The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff — a review: summary, excerpts, and comments.
I wanna be a parent. I don’t see society doing parenthood particularly well. Jean Liedloff has some good ideas. We need more of that.
I just finished reading The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. It has been an affirmative and inspiring read. I read it because I want to be a parent one day, and I long for the right environment in which to embark on that life-giving, life-changing experience.
The Continuum Concept was recommended to me by several of my hippie friends as an alternative method of parenting. It is that, and it is so much more.
Jean Liedloff’s book offers not only alternative parenting methods, but an alternative societal and cultural structure; a different way of organising peoples and places; an invitation back to our millions-year-old evolved natures.
The ‘continuum’ that Liedloff speaks of is essentially the continuum of psycho-biological evolution which we are all, as fellow human beings, part of.
Based on many years living amongst and studying the Yequana tribe of jungle South America, Liedloff advocates for a return back to our primal roots; our innate knowings; our natural way of being, inter-being, and raising our young and integrating them with our old.
The Continuum Concept is nothing short of a radical re-orientation to What Makes Sense. It’s written in heady, academic prose, and yet more than anything it is a call to our non-academic, beyond-intellectual intuition.
The Sunday Times review on the front cover reads, “I hope it will be widely read and taken seriously.” I hope so too. It was published first in 1975. Unfortunately, it seems this hasn’t happened. But my writing about it and sharing excerpts here is the least I can do.
I hope the world gets a little less fucked up in my lifetime, and I believe Liedloff’s body of work can help.
“I was frightened by the boldness of the step I was taking… [away from] my civilisation-blinded mind… but never for an instant did I consider retreat.”
~~
“… a new pleasure added itself to my freedom: it was a way of carrying not just a stick of cane but part of a load shared among three companions… The straightforward business of doing a task in partnership with a fellow-being was lost in a tangle of competitiveness; the primordial feeling of pleasure at pooling one’s forces with those of others had never a chance to arise.”
“… the Indians’ secret of outdoing our well-nourished strongmen… they were economising their forces by using them only to do that job, wasting none on associated tensions [of competitiveness].”
~~
“… against the hunting-gathering millions of years are only eight thousand since the beginning of agriculture… the last coverts of our instinctive competence are rooted out and subjected to the limitations of the intellect.”
“… we can barely sense… or tell an original impulse from a distorted one.”
~~
“‘Correct’… is a tricky word… What is meant here by correct is that which is appropriate to the ancient continuum of our species inasmuch as it is suited to the tendencies and expectations with which we have evolved.”
“… the design of each individual [human being] is a reflection of the experience it expected to encounter… If one wants to know what is correct for any species, one must know the inherent expectations of that species.”
~~
“The continuum of an individual is a whole, yet forms part of the continuum of his family, which in turn is part of his clan’s, community’s, and species’ continua, just as the continuum of the human species forms part of that of all life.”
“In each life-form, tendency to evolve is not random, but furthers continuum interests.”
~~
“In a word, the more a culture relies upon the intellect, the more restraints on the individual are necessary to maintain it.”
~~
“[The baby’s] predominant feeling may be the unpleasant one of hunger, but on another level he feels right about the fact that he is crying.”
“… He only senses that it is right. But if he is left to cry too long, if the response it is meant to elicit does not come, its rightness departs as well, giving way to utter bleakness without time or hope.”
“The feeling appropriate to an infant in arms is his feeling of rightness, or more precisely, of lovableness… All babies are lovable, but can know it themselves only by reflection, by the way they are treated.”
~~
“The infant (like the guru) lives in the eternal now; the infant in arms (and the guru) in a state of bliss, the infant out of arms in a state of longing in the bleakness of an empty universe.”
“The amounts by which the [expectations of the infant] diverge [from reality] determines the distance from his inherent potential for well-being.”
~~
“A baby animal awakens a maternal response in all of us, men, women or children; we want to cuddle and give it things, protect and care for it, whether it is a newly-born walrus, a baby elephant, a tiger cub or a day-old mouse.”
“We are not simply amused but deeply pleased by the sight of one species caring for the young of another.”
~~
“… we have allowed the intellect to try out its gauche fads on this most critical matter, and have trespassed against our in-built ability so capriciously that its very existence is by now all but forgotten.”
~~
“The period immediately following birth is the most impressive part of life… The change from the total hospitality of the womb is enormous.”
“Every nerve ending under his newly exposed skin craves the expected embrace, all his being, the character of all he is, leads to his being held in arms.”
“That she [the mother] has suddenly become detached from her long-standing continuum and now takes he holding or not holding her baby to be a matter of option, has not influenced the powerful urgency nor the precise nature of [the baby’s] primordial need to be held.“
“To make of the intellect a competent servant instead of an incompetent master, must be a major goal of continuum philosophy.”
~~
“The worlds of infants in arms in Stone Age and in [so-called] civilised cultures are as different as night and day.”
~~
“Vomiting, or ‘spitting up’, an everyday event in our infants’ lives, is so rare that I can remember seeing it happen only once in my years with the Indians, and that baby had a high fever.”
~~
“When he awakes he is in hell. No memory, no hope, no thought can bring the comfort of his visit to his mother into this bleak purgatory. Hours pass and days and nights. He screams, tires, sleeps. He wakes and wets his diaper. By now there is no pleasure in this act. No sooner is the pleasure of relief prompted by his innards, than it is replaced, as the hot, acid urine touches his by-now chafed body, by a searing crescendo of pain. He screams. His exhausted lungs must scream to override the fiery stinging. He screams until the pain and screaming use him up before he falls asleep.
“At his not unusual hospital the busy nurses change all diapers on schedule, whether they are dry, wet, or long wet, and send the infants home chafed raw, to be healed by someone who has time for such things.
“By the time he is taken to his mother’s home (surely it cannot be called his) he is well versed in the character of life. On a preconscious plane which will qualify all his further impressions, as it is qualified by them, he knows life to be unspeakably lonely, unresponsive to his signals and full of pain.
“But he has not given up. His continuum forces will try forever to reinstate their balances, as long as there is life.”
~~
“The continuum, ever ready to have its expectations realised, accepts whatever portion of fraction of them it gets.”
~~
“The object of life is life; the object of well-being is to encourage that which produces the sense of well-being. Procreation is to create procreators.”
~~
“[The baby] only dimly perceives that knocking over his porridge-bowl, done to get attention, incurs the wrong sort. Still, he feels it better than no attention and continues to knock it off.”
“His neglectedness and his longing are already fundamental qualities of life. He has never known anything else. For him, Self is wanting, waiting. Other is withholding, unresponsive.”
~~
“One cannot become independent of the mother, except through her, through her playing her continuum role, giving the in-arms experience and allowing one to graduate from it upon fulfilment.”
~~
“… other animals whose expressions of those needs are not inhibited by a necessity to give a rational explanation for doing what they feel impelled to do.”
“Jane Goodall-Van Lawick, in what must surely be one of the greatest ironies of all time, found more inspiring examples of infant care in her chimpanzee friends whose behaviour, even as another species, is closer to that of the human continuum than the behaviour of present-day humans.”
~~
“… the dangerously ignorant hands of the intellect…”
~~
“As befits the economical character of nature. [the continuum child] wants no more than he needs.”
“A child with a full complement of in-arms experience will have no need to beg attention in excess of his physical requirements, for he will not, like the children one has known in civilised circumstances, need reassurance, to affirm either his existence or his lovableness.”
~~
“A baby has no suicidal inclinations… he simply does the safe thing, unaware of making a choice. He is naturally interested in his own well-being…
“He tends more every day toward learning his people’s culture…”
~~
“The father’s constant love maintains the same character as the mother’s but has an overlay of approval contingent upon the performance of the child. Thus nature insures both stability and incentive toward sociality. Later, the father will distinguish himself more and more clearly as the representative of society and guide the child, showing by example what is expected, toward choices of behaviour appropriate to the particular customs in which he will participate.”
“… children do join in the culture, though their approach and pace are dictated by individual forces within themselves. That the end result will be social, cooperative and entirely voluntary is not in question.
“It is assumed that the child is social, not anti-social, in his motives. What he does is accepted as the act of an innately ‘right’ creature.
“If there is anything fundamentally foreign to us in continuum societies like the Yequana, it is this assumption of innate sociality. It is by starting from this assumption… with resultant high well-being… becomes intelligible.”
=> in contrast, we assume that humans are innately lazy, self-serving, economically “rational” agents. Fuck capitalism.
~~
“Among the uniqueness of man as a species is his intellect’s ability to contradict his evolved nature.”
~~
“One of the oddest outcomes of a loss of faith in the continuum is the ability of adults to make children run away from them.”
=> I wanted to run away A LOT as a kid.
~~
“‘Boys will be boys’ [is a saying] implying that the badness is solidly built in… it works with the same disastrous effect as surprise or praise for social behaviour.”
=> our notions of good and bad, right and wrong, are built into us through culture and language from the start.
~~
“The idea of ownership of other persons is absent among the Yequana. The idea that this is ‘my child’ or ‘your child’ does not exist. Deciding what another person should do, no matter what his age, is outside the Yequana vocabulary of behaviours. That is great interest in what everyone does, but no impulse to influence — let alone coerce anyone.
“There is no slavery — for how else can one describe imposing one’s will on another and coercion by threat or punishment?”
=> And is this not what capitalism is built on? Work for the system, make your money, earn your bread, or you’ll starve. Get with the system or you’re fucked.
==> Well, fuck you.
~~
“[Continuum societies have] the firm knowledge that a child wants to be of service and to join in the work of his people. No one watches to see whether the child obeys — there is no doubt of his will to cooperate. As the social animal he is, he does as he is expected without hesitation and to the very best of his ability. It works incredibly well.”
~~
“[The adults] said ‘Mahtyeh!’ — Come along! — to Tadehah whose hammock was still strung in the shelter.
The child only said softly, ‘Ahkey’ — No — and the others went on their way.
There was no attempt to force or even to persuade him to come with them. He belonged, like anyone else, to himself. His decision was an expression of his self-ownership, and its outcome was part of his destiny. No one presumed to override his right to decide for himself just because he was small and weak enough to be dominated physically, or because his decision-making abilities were less experienced.
Among the Yequana, a person’s judgement is thought to be adequate to make any decision he feels motivated to make.
[and at the same time,] small children do not make large decisions… in matters beyond their powers of comprehension, they look to elders to judge what is best.”
=> which implies that the young have trust in the old. This is not the case in the “civil” world we live in today.
~~
“The unwillingness of one Yequana even to cajole another does not seem to be a choice made by the individual. It is apparently a prohibition evolved by the continuum and sustained by their culture.”
~~
“… he is not told that he is bad, or that he is always doing the wrong thing. He never feels he is bad, only, at most, that he is a loved child doing an undesirable act. The child himself wants to stop doing things distasteful to his people. He is innately social.”
=> Brene Brown’s empowering distinction between the rightness of guilt (you did a bad thing) and the wrongness of shame (you are a bad person) is relevant here.
~~
“The Yequana, who had been correctly treated during the in-arms phase, who knew themselves to be lovable, did not seek any extra mothering to offset their pain unless it was excruciating.
… our civilised children, each tacitly acknowledged to bear a permanent burden of pain (the longing for more loving than he has had) are given hugs and kisses and fond words for the smallest bumps… It may be that expecting sympathy is largely a learned behaviour.”
~~
“By comparison with the American middle-class contemporaries [the Yequana] have remarkably few accidents. It is no coincidence that those Americans are perhaps the most carefully protected children in history as regards external safeguards, and are therefore the least expected to know how to look after themselves…
It is another instance of trying to better nature; another example of mistrust of faculties not intellectually controlled, and usurpation of their functions by the intellect, which does not have the capacity to take all relevant information into consideration.”
“The machinery for looking after themselves, in most Western children, is in only partial use, a great deal of the burden having been assumed by adult caretakers. With its characteristic abhorrence of redundancy, the continuum withdraws as much self-guardianship as is being taken over by others.”
“… how could we be described as social creatures if we did not have a strong proclivity for behaving as we feel we are expected? For anyone trying to apply continuum principles in civilised life, this changeover to trust in children’s self-protecting ability will be one of the most difficult problems.”
~~
“The disastrous custom of teaching children that ‘good’ will always be rewarded and ‘evil’ always punished, that promises are always kept, that grown-ups never tell lies, and so on, not only necessitates slapping them down later for being ‘unrealistic’ and ‘immature’ if they have by chance gone on believing the nursery fictions, but also creates a sense of disillusionment which usually applies itself to their upbringing in general and what they believed to be the culture they were expected to follow.
The results are confusion about how to behave, as the basis for the action is snatched away, and suspicion of anything else their culture tells them.”
=> our civilisation’s premises are fucked. So of course we end up doubting everything. The pandemic of broken trust in our politics and politicians is one representation of this.
~~
“Happiness ceases to be a normal condition of being alive, and becomes a goal.”
“… common is the desperate behaviour of the successful, whose instinct for self-preservation prevents the ultimate step into oblivion [suicide], but whose lives are full of heavy drinking, drug-taking, divorce and melancholy…
They cannot remember [their longing’s] original form: their craving as infants for their place in their mothers’ arms.
To all intents and purposes they are staring into a bottomless abyss, when once they may have been quite sure it was money, fame or achievement.”
~~
“The difficulty in finding an acceptable mate has been complicated further by cultural images such as the love objects produced by films, television, novels, magazines and advertisements… the characters they represent, however unrealistic, set standards for our desires which make real people seem more inadequate than ever.
“Advertising has learned to capitalise on the longings of the in-arms deprived public.”
~~~
On competition
“The notion that fulfilment, the feeling of rightness, comes through competing and winning is an extension of what Freud called ‘sibling rivalry’. It seems to him that all of us had to cope with jealousy and hatred of our brothers and sisters who threatened our exclusive access to our mothers. But Freud had no undeprived people in his acquaintance. If he had had the opportunity to know the Yequana he would have found that the idea of competing and winning, as an end in itself, was quite unknown to them. It cannot therefore be considered an integral part of the human personality.
Among the Yequana, there is a variety of motives for wanting things and people, but simply winning out over others is not one of them.
Their emotional life does not require it, so their culture does not provide it. It is difficult for us to imagine life without competition — as difficult as it is to imagine feeling content with what we are.”
“There is no rest, no respite. Nothing is ever allowed to be good enough, nothing ever satisfactory.“
~~
“In a continuum-complete person, the infant’s ability to get what he wants without doing any work gives way to a growing desire to exercise his capacity for work.
[For most of us], the impulse to work… is stunted… Work becomes what it is to most of us: a resented necessity.”
~~~
On various addictions and their logic
“Only research will be able to ascertain the precise relationship between deprivation and addiction, and when it does, the many forms of addiction — to alcohol, tobacco, gambling, barbiturates or nail-biting — may begin to make more sense in light of the continuum concept of human requirements.” => Johann Hari’s gamechanging TedTalk on this topic definitely aligns with Liedloff’s perspective.
“‘Casanova syndrome’ which compels a man to try to show himself that he is lovable by making up in numbers of conquests what is missing in the special quality of love which should have been found in his mother, the kind which assures one of one’s existence one’s worth. The collecting of testimonies to his lovableness does go some way toward replacing the missing conviction. In each moment in the arms of each lady a little is made up, and eventually the unsatisfiable Casanova ‘tires’ of that brand of search for the feeling of rightness and is able to contemplate a more advanced, more mature, position toward women.” => RELATABLE.
The actor personality very often feels the need to be on stage or attended by large numbers of people to prove that he is the center of attention, in spite of his nagging feeling to the contrary, and his unremitting need to occupy that position.”
The compulsive academic, the taker of degrees and lifelong inhabitant of schools in one capacity or another has made of the alma mater a fairly adaptable mother surrogate. The school is bigger and more stable than he.”
Heroine addicts: “It is usually said only that its captives are weak, immature, irresponsible… The life of a heroin addict is not easy, to put it mildly, and to dismiss him as a weakling is not good enough.”
“The dominant emotional characteristic of the addict is said to be his enormous compulsion to abdicate responsibility for his own life… The personality of the addict, centred upon the drug, discards any semblance of maturity it had managed to attain and settles at the infantile level where the continuum was interrupted.
“If they survive, most addicts will stop taking the drug after a number of years, not inconceivably because they have put in enough hours under its influence to have fulfilled the in-arms requirement left over since infancy and are ready at last to move on emotionally to the next set of motives, as a Yequana baby is ready to do before the age of one.
“It is difficult to account in any other way for the spontaneous cessation of addiction after years of slavery to it, but the fact is that there are almost no elderly users, and it is not because they have all died.”
~~~
Montefiore Hospital’s Loeb Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation in New York:
“The Center claimed in 1966 to have cut down the rate of re-admissions by eighty per cent by an approach of ‘acceptance’ and encouraging the patients to talk about their problems…
Using this motherly technique, the Center has found that recovery is faster too.
… fractured hips, a common ailment, heal in half the normal time for a person’s age and overall condition.
Most patients stay in bed for three weeks after a heart attack… those at the Loeb Center were sufficiently recovered to be on their feet after the second week.”
~~~
On Meditation
“For those who meditate regularly, there is an apparent increase in serenity, sometimes called spirituality, which lends a stabilising influence to the rest of their time… It is as though they were, in the case of a civilised, in-arms deprived persons, filling in the gap in infant experience which would have provided greater serenity… The hours of meditation are filling in the lost hours of infant bliss.” => amen.
“The intellect rests; it stops its everlasting spurring of itself from association to association, from guess to guess, from decision to decision. The rest refreshes not only the intellect itself but the entire nervous system.”
~~~
On Society
“While to an infant it is largely the caretaker’s behavior which must fulfil the requirements, the growing individual needs more and more the support of his society and its culture to meet his innate expectations.
Man can survive in appallingly anti-continuum conditions, but his well-being, his joy, his fulfilment as a whole human being can be lost. From many points of view he might be better off dead.” => amen.
~~
“We are living lives for which our evolution did not equip us.”
~~
“Our standard of living rises without bringing up the standard of well-being.”
~~
“It is sadly impractical, unrealistic, Utopian, to describe a culture to which ours could be changed in order to fill the continuum’s requirements. Even if the change should be made it would be fairly useless, for unless we were first to become the sort of people to make it work, it would be an unsatisfactory exercise deemed to immediate distortion and eventual disintegration. Still, it can be of value to try to track down some of the qualities a culture would need to have, in one form or another, if it were to suit the requirements of the continua of its members.”
~~
“A sure sign that something is seriously missing in a society is a generation gap. If the younger generation does not take pride in becoming like its elders, then the society has lost its own continuum, its own stability, and probably does not have a culture worth calling one…
“If the younger members of the society feel the older ones are ridiculous, or wrong, or boring, they will have no natural path to follow. They will feel lost, demeaned and cheated and will be angry. The elders, too, will feel cheated and resentful at the loss of continuity in the culture and suffer a sense of purposelessness along with the young.”
~~
“The work [of society] should be of kinds which can be enjoyed by a person whose earlier requirements have been met so that he has an unimpeded desire to behave socially and to exercise his abilities.”
“In a continuum correct society the generations would live under the same roof to the advantage of all. Grand-parents would help as much as they could and people at the height of their working powers would not begrudge support to their elders any more than to their children.”
“Leadership would emerge naturally among the members of a society… The followers should be the ones to decide whom they will follow and should be free to change leaders as suits their convenience… [but] it will be a long time before we can live so close to anarchy with success. It is none the less worthwhile keeping in mind as a direction in which to move when and if our cultures and population pressures permit.”
~~
“The number of people who live and work together would vary from a few families to several hundred people, so that the individual would be interested in maintaining good relations with all the people with whom he deals.
“The human animal cannot really live with thousands or millions of others.”
~~
“I was once astonished to see a Yequana take it into his head to climb to the top of the hill overlooking the village to pound a drum and shout at the top of his lungs for a good half hour before his impulse was satisfied. He felt like doing it for reasons of his own and did it without any apparent concern for what the neighbours would think.” => hah. Yes.
~~
“A culture which requires people to live in a way for which their evolution has not prepared them, which does not fulfil their innate expectations and therefore pushes their adaptability beyond its limits, is bound to damage their personalities.
One way of pushing the human personality too far is by depriving it of its minimum requirement for a variety of stimuli. The resulting loss of well-being takes a form called boredom. The continuum, by producing this unpleasant feeling, motivates the person to change what he is doing. We in civilisation do not customarily feel we have a ’right’ not to be bored and we spend years doing monotonous work in factories and offices, or alone all day doing uninteresting chores.
The Yequana, on the other hand, with their quick, sharp sense of the limits of their own continua, of their capacity for adaptation without loss of well-being, heed immediately the call to stop what they are doing when boredom threatens…”
~~
“A great part of our tragedy is that we have lost the sense of our ‘rights’ as members of the human species… We say, for example, ‘It is cruel to keep so large an animal in an apartment in town’, but we are speaking of dogs, never of people, who are even large and more sensitive to their surroundings.
“We do not look upon happiness as a birthright… Real joy, the state in which the Yequana spend much of their lives, is exceedingly rare among us.
If we had the opportunity to live the sort of life for which we are evolved, a great many of our present motives would be affected.
For one thing, we would not imagine that children must be happier than adults nor that the young adult must be happier than the old.”
=> I’ve long been inspired by a traveller who was convinced that Life Is Supposed To Get Better As You Age.
~~~
On Sex and Physical Intimacy
“To make matters worse for the deprived adults, his or her need for the physical expressions of sex are mixed with the need leftover from infancy for non-sexual physical contact. In general, this latter need is not recognised in our society and any wish for contact is construed as sexual. So the taboos against sex are also applied against all the comforting non-sexual forms of physical contact.
Even the children and adults of the Yequana, who had all the required contact in infancy, still enjoy a great deal of contact, sitting close together, resting in the same hammock or grooming one another.”
“Under the broad banner of sex, undistinguished from it as a separate impulse, is the need to be held, surrounded by the protection of another person, to be babies and made to feel lovable not because one has brought home a salary or baked a cake, but simply because one exists.”
“Often the desire for sex and the desire for affection lead from one to the other. In adults the satisfaction of the more pressing need may leave the other to arise. A day at the office which ash produced particular insecurity may cause a husband to want to hold and be held by his wife and to be treated with affection; but when that requirement is met he may find his interest in her turns to a sexual one. But in our society he may feel obliged to go on to sex since the two needs are not distinct in his mind as independent of one another… I believe that with a clear notion of the distinction, and a little practice in dissociating the two, a great deal more affection could be exchanged without the complications of sexual involvement when it is not wanted… The vast reservoir of longing for physical comforting might be significantly reduced if it became socially acceptable to hold hands with a walking companion of either sex, to sit touching, not just near, talking companions, to sit on people’s laps in public as well as in private, to stroke a tempting head of hair when the mood takes one, to hug more freely and more publicly, and in general not to curb one’s affection impulses unless they would be unwelcome.”
“We go on seeking fulfilment of our infantile requirements. But as we have not been clear about what we are seeking, we have met with limited success.
~~~
”I believe that making up one’s mind to stay as close to the continuum as possible is itself the most useful step. Discovering ways to do so, once the will is there, is largely a matter of using one’s common sense.“
“Our society must be helped to see the gravity of the crime against infants which is today considered normal treatment.”