Winter Back and Forth

A Structuralist Memoir
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5439-0815-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet/DL/kein Kopierschutz

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

Rather than looking for solutions to world violence on the macrocosmic level of the greater social order, this memoir asserts that all human aggression has its genesis in a child's failure to have its normative attachment needs met by adults within the microcosm of the family; accordingly, it tacitly suggests that all prospective caregivers be instructed on the irreducible needs of children so that they can assist in their being met with no intimation of the aggressive affect that all abusers have at their core. Indeed, this text's thesis is: all aggression is learned by children from adults which, if not stopped, brutally repeats into the next generation. For the world to become a peaceful place, we must explore and express how violence is learned in the most intimate emotions and interactions of the family, of which this text serves as an example.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Winter, David

Leseproben

Zero
Any biography can start by designating the first year of life with the number zero. No human being attains the age of one year until they have survived the first twelve months of life within the enclosed opening of the number zero. As symbol, the number zero suggests infinity by drawing a line and enclosing it, becoming emblematic of the space from which we all emerge, the enclosed possibilities of what we might become, and the finite space to which we physically return. The number zero is the linear symbol that comes to form the circle that releases and shapes us, liberates and establishes limits, while being the age that someone never is. Yet in terms of time it is the numerical signifier of our first year of life. Time has a way of elucidating everything, in equal measure to the way it obscures it. In time I managed to earn a graduate degree from an urban university in the western hemisphere, and in many years of work, life, and study I have modestly succeeded in business and researched in the behavioral sciences and literature, and I am doing post-graduate study in contemporary psychotherapeutic theories of healthy human development across the lifespan. I live apart from my wife yet we love each other; I am middle aged and my parents are deceased; my siblings and I are estranged from each other as my interest in human behavior and the stories that we tell are fundamentally based on the domestic disruptions, physical and emotional, of my early life, what their causes were and how any human being finds the way to articulate their experience of them. Knowing this, my siblings do not engage me. This may be so because we share the belief that human beings might recall their past lives through story the way Freud postulated we recall dreams: marred by displacement in the process of their telling. But we have them, we tell them, we share them with others, doing so in the belief that we will be relieved of their burden. A load shared is a load lessened, so we assign it value with our best judgment and speak. When I was zero, in the first year of life, I had no language, I did not speak. In my current studies I have learned that the word infant is derived from the Latin in fans meaning non-speaker; the word baby has its root in the Middle English word meaning babble. I have no memory of my time of infancy, but in a kind of dream interpretation I recall the bare limbs of the winter tree outside my bedroom window, the noise of other voices coming from distant rooms, the smell of my own life as I lay and breathed in the world. In the zero age I had nothing, so from middle age I can fill the distance with all I have now and assert that for every age of this narrative there will be a new chapter, a new memory of an age revived, and each age will speak as clearly through me of its own details and truth and I will surrender them and leave them here. This is a document of memoir undertaken to announce the start of the new by being relieved of the emotions of the old; it is an encounter with past detail that, unilluminated by language in an infantile paralysis which endear infants to us, becomes so unappealing and often reviled when in adulthood the language of painful experience remains stuck in mind and body, cowering as it always did in the physical and emotional disruptions of a child’s body under siege. The infant signals growing into the child by acquiring language and using it; the abused child signals his readiness for the demands of the adult world through regression out of language and does not speak of his experience ever, especially once an adult. This is a Structuralist memoir in episodic narrative principally based on Freud’s theories of human development, suggesting that how these challenges are met is the optimum means to define a child’s growth, as in their absence the abuse is traumatizing, redounding throughout the child’s life. It uses the Structuralist theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, whose ideas on semiology/semiotics foreground the person speaking as the dominant member of any system, as the value assigned through the naming of any object is arbitrarily determined by the speaker, suggesting that all persons within a system, even at its margins, can also claim power through speech. 1. This document is political, announcing such abused bodies as polity, as a topos, a psychic and physical place where human beings are born and arise and need humane treatment as in its absence and in the presence of adult hostility that life stops, dreaming dies, the body and spirit recoil in desperate slumber until one day through the pain of dis-ease the demand for human decency springs. It assays how the dominant paradigm of Patriarchy infiltrates all parts of human life with impunity, expressing the most toxic aspects of Patriarchal abuse secretively within its last microcosmic redoubt of the family. This document is personal, informed by research in literature and the behavioral sciences, revealing how trauma visited on children by their parents is characterized by psychoanalyst Donald Kaschel as a transgenerational diabolical spirit, giving rise to what Bessel van der Kolk has defined as the condition of Complex PTSD with effects impacting its victims across the lifespan. It reflects the work of Sharon Wegscheider-Cruse which posits that in families defined by abuse of substances or behavior there are four roles unconsciously adopted by the children, including hero, lost child, mascot, and scapegoat, revealing what each of my three siblings became with my being relegated the role of scapegoat.2. It uses the models of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and that of Elie Wiesel’s Night as chronicles of surviving the brutality of Patriarchal abuse. Its style most reflects that of Night in how Wiesel simply recounts what happened as the army of Nazi Germany tore him and his family from their home and forced them through harrowing passages to their final destinations of the death camps, which Wiesel barely survived. Similarly, this text takes the form of a liberatory narrative describing the traumatic lives of children isolated by abusive parents and kept from speaking of the events affecting them throughout their childhood into adulthood. In response to this, it suggests that a critical context needs to be established for adult survivors of child abuse so that for this generation a clear articulation of these horrific events can be documented so their lessons are learned and future generations of children and parents will not have the secure base of their domestic spaces destroyed by the pathogen of violent adult behavior. When a critical context for this kind of text is established it will allow survivors of domestic abuse to release the private hell of their secreted emotions into a normative public forum, whether through creative narrative or through criticism of depictions of child characters in English literature. As is true with women drawn to the Feminist discourse, people of color drawn to the Postcolonial discourse, and gays and lesbians drawn to the Queer theory discourse, so it should be true of adult survivors of child abuse: the pain of private experience is made public and shared through its articulation in the forum of critical contextualization, where their narratives are engaged in university discursive practices with the same level of respect as those of individual members who emerge with narratives of alterity from these other groups. In this way the narratives of adults who are survivors of childhood abuse would not be dissimilar to the Classic Slave Narratives of the 19th-century. Arguably, it will not be until such narratives are accepted within a critical context that domestic child abuse will remain as painful a cultural epidemic as the American slave trade of the 19th-century had been. As was true with the slave trade and the narratives it inspired, the domestic abuse of children will not stop until the narratives of those who have suffered from its effects have been fully articulated and given a critical context within the culture of public discourse outside of the abusive family. If such an effort worked to educate and lessen the punishing effects of sexism, racism, and homophobia, then it will also work to lessen the punishing effects in the lives of abused children and the damaged adults they become. According to Dr. Vincent J. Felitti, adults seeking medical help who knew adverse childhood experiences in their families of origin have a far higher rate of physical health maladies than those who did not, which, with the rocketing rates of healthcare costs, is at least one practical reason to encounter the issue of child abuse and neglect head on. 3. Most importantly, with the behavior of White Anglo-Saxon Patriarchs being at the heart of Critical Theories’ complaints, it is time to look past the assumption that Patriarchal aggression is solely founded on the capital system in which these men compete, and where it is felt that they project onto others all negative aspects of their characters when they fail to win. Indeed, rather than privileging their competitive skills, capitalism rewards the majority of men for their social skills of collaboration. As the early work of psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn makes clear, human beings are not born with aggression as a phylogenetic inheritance, or as the Christian taint of Original Sin; instead, all human aggression is learned through the shaping behavior of parents or primary caregivers. ...