36. The Latenty Motivated Child

As opposed to the manifestly motivated child, the latently motivated child has been given so little nourishment for his positive core that his contact rebuses have become overwhelmingly destructive, and his demotivation has outpaced his motivation. This condition arises when the positive core does not receive sufficient nourishment in the form of positive affirmation, and when the social atom emanates more demotivation than motivation (i.e. it is not loving enough).

Instead, the child mainly receives negative feedback from his environment, and, on balance, destructive contact rebuses from his parents and others. This breeds considerable anguish in the child, and because the life force he receives is too weak for him to deal with this external demotivation, his contact rebuses become chiefly destructive. Development and maturity will have to wait: the child’s prime concern now is to invest energy in surviving and appealing for help (Motivational Work, Part 1: Values and Theory, pages 277 – 292).

Case Study

Jonathan, 12, and a younger friend find themselves in trouble with the police after just having tried to snatch a bag from an elderly woman. Jonathan is aggressive and will not admit to having run away from home. He ends up being taken into a children’s home, where the staff discovers bruises covering his body. When a doctor comes to examine him, he flees from the home but is found by his parents and returned. He tells the staff that his parents have ordered him to lie about the beatings to which they subject him. He later gives the social worker leading the subsequent inquiry an account of how his parents treat him, and when his mother is subsequently confronted with this, she says that she and her husband can no longer cope and want the authorities to take care of their son.

She also tells them that Jonathan has frequently threatened them, and blames this and his general antisocial behavior on a brain injury. Back at the children’s home, Jonathan admits to the staff that he has always felt unwanted by his parents and that he doesn’t want to live anymore. On researching his case, his social worker discovers a history of aggression from play-school onwards and accounts of bullying at the hands of his classmates. When he was ten, for example, his parents accepted an invitation to contact the child psychiatry clinic, where he was either compliant and well-behaved or very aggressive towards the staff.

Discussion

Jonathan uses his very destructive contact rebus to make a desperate appeal for help, both to his parents and to other adults. He is most aggressive and threatening, yet on occasions can be quite acquiescent. His parents’ destructive contact rebuses give him back a certain amount of life energy, as, rather than being indifferent to him, they are actually conveying transmuted positive affirmation to him via their physical and mental abuse, (i.e. violence at the hands of his father, and denunciations of being worthless and unwanted from both).

Once the child is latently motivated, he enters (as Jonathan illustrates) a vicious circle, in which he continues to hunger for the life energy he needs to survive, keep his pain in check, and appeal for help. The demotivation inherent to the contact rebus impels him to construct experiences that conform to his deeply negative self-image, affirmation of which he constantly seeks from others in order to survive. In being destructive both to himself and those around him, the child simultaneously keeps his anguish at a distance and emits an appeal for help, his destructive contact rebus receiving life force in the form of demotivation.

The latently motivated child is abandoned, betrayed, and hated. He stands isolated and forsaken, full of pain, appealing desperately for help.

Consequences in Adulthood

If the child continues to be latently motivated, his demotivation will accompany him into adulthood. Thus, the fact that he has lived with latent motivation since childhood is one of the reasons an adult may be latently motivated, however, unlike the child, the adult has a fully formed psyche, in which the latent motivation has become entrenched. The house is built and furnished, so to speak, even though the foundations are unstable and the supporting walls weak. The latently motivated adult has an adult’s emotional needs and is no longer in the child’s overt state of dependency.