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First Aid to Parents by Anthony M. Ludovici Carroll & Nicholson, Ltd. London 1948
- p. 5 - Contents
- p. 7 - Preface Having years ago written about Man and, years before that about Woman, I am now at last able to present the public with my long contemplated — long promised, I might say — work on the Child. Thus are my Trilogy and the triangle complete. For these three — Man, Woman and Child — do in fact make up the famous triangle of human relationship. No other counts much. No other approaches it in the drama pathos and fury of its tension. Those who fondly imagine that they behold Life's Eternal Triangle when three vain pretentious and low-powered adults face a judge and jury in the Divorce Court, are themselves such children that they could hardly qualify to be among my readers. Because, if it came to a contest in passion, determination, ferocity and the power to hate, any infant worth his salt — or, since breasts are out of fashion, shall we say his bottle? — could easily cast all the Divorce Court trios ever known into the shade. Indeed, it is hard to understand how people ever contrived to connect the Eternal Triangle with the three wretched mountebanks who usually figure as the victims of passion in our Divorce Courts. Man, Woman and the Child were such obvious certainties as winners of the title that Humanity's rooted loathing of Truth alone could have prevented the world from giving it to them. "Humanity was waiting for Freud," you say? But why? — Had not hundreds of generations of adults centuries before Freud's great-grandfather was born; watched the life on a pond in spring? Had they not seen the eternal Triangle in full sail upon its green waters? Or did they not grasp what was afoot when they saw Master Drake Mankind has, of course, no racial memory of the Palaeozoic and Mesozoic days, millions of years back along the evolutionary ladder, when there was no triangle, when no psychological Euclid, or no Euclidean psychologist, was called for, and the relationship of male and female was complicated by no "brats" of any kind. For men's remote ancestors at that time were so much unlike anything that could possibly have presaged humanity that he would have been a prophet with a vengeance who could have foretold that Man would ultimately evolve from them. At all events, male and female lived for each other then, and the by-products of their love were left on the earth to hatch in oblivion and independence. That is why the love of the sexes is a much more primitive passion than the love of offspring. It is of much older lineage and, beside it, the latter is but an upstart. Does this possibly account for some of the vulgarities of love of offspring? Happy were they in those far off Palaeozoic and Mesozoic days? It is a matter of opinion! But although the actual memory of them has vanished beyond recall, they probably left some mark, some trace behind. I, for one, certainly feel, whenever I meet or hear about a genuine courtesan, or an incorrigible roué (and they are not as common as is usually supposed), or a confirmed misopaedist like Byron, that a throw-back to Palaeozoic or Mesozoic times is still possible, and this despite the great difference in form and constitution between Man and the extinct Saurians. Nor is it unlikely that what makes the drake so shameless and callous in charging the fluffy golden parasites isolating him from his mate, is his relatively closer proximity to his palaeozoic ancestors. It seems odd that there should have been a time when no Eternal Triangle in the grand style existed, that for millions of years Papas and Mammas were unknown, that sexual love Yet, if we examine the grievous difficulties to which children still give rise, we soon become aware that we are even now very far from being wholly adapted to their presence. For, to this day, the majority, at least, approach them with very imperfect understanding. Indeed, so gross and palpable are the errors and illusions which continue to be rife about the child, that no one who feels able to shed the faintest gleam of light upon the subject need apologize for adding yet one more treatise to the many already published about it. Far from offering an apology, he should be held guilty of a lack of public spirit if he withheld what he had to say. From yet another point of view, the duty of imparting every scrap of information on this subject, both frankly and quickly, seems imperative. The effects of error in this matter penalize everybody, including the present author and his readers. He who does not appreciate this fact must be blind to most of the distressing features of modern life. There is, therefore, a compelling motive, based in self-interest itself, urging every one of us to do his best to clear up the muddle. We owe it to ourselves, so to speak, to make a clean breast of all we have learned and discovered. But, seeing that a good deal of the muddle we are in over children arises from beliefs and prejudices centuries old, often sacrosanct and, by now, largely instinctive in our race, the examination of the roots from which these beliefs and prejudices have grown cannot be expected to be always either pleasant or palatable. The intelligent reader will hardly expect it to be. He will be prepared for many shocks. May I hope that he will not give me up before the end as too shocking? In conclusion, I should like gratefully to acknowledge the service rendered me by Mrs. Max Rink, who kindly under-
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