The Lens
In this initial onset of life it’s a known natural phenomenon for the child to be incapable of determining things e.g. specific words to utter in communicating and to use in describing and labeling things around, but what’s certain in this phase is the capability of feelings for it’s the emotion that fuels their existence which then is indicated by crying regardless of the levels and dimensions of feelings. Klein (2016) saw human infants as constantly engaging in a basic conflict between the life instinct and the death instinct. As the ego traverses integration, preference to gratifying sensations over frustrating ones becomes natural to the infant. In their attempts to deal with this dichotomy of good and bad feelings, infants organize their experiences into positions or ways of dealing with both internal and external objects. Furthermore, as to survive is innate and no less critical on the child, expressing a certain kind of ‘demand’ in which the child feels necessary for survival takes place. This specific demand can be described as the need for a scaffold or support, protection, and security that whatever may happen someone is there however it must be noted that the degree and levels for which it must be granted are relative as they say ’one child is different from another’ . Now regardless, when this ’certain kind of demand’ is not being met, it would unconsciously engrave a feeling of being betrayed which then influences the thoughts and behaviors which all constitute the emergence of mistrust. The child grows to have trust issues within the self and with people that would be commonly translated to fears, insecurities, hatred, and feeling unseen.
The social and cultural conditions especially childhood experiences are largely responsible for shaping personality. People who don’t have their needs for love and affection satisfied during childhood develop basic hostility toward their parents and as a consequence, suffer from basic anxiety. Horney (2013) theorized that people combat basic anxiety by adopting one of the three fundamental styles of relating to others: moving toward people, moving against people, or moving away from people. Normal individuals may use any of those modes of concerning people, but neurotics are compelled to rigidly believe just one. The ‘basic intrapsychic conflict’ that emerges from compulsive behavior transcends either an idealized self-image or self-hatred. This idealized self-image is being expressed as a neurosis. Self-hatred, on the other hand, is termed and described as alienation from self.
The comprehension of the informants’ self-concept in the context of the Eriksonian psychosocial development theory anecdotes and contends the cutting edge of these important tenets: First, self-concept development takes place according to the ‘epigenetic principle’ i.e. one part arises out of another and has its own time of ascendency that does not entirely replace earlier components; second, in every stage of life there is an interplay of the dichotomy- conflicting interaction between the harmonious element and the disruptive element, syntonic and dystonic respectively. For instance, as vividly expressed in this paper, during infancy basic trust (syntonic) is opposed to basic mistrust(dystonic) . Both, however, are necessary for proper adaptation, whereas an infant who learns only to mistrust becomes overly suspicious and cynical; and third, at each stage, the conflict between the dystonic and syntonic elements although may produce an ego strength, noticeably on the testimonies of the informants when such is left too little i.e. a child who doesn’t acquire sufficiency of its demand e.g. trust will develop the antithesis or the opposite of hope (Erikson, 1993).