Matter & Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber

Author:Andreas Weber [Weber, Andreas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-10-31T14:04:28+00:00

An infant knows it is an I

A child is able to form its own identity because it experiences an other that displays independent, individual, and uncontrollable emotions—in other words, an other who is a subject—and because this subject enters into a well-meaning relationship with it. The clear experience of the boundary, the encounter with a You, is necessary for the development of the I. Groundbreaking research on this topic has been done by the American evolutionary psychologists Andrew Meltzoff and Keith Moore. They have shown that even newborns react to a person’s facial expressions—specifically, by imitating them. When a test subject smiles at a newborn infant, the child gently curls the corners of its mouth upward. If the test subject purses his or her mouth, the baby also tightens his or her lips.⁴

At first, the researchers could hardly understand this ability on the part of the newborn. They were biased by a picture of the infant as a passive symbiosis machine and hardly dared to imagine that a newborn would have experiences of itself comparable to those of other people. But the infant’s ability to imitate left no room for doubt: Immediately after birth—and thus also in the mother’s body, from which the infant had only just emerged—a child knows that its inner experiences are connected with its body and that they express themselves there.

This means that babies never have to learn that their experiences belong to themselves. And it is also clear to them that others can read these experiences on their surface. All of this knowledge arises on its own from the logic of a vulnerable body that gains an inner perspective through its relationships to others. It is our primary, genuine experience. We know what it is to be a subject that feels something “inwardly” and shows these feelings outwardly. The child knows. It does not have to learn that it is an inside with an outside. It reacts to the presence of a communicative outside with a corresponding inner gesture. When an infant imitates another’s smile by smiling itself, and experiences the accompanying feeling of joy and sympathy, it understands how the other person feels. It is in a position to do so because it itself is the connection between outside (the smiling face) and inside (the feeling of released joy).

The parents’ role in this relationship is to strengthen the child’s sense of security and not to hinder its opening up to the world. Of course, this only works when the people in the relationship can express their feelings. A mother who smiles but feels no joy in doing so shatters the correspondence between inside and outside. If the other does not display emotions because his or her own emotions are disrupted, then the child will unlearn the connection between outside and inside, and its own affect will become a mystery to it. For being able to love means trusting in the connection between inside and outside.

And so again we have a paradoxical situation: An infant

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