(
Received July 15, 1970; revision accepted May 3, 1971.)ADDRESS FOR REPRINTS: 403 Jenner Chambers, Jeppe Street, Johannesburg, South Africa.
PEDIATRIC
PERCEPTIONS
GOLEM
ICS
S. Levin, M. B. (Rand.),
M.R.C.P.
(Edin.), D.C.H.Johannesburg, South Africa
Come let us make man in our own image Genesis 1:26
ABSTRACT. In the legend of the golem we find
the prototype of the newly born and about-to-be-born baby. Like the perinatal infant, the golem
was a robot, an automaton, functioning in a
decer-ebrate fashion. In much recent work involving the neurology of infancy, and in particular the
phe-nomenon of imprinting, it seems that neonatal and
early infantile experiences can influence
subse-quent behavior for a lifetime. The behavior and
experiences of infancy and their consequences
might be considered a separate field of study called
Gobemics.
Pediatric?, 49:273, 1972, GOLEMICS, NEWBORN INFANTS.
O
NCE upon a time there existed-lived is hardly the word-a lump of animatedearth, a golem, created by man in his own
image.
Alchemists in particular had essayed
ef-forts at creating a golem, a pseudo-human,
and the best known among them was the physician-alchemist Paracelsus
(
16thcen-tury) who gave detailed instructions on the creation of a homunculus,13 a diminutive
man, a baby robot, without volition, with-out emotion, but with reflexes, with move-ments, with response to instructions, with behavior.
By fan the most famous creator and direc-ton of a golem however, was the wonder-working rabbi, called the Maharal, whose gravestone stands undisturbed in the
Jew-ish cemetry in Prague.4
The term Maharal is a Yiddish acronym for Rabbi Judah Loeb ben Bezalel (16th
century) whose fabled golem, so it is said,
is still to be found in the heap of dust in the
attic of a synagogue which yet remains in Prague.
JEWISH GOLEMS
if God made man of clay, could not man
try to do the same? Jewish tradition has several references to the making of clay no-bots which did the bidding of their masters, and such references go back to the 3rd and 4th centuries during which, with the aid of
the Book of Yetzirah
(
Creation), physician-rabbis created animal golems as well asho-munculi
(
Talmud, Sanhedrin, 65b, 6Th). Golems were generally dwarfed, had no volition and acted only on orders. Such go-lems, robots, were mere automatons, were not alive, could not die and could not be killed so that ‘killing’ a golem was not pun-ishable for it did not transgress the 6thcommandment. Golems simply
disinte-grated into dust.
A golem had no soul, no thought, no in-tuition, only reflex activity. Golems had no larynx and were therefore mute. To this
very day the Yiddish expression golem is
applied
(
in amusement and without nan-con)
to fools, blockheads, those without ini-tiative, human robots. Not surprisingly the computer at the Weitzmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, has beenaffec-tionately dubbed the Golem.
Golems could grow, indeed, like the go-lem of the Maharal, nor; some grew to such heights that they became dangerous and vi-olent. After being fashioned from earth and water a golem could be given vitality of a sort by means of a secret spell on by placing within the mouth a paper with God’s secret name, Shem Hameforash, written thereon.
Alternatively, one could inscribe on the go-lem’s forehead the word EMeT, Truth, the very essence of God. When it was desired to disintegrate the golem, the initial letter
was erased, thus leaving MeT, Death, whereupon the automaton collapsed in a
heap.
It is understandable that the Jewish tra-dition featured clay as the basis of the go-lem. Adam had been fashioned from clay and, it is fabled, for 3 hours he remained a
golem and thereafter had breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (Talmud,
Sanhe-drin, 38b). The golemc clay, like the embry-onic mass
(
Psalm 139: 16)
, was incubated(Jeremiah 43:9) and, like the embryo and
fetus, could be defective (Jeremiah 18:4). Indeed, God himself had failed in his see-ond attempt to fashion a human from go-lemic dust. In the earlier Genesis tale (1:27) Eve was created from clay, but she was deformed, a misanthrope, a demonic wraith who came to be known as Lilith. In the
‘I later stony (2:21
)
God tried again, but thistime used more reliable material, the nib of Alim, so it is translated, though it is more likely that he used Adam’s supranenal gland.5’6
GENTILE GOLEMS
NonJe’ish golems also have a long
his-tony but a different genealogy. Clay forms no part of the Gentile automaton. He is made of sperm and blod. The belief that
the embryo is compounded of semen and menstrual blood is found in the writings of Aristotle, Pliny, and in Hidu texts.
4 In the 13th century oneAlertus Magnus constructed a golem, but the most explicit details came from Philippus Auneolus Theo-phrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, better known as Paracelsus. He held the view
( correctly, it seems!
)
that a uterus or even a woman was not essential for the creation and growth of an embryo and that theho-munculus could be. incubated within the warmth of horse dung. In vaiious descnip-tions it is laid down that congealed semen should be placed within a vegetable
recep-tacle for 40 days, when the semen would begin to stir. During this period blood was
to be added
(
some traditions also include the addition of urine; modern ones prefer agar!)
and after 40 weeks of incubation it would become a living infant which wouldgrow, yet even when fully grown these go-lems were still monstrous dwarfs. They
could show intelligence of a sort: being the products of human skill they might be fa-milian with the ants without having to learn them. They might also become violent and
dangerous.
For the most pant however, they were stupid robots, like mentally defective chil-dnen. Luther throught that such children were in fact golems, masses of flesh, lacking souls, and suggested that they be drowned. It was also thought, in medieval and
nefor-mation times, that these defective golems were not truly human. It was widely
con-sidered that they were substitutes for hu-man infants, golems placed there by imps, goblins and fairies. They were called changelings. Stupid, ugly infants, babies with congenital deformities, were often thought to be changelings. They looked old, with wrinkled skin, sometimes with a thick
throat, and for this reason were called Kill-crop
(
= Kielkropf, crop in the throat) inpants of Europe. They could not stand or walk but crept around like animals. They did not laugh or talk but screamed and shouted.8 The legend is pre-Chnistian in on-gin, stemming from Northern Europe and is mentioned in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Perhaps most changelings were mongolian infants.9 Golem makers and their products persist to this day in the names Frankenstein and Dracula.
HUMAN GOLEMS
In the Jewish tradition the peninatal pe-riod is considered to be golemic in chanac-ten. Although the original golem, the mass of undifferentiated flesh
(
Psalm 139: 16) has developed into a fetus and been born aliveas a baby, something is yet lacking. If an
infant dies before the age of a month, he is not considered to have lived, merely to have existed, somewhat in the nature of a
golem, and is buried without ceremony, without prayers, without his grave being marked. Dust unto dust.
golems, robots, automatons, homunculi, hardly yet human in fact; in the words of
Cornblath,1#{176} “At birth the infant . . . per-forms and functions as a decenebrate, or brain stem creature. All the reflexes which can be elicited in the normal newborn have been equally well demonstrated in the
an-encephalic and hydranencephalic
new-born.”
During the course of embryogenesis the
human infant begins as a decerebrate crea-ture, the basal ganglia establishing colonies of cells at the cerebral periphery.11 These “wandering neurones”12 migrate to the con-tex and increase in number during fetal and neonatal life and eventually total some 10 million cells.
The cortex being an extension of the ba-sal ganglia, we are inevitably automatons with but limited freedom of choice, limited not only by the nature of neurones inhen-ited but also by their experiential “pro-gramming” during fetal and infant life. Whatever the philosophers may say about free will, their conclusions must be limited
by their ignorance of peninatal behavior, of
golemics. It is the fate of philosophers to grapple vainly with the enigma of free will and to disappear in a cloud of footnotes. Such footnotes rarely, if ever, feature the insights of neonatal experiences and behav-ior. From Plato to Kant to Buber there is no appreciation of the fact that our destinies are fashioned in the womb and within the mother’s embrace.
IMPRINTING
Psychologists are ready to contribute to a philosophy of human behavior, human ethology. The University of Michigan’s Selma Fraiberg, in her essay on “The Origins of Human Bonds,”13 has coined the expres-sion “hollow men” for those individuals who,
as infants, were deficient in a maternal
“pro-gramming.” Having received insufficient stimulation and love during critical infan-tile periods, they grew up as “hollow men,” unable to fathom affection or to give it.
Imprinting is being actively explored in animals.14 There is a large body of evidence
from animal ethologists testifying to the
im-portance of early imprinting as a factor in subsequent behavior. Some of the most im-pressive work in this direction has been performed on monkeys15 which, if exposed only to a surrogate mother of cloth-covered wire mesh, grow up unable to relate to other monkeys, to mate with them, or to mother offspring should a rare pregnancy
occur.
But other animals show evidence of
im-printing: dogs, cats, birds. Geese are read-ily imprinted with an attachment for hu-mans. There is a critical auditory period of
8 days in chicks. If their ears are covered for more than 8 days after hatching they cannot respond to a hen’s cackle and
re-main permanently deaf to the maternal call.’#{176}Chickens can be imprinted while still within the egg. If, at this stage, they are conditioned to certain auditory stimuli, they subsequently prefer to follow after the fa-miliar noise.17 If after hatching, the first
slow moving object they see is a balloon, on a human, they become imprinted with these as surrogate mothers and will follow them
in preference to the hen mother.16 The sep-aration of a newborn goat from the mother for even 1 hour results in one-half the ex-perimental mother goats accepting any kid for suckling.1 “The timing and duration of the animal mother’s earliest contact with her young are crucial in determining her later behavior towards her infant.”19
In chicks and ducks the imprinting re-sponse can be inhibited, and the critical pe-nod delayed, by drugs such as meproba-mate.2#{176}
In human infants imprinting is largely a visual effect, but conditioning can occur earlier from olfactory and auditory stimuli. Certain noises, including the maternal heart beat, can affect the fetal heart rate and postnatally, a tape-recorded replay of a heart beat quiets crying babies.2’ It may not be the heart beat per se that does this but noise; the intensity rather than the quality of noise appears to be the quiet-ing factor in infants.22
GOLEMICS
than her lower face being the chief
imprint-er.23 Imprinting begins when babies start to see and ends at about 6 months24 when infants can tell strangers as being foreign to the household and when they are, in fact, rather shrewd, no longer robots, golems, but possess inferential reason. Let there be no doubt on this matter: one has only to see
the accusing Icok in their tearful eyes when they have had an injection to be convinced
that at 6 months an infant can reason, and has already surpassed the capabilities of any computer. Imprinting may be a factor in infant feeding.25
Mothers of fullterm26 and of premature babies27 suggest that imprinting is largely a visual, tactile, and auditory effect. Certainly there is more to imprinting than meets the
eye, and it may be that smell also has a sig-nificant role to play, and before the visual effect takes precedence. It has recently been suggested that humans may also par-take of lower animal olfactory sensitivities. Pheromones are olfactory-sensitive chemi-cals which pattern the behavior
(
especially sexual behavior)
of insects and animals and perhaps also humans.28 Conceivably there may be a phenomonic transfer or imprint from mother to babe; at present, however, this is no more than speculation.Much recent attention has been focused on early malnutrition and behavior.29 Du-bos, et al.3#{176}have paid particular attention to the consequences of infective and espe-cially nutritional noxa during the neonatal period and of the enduring nature of any disorders affecting the neonatal brain. In their paper on “Biological Fneudianism,” which is mostly about mice and men, they conclude, “socially and individually the re-sponse of human beings to the conditions of the present is always conditioned by the biological remembrance of things past.” By “things past” they mean post-natal past but their conclusion surely also applies to pre-natal past. They continue: “from all points of view, the child is truly father of the man, and for this reason we need to develop an experimental science that might be called biological Freudianism.”
Mercifully, this clumsy hybrid has not
elicited any support as a label for the sci-ence of neonatal behavior and its conse-quences. Golemics is a superior term.
LIKE CLOCKWORK
There is a modem view that animal be-havion is devoid of inferential reasoning
and dominated by hunger, thirst,
thermo-regulation, and need for sleep.’ It is also
an old view, prompted perhaps, by long-standing theological teachings that animals
possessed no souls. In his 1637 essay on
Dis-course
on
Method, Rene Descartes devel-oped the theory of the machine-animal working like a “clock made up only ofwheels and spnings.”1#{176}
Certainly animals do have internal
clocks, as do plants. In infants these inter-nal clocks are rudimentary or absent and only develop after 16 to 20 weeks and later in prematures.32 Endogenous biological
clocks are manifest in circadian
(
circa dies;about 1 day) rhythms involving phenom-ena like temperature variations, cosinophil count, urinary sodium and corticoid excre-tion and, of course, sleep rhythms, which tend to be irregular in early infancy. It is likely that the hypothalamus releases
hon-mones at different times which permit of the establishment of cincadian clock-like
rhythms.
Infants spend so many hours sleeping that the brain stem has evolved a unique
mechanism
(
it is absent in reptiles andonly briefly present in birds
)
of “learn while you sleep.” REM (rapid eye move-ment) sleep is controlled by the cau-date nucleus of the pons and during this form of sleep not only do the eyeballs move rapidly but there are other concomitantphenomena such as penile erection, flaccid-ity of neck muscles, increased blood flow
little opportunity available for
“program-ming” the golem-computer. The newborn sleeps more intensively because he dr’eams more actively and shows more muscular ac-tivity in the form of movements, grimaces, whimpers, and smiles than does the
sleep-ing adult. About 25% of adult sleep is REM dream-sleep but about 50% of neonatal
( and more than 60% in premature infants) is of REM character, so that if a very young
infant sleeps 20 hours a day, he still spends
14 hours daily in a REM-type EEG stage, receptive to learning, and not much less than the 18 hours available for learning in the adult.
Does REM dreaming mean that the in-fant is having visual imagery? Those who are competent to express an opinion33 think not, because the occipital cortex is imma-tune and untested and the REM phenome-non is essentially a pontine and decorticate
function. They suggest, however, that olfac-tory, gustatory, tactile, and auditory stimuli, if not visual ones, may be involved.
REASONING GOLEMS
Increasingly within the first year of life, the infant outgrows his golemic character and uses inferential reason in a way no
ani-mal can even do. Never entirely free of his machine, of his golemic, precerebrate on-gins, as an adult the ancient impnintings will still mould his behavior though volition
has become so large a factor as to make some philosophers claim that man has free
will.
The newborn is a mass of reflexes; stroke the cheek and he turns to find the nipple; let his head drop and he Mono’s all his limbs; place an object in his hand and he grasps it; put his feet on the floor and he paces forward; turn his head and one set of
arm and leg flex while the other extends; press his palm and his mouth opens; and at least another score of newborn reflexes have
been recorded by Prechtl in Groningen, Holland.
In the first few hours of life the behavior
of the newborn is stereotyped36 and there-after it is dominated by inborn mechanisms
of sucking, head turning, crying, smiling, clinging, and following.3 The French neu-rologist Andre Thomas “evolved the
funda-mental idea that the newborn child is essen-tially a medullary, subcortical being in whom the cortex is not yet functioning.”
Yet this golem holds a marvelous prom-ise : a prisoner of his evolutionary and ge-netic heritage, forged in a womb, stamped and imprinted during the period of his ex-ternal gestation,394’ and fashioned by his culture, this infant golem proceeds to think and act and, notwithstanding the bonds which limit him, ultimately hurls himself into the heavens, to explore the moon, and
perhaps beyond.
SUMMARY
During the first 6 months or so of life the infant acts much in the same manner as the fabled golem, a mass of clay, an automaton. The stereotyped, robot-like behavior is
evi-denced in, among other matters, the EEC pattern peculiar to infants, and the pre-sumed effects of imprinting. Within a few
weeks of birth however, there is evidence that increasingly the infant can learn and
later use inferential reasoning.
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CORRECTION
In the December, 1971 issue, the name of the second author of the article on page 971 is incorrectly spelled. It should be connected to L. Dallaire, on page 972, on the cover, in the
