Stickers

Last Christmas, my mom gave Helena some stickers.  Not very exciting ones -- I think they came as a bonus with an Audobon Society mailing or something -- but they had pretty pictures of birds on them.  And ever since, Helena has been obsessed with stickers, and will leave behind all of the rest of her beloved painting and drawing supplies (click here for some reflections on her art) just to post some kind of a silly cat on top of a painting she's been working on for hours.  Last week, when Rita found some stickers for her in a stationary store, I think I began to understand this compulsion a little better.

As Helena has stuck her stickers on any surface she can find, I've also been reading Donald Winnicott, the British children's psychoanalist from the 1950s.  Winnicott is most famous for his theory of the transitional object, a way to think about blankets and pacifiers and other stuff that kids come to abopt between 1 and 4 years old.  According to the theory, these things are not really things -- they have no full existence separated from the child), but they aren't just the kid, either.  They are a transition from the child's earliest ideas about the world (that it is all a part of the baby, and she is omnipotent over it (an idea that Helena still seems to have from time to time, as I wrote last week)) to a more adult division between subject and object, an "I" and a "world."

The transitional object is almost part of the baby, but it also has a bit of autonomy; it isn't entirely under her control.  We may be able to see this better in toys, which seem to be under our control, but then suddenly they aren't: the kite or the ball dashes and bobs where we didn't want it to; the dolls engage in conversation and suddenly one "says" something that the child playing with them had never planned.  Toys are also part-me, part-other.

I think the sticker may play the same role.  On the one hand, Helena controls it: she gets to take it off the pad and then put it somewhere, and she gets credit for the art she makes with a sticker (I remember my mom's reaction to Helena's first "sticker-art," full of oohs and ahhs).  At the same time, she didn't make the sticker, and certainly couldn't draw the birds and frogs and mermaids that she sticks on paper. Stickers are also under imperfect control: accidentally put a corner of the sticker down on paper, and it only comes off by tearing, and won't ever be useful again.  The fold and twist in ways we don't expect. And once stuck onto the paper, you'll never get it off (though, as Helena has learned, if you stick it onto  plastic, sometimes you can recover it).  In the world of art, the sticker plays the role of the transitional object.

I just wish we could find a way to help her work through these ideas of omnipotence in other areas: I think it would save us a lot of crying fits when we say "no."

Take Care of Her

Over the last several weeks, all of Helena Iara's toys have become mothers and daughters.  The little mouse is the daughter of the big mouse, who is in turn the daughter of the little cat, who is daughter of the big cat, who is daughter of Pato the duck...  In each of these cases, size is much more important than race or appearance.  Natural "enemies" like cats and mice can be mothers and daughters to each other.

Over the last couple of days, she has made it very clear why and how this parenting relationship develops: they take care of each other.  Today, as I held her frog puppet and had it sing songs to her, she put first the little moose (called "Mimoosinho") and then the larger mouse ("Mimoosão") between the frog's long arms and said "Care for her" (cuida dela!).  At that point, she made the relationship clear: "This is their mother."

One of the great philosophical debates of all time is what kind of emotions lie at the base of what it means to be human.  According to Heraclitus, "all things come about through strife". (war, conflict... it's hard to translate the greek polemos).  In the Gospel of John, we see that all comes about through "the word" (logos, sometimes better understood as reason, thought that's probably not what John meant).  I wonder if Helena isn't taking up with another school of philosophical thought, where care lies at the foundation of all things.

Heidegger was famous for putting Sorge (care) at the center of Dasein (being-there), but I think Helena is pointing at something different: for Heidegger, this care was associated with worry and anxiety (he was, after all an influence on loads of pessimistic existentialists later in the 20th century).  Heidegger did see care as the idea that things or people are important, that they matter to us (in Spanish, for instance, one of the ways you can say "I care about x" is "x me importa", it matters to me.).  People are different from animals because we feel this kind of care and concern in discerning what is important.  For Helena's stuffed animals, care for the next smallest member of the group is the way they come to be "her" toys.

Donald Winnicott may actually be the best resource here: he talks about the "holding space" that babies and small children need to feel loved and supported.  For him, like for Helena, "caring for" is not an intellectual exercise (like Heidegger's existential worry), but a physical act: a hug.  When each of her toys "cares for" the next, it holds the next smallest baby: the frog embraces the cat, who embraces the little moose.

A little game, but philosophically profound: and I think it says that Rita and I are doing a pretty good job at showing Helena we love her.  So that she can show others (even her imaginary friends) down on the line.