It wasn’t all that long ago (over 50 years) that I worked at Bronx House Camps in Copake, N.Y. One of my best friends there was a guy named Elliot who was the swimming counselor. If you know anything about swimming counselors at children’s summer camps, you know that they have to be tough. That’s because a simple mistake can turn tragic, as in someone could drown. The whole idea is that whenever the kids are swimming, the counselors are on duty and must be watching the kids. In many ways, there is not a greater staff responsibility. It’s live or die.
That’s one example of how a sense of responsibility as a kid can accompany us through life. Another one is homework. I think that many of us develop complexes based on our failure to do what is required of us in our earlier years. My parents owned this house on Fire Island where we would go for the weekends. When we returned to the city after the weekend, we’d have to face the music because we hadn’t done our homework from the following day. I cannot believe how potent that failure turned out to be in my life. My bet is that you are able to identify with this terror, or, more likely, you were a better kid than I was.
As a result of not having met my obligations all those years ago, Sundays have always been fraught for me. It’s funny how it works. All these years later, Sunday brings on a sense of doom and extraordinary guilt. Monday, of course, is the beginning of a work week. Fridays were always wonderful days for me. That’s because the day after Friday is Saturday, a day which promised freedom from responsibility. However, lurking in the shadows behind Saturday is the accursed, aforementioned Sunday which is followed by the even more accursed Monday when the whole thing starts all over again.
You might think that I have recognized that I am a failure in life. I mean, if you haven’t done your homework early in life and if that failure brings on a sense of lifelong guilt, the implications can be staggering. Guilt is a terrible thing. Freud knew about it and developed theories that have cost some people hundreds and hundreds of hours in the presence of an analyst. So just think about it. You didn’t do your homework on a Sunday night and you are doomed to wallow in Sunday-night guilt forever.
Of course, guilt doesn’t stop there. Some people learned to harness guilt to get their way with others. The aforementioned Freud made guilt an essential ingredient in analyzing our parental relationships. I suspect that the Oedipal complex is well known to most of us. Young boys being in love with their mothers is not new, but it is extraordinarily potent when we use it to understand why we have turned out the way we have. Along with that love comes the Oedipal competition with the father in a family.
Assuming Freud was right, we should recognize that all that paternal anger and unresolved maternal fixation can go a long way toward explaining why so many people in this world are so angry and screwed up. Just take Vladimir Putin. He threatens to bring all of us into a world war. Had Vlad’s parents worked out their relationship at a more satisfactory level, we might not be facing the threat of nuclear holocaust today.
Some reading this will dismiss the idea that parental relationships mean so much. Tell it to a girl I used to know who would tell me how her brute of a father used to beat her mother. That had lifelong consequences for my friend.
