Letters to the Editor
J.C. Miller
Published Letters: 366 Editor's Choice: 36
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"miss blabbermouth" indeed
[Read the article: The Fix]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bit of a Freudian slip there, because Lindsay has, in effect, “blabbed”, through her behavior, one of our culture’s best protected secrets: AA doesn’t work. Never has.
We know this from the congruence of all of the evidence we have on AA including: scientific research; anecdotal (individuals like Lindsay continuing to use and exhibit troubled behavior after a year of continuing “treatment”, the AA “successes” who have simply replaced one addictive behavior - like smoking, eating, or advice giving - for another); the limited data released by AA (e.g. the 90 % dropout rate); the fact that AA beliefs and practices run counter to known therapeutic principles; and the observations of artists (as in the film Down to the Bone).
AA will continue to serve its critical function of allowing individuals to avoid the anxiety and discomfort that are required for growth and change, and that escape from change is why it will remain a closed, secretive, and vehemently defended system. Except for once in a while when someone blabs.
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sociology and psychology
[Read the article: Choice momism?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is indeed a “huge amount of sociology and psychology” which could inform our discussion of the welfare and best interests of children. We know that what children need for healthy development includes: having basic physical and biological needs met; what we call “secure attachment” to a primary caregiver in the first months and years; an environment free of abuse or neglect; healthy adult role models; and later, differentiation – separation from the caregiver.
We have no indications that, apart from the above conditions being met, the caregiver must be a certain gender, that there must be two primary caregivers, etc. Certainly we have no indications that the caregiver must be in a committed relationship to a second caregiver, an odd notion which seems to have become constructed as some type of normative, legally binding contract (which fails about 50% of the time).
It is easy to explain spurious correlations between “troubled” behavior in youth and a single primary caregiver. In most cases, and in contrast to the viewpoint represented by “choice motherhood”, single caregivers have a child because they have had poor impulse control, poor skills development, and poor modeling – qualities which don’t lead to good caregiving. In addition, they experience race-, gender- and/or class-based discrimination, they are in non-supportive social environments, they lack (as RT noted) conducive infrastructure, etc. None of these explanations require the assumption that what is necessary for the child’s well being is a biological “father” or “mother”, a “marriage” or a “family” in any traditional sense.
In short, our traditional and cherished constructions seem to have nothing to do, really, with what is in the best interests of a child.
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choosing to procreate
[Read the article: Friends and mothers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The question of whether to produce offspring poses one of the most difficult challenges for the individual to sort out her own drive toward self-actualization versus other biological drives and social expectations, often resulting in rationalization of the choice. Not all parents are willing to acknowledge, in retrospect, the unforeseen costs.
And not all prospective parents who are in a couple realize how fundamentally and predictably the appearance of a child will affect the relationship (ask a couple counselor). Or they might think they will avoid that impairment of their chosen partnership, not realizing that there is a biological and neurophysiologic basis for the infant to displace a lover (see, for example, Louann Brizendine’s discussion in The Female Brain). It’s not just about friendships.
The decision to produce offspring is always at some level about meeting unconscious needs of the procreators. The more those needs and their sources are made conscious and examined, the closer the adults come to choosing authentically and adaptively. The drives that end up expressed as “Let’s start a family” don’t just incur costs in social connections, self-actualization and integrity of couples. When they aren’t examined, and therefore persist through the child’s development, it is always to the detriment of the child, in the form of parental identification and overinvestment.
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love and fitness
[Read the article: Love, or biology?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why hesitate to synthesize when these results make perfect sense? Sexual attraction appears not to be constrained by perceived relatedness when uncoupled from fertilization. At the same time, heterozygosity is favored in fertilization couplings (apart from sensual, loving, or intimate), reflecting an overall mating system (featuring male competition, sexual selection, etc.), and sexual reproduction itself, which promote not just heterozygosity but phenotypic variability as raw material for selective change. On a broad phylogenetic scale, heterozygosity becomes a matter of group survival only to the extent that groups are relatively unfit, needing to generate variability for change. Lots of lines do pretty well asexually.
That is to say, humans are driven to produce offspring slightly different than themselves each generation, because the line including humans, as an ongoing experiment in fitting with its environment, has not been doing so well.
Genetic and mating system mechanisms promoting variability and change would become increasingly important in populations unfit in their environments. We become puzzled and attempt to provide explanations in terms of positive fitness and adaptive value, rather than lack of fitness and drive for change, only because of our cherished and absurd view that Homo sapiens, as species go, is relatively fit in its environment.
Take a look around.