Poet, translator, and child psychologist Anita Barrows identifies herself "as part of a growing movement to shift the paradigm of a bounded, isolated self toward a vision of the self that is permeable, interconnected not only with other human selves but with all living beings and processes." How would this change our theories of psychological development? Would we speak differently of separation and individuation, and of "object relations." Would the "oceanic feeling" that Freud restricted to infancy "come to be as valued as rational consciousness?"

Anita Barrows practices in Berkeley, California. Her published works include the award-winning collection of poetry The Road Past the View and (with Joanna Macy) Rilke's Book of Hours, New York, Riverhead Books, 1996.


Our developmental theories have tended to focus on the growth of the child's psyche in relation to other people, the coming of the child into human society: learning its signs, its rules, its values; separating and developing autonomy; and consolidating what are known as the "executive functions of the ego" so as to take a place in the world of bounded, independent, individual selves. But there are cultures alive in the world today in which a child's development is not conceived of only in terms of his family or his initiation into human culture.

In some tribal societies each person is accompanied through life by a totem animal, whose name a child might be given along with other names, and whose function is to embody the child's link with the natural world. A threat to the totem animal is also a threat to the person believed to share its essence. The relationship between the child and the natural world is honored in the southwestern United States by the Hopi, in a ritual reenacting their belief that newborns emerge from the underworld through the sipapuni, or Earth navel. For the first twenty days the infant remains in the darkness of this transition; then, at dawn, he is carried to the east and presented to the rising sun, while his mother says, "This is your child." Thus the Hopi's dependence on the cycles of nature, the diurnal rhythms, is acknowledged; the infant joins not only the human community, but the community of Earth.

The psychological theories that frame our late-twentieth-century grasp of the human condition were evolved, as Theodore Roszak has pointed out, in urban settings by urban theorists. In Freudian and post-Freudian formulations, the child's world is limited to the people who live within the walls of her house; indeed, animals, as in Freud's famous account of Little Hans, are stripped of their power and perceived as symbols of inter- and intrapsychic dynamics. Little Hans was the five-year-old son of a man Freud was analyzing; Freud never met Hans, but it was upon the father's description of his son's fear of horses that Freud first based his famous theory of the "Oedipus complex." In Freud's interpretation, the horses that Hans feared so much represented his father's sexual prowess; Hans's fear was his fear of his own feelings.

Elsewhere in psychoanalytic interpretations, the great dinosaurs become the devouring mother, and the five-year-old's fascination with them reflective not of his awe at these magnificent primitive beings, but of salient Oedipal conflicts. Bears, alligators, and snakes as they appear in our dreams and fantasies are reduced to symbols telling us of our preoccupation with human affairs the only preoccupations deemed valid or even possible. Depending on which theory one adheres to, the animals represent internal or external events; along with other aspects of the natural world mountains, the sea, the moon nonhuman creatures are stripped of their intrinsic value and integrity. Thus, in psychology no less than in the postindustrial political and commercial milieu, nature is understood to serve human beings, to be utilized by them. If an affective relation to nature is taken into account at all, it is most often in the context of the post-Romantic notion of the lonely individual making her or his way through life against the background of indifferent, unloving nature, that is, as the forces of consciousness against the wild, irrational spirit of the natural world. Western psychology, in this regard, bears the legacy of imperialist civilization's vision of "the primitive" in the Victorian era.

As part of a growing movement to shift the paradigm of a bounded, isolated self toward a vision of a self that is permeable, interconnected not only with other human selves but with all living beings and processes, a new theory of child development must be evolved. Such a theory must take into consideration that the infant is born into not only a social but an ecological context. It must acknowledge that, from the earliest moments of life, the infant has an awareness not only of human touch, but of the touch of the breeze on her skin, variations in light and color, temperature, texture, sound. No one who has spent time watching an infant could fail to know this; yet the theorists on whose work our current understanding (and therapies) have been based fail to account for its importance indeed, even for its presence. The "holding environment" is the mother and the domestic extensions of her caretaking: the shapes, colors, and rhythms of her body, her voice, her handling of her infant. If this were so, and carried to its extreme, one might imagine a healthy, balanced child growing up in a totally isolated, sterile room, so long as mother was there. That this example seems as ludicrous as it does is evidence of how deeply we know that the parent-child relationship does not proceed in a vacuum. The awakenings of sensuousness, desire, and pleasure that the mother (caretaker) facilitates in her child are contingent upon, and contained and interpenetrated by, the world into which she has given birth. Some ecofeminists have described rituals whereby they take their infant children out into a garden or park sometimes during the first few days of life, to introduce them to rosebush, squirrel, wisteria, hummingbird. This is something I remember doing spontaneously when each of my daughters was born, and which a number of friends have told me they did as well; but our Western religions have rituals (baptism, briss) only to initiate children into the particular human community into which they are born. And our psychologies reflect an identical worldview.

I am writing this lying in the shade of a grove of live oak in the high desert mountains of southern California. My groundcloth is stretched over dry, pointy oak leaves and grass burnt yellow by the desert sun. Beside me, minnows swim in a spring-fed pond, birds rustle in tall reeds. The wind that has just come up tells me it's midday; I need no other clock. Now an artists' colony, before that this was a privately owned tract of land where a critically ill professor of physics came to heal himself (and lived forty years longer), and before that a place sacred to native peoples. Walking the trails, discovering wildflowers and natural springs, one experiences the sacredness of this place even today, when from the top of the hills a newly built mall is visible a mile or so down the highway. I have come to this place to spend ten days writing. In the four days since I've been here, I've done all of my work outdoors, even at night, by the light of a Coleman lantern. It strikes me that nature has always been a "holding environment" for me; there is something comforting to me, when I descend into the often terrifying blankness from which I draw my poetry, in being outdoors, in being surrounded by warm air, bird song, trees. My earliest memory is of lying in one of those enormous, high carriages popular in the 1940s, looking up at the leaves of the linden trees that lined the boulevard where we lived in Brooklyn. Those moving leaves, the shadows they cast on the inside of the carriage as the warm summer breeze moved through everything these remain with me always. They are what I come home to when I take my notebook and pens outside.

I have allowed myself this digression because it feels important to me that the thoughts I have had for this essay germinating in me for some time now have come to shape themselves finally here; and that I have realized, working in this place, how utterly safe I feel struggling with the demons of writing when I am outdoors. I say this to underline the very real sense in which nature ever since those first encounters with the linden leaves has been identical for me with being held, has permitted me a free flow of creative energy that being indoors often doesn't.

Having said this, I am struck by the complexity of the task that faces the infant. This task is riddled with paradox: the child must simultaneously build enough of a membrane around herself to be able to function in her culture and allow that membrane to be permeable enough, receptive enough to sensation, feeling, communion. Our culture's insistence on independence, mastery, and competition has led to the popularity of a psychology that emphasizes only the first aspect of the child's task: the theory of Margaret Mahler, for instance, which traces the development of the child as a process of separation and individuation. The bounded, autonomous self (achieved, if the child is healthy, sometime around age three and a half) is the goal.

It is an inherent paradox of organic matter that both structure and permeability, containment and yielding, are essential to survival. In this context it should be possible to describe an understanding of development that gives weight to both these aspects of being, privileging neither and acknowledging the ways in which one potentiates the other. The Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget, who began his career as a biologist, pointed to this in his formulation of assimilation and accommodation as the manner in which adaptation and learning are established. His cognitive/constructivist psychology, susceptible as it is to criticism about the areas of human experience it fails to account for, does, however, account quite extensively for the developing child's passion to discover his environment. The study of Piaget, I think, still serves as a healthy balance to theories of development centered only on the child's intrapsychic and family situations, although Piaget does seem to focus on the child's manipulation of, rather than her interaction with, the things around her perhaps too exclusively.

Piaget and others whose theories inform our work now may serve as a bridge to a more ecologically based understanding of child development. In Children as Individuals, Michael Fordham, the British Jungian, posits a self that begins in an undifferentiated state and gradually "protrudes" what he calls "de-integrates" much as, over time, islands might begin to define themselves from under a sea where they have constituted a single land mass. These de-integrates become, in Fordham's conception, the ego, which finds its way into the world, still connected to the original substrate but retaining only the vaguest memory of it. This central self is inarticulable, nonrational, and deeply responsive to archetypal patterns in the world.

Daniel Stern, in his work based on empirical studies of newborns, also suggests that there exists in each of us what he names a core self, a self consisting of sensations and capable of being moved by inchoate perceptions of sound, rhythm, light. In that he does not see this state as needing to be transcended or left permanently behind in that he suggests, rather, that this matrix of sensation is a central cortex around which the rings of further development will construct themselves, and in that this core self is potentially accessible to the rest of the personality throughout life Stern's work may be an important step toward conceiving of a developmental process not exclusively founded in the world of social relationships.

D. W. Winnicott, the British object-relations theorist, formulated for us the concept of transitional phenomena, essentially the investment of subjective meaning in objective phenomena, a shadowy area of experience where there is neither me nor not-me, but rather a dynamic interpenetration between the self and something in the world. From the child's capacity to impart meaning usually, at the earliest, to something quite inanimate Winnicott suggests that the human capacity for creativity, culture, and spirituality evolves. The child first experiences such phenomena in the context of the early caretaking relationship, then extends its realm of experience outward, into the world. That this world is known as the "outside," the "not-me," is a phenomenon of Western dualistic thought; as Thomas Berry, Theodore Roszak, Joanna Macy, and others have pointed out, it is only a by construct of the Western mind that we believe ourselves living in an "inside" bounded by our own skin, with everyone and everything else on the outside. The place where transitional phenomena occur, then (to use Winnicott as a sort of bridge to a new formulation), might be understood, in this new paradigm of the self, to be the permeable membrane that suggests or delineates but does not divide us from the medium in which we exist. It is in this realm that distinctions between subjective and objective begin to blur and intersubjectivity is possible. Interestingly, this is also the realm of interbeing described by Buddhist teacher and poet Thich Nhat Hanh. What evidence do we have of the existence of this "ecological self" in childhood? Certainly the infant's delight in his body and his sensuous reactions to the world warm bath water, cat's fur, cool grass is some indication. No one watching a baby explore the world could deny his pleasure in it; yet, if we take the position of many analytically oriented theorists, we would have to say that all exploration is sublimation, the infant's search for the body of the mother. At its most reductionist, analytic theory would trace all experience of oneness, merging, interpenetration, and awe to preverbal experience of the personal mother.

That children's stories abound with animal protagonists speaks to the bond we perceive between children and animals; though analysts like Bettelheim have sought to interpret fairy tales as allegories of instinctual conflict, I think the attraction children have for fairy tales set in nature and populated with animal characters may also be explained by children's instinctually based feelings of continuity with the natural world. That so many contemporary children's books anthropomorphize and sentimentalize animals is again a manifestation of our utilitarian vision of nature and our elevation of the rational mind over all other modalities of living.

When my daughter Viva was small enough to be carried in a backpack, I used to walk with her almost daily in the open hills of Tilden Park, on the east side of San Francisco Bay. It struck me one day that her babbling hushed to a whisper as we entered a grove of Monterey pine. Under the spun light of pine needles, in the cool summer afternoon, I, too, felt hushed; but Viva's response seemed to me to be entirely her own, and I noticed it many times thereafter, as though something in her resonated instinctually with the changed air, the canopy of branches, the mysterious flickering of shadow. The presence of an ecological self has implications for the way in which we practice therapy. If we see the child as inextricably connected not only to her family, but to all living things and to the earth itself, then our conception of her as an individual, and of the family and social systems in which she finds herself, must expand. How does our limited vision shape what we see, what we subtly encourage and discourage? How would an expanded vision alter our efforts to affect the child's environment, to look beyond her object relationships for the sources of depression, agitation, apathy, violence, or chronic illness? An ecological conception of development brings with it political imperatives, imperatives for social action; for protecting our children and facilitating their growth means broadening our vision to wider and wider contexts.

As we become increasingly aware of our inextricability from the web of life, the many ways in which the ecological self develops alongside the object-related self will, I believe, reveal themselves. A developmental theory embracing both would describe a sequence of stages that might appear rife with internal contradiction, but that would embrace the full experience of growth rather than a single aspect of it. What we have perceived, for example, as serving the process of separation might also be understood as serving the child's sense of connectedness to the world: the toddler who takes his first steps away from his mother makes active forays into the world. Thus mobility leads not only to increased autonomy, but to an enhanced capacity to approach and make connections with the environment. While this interface of child/world is implicit in many developmental theories, their predominant narrative is that of Adam in the garden, of the future dragon-slayer surveying his terrain, or of the victory of Logos over the forces of the irrational. In a sense, what I am suggesting amounts to a simple shift in point of view to see, to continue with my example, that what the toddler is moving toward is as critical to him as what he is moving away from. This might result in our understanding that development does not necessarily rupture a oneness that is henceforth to be mourned, longed for but unattainable; rather, it can make an increasingly widening circle of oneness possible. In a much deeper and more radical sense, then, an ecologically based theory of development will acknowledge two fundamental movements of being the tendency to cohere and the tendency to dissolve, the tendency to consolidate into a given shape and the tendency to yield and be yielded into--as equally valent and equally essential.

Ecophilosopher Arne Naess has suggested, in fact, that the process of maturing as a human involves a gradual broadening of one's identification. Psychoanalytic theory, with its pathologizing of experiences of merger, falls short precisely in that it envisions health as a narrowing and drawing-in of the experiences constituting the self. The conventional construct of the self is useful for us to function in the world, as are many of the other constructs we live with and take for granted time, for instance, which to ancient and tribal peoples has meant something very different from what it means to us; or consciousness, which to the West means logos but to many people includes the reality of dream consciousness and the wisdom of the body. Certainly no one would suggest that a child could develop well without achieving some concept of "identity," some place from which to move forth, some container that gives structure to her experience. At the same time, however, it is limiting to assume that this is the sum, the consummate attainment, of healthy development. Even as consolidation is gradually achieved, another essential stratum takes shape in the child, having to do with the timeless, egoless forces around him, which penetrate him and create his reality in ways that the culture does not articulate or even acknowledge. Frances Tustin, the British child analyst, sees the "awareness of bodily separateness" as the tragedy underlying human existence. But bodily separateness, we might argue, is an illusion; my skin is not separate from the air around it, my eyes are not separate from what they see. I would alter Tustin's statement to say that it is indeed the illusion of bodily separateness that is the genuine sorrow, that accounts for our loneliness, that isolates us and leads us to exploit and violate one another, the world we live in, and, ultimately, ourselves. Our conventional developmental theories have lent support to this illusion that we live wholly within this slender envelope of flesh that encloses the soft, vulnerable organs that we are irrevocably cut off from everyone and everything else, and that much of our suffering arises from the yearning to repossess some primitive state of merger where neither need nor yearning had to exist. To make up for this loss, conventional theories posit an aggressive "taking in," a penetrating activeness, as our best and fundamental stance vis-ˆ-vis the world. We are stewards or masters or conquerors, but nothing ever truly satisfies our vast and restless longing. This sorrowful illusion of separateness is expressed in Judeo-Christian thinking as estrangement from God; it is what the fruit of the tree of knowledge consciousness condemns us to.

Mystical experience, in both Eastern and Western traditions, has often centered on the dissolution of this perceived separateness. But the loosening of boundaries provokes, in many of us, nearly intolerable anxiety. Nonattachment and interconnectedness receive far less validation by competitive consumer culture than the neediness and greediness of the little screaming ego. When by grace or accident or even by intention something like what Freud described as the "oceanic feeling" does arise in us, our response is often terror, as though it signified the brink of madness. We defend against such loosening of boundaries as though our very survival were threatened; and the numbing which we ensure by our addictions to drugs, alcohol, entertainment, and so forth, prevents us from experiencing not only the depths of our anguish, but the potential we have for real communion with our world.

What if such states of communion, such dissolution of boundaries, were as valued as rational consciousness? What if, from the beginning of life, nature were perceived as teacher, guide, source, as important to us as our families? How differently would we live?

Copyright Sierra Club Books 1996. All rights reserved.

Anita Barrows' essay is excerpted from Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind, edited by Theodore Roszak, Mary Gomes and Allen Kanner for Sierra Club Books. The books can be ordered from Sierra Club Books by calling 1-800-935-1056.

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