You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Behaviors vital for species survival may well be encoded genetically and thus formed outside volition and awareness. Such patterns of the unconscious may be made manifest in dreams and other altered states. Among vital species survival behaviors is the parental protection of infant and child, most immediately maternal protection. If there is reality to a phylogenetic concept, what elements of maternal protective behavior might be coded and transmitted?
Unconscious patterns should be coded for at least the following:
Capacity to respond to the infant or child. Its size (with its vulnerability), cry, and smile are some of the stimuli serving as releasers. The primary response is nurturance, e.g., milk flow, holding. These responses are coded with the associated feeling-tone of pleasure, which facilitates the nurturance or fusion response.
The need to ensure the survival of the infant beyond feeding or comforting. This requires the associated painful affect of alarm or fear so that the mother may be mobilized to search for and then locate the threatened infant. The pattern further requires a sense of maternal anticipation, a predictive or futures-scanning capacity, so that survival threats to the child may be prevented or forestalled.
Not as evident, and less vital, a capacity to respond with aggression toward the infant or child. Such a response may be associated with a feeling-tone of pain or pleasure, Adaptively, this may serve to conserve maternal energy from excessive demands and
Dr. Epstein is Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, Tulane Medical School.
promote the child's individuation. It may also serve phylogenetically older purposes in mammalian and human history related to infanticide, which may have had adaptive value in terms of population control or removal of impaired infants.
Observation indicates that innate motivational processes contain ambivalence since all are coded with pleasure-pain and, at the next level, approach-avoid. The opposite p