Ричард Бах

 

Министерство общего и профессионального образования

Свердловской области.

Правовой Лицей имени Е. Р. Кастеля города Екатеринбурга.

Образовательная область: Филология.

 

Предмет: Английский язык.

 

Тема: “I preserve his future, he preserves

 

my past.” (R. Bach). We all are from the childhood.

Исполнитель: Ученица 10 «Б» класса

 

Фамилия И. О.: Калашникова С. И.

 

Научный руководитель: Воронова М.В.

 

17 февраля 2001 года

Contents.

“I preserve his future, he preserves my past” (R. Bach).

We all are from the childhood.

1. Introduction (part 1)………………………………………………3

2. Part 2…………………………………………………………5

3. Conclusion (part 3)…………………………………………14

4. The list of literature………………………………………..17

 

Introduction (Part 1)

Everybody wants to know what is happening around him or her? We hear about criminals, children’s creams and strange behaviour? If analyse the last ten news-programmes, we’ll understand than the kid’s problems stays on the same level with news about gas or oil. The children’s problems are the most interesting and important one for the majority of psychologists. They tries to understand everything what is connected with children, because everybody believes that we can change a kid, but we can not do the same with a man. Frankly speaking I disagree with this statement. Is it means that a person can not understand and solve all his problems? I think, that everybody does not believe in this.

Really, nowadays everyone is surround by a great number of problems. Some of them are really easy, and we don’t need any help in their solving. However, life is not so primitive, the majority of situations are really strange. If we want to cope with such difficulties, we must understand the roots of them. We will never be good at chemistry, physics and math without knowing the basic rules and laws. The same is with the roots of human behaviour. We can not learn about men’s conduct in different situations, else we’ll be able to claimant people’s stresses and predict human reaction (it can be very useful from the criminal side). Or, may be, we can ..!

There are a lot of points of view on a problem, where the origin of this or that conduct is. Freud came to believe that all the roots of possible complicates are laying in the sexual life of a person, Bacon found them in the inward life, in men’s ghosts and idols. A great group of people believes in mystic power, which controls people’s existents. It means that everything has its own beginning. If we know the origins, we will be able to give a right estimation to the situation and, of course, to react in a proper way. But, if we can learn about math rules from the special books, we can’t do the same, if we want to find a local answer to the question:” where are the roots of human behaviour and reaction? Of course, there are a lot of theories and conclusions, which are connected with our topic. Nevertheless, the majority of them touch upon a question about the childhood in any case. They are confident that all information about our future life (precondition) we get in an early age, that our problems are connected with childhood and the roots of good and evil are not in the genes as commonly believe, but in the earliest days of life. This idea is rather new and conflicting, but very popular and under discussion. In this case it will not be only interesting but greatly important to learn such material inside out, and define at last, is it a solid theory, because, if it is, we’ll be able to understand and claimant the impediments after memorising our past. This problem is really dillicate. For it solution, we should work with an enormous quantity theories of different thinkers (like Freud or Birn) and writers (like Bach and Coalio). The main idea is that the majority of conclusions belong to the pen of European scientists. Considering the importance of this question, it is easy to understand that it’s necessary to work with English writing material, because different reports can give us inexact information, and make incorrect opinion of situation. For this reason, my paper is in English. I think, it is not very difficult to understand the aim of this work, of course. It consists of consolidation the theories about the questions that all our problems are from childhood, analysis of this material and response to the issue of correctness of these ideas.

Part 2

Human infants seem so weak and helpless at birth that it is hard to believe they are capable of much interaction with their environment. In fact, not too long ago many people still wondered whether new-born could even see or hear at all. In the last several decades, however, research on the new-born has expanded greatly, and a very different view has emerged.  We now know that human infants are born with sensory systems that are impressively able. They process information and learn about their surroundings from the very moment of birth. They learn the world and try to understand how to survive in it. Children acquire an enormous amount of information in the twelve years of live. For Piaget’s mind “to this age the personality is “shaped””. [1]

Everything what children have learned during this years stays in the subconscious. Of course, people cannot remember the experience of such early age, but they use it, calling - intuition (instinct) or presentiment. So, our reactions and deeds “depend on what we had put in our mind” [2]Lots of psychologists, the main of them is Freud, “came to believe that current problems can often be traced back to childhood experiences.” [3]

“Unfortunately, these early experiences are not usually available to consciousness. Only through great effort can they be coaxed into active memory,” [4]– said Freud to this problem.

The ability to memorise depends on the development of brains. And, in each term, the abilities a person’s brain can develop depend on experiences in the first three years of life, the childhood. Studies on abandoned and severely maltreated Romanian children, as an example, revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain. The repeated traumatization has led to an increased release of stress hormones which have attacked the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroyed the new, already build-up neurones. The areas of their brains responsible for the “management” of their emotions are 20-30% smaller than in other children of the same age. Obviously, all children (not only Romanian) who suffer such abandonment and maltreatment will be damaged in this way.

 The attitude to the children always has its results. An American writer Alice Millir tried to understand, why some people (Hitler, Stalin, Mao and common one’s) are so aggressive. She wrote:” I found it logical that a child beaten often and deprived of loving physical contact would quickly pick up the language of violence. For him this language became the only effective means of communication available. However, when I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the examples of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ceacescu, when I tried to expose the social consequences of child maltreatment, I first encountered strong resistance. Repeatedly I was told,” I, too, was a battered child, but that did not make me a criminal. When I asked these people for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who made the difference, a sibling, a teacher, a neighbour, just somebody who liked or even loved them but, at least in most cases, was unable to protect them. Yet through his presence this person gave the child a notion of trust and love. I call these persons “helping witnesses”.”[5]  So, we see that these people became aggressive because they lack love and protection in the childhood. It means that we depend not only from our common surrounding, but from “the people from the past” [6]If a person lacked protection in the childhood, he will feel himself uncomfortable and “even in a great horror” [7]in the company

of people, he’ll want to protect himself and that’s why his reaction too

ordinary things will be rude. Many have also been lucky enough to find

“enlightened” and courageous “witnesses”, people who helped them to recognise the injustices they suffered, the significance the hurtful treatment had for them, and its influences on their whole life. They may even suffer much in their life, may become drug addicted, and have relationship problems, but thanks to the few good experience in their childhood usually do not become criminals. “The criminal outcome seems to be connected with a childhood that didn’t provide any helping witness, that was a place of constant threat and fear,”- [8]Miller thought.

The parents attitude to the kid finds its mirroring in his future personality and behaviour. It has been observed again and again that parents who tend to maltreat and neglect their children do it in ways which resemble the treatment they endured in their own childhood, without any conscious memory of their early experiences. Fathers who sexually abuse their children are usually unaware of the fact that they had themselves suffered the same abuse. It is rather in therapy, even if ordered by the courts, that they can discover, sometimes stupefied, their own history. And realise thereby that for years they have attempted to act out their own scenario, just to get rid of it. The majority of psychologists believe that the explanation of this fact is that “information about the cruelty suffered during childhood remains stored in the brain in the form of unconscious memories. For a child, conscious experience of such treatment is impossible. If children are not to break down completely under the pain and the fear, they must repress that knowledge.[9]” But the unconscious memories of the child who has been neglected and maltreated, even before he has learned to speak, drive the adult to reproduce those repressed scenes over and over again in the attempt to liberate himself from the fears that cruelty has left with him. For example, The German reformer Martin Luther was an intelligent and educated man, but he hated all Jews and he encouraged parents to beat their children. He was no perverted sadist like Hitler's executioners. But 400 years before Hitler he was disseminating this kind of destructive counsel. According to Eric Ericson's biography, Luther's mother beat him severely even before he was treated this way by his father and his teacher. He believed this punishment had "done him good" and was therefore justified. The conviction stored in his body that if parents do it then it must be right. This example shows, nothing that a child learns later about morality at home, in school or in church will ever have the same strong and long lasting effect as the treatment inflicted on his or her body in the first few days, weeks and months. “The lesson learned in the first three years cannot be expunged,” –[10] said Freud. So we can see that if a child learns from birth that tormenting and punishing an innocent creature is the right thing to do, and that the child's suffering must not be acknowledged, that message will always be stronger than intellectual knowledge acquired at a later stage. Alice Miller made really great research work and her conclusions give us, at last, the hole picture of this situation:“ Usually away from home either praying in church or running the priest's household. Stalin idealized his parents right up to the end of his life and was constantly haunted by the fear of dangers, dangers that had long since ceased to exist In the lives of all the tyrants I analyzed, I also found without exception paranoid trains of thought bound up with their biographies in early childhood and the repression of the experiences they had been through. Mao had been regularly whipped by his father and later sent 30 million people to their deaths but he hardly ever admitted the full extent of the rage he must have felt for his own father, a very severe teacher who had tried through beatings to "make a man" out of his son. Stalin caused millions to suffer and die because even at the height of his power his actions were determined by unconscious, infantile fear of powerlessness. Apparently his father, a poor cobbler from Georgia, attempted to drown his frustration with liquor and whipped his son almost every day. His mother displayed psychotic traits, was completely incapable of defending her son and was but were still present in his deranged mind. His fear didn't even stop after he had been loved and admired by millions.” [11]

But, what happen with people who were loved in their childhood? They have a better live without violent and horror. There are people who grow up with loving and protecting parents who “can later find a kind, sympathetic partner, can organize their life and become good parents”, even “if they have to go through the horror of a concentration camp during their adolescence” [12] after learning about Pablo Picasso we can mention the severe trauma that the child Pablo Picasso underwent at the age of three: the earthquake in Malaga in 1884, the flight from the family's apartment into a cave that seemed to be more safe, and eventually witnessing the birth of his sister in the same cave under these very scary circumstances. However, Picasso survived these traumas without later becoming psychotic or criminal because he was protected by his very loving parents. They were able to give him what he most needed in this chaotic situation: empathy, compassion, protection and the feeling of being safe in their arms.

Thanks to the presence of his parents, the two enlightened witnesses of his fear and pain, not only during the earthquake but also throughout his whole childhood, he was later able to express his early, frightening experiences in a creative way. In Picasso's famous painting "Guernica" we can see what might have happened in the mind of the three-year-old child while he was watching the dying people and horses and listening to the children screaming for help on the long walk to the shelter. Small children can go unscared even through bomb-raids if they feel safe in the arms of their parents.

It is much more difficult for a child to overcome early traumatizations if they are caused by their own parents. Here we have an another example. I analysed the childhood of the writer Franz Kafka. I’ll try to show that the nightmares he describes in his stories recount exactly what might have happened to the small, severely neglected infant Kafka. He was born into a family in which he must have felt like the hero of The Castle (ordered about but not needed and constantly misled) or like K. in The Trial (charged with incomprehensible guilt) or like The Hunger Artist who never found the food he was so strongly longing for. Thanks to the love and the deep comprehension of his sister Otla in his puberty, his late "helping witness," Kafka could eventually give expression to his suffering in writing. Does it mean that he therefore overcame his traumatic childhood? He could indeed write his work, full of knowledge and wisdom, but why did he die so early—in his thirties—of tuberculosis? It happened in a time when he knew many people who loved and admired him. However, these good experiences could not erase the unconscious emotions and memories stored in his body.

Kafka was hardly aware of the fact that the main sources of his imagination were deeply hidden in his early childhood. Most writers aren't. But the amnesia of an artist or writer, though sometimes a burden for their body, doesn't have any negative consequences for society. The readers simply admire the work and are rarely interested in the writers' infancy . However, the amnesia of politicians or leaders of sects does afflict countless people, and will continue to do so, as long as society remains blind to the important connections between the denial of traumatic experiences in early childhood and the destructive, criminal actions of individuals.

An American writer, Richard Bach, is well knowing by his Fantasy and Philosophy. He solves difficult problems, which are connected with “Human psychology”. He does not have special education, Richard is only a pilot (in any case, he was…before he began to write). His first book was “Sea-gull”, than “breach through the eternity”, “One”, “Plane” etc. In this stories and novels Bach taught upon lots of different topics, and one of them is about childhood. This man deadly believe that a person cannot live without his past. And what do we have there, in the past? Of course, childhood! This topic glassed in one of the latest work: “Running from the safety”. The main idea of the plot is that “Richard-men” [13]( he prefers to write about himself rather then to work with heroes) meat “Richard-kid”. It means that he, the old one, meat in his own world a little boy of eight years old. This boy is “HE”, but from the past. In this novel Richard Bach tried to answer the the question: ”What will you do if you meat yourself-from-the-past?” The own correct response he has able to find is “to learn everything what you can from this kid”. What can you learn from the little child from your past? What he can give us? This questions can appeared in the mind of everybody… in “Running…” Bach neatly respond to them: “he remembers all what I have forgot” Really, we have spoken about this already, all information which people get in an early age cannot be remembered further. But kids retain all this, cause it still in their active memory. Some people had critical moments in their childhood, which influence their lifes, but they cannot remember this episode – the most impotent one – and that’s why cannot change the situation. For example, a man is a looser all his live. He cannot do anything with this. Why? After memorising his childhood, he remembered that he was whipped by schoolboys and after this all the school was laughing at him…He understood everything and tried to change the attitude to this situation at last we won for first time. Richard Bach had such critical moments too. At first, the death of his brother and his climbing to the water-tower. After this he understood that he was not a little boy, and “left the family and common world” after this moment he decided to become a pilot and “made the biggest fault” in the live: went to the army. Why he did it? For what he left the family? Why his behaviour was such as it was? Richard cannot understand. But after the talk with Dickey (Little Bach) he was able to explain all this to himself and “ the desert” – Dickey’s world – “converted in a field of green grass”. At first Richard was not able to “survive in the dark of the mind”. But Dickey was able to return to Bach “the part of himself”, and he did it. Now he could be “ out of space and time”. Telling things about the live and answering to Dickey’s questions, Bach found lots of responses for his own issues. “Dickey knows everything about the childhood, and I knows everything about one of his Futures”, - told Richard to his wife. So, the boy could find all the answers in several months, and spare 50 years of had learning the live. The man remembered the half of his life and understood the roots of all the problems. And both took that they could not live without each other. “I preserve his future, he preserves my past”, - said Richard Bach and he was absolutely right.

 

Conclusion (Part 3).

So, we can see that the question about the Childhood is really important. It found the glass in many spheres of human life and men’s deeds. It is not a science theory, but a reality. We know that every cow is an animal doesn't include the statement that every animal is a cow. It has been proved that many adults have had the good fortune to break the cycle of abuse. Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across persecutors who weren't themselves victims in their childhood, though most of them don't know it because their feelings are repressed. The less these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous they are to society. So I think it is crucial to grasp the difference between the statement, "every victim becomes a persecutor," which is wrong, and the statement, "every persecutor was a victim in his childhood," which I consider true. The problem is that, feeling nothing, he remembers nothing, realises nothing, and this is why surveys don't always reveal the truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened witness ... therapist, social worker, lawyer, judge ... can help the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore the unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the process of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence. Working toward a better future cannot be done without legislation that clearly forbids corporal punishment toward children and makes society aware of the fact that children are people too. The whole society and its legal system can then play the role of a reliable, enlightened and protecting witness for children at risk, children of adolescent, drug addicted criminals who may themselves become predators without such assistance. The only reason why a parent might smack his children is the parent's own history. All other so-called reasons, such as poverty and unemployment, are pure mystification. There are unemployed parents who don't spank their children and there are many wealthy parents who maltreat their children in the most cruel way and teach them to minimise the terror by calling it the right education. With a law prohibiting corporal punishment towards children, people of the next generation will not have recorded the highly misleading information in their brain, an almost irreversible damage. They will be able to have empathy with a child and understand what has been done to children over millennia. It is a realistic hope to think that then (and only then) the human mind and behaviour will change. With a law that forbids spanking every citizen becomes an enlightened witness.

So, we see that everything lays in ourselves. It is easy to understand that people can change everything around themselves. The theory about personal children problems is really correct. Now everybody can just analyse his past and remember the main idea of his last deeds. They will help him to solve the difficulties. It is the easiest way to survive in your own inside world, which can be a bright one. But the main problem is that not everybody knows about this theory, and especially such people can not be happy and live an easy life else the whole world can be changed. People will understand all their problems and (it is important) now how to behave and solve all the difficulties. It means – no depress, mad people and their deaths, good social situation, at last. To my mind we should try to use this material, because it can help us and it will be so easy to understand each other and, at the first term, ourselves, is not it?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The list of literature

1. “People, who play in games” A. Birn

2. “Psychology”  Camille B. Wortman

Elizabeth F. Loftus

3. “ The Childhood Trauma” Alise Miller

4. “Running from Safty” R. Bach

5. “Interpretation of dreams” S. Freud

 

 

 

 

[1] The list of literature. The 2^nd book.

[2] The list of literature. The 1^st book.

[3] The list of literature. The 2^nd book

[4] The list of literature. The 5^th book.

[5] The list of literature. The 3^rd book.

[6] The list of literature. The 1^st book.

[7] The list of literature. The 3^rd book.

[8] The list of literature. The 3^rd book.

[9] The list of literature. The 2^nd book.

[10] The list of literature. The 5^th book.

[11] The list of literature. The 3^rd book.

[12] The list of literature. The 3^rd book.

[13] The list of literature. The 4^th book. Other quotes are from this book.