I Can Confirm
Having been raised in orphanages from age 3 months 14 days to age 19, I can confirm two of the premises of professors David Parfitt and Dana Helmreich, in the article, "The Nature of Nurture," by Sally West Johnson '72 (summer 2004), namely, that babies separated from their mothers at birth have a harder time as adults and suffer developmental delay. As a consequence, dating, mating, and matrimony have been out of the question and my social life has been fractured and limping. Thinking, however, that everyone gets married, I stumbled into it. Not being able to show love and emotional support, my marriage collapsed after three years.
Another consequence of affective dysfunction has been the narrowing parameters of my work-a-day world. As a high school Spanish teacher, I could not advise a Spanish club because I could not relate with kids on a casual level. I could not emote with them even at Christmastime. As a sales agent for the Prudential Insurance Company, my effectiveness was limited, for I was not a "rapper," and surely not a "back-slapper." I lacked the knack for gaining centers of influence. The work was excruciatingly difficult, my production only average. Because of the lack of relational grounding, work such as serving on committees, registering people for activities, being a sales clerk, being a church greeter or an emcee, were out.
From infancy, I had no meaningful contact with parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, or even cousins. I remember being kissed only two times while growing up: the first, was by the mother of another orphan boy to whose home I was once invited to spend Thanksgiving Day; the second, was by the "Kitchen Nun" when I was walking by her door one summer morning at St. Vincent's Orphanage.
In my first eleven years, I have no memory of being hugged or sitting on anyone's lap, or even having my hand held. I experienced little affirmation. By age three, emotional atrophy had set in.
All through childhood and early adulthood, my birthday was never celebrated nor did I attend anyone else's birthday. In all my growing up years, I visited family but a few times: at age seven, a fruitless and sterile visit with my mother at the Columbus State Mental Hospital, where she had been committed for schizophrenia; with my father shortly before he died at the Dayton,Ohio, VA Hospital; and several visits with each of my older sisters and second oldest brother during my high school and college years. I had only one visit that I recall at the infant home, and that was by my father.
In short, during my childhood years, I was a "fallen-through-the-boards kid." At St. Vincent's, only the "together kids" were those who served at Mass or other religious services. They were the only ones chosen to play musical instruments. At the State Home in Xenia, Ohio, there were two scout troops, 75 and 62. The first, was for the kids "who had arrived," the second, for the socially inadequate, those who had "fallen through the boards." Mercifully, the latter group was afforded this outlet.
Psychological and academic tests were required for admission to the State Home. When I was ten, a psychologist from Ohio State University at the Columbus Children's Hospital tested me. In his report he said: "Virgil certainly does not put his best foot forward. He is very diffident and very slow in his responses; slow also in movement, as in use of pencil for writing or drawing. One wonders whether some of this is due to the fact that he has been at St. Vincent's all his life. In any case, he seems and acts like the over-institutionalized child is supposed to do. His oral reading is surprising good for a boy who scored only eight and a half years on the 1916 Stanford-Binet scale. He is certainly retarded in his intellectual development and considerably below average in his ability for schoolwork." Signed: Francis N. Maxfield, psychologist, Oct. 17, 1939.
Upon entering the State Home, I was placed back a grade. Upon entering Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, I had to take remedial English.
Virgil Gelormino, Spanish '62
Dayton,Ohio
Post the Results
It was with interest that an attorney in my office read the recent article on separation anxiety ("The Nature of Nurture," summer 2004.) The attorney deals in juvenile matters and asked if the research results would be published in a future edition of Middlebury Magazine. I thought that she raised an interesting point, and I encourage your letting your many interested readers know, as well, so that they may perhaps be able to access the report online. A word to the researchers in the biology department: keep us informed! And thank you for the wonderful magazine my mother and I continue to receive.
Daniel Zwickel ben Avram
(son of Jean Wiley Zwickel '35)
Pittsburg,California
Analyze This, Too
I read with great interest the recent article "The Nature of Nurture" (summer 2004). It was full of valuable new information on the borderline of brain research and early infant psychology. However, I was puzzled by the lack of reference to the many decades of research by psychoanalysts on the effects of early childhood separation from the mother. One of the most important psychoanalytic researchers in the field was Rene Spitz. His paper, "Hospitalism: An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions in Early Childhood," compared the development of two groups of children, one from a foundling home and one from a nursery, during the first year of life, and the consequences of lack of maternal contact for each group (Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, 1941 1:53-74). He continued to contribute to psychoanalytic developmental research until 1971.
Other psychoanalysts, such as Dr. Margaret Mahler and Dr. Anni Bergman have continued to focus on issued of separation and individuation. (See Mahler, M.; Pine, F.; and Bergman, A. The Psychological Birth of the Infant, 1975, Basic Books.) Incidentally, Dr. Anni Bergman will be honored in December 2004 by a meeting of the New York Freudian Society for her many contributions to the studies of early infancy.
I hope that I am not being presumptuous, but important psychoanalytic research is so often neglected by the academic world that I thought it worthwhile to bring it to your attention.
Edwin Fancher '45
Psychologist-Psychoanalyst
New York,New York
The World's Best Must Serve
I am heartened to read the summer edition letters by Captain Dan Nelson '98 and George Logan '61 in response to the spring article about Captain Brendan O'Donohoe ("A Soldier's Story"). Their messages of encouraging Middlebury "to take a fresh look at its relationship with our armed forces" is consistent with the views of many Middlebury veterans. This is a major theme that emerged from the Middlebury Veterans Reunions in 2000 and 2003, and which also was so eloquently expressed by trustee emeritus retired-Lieutenant General William E. Odom (P'87) at the 2000 reunion.
Recent events in Afghanistan and Iraq have shed light on the need for thoughtful, balanced judgment and intelligence in decisions that affect our country and the world. Middlebury, because it guides students with such great potential, has a special responsibility to our society to deliver to it people who can make contributions in all fields, including the military.
Middlebury has answered America's call to arms throughout most of its history, by supporting military service in the Civil War, offering military service programs, such as the Student Army Training Corps in WWI, the Navy V-12 program in WWII, and the Army ROTC program during Korea and Vietnam, and by providing a place for veterans to complete their education. Thousands of Middlebury people served, and nearly 100 have given their lives over the years while contributing to our national security. Since Vietnam, the College has offered ROTC through an affiliation with UVM, but otherwise, to my knowledge, has not provided students opportunities to seriously consider military service.
For decades to come, national security needs will require the best of the free world's intellectual capital, imagination and creativity. As Middlebury reassesses its vision and role in society it needs to decide how it can participate, once again, in national defense by offering opportunities for military service.
Richard E. Powell '56
LieutenantColonel,U.S.Army, Retired
Gainesville,Virginia
Sacrifice for a Few?
I write to add my name to the growing chorus of voices lauding the Iraq service of Brendan O'Donohoe '99 ("A Soldier's Story," spring 2004), and expressing concern about Middlebury's treatment of things military during the tenure of our last president, John M. McCardell Jr.
There is a huge and widening disconnect between our culture's lavish admiration for the wartime sacrifices of previous generations (the nostalgia for the stories, histories, and memorializing of our "greatest generation" is an example) and our society's unwillingness to make such sacrifices in the current war on terror. The result is that today's sacrifices are being made by an increasingly small and unrepresentative portion of our society: young men and women who are (or were before enlisting) less wealthy, less white, and less educated than the citizenry on whose behalf they are killing and dying. Moreover, these troops are serving under the leadership of junior officers drawn much less frequently from elite, liberal-arts institutions like Middlebury. In short, neither we, as citizens at large, nor our college, as an incredibly blessed community, is doing its share.
I find this circumstance shameful, and lay much of the blame squarely on the shoulders of President Emeritus McCardell. John is well liked and has been a very effective fund-raiser. But while he himself is a veteran and has always talked a good game in his dealings with the Middlebury veterans group formed five years ago, I believe he never addressed this critical issue.
This is supremely ironic. John made his scholarly mark as a historian, describing the South's refusal to let go its romantic notions of honor and duty in the "Lost-Cause" era following the Civil War. He has delighted each year in assembling a group of Civil War reenactors in his own back yard, personally firing off a heavy musket and inviting his students to do likewise. He apparently regards these moves as a complete answer to his own rhetorical warning that, in raising funds and building buildings, we must never lose sight of the college's "core mission" to teach students and "to lead by example."
To teach what and to lead at what? Vicariously experiencing war in the most sanitized and offhanded way possible? When comes the actual encouraging and facilitating of present-day sacrifice and service as real soldiers, for those students who might wish to consider it? When comes the impassioned urging to the College community to shoulder its share of the current national burden?
At a session for alumni fund-raisers last year, Kim Loewer '76, the president of Midd's alumni association, read from a letter he had received from Ken Cosgrove '42. The letter was Ken's trip down memory lane as a student during WWII. In it he wrote:
"Dec 7, 1941. Upon returning to my frat house, I saw all my brother Dekes marching in formation on the front lawn with mops and brooms over their shoulders and one of the brothers hollerin' out commands. Half of those boys lost their lives in WWII."
Deke is gone, WWII is gone, and the spirit that animated those brothers in 1941 is apparently gone too—despite President Bush's insistence that 9/11 was the modern equivalent of Pearl Harbor, and that we now face an apocalyptic war of good against evil. Whatever may be the truth of the matter, when a nation's killing and dying is to be done, only those willing to accept their fair share of the risk and sorrow of it deserve to call themselves full citizens of a free republic. As of yet, I believe, those leading Middlebury have not earned the title.
Michael K. Heaney '64
Madison,Connecticut
Correction
A number of eagle-eyed readers noticed an egregious grammatical mistake on page 19 of the summer 2004 issue. In the story "Reality Check," we erroneously wrote: "And on the tennis courts, momentum was not on Middlebury's side when Williams captured the doubles point and the No. 1 singles match on the way to it's way to a quick 3-1 lead in the best-of-seven championship match."
Chalk the unforced error up to an unfortunate typo.
Letters Policy
Letters addressing topics discussed in the magazine are given priority, though they may be edited for brevity or clarity. On any given subject we will print letters that address that subject, and then in the next issue, letters that respond to the first letters. After that, we will move on to new subjects. Send letters to:
Middlebury Magazine
Meeker House
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753
E-mail: middmag@middlebury.edu