Artefacts of Human Phylogenesis: A Psychoanalytic-Anthropological Exploration of Early Infant Crying and Infant-Directed-Speech

Abstract

An unknown fraction of what can be known is inaccessible to the verbalising which has otherwise made rational science so dramatically successful. The lack of a verbal currency has not extinguished these domains but their relatively diminished access has pushed them into obscurity. Despite its relative success, rational science has limits and obscuring the non-rational has foreclosed on searching it for contributions to the epistemology of human and natural phenomena. Following Vanelli (2001)*, my thesis pushes against the narrow perspective that rational science is the only legitimate mechanism for constructing new knowledge. I do this by using frameworks of comparative anthropology and psychoanalysis to interpret ‘unexplained early infant crying’ and ‘infant directed speech’, two prosaic and universal human behaviours. These two phenomena have been abundantly studied through the prism of rational science but neither has been adequately explained. I first survey the dimensions of unexplained early infant crying such as its susceptibility to cultural variation and resistance to rational explanation. That it is a human universal suggests it maybe a physical manifestation of a more deeply seated phenomenon and so I broaden the field of inquiry from that of observation of extant behaviour to human phylogeny. In so doing, I use the psychoanalytic frameworks of Winnicott and Grotstein to situate the so called “primitive agonies” as a consequence of the hominin obstetric dilemma purported to result from the habitual bipedalism by Ardipithecus ramidus ~4.4 mya. Through this synthesizing of the evidence from evolutionary anthropology, primatology and psychoanalysis, I show how the temporal, diurnal and synchronic profiles of early infant crying, including cultural variations, all become explicable as an outcome of the infant’s experience of their primitive agonies. These have no contemporary causation but emerged with the emergence of the hominin mind. A similar survey of infant directed speech, shows how unlikely it is to be a derived behaviour and that its universality again hints at deeper evolutionary roots. And so again through synthesizing phylogeny with the psychoanalytic models of Bion and Melanie Klein, I argue that premature birth of hominins exposes them to negative consequences of using that which Bion labelled in humans, the alpha-function, but which Castoriadis exposes to us as an existentially vital mental function of all sentient life. Infant directed speech can then be argued as the primary sensory stimulus to facilitate the self-organisation of the specific neural architecture from which this property of mind emerges. By engaging with the vast store of that which can be known but which is inaccessible to rational science, these seemingly trivial instances of human mental neoteny become significant knowledge pathways into the foundation of the human mind. Keywords: Hominin evolution, early infant crying, infant directed speech, primitive agonies, psychoanalytic anthropology, Winnicott, Bion, Grotstein, Castoriadis