The notion of boundary is embracing and elusive: it points to the limits of whatever is, be it natural or social, mental or material; a boundary sets the limit between two states, some of which are sharply controverted in post-modern times. Truth is an elusive concept too: to the philosopher Donald Davidson (1999) truth is notionally so basic that it is folly to attempt to define it.
In the biblical narrative—a founding document of Western culture—man's foremost limit, his finitude, comes from the Exile, banishment from Eden: whereby a primal, joyful state of blissful innocence is displaced by toil, suffering, hostility and conflict, with their attendant guilt, sickness, aging and death. The Fall from the Garden of Eden to the Valley of Tears comes from the sin of disobedience, likely sexual; ultimately, the root of the adversarial clash with the Deity (who remains a deus absconditus, an unknowable, omnipotent hidden god) is in a third party, Lucifer, not man.
We get a quite different picture from another main source of Western civilization, archaic Greece: the Greek start of the human story elicits no simile to the Garden of Eden. In the beginning there was Chaos, thereafter came the Titans, later overcome in strife by the Olympian gods. The Titan Prometheus created man from clay, giving him fire which, in open defiance, he stole from the gods: Zeus sentenced him to eternal torment for his transgression.
The boundaries between the gods and men are lax in Greek mythology; its myriad gods were all-too-human, displaying human-like conflicts, attitudes, needs, wishes and foibles, often masquerading as human to carry out their plots; men and women, on their side, often sought godlike, heroic feats and powers. In Homeric times it was unclear what, in a person's life, pertained to the person, and what came from the gods: according to the historian E. R. Dodds (1951), violent fury and sudden impulses, proceeding from the gods, were not personal events.
Centuries later, in classical times, men gained through Socratic argument, by weighing evidence and delimiting the contexts, a fully personal, ‘civilized’ mind: a process of individuation—achieving boundaries between what is and is not self—unfolds in Greece from pre-historical to properly historical times. However, in the temptation of hubris, transgressing the limits set to men by the gods—mainly by self-aggrandizement in heroic actions—there was danger at the boundaries which brought deep anxieties about the gods' revenge, the myth of Icarus being exemplar of the risks of over-ambition. The Homeric hero, says Moses Hadas (1960, p. 21), does not compromise loyalty to his own being with loyalty to any other, the great model being Achilles. Hubris is relevant in everyday relationships too, because by ill-treating and shaming others men feel their own superiority: as Aristotle (c. 350 BC, p. 107) states in his Rhetoric “by injuring, they conceive themselves to be more decidedly superior.” This found practical use at legal proceedings in the Sophists’—risus sophisticus—use of mockery to destroy, regardless of truth, their adversaries’ arguments. Both themes, the biblical theme of the exile from Eden and the Greek one of the heroic combat with the gods and with each other, underlie the passage from modernity to post-modernity.
A main achievement of civilization in passing from archaic to classical Greece was, then, an individuation process, an increased discernment between man's own omnipotence and an evolving sane self. An akin process of conflation and discernment in primitive peoples was taken up by Freud in Totem and taboo (1913)(concerning the quasi-omnipotent godlike powers over events of nature, such as the rains required for their crops, conferred upon their kings, who were held to be sacred but put to death and replaced when their magic came to fail.
Can ethological evidence from our close biological relatives shed added light on our instinctual roots which, said Freud (1920), are the most important and the most obscure part of psychoanalysis? Having dealt with this theme elsewhere (Ahumada 1997, 2015, 2021, in press) I offer here a brief summary on status/sexual and on territorial rivalry and, importantly, on the maternal and social co-evolution of instinct in the development of our next of kin.
In the acculturation of the chimpanzee, psychic boundaries arise by
the evolution and differentiation of emotional bonds. The baby chimp spends his first year of life in skin-to-skin contact with mother, clinging or being held; she plays with him after the first weeks, and a bit later presides over his contact with peers: their close emotional attunement to each other primatologists call ‘mind-reading.’ Weaning, starting in the fourth or fifth year, is a highly adversarial initial part of chimp acculturation, resisted by the infant by force and by cheating. Peer play in infancy and adolescence displays a wide range of both aggressive and sexual activities, a must for both male and female chimps in order to gain social and sexual maturity; discipline is initially exerted by the mother and, later on, also by the male adults.
A crucially relevant boundary achievement is self-recognition, the acknowledgement of one's existence as a distinct object, attained by higher apes but not by monkeys. Direct evidence came from Washoe, the first chimpanzee bred in deaf-mute gestural language who, when asked in front of a mirror, Who that? promptly responded: ‘me, Washoe.’ (Goodall 1986, p. 35); she had long talks with herself in sign-language, and when she felt intruded upon she went up a tree to regain her privacy. Self-recognition, an indispensable requisite for self-reflective personal thinking, comes exceedingly late in evolution and is quite frail; not all chimpanzees attain it, and it tends to get lost as they grow older. Importantly, those traversing emotional deprivations in their infancy do not attain self-recognition, which closely depends upon growing up in a healthy enough affective environment. Also, females who were emotionally deprived in infancy are unable to become viable mothers.
As is well known, according to Freud (1921), psychoanalysis is both an individual and a social psychology; the same appears to be true for the instinctual life of the chimpanzees: as becomes apparent in sign-bred chimpanzee communities, most of their ongoing gestural signing refers to aspects of their relations to the other individuals. That infant learning of deaf-mute communicational signs is grounded on affect appears in the fact that the baby learns the signs his mother employs, not those used by attendants who are emotionally less relevant; also, as happens with human babies, their ‘whats’ and ‘hows’ much precede their ‘whys.’
Deaf-mute sign languages, emerging in the Middle Ages, are considered by linguists as natural languages similar to the English or Latin languages; communicative actions in the wild are not syntactically structured languages, but they validly communicate nonetheless.
The most distinct characteristic of chimpanzee life is, according to Jane Goodall (1989), a strong instinct of domination. They are highly hierarchical beings, an overriding concern with hierarchy is on display in both male and a female associations: status conflicts being constant from puberty on, leading to never-ending alliances and rivalries. Sexuality and status bear on each other: the alpha-male demands privileged access to females, but can enforce this only when he is within sight; when an alpha-male runs across a couple in coitus, which often happens, the female slips away in the foliage while the male covers his erected penis with both hands, making loud vocal and ample gestural signs of submission: these signs usually satisfy the alpha-male, who then abstains from reprisals. It must be noted that status fights in the community, though quite frequent, normally do not lead to serious bodily damage.
Intercommunity rivalry and fighting is a different affair. Each chimpanzee community holds a territory that supplies its feeding needs, and in order to protect its boundaries, border patrols are routinely carried out by a small group of able-bodied males; also, as night falls, a vocal male chorus proclaims to the surrounding communities the might of the group. Awareness of dangers leads to territorial limits being incorporated as psychic boundaries: chances for strife being ever-present, males avoid going outside their territory alone, given that rival groups they come across may excitedly go for the kill: effective as a way of lessening the power of rival communities, killing is also a feast, and even remembered, the victors coming back again and again to the scene of their deed. Territorial boundaries are sustained by force and deceit. After the number of able fighting adult males in the Gombe community was starkly decreased because of an internal split and the ensuing internecine warfare, several young adolescent males joined the night-time vocal chorus convincingly enough to thoroughly deceive surrounding communities for several years, until the time came when they were fully grown up. Chimpanzee communities pay close attention to their respective balance of forces, because whenever open warfare erupts it ends with the annihilation of a whole community, infants included. Thus, intercommunity
bonds are on the brink of that thanatic Hobbesian scenario, the war of all against all. As Strachey (1961, p. 62) notes, in a 1915 addition to the Three Essays, Freud stated that “the impulse of cruelty arises from the instinct for mastery”—the Bemächtigungstrieb—, for which, as we see, there is ample ethologic evidence (see Ahumada 2015, 2021).
So, just as co-evolution in a maternal and then a social milieu are required for instinct to viably evolve in chimpanzees, thereby allowing a thinking, self-recognizing mind to be gained, status rivalries within the community are similarly constant, and territorial warfare is a permanent threat: both status rivalry and territorial rivalry are instinctual facts in chimpanzee societal life that individual chimps are always attuned to. Instincts are no doubt processes of discharge, as Darwin and Freud affirmed, but they are much more than this: as Darwin (1879, p. 96–97) held about the whole range of species evolution but is most noticeable at its top, there is no neat way to untangle instinct and reason; what is more, as shown by self-recognition, reflective thought can evolve only as affects co-evolve in the right track. Sustained reflective thought is manifest in the fact that in the Bissou community mothers painstakingly teach their infants to crack palm nuts using stone hammers and anvils, modifying in the process their tools as needed, which shows a grasp of their function; this ability requires years to be mastered. Eureka processes of discovery can be discerned in procedural matters and also, in the service of domination, in the instinct-driven power struggles for status (Goodall 1986). With the kerosene cans he had robbed from Goodall's encampment, clanging them in front of him on his charging displays at fellow males, by terrifying them in this way, Mike, a low-ranking ambitious chimpanzee, became alpha-male with no need for fighting. Still, he was thereafter nervous and irritable despite lack of subsequent defiance; relevantly to our purposes, power does not accomplish happiness: it took him fully two years to settle into his new role and turn into a self-assured, calm, able alpha-male (Goodall 1986).
The process of individuation attained in the passage from archaic to classical Greece was exported to the Middle East by Alexander the Great and, in later centuries, regained and geographically expanded West and
East by the might of Roman conquests opening the wide space of the Pax romana; after the fall of Rome came the Dark Ages in which the spirit of literacy and civilization was barely kept alive, initially in Ireland, in the secluded realms of the monastic orders. Gradually, with the turn of the centuries, feudal times stabilized and then, as kings gained the upper hand and nation-states emerged, leading to the rise of the urban bourgeoisies, and then the upsurge of industry and commerce. Then, during the Reformation, the invention of print is credited with a second great leap in the individuation of the person, partly because existing knowledge, including historical knowledge, became available to a much wider public, partly because it allowed each literate person the chance to think on printed events privately by his own light, partly because print culture brought to the fore new boundaries: the work of sustained contact with the text furthered the buildup of an organized space for thinking and for sharing thoughts, and of providing an indispensable instrument for organized societal institutions such as public and private educational systems. A prominent literary critic, Harold Bloom (1994), vehemently argued in The Western Canon that literature teaches us to talk with ourselves: though he stresses literature at the expense of equally relevant matters, such as the expansion of legal, technical and scientific knowledge, these being especially significant to a time in which, as a result of the technological advances over the last two centuries, we have been led into a daunting sociocultural transition from the culture of the text to the culture of image.
As recounted elsewhere (Ahumada 2011, p. 201), a founding father of communication technologies, Samuel Morse, showed a keen intuition of the coming changes: his first long distance message sent from Baltimore to Washington stated: What has God wrought? On the next day, a Baltimore newspaper announced the annihilation of space. According to Neil Postman (1982), both time and space were eliminated in one stroke, moving us from local (and personal) history to the instant and simultaneous. The boundaries of one's personal life and one's attention underwent a sharp shift, the effects of which gradually unfolded in the last century and a half, propelled by the worldwide explosion of new technologies: the telephone, radio, film, television, videogames, the Internet, and the Web. This time span roughly coincides with the period Cornelius Castoriadis (1996) connects to the downturn in the role
of the family: the literary critic Robert Darnston (1997) deems motherhood and conversation to be now lost arts. Decades before, the historian Roger Collingwood (1937) forcibly warned that the heightened thrust of entertainment erected a watertight bulkhead displacing people's interest in daily affairs, which became emotionally bankrupt, with a pervasive increase in boredom which in turn prompted an increased demand for diversion, drugs, and high risk or criminal activities. The end result of the shift from the culture of the text to the media culture, notes Postman (1982), is the adult-child, grown-ups having the intellectual and emotional capacities of children, in a social context where, in an ahistorical, anti-aging, perpetual present, mothers strive to look no older than their daughters. Indifference, says Jean Baudrillard (2005), is not far from becoming the only actual social bond.
To the social historian Christopher Lasch (1979, 1984), society turns tribal again—which, it must be remarked, leads to herd mentalities and herd dynamics. The “new narcissist,” he argues, demands immediate gratification, and beneath a superficially relaxed appearance is fiercely competitive in seeking an admiring audience: his world has become a mirror scene. Deep and lasting relationships become too perilous amid a generalized flight from feeling entailing a protective shallowness, an inability to mourn and to feel oneself part of a historical stream, while indifference to reality, if not the collapse of the very idea of reality, leads to a ‘new illiteracy’ at all educational levels; as to sex, it is pursued in a frame of restriction of emotional involvement. From the 50s on, says Lasch, the sense of identity shifted from definiteness and continuity to a fluid, protean, problematical self, blurring the limits between self and others: in the context of group mimesis the boundaries between individual and social psychopathologies are erased.
Freud on his side anticipated in “Civilization and its Discontents” (1930) the impending changes, hostility to civilization becoming a main concern. Life, he pointed out, is not light to bear, unhappiness being much easier to experience than happiness, and genuine love making us vulnerable, we have recourse to deflections such as work, to the mild narcosis of art, or to intoxicating substances. Alternatively, one can turn one's back on life like the hermit, or “one can try to recreate the world … in conformity with one's own wishes,” deeming especially important the case in which a delusional remolding of reality is achieved by a considerable number
of people in common (p. 81), which well applies to society-wide cultural shifts. To Freud the instinct of destruction presents the ego with a fulfillment of its old wishes for omnipotence, the inclination to aggression being “an original, self-fulfilling instinctual disposition in man, and … it constitutes the greatest impediment to civilization” (p. 122). Earlier than most, he anticipated that, assimilated to his technologies, man increasingly becomes a prosthetic god, though he is not happy with being in this condition. In Freud, Sadism is coupled to the sexual instinct only belatedly, when he acknowledged that the pleasure principle, originally ascribed to eroticism, plays its game on both sides, erotic and thanatic.
Preceded by a poetic and literary movement, the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress), and coming in the aftermath of the French Revolution, early Romanticism came to be in the intellectual backwaters of German Lutheran pietism; it was at first poetical and literary, soon turning philosophical and, later on, political. The Polish-American philosopher Leszek Kolakowski (1990) places its initial act in Friedrich Schiller's 1789 pronouncement, in his inaugural conference at Jena, that our image of the past is a projection of the present. Whereby, in a blurring of the boundaries between truth and falsity, the significance of past events is built up from our own world, and what we call a fact, or an event, is no more than an arbitrary construction: any construction, any selection, any ‘structure’ is as good as any other; history turns either impossible or useless, which frees us from the fetish of facts and from the obligation to learn. Under such erosion of boundaries we enter post-truth times. Through art, says the Oxford historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin (1975, p. 220–222), Schiller liberates man from the chains of causality: man's liberty expands by this unhooking from nature into a radically new autonomous condition.
The nostalgia of the exile from Eden dominates early Romanticism: in Novalis' ‘magical realism’ the world must be as I want it to be: in the joyful manner of children's play, poetry refashions the world and the happiness of Paradise is regained, turning life into a redemptive dream (Béguin 1939). However, godly heroic stances surge early enough, as Isaiah Berlin (1975, p. 230) quotes from the Sturm und Drang poet Jakob Lenz:
“God brooded over the void and a world arose. Clear a space! Destroy! Something will arise! Oh God-like feeling!”—which states loudly enough the anarchistic joy of destruction. In 1799, and again in 1801, another poet, Jean Paul, announced the ‘death of God’—which would be taken up by Nietzsche seventy years later, ultimately leading to his anarchistic dictum: “Everything is false. Everything is permitted” (Nietzsche 1901, p. 326). In the meantime, in a sweeping dismissal of all norms and all dependencies Johann Gottlieb Fichte proclaimed “I am wholly my own creation” (Berlin 1960, p. 180); and for Fichte, in the political realm, values are made, not found; and, in a reversal of values, the essence of man is identified not with reason but with the source of action, with the will: what matters is our inner motive, our integrity, our spontaneity, not the consequences. The stated goal of the Romantic thrust is an overall dismissal of all boundaries and all continuities, a spiteful rejection of the received and the given.
We witnessed in our next of kin, the chimpanzee, that in providing loving care the mother is the first link, as well as the first boundary, for the baby's boundless instinctual desires, in a long-term bond at a time tender and adversarial. So the insatiability, unyielding rigidity and lack of adaptation to real circumstances that Freud (1910, p. 133) ascribed to instinct are just part of the picture, because instincts need to develop in maternal and then in social bonds for a viable maturity to be achieved. He also affirms (Freud 1910, p. 42) that “A child has sexual instincts and activities from the first; it comes into the world with them,” and the same is true for the aggressive instincts.
There are several theories of psychic origins in Freud's work: primary narcissism, primary autoerotism, primary object love (Balint 1968). For my purposes, I opt for a Ferenczian-Mahlerian-Tustinian fusional variant of primary object love, which I think is characteristic of the final Freud: “‘the breast is part of me, I am the breast.’ Only later: ‘I have it’—that is, ‘I am not it’” (Freud 1941, p. 299). Grasping primary object love as unrepresented and unconsciously fusional allows proper place in infant development to the separation-individuation process which, as we observed in the weaning process of the chimpanzee, is perforce adversarial and thereby, to some degree, traumatic: this everyday event of infant
life, the furies of the temper tantrum, occur on contact with the fact that the mother is not part of the baby and does not necessarily respond according to his wishes. Tustin's (1981) term, “crisis of two-ness” seems apt, because omnipotent possessiveness of mother's body and mind is not easily relinquished, nor is one's separateness gladly admitted: a holding, “good enough” mother is a must for viable psychic boundaries to be attained. But a paradise is lost, as Freud (1910, p. 129) deemed the joyful intimacies of the nursing situation to be “the highest erotic bliss, which is never again attained.” To the child, says Winnicott (1970, p. 40), “the Reality Principle is an insult”: it elicits pain and rage; there inevitably remain in the child's mind unmitigated islets of rage and pain, split-off, unrepresented in the main, unconscious furies ready to flare up when the turmoils of adolescent rivalry arrive.
Of course adolescent rivalry has always been there: it is part of our instinctual endowment and, as above described, it is there in each and every pubescent chimpanzee, female and male. But as Freud (1930) held, civilization is built on love, and as such it requires building boundaries to anger. The question is, how can this be accomplished in these postmodern, post-truth times?
Over a half-century ago, René Spitz (1964) noted an underlying aggravation of the psychopathologies across his lifetime, a pervasive derailment of the infant-mother primal dialogue. Unalloyed mother-infant emotional closeness—Winnicott's (1956) “primary maternal preoccupation”—risks becoming the exception, as today's hard-pressed mothers keep one eye on the job and one eye on the baby—and, all too often, have both eyes stuck on screens, it being unfortunately not unusual for mothers to be absorbed in their smart phones or watching TV while breast-feeding! Babies look at screens too, or enchant themselves unendingly playing with images on phone screens, while parents assume that whatever charms the baby is good for him—and good for them too, as it relieves them from the tasks of attending to the baby. Walking along sidewalk cafes, you might often enough run across mom and dad busy at their laptops or smart phones while a three-year-old kid loudly talks to them, to no avail. Affectively unacknowledged children become equally unacknowledging adolescents and adults.
The Media Age does not make things any easier, as visual media dutifully
strive to take one's mind off one's own mind, an unending, perpetually moving, disconnected flow of images and events by way of which excited, banal fascination efficiently displaces thought. The everyday orgy of mindlessness is serious enough to occasionally hit national levels: recently, the French Secretary of Finance addressed the nation, clamoring “Unglue yourselves from the screens. Read.”
How, under such conditions, can Winnicott's (1960) “true self” develop? We get instead what Lasch called a “minimal self,” in diverse variants. The earliest and severest is early infantile autism which in our experience, described in clinical and technical detail in “Contacting the autistic child. Five successful early psychoanalytic interventions” (Busch de Ahumada and Ahumada 2017), is due to the rupture of the primal dialogue, of the affectionate connection with mother (and thus everyone else): a disconnection that can be fully resolved if psychoanalytic treatment is started early enough, in the first three or four years of life.
The condition the Minimal Self was behind the widespread shift from ego-dystonic neurotic states, on which psychoanalysis was built, to ego-syntonic non-neurotic states such as borderlines and the current vicissitudes of identity, the epidemics of autism, of gender dysphorias and of filio-parental violence amid social constellations such as the culture of victimization. To my mind both Utopias, the myth of an Eden lost and the combat with the gods are coupled as an unconscious duet, serving as guideline to current pathologies.
Infantile autism is an extreme symptomatic vicissitude of pain/aggression, offering self-encapsulation as a way of isolating from the outside world; diverse damages—bodily or psychic—on the self are another possible course of affairs. If we admit with Matte-Blanco (1988) that the deep unconscious does not recognize individuals, it may be hardly decidable at any given clinical moment up to what point attacks on the self are revengefully addressed to objects, be it to the parents or to society at large or to both: the damage to the self can by itself be the revenge, in which case the danger lies on the side of bodily damage: self-harming, accidents or suicide. Unconscious, and eventually conscious, feelings of victimization bring the privilege of revenge, allowing one to become a forthright victimary: by lending legitimacy and giving free rein to the impulse for cruelty, victimhood can turn into a highly sought status.
The myth of an Eden lost it is at everyone's disposal in his own unconscious, to be readily contrasted with the hardships and conflicts of everyday life. It is at the backbone of Romanticism, it has pride of place in postmodern ideology, and it opens wide ways to ideologies of reprisal. “Utopia equals totalitarianism” (Stoller 1996, p. 15): it fosters blind protagonisms, domestic, intellectual, or political, readily exploited by populisms of all brands. Utopia abolishes the ties to everyday common sense, and then boundaries are up for grabs, in a pervasive feeling that, as was written all over the place in the university district of Buenos Aires, and I guess elsewhere too, shortly after the Paris May '68 events: “anarchism will be an eternal springtime.”