You can see it in the child’s eyes and in their smiling and their response and you do have a far more rapid development. The development is astonishingly more rapid.  Their achieving object constancy is somewhere between seven and eight months as opposed to upwards of sixteen to eighteen months quite often in the unbounded child. So you have unfolding according to nature’s agenda simply by providing the proper environment which is the proper model and you can’t keep the brain from its unfolding.

You we are operating intellectually we’re operating within a balance of tightly excluded material. Intellect is going to exclude anything that doesn’t fit this particular agenda. So it closes in continually. It’s what we call tunnel-vision. It’s a magnificent thing. It’s like under the microscope you can peer into the very heart of the matter at the expense of lots of that which it tends to leave out. Whereas, intelligence again is open-ended and always only moving for a certain huge kind of universal balances and so on.

M:        Let’s go back to this notion of where we left off which is nature’s plan and the implicit expectation of the baby or the infant. Given a natural environment, those expectations would be met spontaneously. We have distorted the environment therefore these expectations on the part of the child are not met. For example, taking the baby away from the mother and putting it in a nursery radically upsets the expectation of the baby. Could we approach what happens in a conventional child birth from that point of view? What I’d like to get across is that if you have this highly intelligent self-organizing system which is the infant or newborn, then it’s got all kinds of things going on. It has expectations. It needs to have certain things to be there and when those then are not present.  So just help me understand that.

J:          Again we have the fact that nature’s agenda is the intelligence for our well-being is simply to open up the whole expanse that’s available to that infant child. The child comes into the world expecting his needs to be met. Our species has survived by a successful meeting of the needs of that new individual throughout the ages. To some extent those needs are met. Now, the needs of the intelligence of the child, intelligence again being this constant open-ended movement for the well-being of the child and for our whole species, if that is countered by intellectual interferences, which again intellect is always selective and operates by narrowing down to a few secluded facts that it’s operating with at the exclusion of everything else, and we get these intellectual interferences with the child’s opening up, then the only result can be that the child starts closing in by default, and we get a literally retardation although we’re not cognitive of that from the very beginning.

The intellectual interference with intelligence of childhood, see that’s not just a figure of speech, here’s a process designed by millions of years of genetic encoding to start opening up, to embrace the universe, and here’s an intellect which is cutting off all the access to that and the child has no choice but to close up again. And so we have the fact that what we call the unbounded child will close up, has no choice except to go back into kind of a fetal defensive mechanism and there’s up to a 10-12 week delay in their first cognitive acts, their first conscious acts which we recognize as the smiling syndrome and so forth.  This has been established now for fifty years and it’s become part of the ordinary set of expectancies’. We don’t expect that in the child for 10-12 weeks because it takes that long for that damage system to compensate and begin to open up. 

Whereas we do know in the child where separation does not take place, in which the exterior environment is simply the other side of the coin of the interior environment. So they’re moving from that which is firmly known into simply another aspect of the known. Theirs is opening up and within minutes you are into the smiling syndrome, you’re into the open embrace of their world and a tremendous part of cognition starts immediately. You can see it in the child’s eyes and in their smiling and their response and you do have a far more rapid development. The development is astonishingly more rapid.  Their achieving object constancy is somewhere between seven and eight months as opposed to upwards of sixteen to eighteen months quite often in the unbounded child. So you have unfolding according to nature’s agenda simply by providing the proper environment which is the proper model and you can’t keep the brain from its unfolding.

M:        We have accepted an increasingly dysfunctional norm as the norm. In other words, we might go back just briefly and talk about, because we’re moving into a field here of how this intellect has imposed itself on the development of intelligence. You have stated often that a lot of that, a great deal of the real impetus for this has taking place within the last fifty years. Can you give me an overview of what has taken place in this fifty year period?

J:          Since World War II.

M:        That has had no historical presence.

J:          Well I think that if we look at the difference of quality of life and standard of living. For a child of course quality of life means one thing and only one thing. The feeling of being unconditionally loved and accepted, that is nurtured, protected, so that they don’t have to collapse into a defensive fetal posture but can move out and embrace the world. That unconditional acceptance by a primary caretaker is critical. Now that’s quality of life.

In studies in World War II in England of little infants, babes in arms, who were for the baby’s safety taken and put in these big nurseries out in the country where they had everything except mama. Their level of collapse and their collapse was thriving and so on was enormous. Whereas, the infants left in the mother’s arm, with bombs falling all around you see, thrived. They did beautifully. Why? Because the environment is the mother. See the mother is the environment. That’s what’s important. Now the mother’s environment plays some role in the infant but the mother as an environment is far more critical. And so that’s quality of life.  Quality of life is being given that safe ambient of the mother.

Standard of living has nothing to do with it whatsoever. Now we thought that standard of living was more important than quality of life. And we think that now. When both parents rush off to work at root is the fact that standard of living is more important than quality of life. And we have all sorts of rationale for it but at base standard of living takes its precedence over quality of life.

Now as quality of life deteriorates we find anxiety minds, suicide cropping out at large levels, violence increasing at a level never heard of when I was a child, none of this existed at all. We were extremely in the thirties but we had quality of life. Now, there’s not that kind of poverty at all, except in a few isolated cases, nothing similar to it.  But the quality of life has deteriorated to the point where everyone is in a state of primary anxiety. Even though we nurture our child and give them everything, then we have to risk them to a highly violent volatile social scene.