Читать книгу Artemis - Jean Shinoda Bolen - Страница 23

In my years of medical training, as I observed newborn babies in the nursery, I realized that personality traits show up early. Some newborns are quiet and placid when they are picked up from the bassinette; others protest loudly when disturbed. Most seem to spend their time asleep, but others look around and stay awake more. There are fussy babies who cry a lot and others who rarely do. Levels of passivity and activity differ.

I was taught as a resident in psychiatry that babies are like a tabula raza (blank tablet) on which experience writes character and personality. This theory puts mothers at fault for everything, including sexual orientation and psychiatric illnesses. While pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott's concept of the “good-enough mother” (Winnicott Studies, 1994) helped mitigate the impact of this theory and lessened the pressure on mothers, mothers were still held to be the responsible ones; fathers were neither praised nor blamed. The unique personality of the baby itself was hardly ever mentioned, much less emphasized. It took having two babies of my own to learn what mothers have known all along—that, far from being a blank slate upon which we write, babies come with predispositions and train their mothers. They push buttons in their mothers' psyches and draw out aspects and responses—for better or worse.

I also suspect that infant girls and toddlers who survive illnesses that were expected to kill them—or were abandoned shortly after birth and then are found alive, or who survived terrible physical assaults—have an inherent or archetypal will to live. They draw upon an indomitable spirit, a characteristic of Artemis that shows up early when it has to. One amazing true story of survival, found in The Girl with No Name (Chapman, et. al., 2013), tells of a five-year-old toddler who was probably kidnapped and then abandoned in the Colombian jungle. The child stayed on the periphery of a troop of Capuchin monkeys, eating what they ate. She was taken in by the monkeys and grew up feral and walking on all fours until she was found and maltreated by humans, which began another whole saga of survival. The child's birth name was never discovered; she now goes by the name Marina Chapman. Marina made me wonder if Atalanta could have been a real person about whom stories were told—a little girl who became a mythical figure, a girl thought to have been suckled by a bear and found by hunters.