Let us imagine a totally different situation
where a baby is harshly beaten by the mother, instead of engaging in mutual
smiling. The baby might experience an intense emotional trauma with strong fear
and anxiety. As we saw above, in such a traumatic situation, the baby’s brain,
especially prefrontal area is activated in order to suppress areas related to
emotional experiences, such as amygdala and other areas in his limbic system. The
baby’s mind is in a sense “hypnotized” (i.e., dissociated) and the imitative
response of the mother’s behaviors based on the MNS cannot be followed through
with. What the baby would experience, instead, is depersonalization and
derealization, or out-of-body type of experiences. Why would these experiences occur?
The baby might lose a sense that he is passively beaten-up by his mother, as
there is no pain or tactile sensation which should accompany and
establish that passive experience. Then a new center of consciousness, a new personality is established on
an emergency basis, which observes himself from outside, in a sort of out-of-body
state.
Another situation which might occur in a
more severe cases is that baby’s passive experience of being beaten might translate
into an active experience of beating (himself). As I stated, the experience of
passivity and passivity has a dual nature. One as a real experience and the
other as a vicarious experience of the other through MNS. Being smiled at, for
example, is doubled by the counterpart of smiling, etc. In a situation of being
beaten, the passive experience would be obliterated through dissociative process
and the only active experience remains, establishing that experience primarily
as the active one. This process is considered the “identification with the aggressor”.
To schematically
describe, this is what might happen in the baby’s psyche:
Experiences of being beaten (actively,
virtually beating experience + direct experience of being beaten + lack of
physical experiences of passive experience = establishment of by-stander
personality, or establishment of aggressive personality ← overactivation of MNS.
