If psychobiological research is to be
believed, then the dynamic experiences of early attachment are encoded by the immature
brain after birth as implicit memories. Consequently there aren’t many
formative engrams competing for remembrance or conscious awareness in a mature
adult, save for when their quality is value laden, charged with ebullient emotion,
and deeply meaningful. Both empirical science and personal experience declare
that traumatic separation from primary attachment figures cleaves treacherous
land mines into our neural hardware. These, it seems, are likely to implode
when subsequent environmental contingencies closely mimic or replicate the
original traumatic event. I, myself, can only recall two such instances, both
involving the adaptive response bequeathed to us by natural selection called fight-flight-or-freeze and
self-preservation. The first involved being torn from the grasp of my beloved
mother; the second getting lost in a rambunctious crowd in the middle of a
shopping center.
According to my Hellenistic parents my
core characterological traits manifested during the first few years of my development–Jean
Piaget’s sensory-motor, pre-verbal stage. While object
permanence may have been a fixed feature of my cognitive furniture back then,
it never confounded parental convictions that I was indeed an inwardly-turned,
inquisitive, and unobtrusive infant with a natural predilection for structure
and meaning-making imposed and mediated by multiple attachment figures. Even
though my language centers were largely unformed and my semantic capacities
non-existent, my mother professes that there was never a time when I didn’t
listen to verbalized instructions and commands. Machinery and railroad cars
pushed by locomotive engines held my proto-attention for more protracted
periods than what was expected (I loved Thomas
the Tank Engine), and nothing was able to placate and sooth me as much as
an extended trip into the beautiful countryside, or so I’m told. Frequently my
mother and grandmother would narrate popular Greek tragedies, myths, and
folktales from imported books, and I would spontaneously fixate upon the
pictures and point towards the protagonists. My parents are convinced that I
was born equipped with a love for literature and learning. They also believed the
sphere of my forming personality encompassed the aesthetic and hedonic, for on
innumerable occasions they bore witness to my little fingers running up, down,
and between the crocheted lace and satin edge borders of my blankets, as if I
were really relishing the smooth texture.
The inauguration of Piaget’s pre-operational representation (2-7yrs)
involves a swift detonation in language and locomotion, launching the child
into the consensual physical and social worlds. Here, the maturation of the
limbic structures, the amygdala and hippocampus, as well as the higher cortical
structures enable explicit memory systems to organize semantic, sensory, and
motor information within personalized episodes and narratives. These exist as
subconscious repositories and are available to conscious recall. My father says
that at three years of age I would ignore calls of my name because I was so absorbed
in my perambulations and explorations of the house. I spoke at one and a half;
I could recite the entire alphabet without any misnomers by the time I turned
three; and I could also write my name at three. The absence of conservation was
of no detriment to my powerful attachments, particular the love and adoration I
held towards my father who would furtively sneak out of the house early on Sunday
mornings before I could awake and devise emotional machinations to stall him.
On the same note my primary attendances at kindergarten were permeated with traumatic
affect for two very valid reasons: I suffered from severe separation anxiety
and could not understand the English language. Both my parents affirm that my
colors of choice have always been the iridescent blues and greens; that I was
constantly writing and drawing; and that sometime after four I developed an
unusual fixation with African palm trees which expressed itself as a constant
need to play around them, to reach out and touch their fronds, and to draw them
with coloured Derwent pencils. “Something about their shape really captivated
you,” my mother says. Their recollections spurred first-person memories–I
actually remembered…
At seven I moved into Piaget’s concrete operational stage (7-10yrs) whereby
the continued evolution of higher order neural structures like the prefrontal
cortex makes possible the wonders of rational analysis and internal
computation. According to Piaget children in this developmental phase can
“think” before engaging in social interaction. Both the anecdotes told by my
parents and the continuum of explicit memories associated with those periods of
my life swear that I was the scheming and conspiring type. At eight I had the
gumption to switch the deteriorating batteries of my train set with newer ones belonging
to my dear cousin when nobody was looking; at nine I was unwrapping Christmas
presents brought for the entire family by relatives, picking out the most
interesting and appealing ones, and then claiming them as my own; and at eleven
I was threatening to shift the gearstick of my dad’s thrifty Kingswood from
parking to reverse if my cousins capitulated to a frivolous ruse. I also
“thought” about it for a while before joining the school choir and dancing
group along with martial arts training.
At about eleven moral reasoning and hypothetical
thinking appeared, a phase Piaget calls formal
or hypothetic-deductive operations.
This phenomenon worked to my advantage, for the most part. I excelled at
school, practiced karate, and fed my innate introversion with hours in front of
the television soaking documentaries on history, adventure travel, and natural
science; popular Hollywood flicks; and Disney cartoons. More significantly, the
internal narratives relating to my own identity and self-definition served as potent
catalysts for neural network integration occurring within the associational
areas of my frontal, temporal, and parietal lobes. I entertained grandiose fibs
about the Midas touch of my gold-plated fingers and when behaviors and their
underlying intents didn’t spontaneously turn to gold, I would rationalize the phenomenal
incongruence in the context of external attributions. The reason for losing at
tennis or soccer had nothing to do with the formidable play of the opposition, but
rather because I, myself, had performed at subpar levels.
Yep, that was me!
