Among the peasantry since time immemorial, and even today among most urban dwellers, mothers customarily wrap up their infants in narrow strips of cloth (“pelenki”) from birth. These swaddling bands serve both to contain the child’s excretions and to severely restrict bodily motion. The arms and legs of a swaddled child are rendered immobile. When fully swaddled the entire child (except for its face) is tightly embraced in a kind of womb-substitute.
Lev Tolstoy, in an autobiographical fragment of 1878, tells us how this can feeclass="underline"
I am bound [ia sviazan], I want to stick my hands out and I cannot. I cry and weep, and my cry is disagreeable even to me, but I cannot stop. Some people are standing bent over me, above me… I remember that there are two of them, and [crossed out: they feel sorry for me, but because of some strange misunderstanding they] my cries have an effect on them: they are alarmed by my cries but do not untie me [ne razviazyvaiut menia], which I wish they would, and I cry still louder. To them this seems necessary (that is, that I be bound), while I know it is not and I want to prove this to them [crossed out: and it is this misunderstanding that tortures me most of all and forces me] so I let forth a cry repellent to myself but irrepressible. I feel the unfairness and cruelty not of people, because they feel sorry for me, but of sud’ba and I feel sorry for myself.89
Tolstoy may not actually be remembering the experience of being swaddled, that is, he may be having what psychoanalysts would term a screen memory.90 Nonetheless, this description is written by one of Russia’s greatest authors, an acknowledged master in the depiction of human emotions. It is not unreasonable to assume that a swaddled child feels much the way Tolstoy says it feels.
There is an enormous anthropological, psychoanalytic, and medical literature on swaddling practices worldwide.91 In Russia medical specialists and journalists have denounced swaddling ever since the middle of the eighteenth century—but largely in vain.92 Psychoanalyst Geoffrey Gorer made the Russian version famous when he advanced his “swaddling hypothesis” in 1949:
When human infants are not constrained they move their limbs and bodies a great deal, especially during the second six months of life; it seems probable that much of this movement is physiologically determined, as an aspect of biological maturation. Infants tend to express emotion with their whole body and not merely their face, for example arching their back or thrashing about or hugging. They also explore their own body and the universe around them with their hands and their mouth, gradually discovering what is edible and what inedible, what me and what not-me. While they are swaddled in the Russian manner, Russian infants can do none of these things; and it is assumed that this inhibition of movement is felt to be extremely painful and frustrating and is responded to with intense and destructive rage, which cannot be adequately expressed physically.
Tolstoy’s remembered experience certainly confirms this idea that swaddling generates rage in the child. Gorer goes on to say:
These feelings of rage and fear are probably made endurable, but also given emphasis, by the fact that the baby is periodically loosed from the constraints, and suckled and petted while unswaddled. This alternation of complete restraint without gratifications, and of complete gratifications without restraint, continues for at least the first nine months of life. It is the argument of this study that the situation outlined in the preceding paragraphs is one of the major determinants in the development of the character of the adult Great Russians.93
According to Gorer, swaddling contributes to such supposedly Russian adult characteristics as: the need for authoritarian constraint alternating with total gratification of impulses (e.g., orgiastic feasts, prolonged drinking bouts); the ability to endure pain and deprivation for long periods; a generally inward orientation and great concern with matters of the soul; persisting guilt feelings which require periodic absolution or purging; and others.
Unfortunately it is not always clear just what the connection is between swaddling and whatever psychological phenomenon Gorer happens to be discussing. Nor does Gorer always get his facts about Russia right. But it does not seem unreasonable, on the face of it, to expect that swaddling would have some effect on the child’s (particularly emotional) development, or that it be one of the determinants of the character of adult Russians.
Subsequent empirical studies have shown that swaddling does not usually retard motor or cognitive development, and that it does not necessarily provoke a rage reaction in the child. Indeed, once the swaddling bands are in place (after some initial fussing by the child), and as long as the infant is not too old or has had no experience of this treatment, then swaddling seems to have at least a temporary calming effect.94 This is clearly a boon to an overworked mother.
I once ran into a couple with their swaddled child in a Moscow elevator. I asked the mother if the child was swaddled tightly. She replied: “Yes, he is such a little bandit!”
Ninety-six of Kluckhohn’s sample of 172 Russians stated that they had been swaddled. Twenty-two said they did not know, and twenty-six reported that they definitely had not been swaddled. The remaining subjects evaded the question or equivocated. Kluckhohn noted that most subjects tended to feel very uncomfortable about discussing this topic.95 I have noticed the same discomfort in conversations with Russian colleagues and friends.
From my own casual observations of swaddled children in Russia over the last fifteen years or so, and from conversations with urban Russians who have children, it would appear that swaddling is still a widespread practice. The Russian mother is still more likely than not to swaddle her infant. The severity of swaddling seems to have decreased, however. Often the arms are left free, and the bands are not tight (“tugo”). Swaddling also seems to be terminated early in urban areas, that is, after two or three months.
Highly educated Russians still give the same old, peasant-style answers when asked why the child is swaddled in the first place: “so that his legs will not grow crooked”; “so that he will not scratch his eyes”; “so that he will not tear off his ears” (a child whose arms are not swaddled may have to wear special little mittens). These statements are absurd, but psychologically revealing. Since they are manifestly untrue, they probably apply to the adults who make them rather than to the infants. In declaring that infants will harm themselves unless swaddled, that is, in declaring that their infants are natural masochists, adults are revealing that they themselves are preoccupied with masochistic ideas. The same goes, incidentally, for grown-ups who are generally oversolicitous and overprotective of children (Urie Bronfenbrenner has noted the extreme solicitousness of adults toward children during the high Soviet period).96 Indeed, the same applies to intrusive altruists in Russia generally, for example, the complete stranger who approaches you on the street and tells you to button up your coat.
Fathers, it should be noted, do not swaddle. Mothers do. The swaddling scene is pre-Oedipal, or at least a-Oedipal.
Swaddling is an aspect of the pre-Oedipal mother’s control over the child. Although swaddling may calm the child for a time, initially the child fusses, and later, when the child becomes hungry or otherwise agitated, there is obvious discomfort with the swaddling bands. Only a prompt unswaddling by the mother can prevent a full-fledged rage reaction. But what if the mother does not react, or is not able to react soon enough, or is not available to react? It seems unlikely that rage and defiant feelings can be averted, even with good-enough mothering. Or more precisely: it seems unlikely that rage and defiance of the mother herself can be averted.