Feature: Psychiatrist Dennis Friedman says forget Asbos and trust in what a child really needs
Published: 4 February 2010
THE stairs are steep as doyen psychiatrist Dr Dennis Friedman, now 85, stubbornly climbs to his top floor eyrie at Cambridge Gate, Regent’s Park, and gazes out over Camden.
This is where he wrote his latest book, An Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do What We Do, in which he outlines his controversial ideas, based on decades of study, about the fundamental role of our mother’s love in determining who we are.
He describes the latest research involving the “babble talk” that goes on between pregnant women and their offspring, how they sing in harmony and how bonding between mother and child is so vital in the first three years of life.
Those deprived of love may become insecure, greedy bankers, never satisfied, no matter how many millions they have, or power-hungry politicians seeking satisfaction in promiscuity, or bullies beating up others because they feel rejected, etc.
We can become brainwashed too and made fearful by violent computer games, dysfunctional TV soaps that exploit murder, rape, dishonesty and the worst manifestations of humanity, solely to provide visual sensations.
Dr Friedman’s own upbringing by a warmhearted mother left him feeling deprived – because she extended her love to children other than her own, bringing them into the family and ignoring him. Fortunately, that turned him into a thoughtful child concerned with relationships, who was reading Freud at 15.
But, in today’s world, we have created social problems on the scale of the murder of Jamie Bulger and the horrific attack on two boys near Doncaster by socially deprived brothers, who terrorised the neighbourhood. “Governments are not addressing these issues,” softly spoken Dr Friedman says. “They are addressing the outcome of them, picking up the pieces by blaming others.
“The whole idea now is to punish the offender. We have gone through anti-social behaviour orders, hit them where it hurts by increasing sentencing, banning them from football matches. And it hasn’t made the slightest difference.”
Mention Tony Blair and the Iraq war, and he suggests: “Very often grandiosity takes over. Then you are making decisions based on grandiose needs, according to the reality of the situation.”
Politicians, he says, “are in business to exercise power and with the acquisition of power they feel stronger. And they very often use that power sexually; they become promiscuous to help them feel more loved, a process that needs to be constantly repeated.”
And bankers? “People dealing in money and securities are clearly trying to compensate with the insecurity they have grown up with,” he says. “They compensate for what they never had when they were little by building up a huge stack of money. But these people are never satisfied.”
Yet Dr Friedman, who is married to the novelist and playwright Rosemary Friedman, remains hopeful. One of his solutions is for the government to provide mother and baby classes where a child’s vital need for love is made a priority.
“A mother has to ask herself how to communicate with this human being she has produced and how to listen to what he/she is saying to her, so that there is a proper conversation going on that will make them both happy with the outcome,” he says. He identifies this as a child’s human right. “If a mother and her child do not have that kind of early life where they understand each other, then the future will be dire.”
• An Unsolicited Gift: Why We Do What We Do. By Dennis Friedman. Arcadia Books £11.99