The Nomadic Alternative – Page 258

interference in her life - even if she had enough milk to do so.

In a civilized society the mother puts her baby in a rocking cradle to substitute for her movement and later she may but it a rocking horse. Nearly all children, at some time or other, are left in the house with a friend or relative while the mother goes out or away.

But by abandoning her child - if only for a short time - she auto-matically fires off the Early Warning System against the Beast. The child is oppressed by fears it cannot explain. Horrid presences waken it in sleep. It sucks its thumb in withdrawn anxiety or screams with frustrated fury.

However, the mother who wishes to leave can give her child all or any of three things to compensate for her absence - a dummy for the nipple or third point of contact, a soft toy to replace her warm body and hair, and something to bang up and down to imitate her movement. All these minimize the frustrations of confinement, and save it from the complete mental breakdown of withdrawn children. She can repeace all these substitutes for her affection within a playpen. This infant prison is civilization's cage in microcosm.

But by diverting attachment behaviour from the mother elsewhere, the children of the settlers develop cravings to hold, possess and treasure inanimate things. The late Professor Winnicott suggested that things or 'transitional objects' as he called them, helped a child articulate his dawning sense of symbolism and were essential for the formation of the intellect. Dr. Bowlby disagrees with this interpretation of their function. "A much more parsimonious way of looking at the role of these inanimate objects is to regard them simply as objects towards which certain components of attachment behaviour come to be directed or redirected because the 'natural' object (i.e. the physical presence of the mother) is unavailable."

On this point the attitude of the hunters is most instructive and suggests a position between these two opinions. The mother gives her child 'things' to play with, handle and name; these things are the content of his environment and the very stuff of his or her intelligence. But there it ends. The mother actively weans her