Yesterday was my dad’s birthday, and he and my mum came to see me in Oslo. I took them to Vigelandsparken, one of my favourite places. It’s a sculpture park filled with the work of Gustav Vigeland, who wanted to make this place a synthesis of nature and culture, to allow the viewer to merge organically with it all.
The Monolith Plateau is perhaps one of the best known tourist destinations of the city. The entirety of the work is about the cycle of life, and how people relate to each other, for better or worse.
Perhaps because of the brutality of our time, I was even more struck by the humanity of the work than usual. I don’t understand how someone can make something as hard as granite look and feel so soft. I wondered, how much time did the artists who cut all of these sculptures (because Vigeland didn’t do it all by himself) spend looking at us. Humans. Our bodies, our shapes, and how we move, how we sit, how we touch, hit, cry, love, grieve; how we comfort, hold each other, lift each other up, push each other down, how we fail, how we struggle, hope and laugh; how we die.
There’s a term in developmental psychology, called object permanence:
the understanding that whether an object can be sensed has no effect on whether it continues to exist (in the mind). Jean Piaget, the Swiss psychologist who first studied object permanence in infants, argued that it is one of an infant's most important accomplishments, as, without this concept, objects would have no separate, permanent existence.
Achieving object permanence is an important part of having a functioning working memory, but it is also among other things a requirement for developing empathy. The understanding that outside my view and our interaction, you go on being, with a complete and rich human experience as valuable to you as my own is to me. What happens to you can be felt by me in various degrees of separation or enmeshment. Being overly attached or making other people’s pain about your own emotional response to that, for instance, is not necessarily an empathetic expression, while sympathy is a difference in levels and signals an unequal relationship, in the same way charity is not an act of solidarity. Charity is, I would argue, a lack of having achieved object permanence, because the receiver of your charity is only truly brought alive and has value in your mind through the act of adding to them what you understand as valuable.
I first learned about object permanence when I was studying developmental psychology, and all the different phases a child will go through in order for them to develop a sense of self separate from their primary caregiver. This transition is a pretty brutal one if you think of it, and scary. And when we experience it, we don’t have a language to communicate or express our emotions other than to have them and probably cry about how overwhelming it all is. By the time we are grown-ups ourselves, we have most likely forgotten all about how dramatic it is to be a child, and the memories of separation are beyond our memories in words, and difficult to access. They manifest in stead in different attachment styles and patterns, with more or less functioning models for emotional responsiveness, including your range of empathetic presence in your relationships.
I started to think about the term after visiting Vigelandsparken because of how deeply I appreciated being able to come back. I thought about how places and works of art become anchors. Permanent objects, that are filled with memories and new meaning every time I see them. They go on being, and they mean a billion different things to hundred of thousands of people, who will go back to see them from time to time as I do, or just remember them, with a tender heart perhaps.
I was thinking about these things because of the devastating destruction of peoples homeland and cultural heritage that have been going on for many many years, I know, but that seems to know no limits in this moment in time. I was thinking of how the destruction of this place would absolutely break my heart.
It is difficult to take in the level of dehumanization that is necessary to disregard a fundamental developmental achievement like object permanence, that teaches every child every where, that I have a self, and you have a self. This is central to mentalization, or theory of mind, which can be defined as
the ability to explain, predict, and interpret behavior by attributing mental states such as desires, beliefs, intentions and emotions to oneself and to other people.
In dehumanization processes that we are witnessing through racism for instance, people will attribute certain traits - or privileges - to being consequences of a certain skin color, with misogyny or transphobia the traits are attributed to gender, with islamophobia or antisemitism it’s about culture, religion, and so on. The problem is of course that it’s all really about maintaining different systems of oppression, which necessitates the creation of a hierarchy, an us and a them, wiping out the deeply human realization that I am a self and you are a self. Which is why these systems are in essence anti-human. And why art, at its core, can be an antidote.
I don’t know when we will see the end of this. I don’t know how many more people will die, how many more people will be sacrificed because men with the weakest minds and moral fibre seem to have acquired all the biggest weapons of the world and are aiming them straight at us. The political leadership of the west seems to still struggle with accepting Palestinians as worthy of being understood as victims of a crime against not only them, but humanity; just as the holocaust against jews, queers, disabled people, romani was a crime against humanity. The sharing of a terrible fate with others does not diminish the atrocity in any way. It could in fact bring people together at a deeper level. But if your identity as a victim is used to leverage privilege and oppress somebody else through it, you have forfeited it.
I believe that anything we can do now to resist any and all forms of dehumanization is of significance. I believe that everything we do now to deepen our connection to each other, nature, to life, and all living beings, is of value. Don’t stick your head in the sand. Don’t run away. Try to be as present as you can when you meet another being, and maybe take a moment to recognize how you are a self, and they are a self.
We’re in this together.
So appreciate what you say how you say it… so much wisdom 🙏🏽so, …thank you 🩵Sage