The Origin of Anxiety: A Synopsis

ABSTRACT: For thousands of years, in all developed societies throughout the world, mothers have been separated from their babies-as an emotional adaptation to a life of alienation. The first advanced civilizations which can relate this to us are the Sumerians-and their successors the Babylonians. Five thousand years ago they developed the cuneiform writing system and then recorded the oldest stories in the world. I understand their mythology as the 'great dreams' of these peoples. In the stories that tell of the great goddess Inanna and her Taaby" Dumuzi, these early separation dramas are described with impressive imagery. At a deeper level, the heroic battles are interpreted as a symbolic representation of birth: at the end of a struggle beyond the limits of human imagination, the dragon or monster is beheaded: the umbilical cord is severed, the baby is born. But this enormous battle is not the end of the myth. There are also tales of the gods that actually tell what a baby experiences in its mother's womb. The Sumerians are the first culture to write of these dramatic events. Based on these wounds from pregnancy, birth and infancy, they invented more and more new pictures and stories, to make these early traumatic experiences understandable. As I believe, to calm the people of that tune. These interpretations are the key to understanding the mythology of other cultures, but also to understanding the hidden pre- and perinatal aspects of our own dreams. KEY WORDS: Sumerians, mythology, pregnancy, birth. HUMANITY'S EARLIEST MYTHOLOGY REFLECTS PRE- AND PERINATAL LIFE In all traditional cultures, a baby is in constant physical contact with its mother or with another caretaker, during the day as well as at night, as with the apes. A baby in this situation feels at peace and safe, it does not cry, and if it does, this is a signal to which its caring environment immediately responds. The situation was quite different in the ancient civilizations, where mother and child were separated after the birth. And there is a pattern: the higher the civilization, the earlier and more radical the separation (for thousands of years). We know, from comparative behavioral studies, that a young animal's first emotional experiences are the most important ones. They are irreversible-this phenomenon is known as imprinting. Depth psychology tries to define this with the term 'sub-conscious'. From this follows: in the depths of the soul of each person from all civilizations there is the panic and anxiety of an abandoned baby, a hell of loneliness-to a greater or lesser degree. It is the emotional adaptation to the alienated life in a town. This anxiety is, at the same time, the driving force for all the higher achievements in the culture of mankind: for its technical curiosity and creative activity. The ability to form relationships and to love is also rooted in this early stage-but so too are all forms of violence, up to and including war (Renggli, 1972). In my book on the Plague-Selbstzerstorung aus Verlassenheit (Self-destruction due to abandonment), 1992-I concentrated on the history of the changes in the mother-child relationship in our culture connected with the flourishing of towns in the High Middle Ages from 12th to 14th centuries. During this time a baby loses its last calming bodily contact with its mother: it is banished from her bed to the cradle. Just a small intervention? Yet it can be shown that Mary and her baby Jesus were the dominant subject in painting from the 13th to 16th centuries-for 400 years! The people in this period must have been obsessed with the subject of a mother and her infant child. These Madonna pictures are a key to understanding the anxieties and conflicts in our culture. If such a 'small' intervention as this nightly separation could have such a fundamental effect on the mentality of the period1, how much more dramatic must have been the infant's experience when it was separated from its mother, during the day, during conscious experience, for the first time? …