Interview with Evânia Reichert: “Early childhood is like a reserve fund for a lifetime”

There is increasing evidence that childhood is a primary stage in character formation. Apparently, allowing development between freedom, limits and emotional bonding is the key. E. Reichert tells us about it in this interview.

Taking advantage of your trip to Barcelona from São Paulo (Brazil), we have been able to interview Evânia Reichert. It is a woman who observes, listens and speaks slowly, and is interested in the situation of children in our country. The dialogue between psychological theory, educational practice and political debate is served.

Because it is a period that needs to be seen as a truly sacred time. Not in an esoteric sense but because the preservation of everything that is being formed in that age is decisive for human life.

As a period to be protected ... but without overprotecting?

There we have a dichotomy: on the one hand there is a lower connection of the adult with child subjectivity, and, on the other, a greater overprotection, which exerts a very negative pressure on children. There is nothing worse in our lives that we cannot develop, and as soon as childhood is overprotected, it is severed in its development, it cannot develop: it is oppressed within excessive protection.

You talk about the scientific advances that confirm ideas that psychology already had. What does neuroscience offer us today?

It gives us exams and scientifically proven data, very good information for debate and changes, to justify things that were in the field of subjectivity. For example, that body contact is decisive at the beginning of life for the construction of the brain because it favors the production of a hormone that stimulates synapses. In particular, from 1 to 3 years there is a fundamental development for the brain.

There is often talk of stimulating children a lot, with music for example. What is the stimulus we are talking about?

The most important thing is self-regulation, to enable the child to self-regulate (see box) because he will determine everything that will come later: anxieties, concerns, relationship difficulties ...: everything. The matrix is ​​there. In that sense, an excessive stimulus disturbs: up to 28 days, the baby is a newborn and that period we need to rethink it because, although it is a party, we must see what the baby needs. There are many visits, many stimuli such as "I take it in my arms, I pass it to you, you pass it to me", while the baby is in a very sensitive period and the stimuli must be very balanced.

A one month old baby should not be stimulated; He needs silence so that the psyche and body integrate. If there is a lot of interference, that integration does not happen and, then, we have a formation of ruptures, which often form psychotic nuclei. The only necessary stimulation is physical contact ... relaxing! And then it can be expanded.

What are the main difficulties to breed in self-regulation?

In São Paulo, in Brazil, children spend whole days inside the apartments, between video games, television and computers. They have no space, no nature, no parents at home, that when they arrive they are tired, with tasks to do and discharge their irritation ... on children! I must see how the child is and what he needs, and I also have to self-regulate first if I want to raise him with self-regulation. When I start doing this, I will reconsider the entire system, seeing, for example, whether or not your school respects that self-regulation.

But it is worth asking if we do not blame mothers and fathers with that responsibility. Maybe it's something that concerns the whole society ...

I want to make it clear that this is a political and social issue. These mothers or fathers have a very difficult time if they must work many hours to support their family, many more than we did in another era. It is a social whole. I have been participating in round tables on labor rights, paternity leave; issues that are not yet in the political debates. We are in a movement in Brazil for the extension of maternity leave, from 5 to 6 months.

More than in the Spanish State, where we have 4 months.

We fight for 6 months because it is the minimum a baby needs! In those round tables, there are those who claim that increasing that period has a very high cost for companies and for the State. But a group of us has presented data on the extent of casualties due to depression: the cost for the State, for companies, specific numbers. Many of the depressions originate at the beginning of life (and this is stated by the WHO, which promotes the prevention of hyperactivity and depression from the beginning of life); Knowing that this happens right in the period of maternity leave, what is the cost of extending it, compared to the cost of all those absences due to depression and its consequences? This can be foreseen, and it is urgent that we deal with it.

Taking up care in that initial phase, what would Winicott call a second mother or a caregiver good enough?

It is not a good mother, or a suffering father but someone who is attentive to the needs of the baby, who understands what he needs at all times, respects his rhythm, which can even give him contention n. In short, he is able to get out of his egocentrism to look at the other.

Between compulsory education and self-repression versus education, how can we place ourselves in what is called the optimal point, nor in permissiveness or excessive repression ?

Adults should understand what is happening and is being formed at all times, and what needs it has at that stage. Starting from this premise, that th best point will come from your sensation and wisdom, because there is no formula for everyone. It depends on the social condition, the culture, the place, the type of family. Compulsory education is the tendency of the adult to believe that he is always right, even when he is wrong and cannot recognize him in front of the child or the adolescent because he believes that he will lose authority., on the other hand, to do it or the opposite: we are not going to be authoritarian or hard, we are going to be free.And we are wrong again, because neither the rigidity nor the freedom without limits allow self-regulation: for that, space is needed to express and containment for security.

What once were morals and repression, which went against self-regulation, what would it be today?

We live a change in the ways of relating. From a very great moral repression, we have gone towards something lighter, not so rigid. But there is also a loss of contact, of affections, of spaces of coexistence between children and family. A cultural disconnection with childhood. The little ones go to the nursery very soon, (and we should have some emotional, very affective nurseries!). Lack of contact, early nurseries and, also, that adults reproduce the problems of their childhood when educating are elements that influence each other. Today they appear as authoritarianism or the opposite: fear of being authoritarian, not setting limits. The syndrome of the emperor child has to do with the lack of self-regulation, as another consequence of the lack of presence and contact.

The topic of self-regulation paints a child who does what he wants, without more. How do we recognize a self-regulated child?

It is a boy or girl who has the ability to express and be spontaneous but respectful, and has a limit. Given what happens to him, he expresses himself, stands, is not repressed, nor is he afraid, he is peaceful, he is emotional. They are very loving children, very expressive. I think that self-regulation allows the flexibility of the person. The biggest confusion that exists around W. Reich is that of those who believe that freedom education is debauchery, no limits. Reich says that freedom in education is the freedom of being, that being can be constituted; self-regulation also contemplates containment because, without it, it cannot occur.

Self-regulation: Reichart is a follower, among others, of W. Reich, especially his concept of self-regulation. According to that idea, education must respect the rhythms and qualities of children, without suppressing the expression of desires and emotions, to prevent the creation of emotional “hearts”. Freedom and respect also imply avoiding overprotection that prevents full development. Self-regulation, then, also requires containment and limits.

What relationship does this have with learning? Because another topic says that if we enhance self-regulation and freedom, then they will not want to learn or strive.

Early childhood we can consider it as a reserve fund for life: everything that will come later, you can take from that reserve fund. In the infant genital phase, when the discovery of sexuality and the identity of a boy or girl (between 3 and 5 years) begins, it is when a drive that we call epistemophilia is born next to sexual drive, that is, the drive for knowledge and, as if it were the same river, the two things are born together. If we repress those drives very hard, that is divided. There is born the curiosity, the anatomical, seeing the differences between one and the other; initially between masculine and feminine, but it is the beginning of a huge field of knowledge. If that is allowed, without excessive repression, you will remain curious, and you will be interested in it and many other things, because the stimulus for knowledge is greatly expanded. I believe that what is lacking in learning is all the stimulation of contact: with mothers and fathers, with caregivers, with constructive schools. In Waldorf schools prohibit the use of the computer before age 6, and it makes sense because at that age they have to experiment with the whole body: music, dance, movement, integration, energy, rhythm, motor skills ..., so that, When the epistemophilic drive arises, all that reserve fund is full of experiences, of sensitivity, of fine and gross motor skills. Automatically, all that energy drive will go ahead for pleasure, for intellectual eroticism. There is that eroticism: the pleasure of studying, of knowing. Reich asserts that sublimation (that is, the fact that bodily instincts become intellectuals) is given for satisfaction, not for repression, as Freud claimed. It is a more effective sublimation.

In this sense, the school is still impregnated with that repression, when it contrasts pleasure and effort.

Without a doubt, the school also needs to change. Spend a lot of time sitting in a chair, with a very traditional system, as in another era! So what the child does (and knows how to do very well) in the face of his need for activity is to do it with his head: he disconnects and feels that way [he drops down on the seat]. Find what your body needs because you are angry, tired, discouraged.

In your book you describe in detail each phase and the possible blockages. But to what extent is it decisive? If my daughter had a trauma or a blockage and I couldn't help her then, what can I do when two years have elapsed?

I think there is always a strong and clear possibility of growing, unless you have a serious disorder. Life and development are fascinating because you can always move forward, but I must understand how. For example, if someone was fixed on what we call the oral phase, we must move him to the next stage. I can work on this by making him realize how his current behavior (he wants more than he has, has an excessively full schedule because he has a disturbance of time ...), is related to that fixation. These little things modify the energy of the process, and in this process we move forward.

AUTHOR: Miquel Àngel Alabart, director of Growing in Family.

SEEN AT: https://cambiemoslaeducacion.wordpress.com/2015/09/04/entrevista-a-evania-reichert-la-primera-infancia-es-como-un-fondo-de-reservas-para-toda-la -lifetime/

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