. Camilo was a much desired son by his mother, a woman with dwarfism who had become pregnant by one of her 15 lovers and died in childbirth. “The child was the remnant of a bead from another body, which, in the moment of death, seemed to revolt in an attempt to leave a memory”. (Hugo Mãe, V., 2012, p. 63)

When his mother died, Camilo was adopted by the elderly Alfredo. Alfredo, in his turn, was the widower of Carminda, also called Minda, who strongly wished to give birth to a child, something she never achieved. “Sitting with Camilo on his lap, [Alfredo] thought: Minda, our baby has arrived. Then he rested his hand on the boy’s head, as if to put the right soul in his body, and smiled.”  (Hugo Mãe, V., 2012, p. 66) Alfredo called himself his grandfather. And it was in his house that Crisóstomo found Camilo, disconsolate by his grandfather’s recent death, and took him to be raised at his house.

“He was a boy on the edge of the world, almost lost, unknowing how to hold himself and unknowing the path. His eyes had a precipice.   And he was about to fall inside his own eyes, in the infinite precipice dug inside himself. A boy full of absences and silence. “ (Hugo Mãe, V., 2012, p. 15) 

There was also Isaura, a devirginized woman, “foundling and tiny”, who no one wanted to marry. So she married Antonino, a gay man. “It was a common idea for gay men to look for foundling women for appearance marriages.” (Hugo Mãe, V., 2012, p. 54)  Just like Crisóstomo and Camilo, Isaura “was a woman full of absences and silence.    (…) Inside Isaura, Isaura fell.”  (Hugo Mãe, V., 2012, p. 60) After Camilo’s (second) adoption, Isaura and Crisóstomo meet, fall in love with each other and move in together.

The mom-dad-child model was impossible to them, ejected from the  traditional family model. Crisóstomo and Isaura have never married, Antonino was gay, Camilo’s mother was a dwarf who was assumed to have no sexuality at all, Alfredo and Carminda never managed to get pregnant. Far from the fantasized wholeness of traditional families – which we saw with Myriam in Slimani’s novel – the members of the adoptive bond explored by  Hugo Mãe are figures marked by absences and voids. Within them, wounds exist before the love encounter.

We know that, regardless of the child’s age, if they truly and confidently settle into the adoptive bond, they will recover some of the newborn’s despair and will call upon the bond with the same level of fine attunement. It’s not a matter of counting years, but of the intensity of the primal openness to a constitution in dependence.

One’s family of origin is not always the best place to offer care. Many children spend their entire childhood, up to the age of 18, in a care institution and it is imperative to recognize that these places assume a role of primary care, going beyond a place of just waiting for adoption. Assuming  that real care only begins with adoption produces children who cannot lodge themselves at the institution and who spend years as if life would only happen afterwards. There is life there, already.

Psychoanalysis, especially child psychoanalysis, sometimes fails to recognize the importance of others than family in children’s and teenagers’ lives, failing to legitimize school, friends, music bands, etc. as worthy and necessary constitutive interlocutors for a patient’s mental health. I have seen cases of withdrawn teenagers, struggling to detach from their family’s environment and to mingle into a circle of friends and colleagues. In some of these cases, when the teenager timidly became interested in a colleague or in an idol from adolescent culture, the analyst associated the bond with these new others to relationships with primary caregivers, which pulled the rug out from the hesitant step that the teenager is attempting to take, once more forcing them back into the family’s nest. It is sort of a psychoanalytic kink to overvalue primal times, which ends up inflicting father’s and mother’s figures even where they are not called upon. 

Often, those necessary others besides the family get stuck in the resentment position that we have just pointed out – ‘it should be the mother or the father’. In this position, instead of widening the child’s care network, strengthening not only the child, but also the caregiver, they stick to a condemnatory position that implodes the whole care field. This is how we hear in the book Lullaby the following sentences addressed to Myriam by her children’s teacher. These are sadistic phrases from people who exempt themselves from the consternation that involvement in a care network brings, pointing out parents as failures and, therefore, establishing an ideal of caregivers who know everything and who are not inhabited by absences, silence and precipices like the characters involved in creating the humanizing network of “a thousand men” that we will continue to follow.

“If you only knew! It is the century’s evil. All these poor children are abandoned to themselves, while their parents are devoured by the same ambition. It is simple, they run all the time. Do you know the sentence parents more often say to their children? “Let’s go soon!”. And, of course, we are the ones who bear everything. Children make us pay for their anguish and their sense of abandonment.” (Slimani, L. [2016]. 2018, p. 35).

Myriam’s children’s  teacher seems to be saying that, if parents could do their job well, these teachers would not be burdened with anguish. But where has one ever seen care without anguish?

Elsewhere, Paul’s mother-in-law, Sylvie, attacks Myriam:

“Sylvie scolded her for devoting too much time to her profession, even though she had worked throughout Paul’s entire childhood and had always bragged about her independence. She called her irresponsible, selfish. She listed the professional trips Myriam had made even when Adam was sick and Paul was finishing an album record. It was her fault, she said, if the children were unbearable, tyrannical, capricious.” (Slimani, L. [2016]. 2018, p. 100).

Unbearable, tyrannical and capricious: these adjectives, attributed to children, place us into the omnipotence environment that this way of conceiving family and care produces.

I understand the child psychoanalyst is one of these others that our culture makes available to act in the network of concentric care circles for the children. The psychoanalyst is part of our cultural caring bonds. And we need to be careful not to incur the resentment pointed out above, widening the chorus of those who say that, if the child needs someone else, it is because the parents were not good enough, or it is even because the parents were evil. Let us be careful not to carry between the lines of our actions a ‘blaming of parents’, which makes us believe that every time we obtain good results in our clinical interventions with our child patients, we conclude that the parents did not do what they should have done on their part. May our good deeds not correspond to their bad deeds. As we have been saying, we know in advance that human care requires many others beyond family. And that others are called upon is a prerogative, not a sign of failure. Parents are certainly limited. And the good work of a mother or a father depends on the good work of so many others around them.

Following a friend on Instagram who posts photos of a happy motherhood, Myriam, from the book Lullaby, daydreams: “We will only be happy (…) when we no longer need each other. When we can live a life for ourselves, a life that belongs to us, that does not have to do with others. When we are free.” (Slimani, L. [2016]. 2018, p. 37) Later, she remembers her husband’s expectations on fatherhood, before the birth of their children:

“When Myriam got pregnant [her husband] went crazy with joy, but he warned his friends that he did not want his life to change. Myriam told herself he was right and looked at her man, so sporty, so handsome, so independent, with even more admiration. He had promised to care for their lives to remain bright.” (Slimani, L. [2016]. 2018, p. 101)  

After the children were born, the frustrating effects of their initial dream are reaped:
“Something was dead and it was not just youth and carefreeness. He was no longer useless, they needed him and he had obligations on that matter. After becoming a father, he gained principles and certainties. (…) His generosity was now relative. His enthusiasm cooled. His universe shrank”   (Slimani, L. [2016]. 2018, p. 107)

The resentment towards the experience of dependence and helplessness, inherent in involvement in supporting other lives, causes Paul, Myriam’s husband, to defensively close himself off in certainties, which cools and shrinks his emotional field.

Myriam and Paul find themselves involved in a deeply individualistic family and care project, making it genuinely difficult to conceive themselves as interdependent with others.  The terror that follows the novel Lullaby, since the beginning, is ultimately the horror of the strangulation of an individualistic care project incapable of being inhabited, either by helplessness or by the collective. That is not possible, the novel seems to denounce; the exclusion of helplessness and solidarity from the human care network leads to a tragic end. Nothing could be more contrasting to what happened to Crisóstomo, Matilde, Isaura and Antonino, characters in the book “O filho de mil homens”, who experienced through parenthood the generous expansion of care for humanity as a whole.

The event of having children carries the risk of becoming closed off within the family itself and forgetting the breadth of the collective. It brings with it the risk that, in the name of the family, care for the broader community— which is also a condition for the family’s survival—may be neglected. 

References:

HUGO MÃE, Valter (2012). O filho de mil homens. Editora Cosac Naify, São Paulo.

SLIMANI, Leila (2016). Canção de Ninar. Translation by Sandra M. Stroparo. São Paulo: Editora Planeta, 2018.

An extended version of this paper was previously published on 12/19/2023 at Lacuna: uma revista de psicanalise, available at https://revistalacuna.com/2023/12/19/n-15-03/