We may recognise that at four years old the child makes the conscious decision to conform, submit, give in, becomes resigned to obey the demands of the Ego - the adult world - against its own natural will to obey what is good and right - The Myself.
During the first four years of life, the child will have begun to yell and will have developed the capacity to tell lies at two years old, will have enjoyed the Dionysian phase at 3 years old, will have been plunged at 3 1/2 years old into the pit of terrorised rage. Teething difficulties and infantile colic are common. as are digestive difficulties, particularly constipation at around 2 years of age. There are also the infant diseases, measles, chickenpox etc which may continue beyond four years of age, and which inform us of difficulties experienced by our ancient ancestors at the equivalent stages of human evolution. (Vaccination does prevent these diseases, but does not change human phylogeny. It may be that the phylogenic effects merely go ‘underground’, and that the ancient difficulties present, breakthrough, in other ways.)
At four years old, the child is impelled by the phylogeny to conform to the dominant Ego. But the decision to conform is conscious, a conscious decision to abandon the needs of The Myself. The child experiences resentment when it must begin to abandon The Myself.
The dominant Ego provides compensations for this loss. The child becomes a big girl or boy which brings privileges. The big boy or girl now looks down on the babies; helps mummy and so on. But the loss of The Myself is very great, and often the ‘big’ child seeks further compensation.
(A note here on ontogeny and phylogeny: many young children adapt quite well to the psychological change of beginning to grow up in the Ego dominant realm; other young children do not adapt so well, and we may understand that where the infant has experienced great ontogenic trauma earlier in infancy, the sense of loss and injustice will be greater.)
I have observed small children in the park and in families and elsewhere. Often I’ve seen how the big girl or big boy gleefully mocks the younger child who cannot yet do the difficult things the ‘big’ child can do. I’ve seen a ‘big’ girl do something naughty and successfully put the blame on her younger friend - and only later did I realise that I’d been manipulated by a pre-school child. In a supermarket I found a little girl sitting on the floor while her ‘big’ brother kicked her, hard - and when I protested he said that his mummy let him do it, which may be true, but I told him firmly that he mustn’t. And in another supermarket in the check out queue, a little boy strapped into his pushchair was being punched hard in the groin by his ‘big’ brother - the mother was there, but apparently didn’t see …
These two examples of violent bullying are rare in my experience. Most of the bullying I’ve observed by ‘big’ children on younger infants has been more subtle often simply the disagreeable gleeful mocking of the ‘stupid baby’. But it is all bullying, and there is a lot of it going on, as the ‘big’ child impelled away from its natural instinct to good seeks compensation for its loss. We may speculate that the ‘big’ child has a sense of entitlement: that he or she is ‘allowed’ to bully the younger child, in compensation for the loss. Or we may understand that the sense of being entitled to bully develops later.
There is no entitlement to bully. We must recognise that all the perversities of human behaviour arise from fear, that awful creeping fear; very many of us experience this fear in the various phobias which afflict us in daily life, and which science nor religion cannot cure.
But be very clear that there is no entitlement to bully. And the cure for the fear is the recognition that human nature is fundamentally good.
Last week Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were poisoned with a nerve agent in a city in England. They are both in a critical condition in hospital. A policeman who went to their aid is also still in hospital. It is feared that part of the city is contaminated. Who would do such a terrible thing? It is widely believed that the nerve agent was developed in a Russian governmental laboratory, and that the Russian state ordered the murder of the Skripals; this is denied by the Russian authorities - who accuse the UK of whipping up anti-Russian feelings. It is understood that there is something of a Russian tradition to seek out and murder those that they see as traitors.
Whoever poisoned the Skripals, whoever ordered the act had no entitlement to do so.
We cannot have enemies when we recognise that ‘they’ are as fundamentally good as we are. We cannot need to project our self-loathing on ‘them’ when we understand that we ourselves are fundamentally good.