Clarissa's Blog

By xykademiqz‘s request.

An infant can’t get her own food. She is totally dependent on whether a nipple (artificial or real*) will come from nowhere and feed her. She has no control over the nourishing nipple. Every time the nipple walks away, the infant faces the terror of it never coming back. The nipple is the center of the infant’s world, the only possibility for it to survive. 

If the nipple behaves badly (doesn’t arrive when needed, offers too little food, or too much), this has an enormous influence on the way the infant learns to relate to the world. For the rest of her life, she will unknowingly repeat her relationship with the all-important nipple.

In stressful situations, she will self-soothe by using an equivalent to the nipple. She will suck on a cigarette, bite her nails, eat her hair or paper, stuff her mouth with food and / or alcohol, etc. because they will be her “kind nipple.” This kind nipple will be controlled by her and will never abandon her. The panic of a smoker who is out of cigarettes and can’t find a place to buy a fresh pack is the panic of an infant whose nipple went away.

Oral traumas are all about dependence. The infant feels completely dependent on the goodwill of the nipple. This dependence is unpleasant and painful but it is the feeling that is the most familiar to the infant. And as we know, human psyche values nothing more than stability. In adulthood, a person with oral traumas will develop complex methods of depending on others**. She will feel heart-broken, demolished, and miserable at the smallest sign of rejection because, to her, being rejected in a professional or personal context is a way to relive the situation where the capricious nipple subjects her to the emotional roller-coaster of losing it forever and then recovering it.

There is also a curious way of deriving power from manufacturing such situations. For example, an academic submits an article she knows is subpar***. When the article predictably gets rejected, the academic experiences extreme pain (“My nipple went away!”) but she also knows she will survive the situation (because what adult doesn’t?) and will finally demonstrate to the mean, nasty nipple that she is not destroyed by its abandonment.

*It is entirely unimportant whether the nipple in question is real or artificial since the infant is not equipped to distinguish them. 

** People or physical objects, it doesn’t really matter.

*** Falls in love with a man who will dump her, develops an attachment to a friend who will betray her, etc.