The face of a 2-year-old Honduran
girl, dwarfed by the adults who only appear as legs in the photo, communicates
undeniable anguish. Used to represent the horror of children separated from
their parents at the US Mexican border, the photo became a lightning rod for
controversy when it turned out that this particular child was not actually
separated from her mother. In an interview for CBS News the border patrol
officer involved in the incident explained that they asked the mother to put
her daughter down so she could be searched. He explained, "It took less than two minutes. As soon as the search
was finished, she immediately picked the girl up, and the girl immediately
stopped crying."
The fact that the
girl recovered immediately shows that she has had accumulated a reservoir of
experience with her mother coming back. Rather than falling apart, she was
immediately comforted. The very presence of her mother appears to have given
her the skills to manage her distress. In an instant she is OK.
But when
separations are beyond a young child’s ability to manage, the capacity to
recover in the face of disruption is compromised. Time is of the essence. With too much time, “stress” is transformed
into “trauma.”
Pediatrician turned
psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott captures the role of time in child development in
a way that seems particularly poignant in light of current events. In his book Playing and Reality he describes
how a young child comes to have a sense of himself in relation to the world
around him:
“It is perhaps worth while trying
to formulate this in a way that gives the time factor due weight. The feeling
of the mother’s existence lasts x
minutes. If the mother is away more than x
minutes, then the imago fades, and along with this the baby’s capacity to use
the symbol of the union ceases. The baby is distressed, but this distress is
soon mended because the mother returns in x+y
minutes. In x+y minutes the baby
has not become altered. But in x+y+z
minutes the baby has become traumatized.
Trauma implies that the baby has experienced a break in life’s continuity… [his
behavior] now becomes organized to defend against a repetition of ‘unthinkable
anxiety.’”
When the
Honduran girl’s mother picked her up her rapid recovery reflects an experience
Winnicott describes with the lovely phrase “going on being.” The countless
experiences of the mother coming back, in typical day-to-day interactions,
literally builds a child sense of self. The “unthinkable anxiety” he references
is the profound unraveling that accompanies a loss of bearings, a loss of sense
of self.
While
unfortunate that the photograph was misrepresented, in fact it proves a point
about the actual separations known to have occurred in large numbers. Young
children rely completely on their parents to hold them together.
Self-regulation, the ability to manage on one’s own, is a developmental process
that occurs over countless moment to moment interactions in co-regulation with
primary caregivers. Separation beyond a young child’s ability to manage
represents, from a developmental perspective, a fundamental threat to
existence.