MinorMajor

JM Coetzee's novel DISGRACE excels in many ways - despite its brevity and concision it touches on some big questions. I have been reading some secondary material and came across an article by Mike Marais which discusses its ethical dimensions: http://www.unisa.ac.za/default.asp?Cmd=ViewContent&ContentID=11816

written in response to a review by Jane Taylor: http://www.chico.mweb.co.za/mg/books/9907/990727-disgrace.html

This caught my interest because it ties in with another book I recently looked at, THE DEATH OF IVAN ILLYCH by Tolstoy. Tolstoy's book also touches on what duties we owe others and the danger of living a life in the mainstream, operating according to what Marais calls the instrumentalising logic of autonomous individuality.

More to follow soon.

If I were to tell you that people who grew up in unstable family environments were more likely to reproduce that kind of environment than those who did not, how surprised would you be?

Well if 'not too much' seems like a reasonable answer- I'm not sure you'll need to read 'Transgenerational Consistencies of Attachment: A New Theory' by eminent psycho-analytic researcher, Peter Fonagy.

A new theory? I doesn't seem shiny new to me! He does, however, support this truism with research by attachment theorists and psycho-analysts and makes a good case for it. Whether it gets us much beyond Philip Larkin's famous verse, is another matter. [Good piece on Larkin from Arts and Letters - by Adam Kirsch, whoever he is, published in Walrus Magazine from Canada].

Good parents, [I think we're still talking mothers here...] are able to empathise with their infants and respond to distress appropriately. They contain the emotions that young children aren't yet capable of containing. They mirror the reactions of the children, but add in other elements - smiling [tenderness], humour [distancing] etc - making what was initially undiluted, complex. Parents who are good at this - something along the lines of Winnicott's 'good enough' mother - are much more likely to establish 'secure attachment' which in turn is the cornerstone of all future relationships. Fonagy goes on to remind us that there's plenty of evidence to suggest that our capacity to think is inherently intersubjective. That without moving from a teleological to a intentional world view the child will not be able to know what it feels OR what other people feel.

Again, there's not much new here, but it did remind me of an interesting article by Ian McEwan, 'Only Love Then Oblivion', written in response to 9/11. It discusses the relationship of cruelty to imagination. I'm not sure how much research went into the early life experiences of the 9/11 Al Qaeda crew. I remember reading that Mohammed Atta was pleasant, religious - a good son, a good student. A shame that someone like Fonagy isn't dragged in front of the camera by a documentary producer to look into this further. Anyway, where was I? Good capacity for 'mentatlising' as Fonagy puts it stands the securely attached child in good stead for future relationships. Great for the securely attached kids, tough for those with less psychologically robust mothers.

It's reminiscent of the moral luck debate. I'm sure it is, but it's too late to outline how! Fonagy sums it up in this way:

These three components (the second-order representation of affect, the intentional representation of the caregiver and ultimately the intentional representation of the self) equip the child to confront a sometimes unduly harsh social reality. I shall go on to argue that the robust establishment of reflective function has a protective effect and, by contrast, its relatively fragile status indexes a vulnerability to later trauma. Secure attachment and reflective function are, I believe, overlapping constructs and the vulnerability associated with insecure attachment lies primarily in the child’s diffidence in conceiving of the world in terms of psychic rather than physical reality. Given trauma of sufficient intensity, even a secure bond may sometimes crumble and in the absence of psychosocial pressures, reflective function may offer only marginal developmental advantage. To understand severe personality disorder, as I hope we shall see, it is important we are attuned to our patient’s capacity to use the language of mental states for self organisation as well as social understanding.

So some kind of repair via therapy seems to Fonagy's palliative for this early deprivation. It does all seem quite reasonable to me, but so did what Steven Pinker had to say in 'The Blank Slate'. In the absence of a dialouge between the two, a word from someone suitably qualified would be most welcome.

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First post on the minor major blog. I'll be adding some posts on stuff I've found interesting in the last few weeks or so. I'm hoping to get some feedback, so please feel free to add comments. I plan to take a look at the Mark Romanek video for Johnny Cash's aubade - a cover of the Nine Inch Nails song, 'Hurt'. I'll also be discussing Marc Isaac's documentary 'Calais'.