One kind of first catastrophe

 

My childhood was very frustrating, almost terminally frustrating, through all the pre-teen years. But I didn’t know it, was not aware of it. While I lacked the blueprint of ego strength and initiative that many babies arrive on planet Earth with, it is true that life is a “done to” affair for most children. They are not, in Alice Miller’s term, the “central actor” in their own lives, and are either welcomed or begrudged or disdained hitchhikers on their parents’ and others’ rides.

Many children have it worse, in tangible terms, than I did. For example, a recent client would be locked in the basement by her mother, sent to her grandmother, put in foster care, then back again. This would produce an especial quality of frustration different from mine, which was only subtle, invisible. I was left alone most of the time, sequestered in my room. And as a child needs to use his body – to have deliberate action that’s in direct sync with his thoughts and desires (at least much of the time), my room’s walls became a prison. Chairs and mirror and desk were like bullies, because they could not be thrown. They were in my way. They could not be thrown through the wall for my escape. The intimate, inanimate world was in my way.

There would also be the caregivers’ voices, their reasonable or negative voices like prison guards and walls and desks that blocked and intruded into our need to have our own moods and our own quiet.

For so many of us, the material world and others’ voices are still in our way. We still feel, at the bottom molecular level, the frustration of a mind effete, separated from its justice, its necessary action.

The client ignites ragefully when her husband rises from the sofa with an atypical body movement. The 18-year-old is “always furious,” smashing his fist in the wall, banging his head against the door, breaking his glasses, cutting his forehead. A man hurls the remote, like Zeus, when a button is dumbly unresponsive. My hearing aid charger has the nerve to slide off the desk onto the floor again. Sit there for goddamn ever, you little bastard. A man seethes, deeply, terminally, at life.

We don’t realize we’re still feeling this utterly creationist frustration, when we needed things to heed our command, so we were not disembodied wills and feelings. Nothing ever surpasses, replaces this primary catastrophe. Our first reality is impotence.

Remember this next time you rage, and hate, and rip out of existence a tangled computer cord.