Touch in Early Development

Tiffany M. Field

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805818901
• eBook ISBN: 9781317779568
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología del desarrollo

A symposium titled, "Touch in Infancy" was held to celebrate the opening of the first Touch Research Institute in the world. Although touch is the largest sense organ in the body, it is the one that had been the most neglected and the only one to just recently have a research institute. Designed to conduct basic research on touch and on the skin, the institute will work with wellness programs such as massage therapy and other kinds of touch therapies to facilitate better health and to treat various diseases. The institute's opening symposium featured presentations from several of the world's leading experts in infant development. Published in this volume, their work addresses the relevance of touch to the neonate's well-being.

CHAPTER ONE

Animadversions on the Development of a Theory of Touch

Ashley Montagu

Princeton, New Jersey

It is of great interest to me how ideas get started. One of the most amazing things to me, as I look back on my own history in connection with the development of ideas relating to the importance of touching, is that they originated in my childhood. I was born in England, a land full of people who, in a well-bred family at least, seldom touched each other, in which you apologized to your parents or siblings whenever you touched them accidentally. This, of course, was the rule in well-bred families, so-called because they regularly devoted more care to breeding horses than caring for children. In the uppermost classes, the custom was that you married a horse from your own stable. The couple would then occupy separate rooms in remote wings of the house. They very rarely met because, most of the time, the husband was out hunting, fishing, and shooting or traveling abroad. So, in the ruling classes, the class that set the pattern for all others, very little touching occurred. At an early age, boys were sent away to public school—so called because the public was not admitted to it. In most English families, there was very little, if any, touching, and very little love. When I was small, the usual approach to me by a male adult visitor to our household, was to muss up my hair, tweak my cheek, sometimes flick my ear, and then announce, “What a nice boy you are,” and, with easy indifference, to depart—leaving me with the puzzling problem of resolving how one can be a nice boy, and at the same time be so hurt and humiliated. So, I began to wonder about adult males. What impressed me deeply is that women never behaved in anything approaching so unpleasant a manner. Women were really interested in you as a human being, and would pat you on the head or the cheek or under the chin, and always behaved like caring civilized human beings who were genuinely interested in you.

That was the origin, I suspect, of my book, The Natural Superiority of Women (Montagu, 1953). Why were men and women so different? Could men ever have been children? From their conduct, it seemed to me that they never could have been, for from their behavior they clearly didn’t understand children. I concluded that men were created adults from the very beginning. The fact is that most Englishmen of my generation never were children. As children, they had lived in a territory occupied by enemies—adults, parents and other socializers, tyrants—who ordered them about with scarcely an explanation. This was the beginning of my interest in how human beings become what they become.

At a very early age, I decided I would become what was called as late as the third decade of the 20th century, an alienist, someone who studied and treated those who were mentally deranged, or alienated from themselves or the world in which they were living, what we now call a psychiatrist. At my first dinner at a freshmen welcome, I was seated next to a student from the Middle East who asked me what I was proposing to be. I replied, “An alienist.” I had to explain to him what an alienist did, because his English was not what it might have been. There was then a long pause. When suddenly the dawn broke on him, he exclaimed, “Ah, a doctor of fools.” His English may not have been formally sound, but there was no doubt that he had figured out that it had something to do with the study of the id by the odd.

At college, I had the good fortune to meet three professors, one who professed psychoanalytic psychology, another who was a mathematically inclined cognitive psychologist, and a third, who professed anatomy, but was devoted to anthropology: J. C. Flügel, Charles Spearman, and Elliot Smith, respectively. Spearman set up a special meeting with Elliot Smith, at which they gently quizzed me. They decided that I could roam around freely and not have to worry too much about examinations. Needless to say, I was very lucky and took every course that interested me. The result was a very unusual education, which has enabled me to perceive relationships between things that others have not seen as easily. We don’t have anything resembling education in the Western world. What passes for such is mostly instruction, a very different thing. The origin of the word education is the Latin, educare (or, to anglicize, edu-care). This is very good because the word care, as you probably know, in spite of the King James translation of the Latin word caritas, means “love,” and not “charity,” as it was inaccurately translated; it means “to care for.” When you talk about a caregiver, you really should mean “one who loves the other.” Insofar as touch is concerned, as a result of my lifelong studies in these areas, I know very clearly as a scientist that love and touching are two faces of the same thing. For example, I am a passionate dancer, in the style of Fred Astaire, but not within light-years of his elegance and skill. When we have concluded dancing, I may say to my partner, “Do you know what this is? It is a declaration of love.” That sometimes results in an incomprehensible stare, but generally it is quickly understood, for what it is: the beginning of a deep friendship. So, the recognition of the relationship between love and caring and touching came to me in a series of gradual steps, which I can not possibly explicate in so little space.

Following a stint at the British Museum (Natural History) and another as curator of physical anthropology at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in London, I was an assistant professor of anatomy in the Graduate School of Medicine at New York University. It was my lot to be in charge of the dissecting room, which was a wonderful experience, because I had 100 students for 3 hours every morning, 5 days a week. A lot of investigation and experimentation could go on during that time, not only with but also of the students, as well as with and of the instructors who were assisting in the dissecting room. A considerable amount of research and publication started in that laboratory. What was most unfortunate was the experience of seeing that many of the students who arrived with some interest in the humanity of human beings left with scarcely any interest in human beings at all. The trade school put an end to all that. As they passed through, they went through the process of dehumanization: the loss of understanding of what medicine should be, the loss of sensitivity and caring. With most of their training devoted to tests and disease, and hardly any to its prevention, and the maintenance of health, there was literally nothing taught relating to the human being. Because I was at N.Y.U. as an anthropologist and anatomist, my interests embraced every department, and I took advantage of the opportunities for observation and research they willingly offered, including those of Bellevue: obstetrics, pediatrics, radiology, genetics, and even teaching and doing research in the dental school. All of this led to a greater understanding of the interrelatedness of these branches of knowledge, and a good deal else. It was all very exciting and illuminating, and I felt very grateful.

Apropos of this, for many years I have longed to give a lecture entitled “Radiology and Love.” I have given the lecture, but no medical school would permit me to use that title because my kind sponsors said, “No one will understand what on earth you are talking about from that title. What does radiology have to do with love?” Radiology has a great deal to do with love, and affords a powerful means of showing what a fundamental role love, or its absence, can play in the physiological developmental history of a person. If, for example, during a period of growth the organism has suffered a lack of love, you will see bilaterally transverse lines of retarded growth at the distal ends of the tibia and radius of the individual (Dixon & Sarnat, 1985). You will also often see such lines (sometimes called “Harris lines”) in the x-ray of metacarpal bones of a newborn baby if the mother has had an emotionally disturbing pregnancy. All seven, or most, of the carpal bones may show radio-opaque lines toward the periphery of the bones. At the lower end of the tibia, there may be as many as 12 of these lines of retarded growth of varying thickness, depending on the frequency and duration during which the individual has been either bedridden or unloved during development. These show up very clearly in animals also. I don’t recall how or when I first learned about these lines of retarded growth, but it was long before I came across Bone Growth in Health and Disease, whose author, H. A. Harris (1933), happened to be a lecturer in the department of anatomy when I was a student in the early 1920s at University College. Harris’s book has been out of print for many years. I tried to persuade the publisher to reprint it, unsuccessfully, alas. Some day, it should be republished.

When I was at N.Y.U., I became very interested in the whole process of obstetrics and the mother-child relationship. At the time, breast-feeding had been largely replaced by bottle-feeding. This was because in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, both the mothers and the nurses had been brought up on the widely influential opinions of Luther Emmett Holt, professor of pediatrics at Cornell University Medical School, the most influential pediatrician of his day. In 1894, Holt published a booklet entitled The Care and Feeding of Children; the 15th and last edition appeared 40 years later, and it continued to be printed by the U.S. Printing Office and distributed freely by the government to millions of mothers (Holt, 1935). In this booklet, Holt recommended bottle-feeding as being just as good as breastfeeding, and strongly recommended the abolition of the cradle, while giving such sage advice as never to pick up a child, no matter how long it cries, and of course to feed it only at 4-hour intervals. In the early 1920s, the evaluator of contemporary trail blazers, Grant Overton, wrote of Holt’s book that it represented “possibly the greatest service to humanity in our time” (Overton, 1924, p. 117).

Another great influence was the founder of behaviorism, John Broadus Watson, head of the department of psychology at Johns Hopkins University (Cohen, 1979). In 1928, he published The Psychological Care of Infant and Child (Watson, 1928). The book opened with a poem in tribute to Holt’s book and its influence. Bertrand Russell, the distinguished mathematician and philosopher recommended the book effusively. The Atlantic Monthly reviewed it as a book that should be read by everyone, while Parents Magazine said it should be on every mother’s bookshelf. So much, then, for the opinions of the “authorities.” Here is Professor Watson, in his own words: “Nearly all of us have suffered from over-coddling. How does it show? It shows as invalidism. As adults we have too many aches and pains” (pp. 75–76). “Over-conditioning in love is the rule” (p. 78). “Kissing the youngster on the forehead, on the back of the hand, patting it on the head once in a while, would be all the petting needed for a baby to learn that it is growing up in a kindly home” (p. 81). “There is a sensible way of treating children. Treat them as though they were young adults. Dress them with care and circumspection. Let your behavior always be objective and kindly firm. Never hug and kiss them, never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them, in the morning” (pp. 81–82). “No child should get commendation and notice and petting every time it does something it ought to be doing anyway” (p. 84). And so Watson went perniciously on.

Who can calculate the human damage that these “authorities” did? It was undoubtedly considerable. The model and the basic pattern on which all human behavior should be based is that which is set at the moment of the appearance of a human being on this earth, namely, the loving behavior shared between a loving mother and her child, the reciprocity of love and its growth. Babies are born with the need for love, not only to be loved, but also to love others, to grow to love others more than they love themselves. It is important to love others more than you love yourself, as, indeed, a mother loves her child. It is the love between mother and child that is the basic pattern of the loving connectedness that we are designed by our very nature to follow and to grow in all the days of our lives.

We are aware of the existence of the basic physical needs that must be satisfied if we are to survive: oxygen, food, liquid, activity, rest, sleep, bowel and bladder elimination, and the avoidance of noxious stimuli. We cannot ignore the need for love and touching.

One of the most wonderful courses I took as a student was my 2-year course on linguistics with Franz Boas at Columbia University in 1934–1936. We studied the grammar of five American Indian languages: Algonquin, Teton Dakotan, Siouan, Kwakiutal, and Iro-quoian. One of my great discoveries during this experience was that we become more enamored of the myths that are enshrined in our words than we are in the truths that they obscure. So, in the discovery of the meaning of words one may find the meaning of what one learns at one’s mother’s breast. As the psalmist wrote, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help” (Psalm 121).

Speaking of mother’s breast, take the example of breast-feeding. Breast-feeding has been observed for many, many years, millions of times, but what really happens at the breast? We say that the baby sucks at the breast, but that is wrong. He or she would not get enough of the elements necessary for survival that way. What the baby does is to suckle, that is, to turn its mouth into an hermetically sealed suction pump. In each cheek, there is a ball of fat almost the size of a golf ball; this gives the baby its rounded cheeks. On each side of the inner cheek there is a membrane (the gingival membrane) that attaches the cheek to the gum, all in readiness for the baby to apply its lips and gums to the areola region. Thus, the nipple rests between the upper and lower gums and the hard palate and the baby’s tongue, and the tongue plays an active role in compressing the nipple against the hard palate.

So, we see that words often mislead and create errors that their continued usage perpetuates. Definitions cannot be meaningful at the beginning of an inquiry: they can only be so at the end of one. We should be learning how to use words as if they were experiments that we are observing. When, for example, we use a word such as observation, it must be used as an act of experiment, experimenting in one’s mind as we are thinking. Thinking is problem solving, and it is pleasurable hard work. It is not simple stereotyping or a cliché. In observation, one should be critically examining what one is observing, weighing, analyzing—in short, being critical, in the Greek sense of the word Kritikos, doing the best with one’s mind, being careful not to add ambiguity of words to confusion of thought. What you do is what you believe, not what you think you believe.

There is a trenchant quatrain that puts the point beautifully. It was written by Jane Taylor, who lived at the beginning of the 19th century:

Man, a thinking being is defined,

But few use the grand prerogative of mind,

How few think well of the thinking few,

How many never think wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Animadversions on the Development of a Theory of Touch
• 2 Fetal Observations: Could They Relate to Another Modality, Such as Touch?
• 3 Touching During and After Childbirth
• 4 Touch and the Kangaroo Care Method
• 5 Touch in Mother-Infant Interaction
• 6 The Genetic Basis for Touch Effects
• 7 Touch and Smell
• 8 Touch and the Immune System in Rhesus Monkeys
• 9 Infant Massage Therapy
• Author Index
• Subject Index