Category Archives: early childhood development

Plato’s Cave Analogy, Via an Intrauterine Dialogue

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Things are not as they seem. They never are; for we only can “see through a glass darkly.” But if darkness is accepted as our reality, and not subject to a mite of critical reasoning, then we will never see the light, i.e. “the Light.” Plato’s cave analogy put this on the table of human consciousness 2500 years ago. Here, I will share the same primordial truth from a dialogue between two children in the womb:

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one has ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence, and you can hear Her loving voice, calling down from above.”

– Útmutató a Léleknek

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The Cathartic Power of Language

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Another one of my “girlfriends” has shaken me out of my literary doldrum!  One of them, Emily Dickinson, often does this but this morning a contemporary girlfriend, Julia Kristeva, has intervened.  Kristeva is a Bulgarian-born linguist and psychoanalyst, educated in France and now practicing in Paris.  Upon awakening, for some reason I plucked from my bedside bookshelf, “Black Sun:  Depression and Melancholia” and opened it to a bookmark from earlier readings and found the following observation:

Once solitude has been named, we are less alone if words succeed in infiltrating the spasm of tears—provided they can find an addressee for an overflow of sorrow that had up to then shied away from words.

Or as George Eliot put it in the 19th century, “Speak words which give shape to our anguish…”

Oh, the power of language!  I now realize that in my early youth when I discovered language I had found my home, a sacred domain which provided an haven from the morass of poverty and incest of my culture.  And in my clinical training and practice I often witnessed the power of words being discovered by my clients…often with my facilitation…allowing them to “name the demons” that were haunting them. Leonardo Da Vinci realized this power of language in 15th century Italy, telling us:

O cities of the sea, I behold in you your citizens, women as well as men tightly bound with stout bonds around their arms and legs by folk who will not understand your language; and you will only be able to give vent to your griefs and sense of loss of liberty by making tearful complaints, and sighs, and lamentations one to another; for those who bind you will not understand your language nor will you understand them. Leonardo da Vinci, from “Of Children in Swaddling Clothes”.

Sparrows, Wendell Berry, Stanley Kunitz, and Paul Tillich

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I often perseverate. Just a few days ago I was perusing my library and pulled out two copies of the work of poet/essayist Wendell Berry and shared a couple of thoughts here. But this casual, even random perusal of my books has done what literature should do, it has stimulated me along a certain vein of thought. Thus my current “perseveration” which will lead me soon to even an heavy-duty German/American theologian of the 20th century, Paul Tillich. But first, from yesterday the notion of a sparrow being but “organized energy” has really grabbed me, as I realized that some similar “organized energy” grabbed me at birth…and even before…and is still here today. This is some vestige of primordial will operating through me which has led me to this phase of my life in which I bring emphasis to the metaphorical dimension of life. And there is no escape from this central entelechy in one’s body and soul, only modification so that we might more or less fit in which the entelechy that is guiding our species. Let me illustrated with the wisdom of poet Stanley Kunitz who once said in a poem entitled, “Layers” that, “I have walked through many lives, some of them my own. I am not the one I was though some remnant of being remains from which I struggle not to stray.” That “remnant of being” is a way of describing the very core of our soul, a primal energy that has been “harnessed” as is with the sparrow so to bring us to this moment in our life. The same could be said of our species.

This indomitable, irrepressible will, in my daily “perseveration’ in life, has brought me this morning to the aforementioned kindred spirit of mine, Paul Tillich. My next post, if this current flow of “perseveration” continues with me, will be his observation about human will and the complexities of “harnessing” it.