relationships between them. How we come to connect physically with others, skin to skin, even in the most perfunctory manner, is determined by a host of different factors that at a conscious level we may only be dimly aware of. Your boss might touch you briefly on the arm to gain your attention, but would you take the same liberty with her? A young man in Indonesia might walk along the street with his friend, their hands touching, but would young heterosexual men in Sydney do the same? A close female friend may drape her arm around your waist, but if she assumed the same liberty with your husband or partner how would you react?
Generally, we spend little time analysing the appropriate way to touch others. It is something that most of us know deep within our bones, and is based on learning that began the moment that we emerged from our mother’s body and—depending on the year and the circumstances of our birth—were either placed in her arms, held upside down and smacked on the bottom, or whisked away in the latexed hands of a professional for medical tests or intervention. Based on experience and observation built up over our formative years, we know without thinking how the layers of culture, age, intimacy, status, and gender dictate the appropriate way to touch another person.
Occasionally, though, the way we use touch may be more calculated: at the beginning of a business negotiation, how long will you clasp your colleague’s hand when you greet them? Will you grasp their elbow at the same time? To garner a friend’s allegiance in a fall-out with another crony, will you use touch to subtly underline the bond between you? As a lone woman in a roomful of men, will you decide to initiate a handshake in order to signal your determination to be taken seriously in the discussion about to take place?
‘I’M TOUCHED.’ We hear the phrase often when someone is trying to describe how a gesture or a word has moved them, directly connecting the realms of emotion and physical sensation. As a matter of course, we regularly use words with tactile overtones to describe our sentiments and moods: the prickle of irritation, the warmth of a smile, the sting of rejection, the weight of loneliness, the buzz of excitement. Anger is ‘hot’, kindness is ‘warm’, and to be ignored is to be ‘given the cold shoulder’. Given this linguistic link, would emotions still have the same power if we could not feel the physical world?
Without the ability to name and describe feelings in this tactile way, would emotion wash over us in a deluge of feeling devoid of the nuances that we can categorise so precisely: would anger feel the same as frustration, would sorrow be indistinguishable from ennui, passionate love similar to confusion? Perhaps we would wade through a porridge of feeling rather than dart among the sharply defined mosaic of emotions that we are accustomed to. Such puddles of ill-defined perception would make for much murkier interactions with our fellow humans, and negotiating even the closest of relationships would be a formidable challenge.
THE SKIN, it has been said, is the surface of the brain. Certainly, as anyone who endures an attack of hives or a sudden flare-up of eczema as a result of stress could tell you, the skin and the processes of the mind are not entirely separate.
In fact, there exists at a very fundamental level a link between our skin and our psyche. As the foetus develops in the womb, the skin and the central nervous system, which includes the brain, develop from the same ectodermal origins. The ectoderm is the outermost layer of the three primary layers of the embryo. From our very beginning, then, our mind and our skin are intertwined.
Given this connection on such a basic physiological level, it follows a certain logic that researchers in the field of touch have noted the benefits that massage can have on a variety of psychological disorders. Studies have found that regular massages improve the behaviour of children diagnosed with attentiondeficit /hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and make them feel happier. Massage can help girls with eating disorders develop less distorted body images and improve their eating habits. Other studies have suggested that the aggressive behaviour associated with boys may be due to them being touched less than girls.
American researcher Tiffany Field, director of the Touch Research Institutes at the University of Miami School of Medicine, has proposed that teenage sexual promiscuity and pregnancy are on the increase partly because young people rarely receive appropriate, positive touch from their teachers, sporting coaches, and other adults who shape and influence their lives.
We live within a climate that regards adults touching children with suspicion. Fear of being charged with sexual assault has resulted in teachers being instructed not to touch students, or only to do so within tightly prescribed guidelines. Maintaining concern about sexual abuse is entirely appropriate given the shameful revelation over recent years of systematic abuse of children within various institutions, including within religious and welfare organisations. But at what cost do we starve our young people of positive experiences of being touched?
We know that our bodies and our minds both suffer when we are denied touch. In 1990, after the fall of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, distressing images from Romanian orphanages flashed around the world. Stricken children, wizened and undersized, with empty, sunken eyes lay motionless in their cribs. Under-resourced and understaffed, these institutions struggled to care for the children living there. The children languished in their cribs, rarely touched. Their emaciated forms and lustreless eyes demonstrated, in the most graphic and heartbreaking way, the detrimental effects on growth and development of not being touched.
The images prompted a flood of offers to adopt the children abandoned in these orphanages, and many of them found their way to Western countries and new homes. Years later, most of these children were still physically smaller and developmentally delayed compared with other children their age.
CAROL NEWNHAM is a neuropsychologist who works in the Parent—Infant Research Institute at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne. Her work assists parents of preterm babies learn how to interact with their children to overcome the many barriers to their development that often exist. These barriers may result directly from the fact of their premature birth, or from the demands of the care to keep these tiny babies alive.
‘The medical intervention that is required for babies born at or below 30 weeks often means that babies are denied contact with their mothers, something we know is essential for their growth and development,’ Carol says, obviously engaged by her topic and moved by the plight of the families she deals with. ‘In addition to this deprivation are the many, and often painful, procedures the babies must undergo.’
Preterm babies must be kept in isolettes, the heated, plastic boxes that maintain the babies’ temperature. They are also routinely subjected to painful medical interventions that may include having their heels pricked and blood squeezed out sometimes several times a day, suction may have to be applied to clear their lungs, IVs inserted into their veins, lumbar punctures performed, and tubes inserted to aid ventilation. All this, according to Carol, can have the unintended, but hardly surprising, result that the babies become frightened of being touched, even by their mothers.
Skin and skin contact has a lot to do with the first months of a healthy baby’s life: ‘The baby’s been in a body, and with a full-term baby they then do a lot on that mother’s body,’ Carol explains. For babies born prematurely, this contact, which includes touching and massaging, smelling and tasting, and vestibular (whole body) movement, is severely disrupted. For the parents, too, the need to caress and hold their child is almost overwhelming, but the result of a baby associating touch with pain and stress can turn even the simple task of changing a nappy, or giving the baby a bath, into a heartbreaking clash of conflicting needs, high anxiety, unread signals, and tears.
Many of us assume when we become parents that we will intuitively know how to touch our babies, to give them comfort, to soothe them when they cry. The mother—infant dance is what Carol and her team call that ‘happy state’, when everything falls into place and mother and child react and respond to each other in concert. Her description of this phenomenon reminds me of a documentary that I saw about the separation of a pair of conjoined twins. The babies were joined along
