When I read that study, I thought immediately of my father telling me about trauma being in my mother’s blood. Add to that despair and detachment. Add to that an inability to follow rules, form lasting relationships, or feel guilt. Those are all things that are also true of me, in some measure. They are the qualities I most detest in myself. They are qualities that would make it difficult for me to be a mother.

After all, there is something to be said about corruption - or unregulated consumption - in a social landscape scarred by centuries of deprivation. Greed is inevitable in this context; as it happens, it turns out to be the cousin of envy too. Both states suggest preoccupation with a prized commodity: the man of envy is powerless over its supply; the man of greed devours it as he wishes, when he wishes. The desire of one is frustrated by lack; the desire of the other cannot be sated even by plenty. One looks on forlornly from the sidelines; the other is on the field of play, feasting, snout revelling in the trough.

I agree with Carl Rogers who asserted that the human baby arrives complete with unconditional self-regard and expects to find that as the culture of their life. Children have to be cudgelled into giving up this expectation. We grow unwillingly into adults who disdain and withhold appreciation. Fortunately, thinking pairs can restore both our experience of it and our expertise at it. And before we know it, we live it.

Winnicott, my psychoanalytic hero, had something to say about this kind of situation. He was writing about parents’ concerns about children’s lies, but his insights go well beyond lying.

If development proceeds well the individual becomes able to

deceive, to lie, to compromise, to accept conflict as a fact and to

abandon the extreme ideas of perfection and an opposite to

perfection that make existence intolerable. Capacity for compromise

is not a characteristic of the insane. The mature human being is

neither so nice nor so nasty as the immature. The water in the glass

is muddy, but is not mud.

The emotional consequences are too intense for the child to bear and, to protect himself or herself, dissociation takes place in which the unbearable feelings are closed off and put aside so that the child can go forward safely. A kind of armor is created, but the unmanageable feelings lurk and rise up unbidden at inopportune times as if out of nowhere. Winnicott described such feelings as like being “infinitely dropped,” and eloquently wrote of how the afflicted person often fears a breakdown that has already happened. The person projects the thing from the past into the future because they were not able to be present with the breakdown when it was actually taking place. To be free, they have to be able to remember the trauma that was never fully experienced, and they have to be able to put it in its proper place in history.