The Nomadic Alternative – Page 237

Belief, when she shows her breast, she relieves the child's anxiety about the continued flow of food.

But the child who sucks feverishly at the breast has no interest in the food it contains. Anxiety for lack of food cannot explain what child psychologists have called "non-nutritive sucking". This led others to the ingenious, but implausible hypothesis that the inner world of a squalling infant seethed with destructive fantasies of terrifying ferocity, which resurfaced in later life as the love-hate relationship all people are supposed to have for their mothers.

By tearing aggressively at the breast, the baby discharges its destructive impulses against the sinister aspect of the mother, who would swallow, smother, and, if it was a boy, eventually castrate him with her love. But there is a more simple and plausible explanation of this rage to which I shall return shortly.

If the cries persist, even after the mother has offered her breast, as a third alternative, she may take the anxious child in her arms and rock or "walk" it back to happiness. "The ideal movement", writes Dr. John Bowlby, "is a vertical one with a traverse of three inches. Rocking at slow speed such as thirty cycles per minute is not effective in arresting crying. Once the speed is increased to fifty cycles per minute and above, every baby stops crying, and almost always remains quiet." The old psychoanalytic explanation of the need for rocking the baby supposed that it "remembered" and pined for the heart beat of the mother which it had once known in the womb. This was essential evidence for the theory of the birth trauma.

The mother's heart certainly comforts the child. It prefers to nurse on the left side where it can feel it beating, and it would be the first to sound the alarm if the heart stopped. But there exists a difficulty of synchronism. The heart of the mother beats around the rate of eighty per minute, the baby's at around a hundred and fifty. This would mean having two heartbeat rhythms sounding off against each other. But the optimum speed for rocking the baby is sixty rocks per minute, one per second, and the vertical traverse