Beyond Fear. Dorothy Rowe

baby wishes to feed when hungry and sleep when satisfied. Some lucky babies are allowed to do so. But many are not. Many millions of babies have mothers who are too poorly fed themselves to be able to feed their babies whenever they are hungry. Such babies have to make do with what is offered to them and, if they survive, they may be haunted for the rest of their lives by images of hunger and greed. These images may be immensely powerful. I have never been in danger of starving, but images of hunger have been handed down to me by earlier generations of my family. My father, who, as a soldier in France in the First World War, had often gone hungry, would at home consume scraps of food and stale crusts of bread rather than have the food thrown away. Messages about hunger came to me from other family members who had gone hungry in the bush when food was scarce, or had been told by their relatives about the famines that beset the poor in Ireland and Scotland. Living alone in London now, I buy less food than I might consume and can easily afford because I cannot bear food to be wasted. My father would be proud of me.

      In affluent countries where no baby need go hungry, many do because their mothers, intent on being ‘good mothers’ obeying the dicta of their own mothers or the child-rearing ‘experts’, feed their babies according to schedules which relate to the adults’ needs rather than the child’s. Being hungry and being left to cry until the clock reaches a certain hour were for many of us our first lesson in learning that we were of little importance in the scheme of things. We learned that saying ‘I want’ is greedy, and being greedy is bad. Whenever we feel a desire that we cannot fulfil and perhaps cannot even articulate, and we see other people enjoying the fulfilment of this desire, we feel envy. Envy is a natural response, and a common one, because we can always imagine more than we can ever do or own, and if it is acknowledged and accepted it can become part of the motivation which urges us on to greater things.

      However, if we feel envious and cannot do anything about it, if we feel helpless and frustrated, and the frustration goes on and on, then our envy becomes mixed with rage and a fierce desire to destroy both what we want and the person who has what we want. Babies are helpless, and, when their desires are not met, they can feel a destructive rage which they express not just in crying and flailing limbs but also in biting the breast which is offering to feed them. Some mothers, pitying their baby’s helplessness, accept their baby’s greed, envy, frustration and rage, and so patiently hold, soothe and feed their baby. But other mothers see this violent rage as evidence of the baby’s inherent evil. They become frightened of their baby and seek to drive the evil out with stronger rules and punishments. The baby must learn obedience. What he learns is that envy is always accompanied by fearful impotence and murderous rage. Such envy is common in our world, and usually underlies the destruction and terror which one group of people can inflict on another.

      Children who are taught that greed is bad are also taught that envy is bad, and so they are condemned to a life of struggling with their impulses of greed and envy, either sacrificing themselves to others, never daring to ask for anything for themselves, or resorting to devious, dishonest ways of trying to gain more for themselves and to hinder and destroy the people they envy.

      In families and in society anger is always a problem. It is our natural response to frustration, and without it we, a physically weak species compared to those which competed with us for food, would not have been able to use our intelligence to establish ourselves as a viable species. Anger can make us creative and brave, but we need to live in groups, and anger within the group is always a threat to its cohesion. In a family, when the father becomes angry, whether he beats his wife and children or merely retires to his room in icy silence, the other members of the family feel frightened. As they did when they were children, many adults devote their lives to doing nothing to make their mother or father angry. A baby being angry can frighten the parents because they fear that they will not be able to control this new member of the family. For such parents the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote:

      We all know what it is to lose our tempers and we all know how anger, when it is intense, sometimes seems to possess us so that we cannot for the time being control ourselves. Your baby knows about being all-out angry. However much you try, you will disappoint him at times, and he will cry in anger; according to my view you have one consolation - that angry crying means that he has some belief in you. He hopes he may change you. A baby who has lost belief does not get angry, he just stops wanting, or else he cries in a miserable, disillusioned way, or else he starts banging his head on the pillow, or on the wall or the floor, or else he exploits the various things he can do with his body.

      It is a healthy thing for a baby to get to know the full extent of his rage. You see, he certainly will not feel harmless when he is angry. You know what he looks like. He screams and kicks and, if he is old enough, he stands up and shakes the bars of the cot. He bites and scratches, and he may spit and spew and make a mess. If he is really determined he can hold his breath and go blue in the face, and even have a fit. For a few minutes he really intends to destroy or at least to spoil everyone and everything, and he does not mind if he destroys himself in the process. Don’t you see that every time a baby goes through this process he gains something? If a baby cries in a state of rage and feels as if he has destroyed everyone and everything, and yet the people round him remain calm and unhurt, this experience greatly strengthens his ability to see that what he feels to be true is not necessarily real, that fantasy and fact, both important, are nevertheless different from one another. There is absolutely no need for you to try to make him angry, for the simple reason that there are plenty of ways in which you cannot help making him angry whether you like it or not.

      Some people go about the world terrified of losing their tempers, afraid of what would have happened if they had experienced rage to the fullest extent when they were infants. For some reason or other this never got properly tested out. Perhaps their mothers were scared. By calm behaviour they might have given confidence, but they muddled things up by acting as if the angry baby was really dangerous.⁶

      Donald Winnicott wrote this about forty years ago but his wise lesson has not been learned by many people. Over the past few years I have run a number of workshops on the topic of ‘Anger, Revenge and Forgiveness’. My idea for this workshop was that in the morning session we would discuss how this trinity was handled in our childhood families, and in the afternoon session our discussion would concern our present families, with the emphasis on looking for parallels and contrasts in each pair of families. So much for a great idea. In each workshop the participants, who came from a wide range of backgrounds, had so much they wanted to talk about in connection with the way anger was handled in their childhood family that little time was left for the remaining topics.

      In all these workshops each of the participants fell into one of two groups with regard to their childhood experience. Either they had grown up in a family where anger was expressed with great emotion and noise, even violence, or they had grow up in a family where anger was never revealed directly. There were cold silences, sulking and icy withdrawals from family life. I asked all the participants whether their parents had even discussed with them, in the way they might have discussed with a child road safety or being unselfish, how anger ought to be handled. Not one participant said that their parents had done this. Indeed, the idea that anger could be a topic of discussion between parents and children was to some participants shocking in its novelty.

      Anger is integral to the way we live. Events and people constantly frustrate us, and we respond to frustration with anger. How best to express that anger is always a problem. Anger is another aspect of our lives where we have to find a balance. An angry response can save us from death or injury, and can ward off the disconfirmation of our meaning structure. Anger is pride in action, warning us that we are in danger. When someone insults us our immediate response of ‘How dare you!’, whether said aloud or not, can do more for our self-confidence than any amount of positive self-talk. Yet our anger can put us in danger. Other people may respond with anger or reject us for our unacceptable behaviour. In dealing effectively with our own and other people’s anger we need to see it as something which is basically natural and valuable but which needs to be tended carefully, in the same way that fire is natural and valuable but needs to be handled with care.

      My workshop participants showed very clearly that the two parental styles of dealing with anger had been a poor preparation for their