Have wings, won’t fly
By Rana Nayar

INFANCY or childhood has often been celebrated in both literature and religion as an ideal state of being; pure, perfect and innately good. Admittedly, such a propensity has been rather strong among the English romantics. Wordsworth is believed to have said that "heaven lies about us in our infancy." Blake, too, is known to have glorified the incorruptible, untainted nature of childhood in several of his poetic works. Oriental as well as Occidental religions are replete with the stories of child-God; it could be Krishna in one context and Christ in another.

Behind such an idealised image of childhood always lay an ideology which valorised the past, pushing the present, the contingent and the historical into a virtual neglect. It was a sense of disillusionment with the living reality that often led the poets, prophets, saints and seers to hark back to the lost, unrecoverable glory of an earlier state.

With the advent of modern psychology, however, this view came in for a reconsideration. Freud’s writings helped a great deal in altering the perceptions and attitudes towards childhood or infancy. Rather than look upon it as an ideal state, he saw it as an imbryonic state, a stage when all potentialities are latent, not manifest. Over turning the romantic notion, he emphasised how childhood experiences enable a psychoanalyst to reconstruct a stable identity for his neurotic adult patient. In his writings on infantile sexuality, he is believed to have warned that an extended childhood or delayed adulthood is a dangerous symptom which a psychoanalyst would ignore only at his own peril.

It was Erik H. Erikson, a Neo-Freudian, who went a step further when he sought to study the linkages between infancy and society. In his famous book Childhood and Society, he has put forward an interesting thesis about how the changing patterns in a given society give rise to the anxieties, obsessions and fixations of infancy. Commenting upon the role of society in preparing children for adulthood, Erikson says: "Every society consists of men (and women) in the process of developing from children into adults. To assume continuity of tradition, society must early prepare for parenting in its children; and it must take care of the unavoidable remnants of infantility in its adults."

What Erikson has described as "unavoidable remnants of infantility" have come to be known in the parlance of psychoanalysis, signs of Infantilism. His apprehensions about its presence in the adult behaviour stem from the fact that it is often seen not as a normative but as a deviant condition.

It is an aberration, a psychopathological condition that signifies a state of neurosis in an individual. It is a condition in which infantile behaviour patterns persist, owing to some emotional repression in early life and are dominant over more appropriate reactions. If the pleasure principle is what rules and governs the state of infancy, infantilism marks a compulsive return to it, leading to the gross neglect of the reality principle.

It is a neurotic condition in which instant gratification of one’s needs and desires is sought to the exclusion of other considerations. In other words, it is an involuntary form of regression, a periodic return to an earlier state, archaic or residual past in some form or the other.

It might be argued, at this stage, that if infantilism is a psycho-pathological condition characterising individual behaviour, how far is it right to extend this concept to describe a society or its social processes? Is it right to talk in terms of collective neurosis or seek to uncover the unconscious dynamics of a society as complex as ours? Though not necessarily in our context, such questions have been debated among the Freudians and Neo-Freudians for a long time now.

It was Freud again, who, in his work Civilization And Its Discontents, had hinted at the possibility of discussing the pathology of the civilised communities. He did anticipate though that such an enterprise could pose its own share of problems for an analyst. However, a good number of Neo-Freudians, undeterred by the challenges involved, simply went ahead with their critiques of society and culture.

In this regard, one may recall, among others, contribution made by Erich Fromm, the famous pop psychologist. In several of his writings, he has sought to focus on the collective neurosis afflicting the American society. In his book The Sane Society, he has raised a number of issues which could serve as a good starting point for anyone wishing to enter into a similar exercise.

Fromm is of the view that it is both desirable and possible to pose this question: Can a society be sick or could it be said to have a psychopathological condition of one kind and or another? He further suggests that the only normative principle on the basis of which a particular society could either be described as being sick or healthy is none other than a form of humanitarian ethics. What is, indeed, quite significant is his idea of "pathology of normalcy" which signifies that often it is the seemingly normal that turns out to be pathological. These are some of the assumptions that lie behind the present exercise, too, whereby Indian society is perceived to be an infantile one.

Let us look at the Indian politics, for instance. Though we claim to be a democratic nation, we are still waiting for a two-party system to emerge in our polity. For over 40 years, Indian politics was dominated by a single party which, in turn, had and continues to have a neurotic fixation and obsession with Nehru-Gandhi family. For the brief intervals that the parties other than Congress have been centre-stage, no real difference in terms of governance, style of functioning or intra-party democracy has been in sight. The ideology that often sets one apart from the other is nobody’s concern anyway. Mirror images of each other, the political outfits in India have remained hopelessly monolithic, authoritarian and dictatorial. The manner in which they function is in no way different from the way in which the tribals organised themselves politically or the feudals their monarchies.

In a strange way, our political culture has shown compulsive signs of return to the archaic, residual forms of expression. The political parties depend upon a single, charismatic leader for their continuance and survival as though he were a mukhiya or a raja. Institution-building, which is the bed-rock of democracy, is virtually unknown to us. It is this kind of political infantilism which has made the dream of democracy in India turn into a living nightmare for all except the players.

In the field of economics, too, contrary to what most of us like to believe, we have not moved forwards but backwards. From a Socialist pattern of mixed economy, we have returned to a more liberalised market economy.

What is being suggested is not that capitalism had existed earlier in our context but that, in normal order of things, it certainly does precede Socialism. From the promise of social equality and self-sufficiency which, in all probability, would be regarded as the hallmark of higher stage of growth, we now find ourselves pushed back into a creed of self-directed profiteering and unregulated consumerism.

And where has this choice of a truly globalised economy led us if not into an impasse? From one recession to another. A recession results when an economy falls flat on its nose in the face of an imminent threat of collapse. It is a form of regression, an inability of the economy to cope with stressful, crisis-ridden situations. It’s the proliferation of goods and commodities in a consumerist society that first makes them lose their intrinsic worth and then obliterates all distinctions based upon quality.

Here images, values or relationships are consumed as mindlessly as tea, coffee and noodles are. Here cellular phones and lap-top computers are not necessarily acquired for their intrinsic worth or utility but for the pleasure of sensuousness these offer. Once the logic of the market economy takes over, the utility principle is almost involuntarily abandoned in favour of the pleasure principle. A consumerist society throws up self-indulgent social group(s) that live for pleasure, not productivity, thrive on sensuousness, not thought. Driven by the primal instincts of greed and hoarding, which Freud recognised to be forms of anal-fixation anyway, such groups seek instant gratification in much the same manner as a child does.

Consumerism simply promotes an unbridled, unabashed indulgence of the pleasure principle, bringing to the fore latent, infantile tendencies among us, pushing us into regressive foetal postures. A lingering image of modern India is that of a couch potato, consuming tele-images hungrily and tirelessly; a foetus inside the womb of his cosy, secure room.

That we, in India, have already arrived in the age of hedonistic consumerism is also evident from the way in which we have practically abandoned the reality principle altogether. The real issues such as poverty, illiteracy, population, unemployment and development have ceased to be the active principles on our agenda. It’s a sign of our total absorption and immersion into the pleasure principle that we have conveniently put these issues on the backburner. A vast segment of our population simply does not exist for us any more.

Their problems are no longer our major concern or that of the rest of the society, except that of a minority of sensitive individuals who continue to do their bit anyway. In good old times of socialism, at least, the political rhetoric was vociferously heard, but now there is only an indifferent silence; an infantile snuffing out of the painful reality.

While the real, burning issues stand exhumed in our collective consciousness, religion continues to bedevil our secular polity, vitiate our minds and divide our people. More than the fact of its dominance, it’s the form(s) in which we practise religion that we need to worry about. For us, religion is no longer an expression of a humanistic impulse, a binding force, a personal faith or a way of life. Instead, it has become a pretext for pulling down mosques, vandalising churches, torching human beings alive or persecuting a community. The most barbaric, shameful acts and deeds are being committed in our society in the good name of religion. This kind of anti-humanism that religion has come to signify in our context is a throw back to a pre-civilised, violence-ridden stage.

This is when religion was used for spreading hatred, not love. Religion is being practised among us in its most primieval, archaic form. In his book, The Inner World, Sudhir Kakar, the famous psychoanalyst, has suggested how catacylsmic dislocations in a society make for regressive modes or defensive measures.

In matters of religion what we practise is infantilism at its worst. Nowhere is the psychopathology of our society reflected so prominently as in our use or rather abuse of religion.

By all accounts, ours is an infantile society, constantly regressing into the shadows of its collective past in its efforts to move on ahead. Poised on the edge of a new millennium, it is not altogether an insensible question to ask: Where are we headed, after all? Are we fully equipped to face up to the challenges that lie in the womb of time? Will our backward-turning, obsessive fixation with our historical past in its multiple incarnations ultimately manage to open the doors on a secure, comfortable or a promising future?

Will we, as a society, be able to understand the dynamics of our collective neurosis, rethink and reorder our priorities and choices, build institutions where none exist and carry the vast though forgotten populace with us in our onward march?

Questions abound, but answers are hard to come by. Perhaps, the answers, too, shall be found before it is too late, before we go into another of our regressive downslides. Or is that a mere wish-fulfilment? Another fantasy? Another infantile posture?