Original Sin

Yes, this is a strange topic for a psychology blog. Consider the following statement:

“In the Puritan ethos of seventeenth century England, for example, children were thought to be the carriers of original sin. They were liable to be dominated by wicked impulses and childhood was the time of life when control of these had to be instilled."

This is from an article by Michael Parsons, called Sexuality and Perversion a Hundred Years On: Discovering What Freud Discovered.

Often patients come into therapy with the idea that they are bad, not just damaged or broken or hurting, but bad. This badness goes back as far as they can remember. It seems to contain a mixture of shame and guilt, and it feels to them to be unfixable, just a basic fact of who they are.

When we explore this “badness”, it seems to reduce down to wanting something that a parent could not or would not give – love, affection, attention — things that we consider basic human needs. They may report it as wanting a toy or being alone in a hospital bed and wanting someone there to take away the pain, to mention two extremes, but the experience was of endlessly wanting something you could not have.

How does this turn into “badness”?

Let’s go back to Adam and Eve. God is all good, all-powerful (so the story goes). God gives Adam and Eve anything they want in the garden, except, of course, he holds back on the fruit of two trees: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Commentary has it that eternal life and awareness of good and evil were the ways humankind differed from God.) Of course, if a parent says, “You can taste anything but this. This is mine” what is held back becomes the focus of desire. We all know what happened to Adam and Eve: Eve stole the apple, gave some to Adam (hey, remember Prometheus stealing fire? Same story.) God punished them – they were expelled from Eden; they experienced shame and suffering. God stayed all-powerful, and God’s goodness was not in question; Adam and Eve were bad.

For a child, even wanting what you can’t have makes you bad. If you are able, through whining or tantrums or other tactics, to succeed in getting what you desire so fiercely, it’s a pyrrhic victory. The gain is never worth the feeling that you are bad for wanting or for getting what is grudgingly given.

Back to Parsons: “They were liable to be dominated by wicked impulses and childhood was the time of life when control of these had to be instilled.” If we believe that impulses – drives in psychoanalytic language – are object based, then the wicked impulses that a child experiences have to do with either a desire for love (physical and emotional) and/or the expression of rage when his/her desires are thwarted directed at a parent, usually the mother (the object).

So how does the child end up being the bad one? In order for our gods to be loving and benevolent, not punitive and withholding, in the binary system of early development, we are to blame/at fault for our distress, anger, and longings. We need our gods to be good (and our parents are our first gods}, so we ourselves must be bad. Children need to believe their parents are both good and powerful – their sense of well-being, their security, and possibly, their lives, depend on it.