The Myth of Normal p.62

Epigenetics revamps our understanding of human development from embryo to adult, and even how our species got to be here. I spoke with one of the foremost researchers in the field, Dr. Moshe Szyf, at McGill University’s storied medical school. “Evolutionary theory is a difficult one to change because it became almost religion, a religion of science,” he said. “And any questioning of it seems to be a heretical question of the whole system, which obviously it isn’t. Epigenetics doesn’t deny evolution. Epigenetics is part of evolution, but it demands a new look at how evolution works.” The new biology improves upon the standard Darwinian view of spontaneous mutations and random selection as the motors of species adaptations; it demonstrates that circumstances themselves can shape how genes adjust to the environment.

Said another way, our lives are what happens when life acts upon life.

Dr. Szyf and his team in Montreal performed one of the most cited epigenetic studies, with major implications for how we view development, behavior, and health. Working with laboratory rats, they examined the effect of the mother’s interactions with the infant in the first days after birth on how the offspring, for the rest of their lives, respond to stress—whether appropriately and confidently or with anxiety and over-reactivity. The focus was the HA axis, the stress-regulating feedback loop between the hypothalamus and the pituitary and adrenal glands. In particular, the researchers looked at receptor molecules in the brain whose task it is to modulate stress, which is to say, to ensure the appropriate behavior when stress is present. Creatures with poorly self-regulated stress reactions will be more anxious, less capable of confronting ordinary environmental challenges, and overstressed even under normal circumstances.

The study showed the quality of early maternal care to have a causal impact on the offspring’s brains’ biochemical capacity to respond to stress in a healthy way into adulthood. Key epigenetic markers—the ways certain genes expressed themselves—were different in the brains of rats who had received either more, or less, nurturing contact from their mothers. Strikingly, the offspring in turn passed on to their own infants the type of mothering they had been given. Szyf and his colleagues have also shown that the quality of maternal care affects the receptor activity for estrogen—a key female hormone—in daughters, with ramifications for mothering patterns down the generations. Through ingenious manipulation of the rat population studied inconceivable in human research—both the physiological and behavioral effects of early nurturing patterns were found to be nongenetic: that is, not transmitted through the so-called genetic code, which remained unchanged. Rather, they were epigenetic—in other words, determined by how the various kinds of maternal nurturing influenced gene activity in the offspring’s brain. (The specific maternal behavior tracked by these researchers was how “lovingly” the moms “groomed,” or licked, their infants.)

Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté – The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness & Healing in a Toxic Culture p.62

Nameless: Understanding Learning Disability p.44

Just as we breathe in the air around us and can recognize and differentiate between good and bad environmental influences – pure fresh air or stale, polluted air – so the baby simultaneously breathes in the mood of his environment and absorbs influences therein which do him good or harm.

The air is not an object but a substance, like water or milk, sand or plastic. Their chief characteristic is their indestructibility. Bodily needs are in themselves a disturbance for the baby, the destruction of its vital need for homeostasis. Hunger hurts, as does coldness, dampness and not being held. The mother is the one who is supposed to smooth out all these disturbances. For the newborn baby she is like air; it does not see her as an independent person, does not thank her for her attention and is constantly demanding more. She must be able to tolerate this and should not expect any reciprocity from it initially. On the contrary, she must be able to discern from its undifferentiated expression of unpleasure what its precise needs are. She must not confuse coldness or not being held with hunger; if she feeds her baby when all it wants is to be held, she can provoke spitting or colic. In order to be so finely attuned to its needs, she has herself to be functioning at the level of coenaesthetic reception. Only in this way can she infer what her child’s needs are.

Dietmut Niedecken – Nameless: Understanding Learning Disability p.44

Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context p.105

The linking of adult depressive states to an infantile origin did not fit easily with the prevailing Freudian views on mental development. Freud was not persuaded that the newborn is able to have a significant recognition of a maternal object. Freud continued to believe instead that the infant’s initial existence is sheltered in a state of primary narcissism, and that while the infant does imbibe maternal goodness, he does not differentiate it from the totality of his self-centered, bodily experiences. Freud conceded that worldly impingements are none the less gradually registered, and that this makes possible a growing recognition of the world. However, he continued to hold that it is only after mental maturation that the mother can be recognized, and that when this happens she is recognized entirely and fully. The child typically continues to love, desire and perceive her as good, at least until the onset of the Oedipus complex, when he begins to accommodate the significance of two parents.

Meira Likerman – Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context p.105

Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context p.36

Ferenczi outlined intellectual growth as a process of increasing recognition of the world as it actually is – separate from the infant and not subject to his omnipotent control. In this vision, the dawning of recognition is inevitable and prompted by life necessities. The human infant initially relies on his environment for a fulfillment of urgent bodily needs, both of survival and of pleasure. The infant is only able to communicate his needs in direct physical ways; his body deals with accumulated tension by discharging it and simultaneously using discharge mechanisms – crying, for example – as communication gestures. Initially these gestures are felt to be magical in that their very force is imagined to have conjured up the desired satisfaction. When the infant encounters actual frustration or delays, his mind fends them off through the use of omnipotence, described by Ferenczi as ‘the feeling of having everything that one needs and wants’. The mother complements this natural state because she instinctively wishes to shield the infant from the full force of his helplessness. She thus simulates for the infant some of the conditions of his lost intrauterine perfection, such as reliable warmth and nourishment.

Time and growth bring a greater recognition in their wake, and the infant begins to make use of a more evolved communication repertoire. Uncontrolled bodily discharges of tension are gradually abandoned in favor of gestures and sounds which are orchestrated in increasingly evolved ways to convey meaning. Ferenczi regarded the culmination of this line of development as the acquisition of language, which necessarily also carries the acknowledgement of a separate world. Development in thinking can therefore be described as an expedient shift in the site of the infant’s expressive life from the body to language.

Meira Likerman – Melanie Klein: Her Work in Context p.36

When the Body Says No p.82

You come from a mother’s body and you relate to the mother. The mother is the universe for us. It’s the universe that lets us down. When the father comes along as an abusive, threatening figure, the universe protects us or the universe doesn’t protect us.

Gabor Maté – When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection p.82

Projective Identification and Therapeutic Technique p.106

In viewing internalization of maternal pathology from a developmental perspective, the discussion must immediately center around the changing pattern of the ways in which the mother and child perceive one another. At the beginning, the good-enough mother and her infant feel to one another as if they are a single unit (Mahler, 1968; Spitz, 1965; Winnicott, 1956). There is no inside or outside, self or other. The mother’s role is to be responsive to the infant’s emotional and physiological needs and in so doing create the illusion that the infant and mother are one. The wished for breast is there when it is wanted and in precisely the way that it is wanted because that is the nature of things.

Thomas H. Ogden – Projective Identification and Therapeutic Technique p.106