Ontogenetic paralysis

Definition of ontogenesis:
In biology: ontogenesis refers to all processes that, in an animal or plant organism, lead from egg cell to breeding adult.
Ontogenesis of behaviors. Development of sensory-motor bonds during body genesis and growth (d-apr. Lar. encyclop. Suppl. 1975)
Shepard borrows this concept from biology to refer here to psychic development. In a more psychoanalytic vocabulary, one should speak of “psychological structuring”, while knowing that the brain bonds between neurons depend on it and make it lasting. By “paralyzing”, it means inhibition of normal psychic development because of the lack of stimuli in the rural context, very poor compared to the world of hunter-gatherers, to which our brain would still be adapted.

We can remember from this that there can be a very irreversible relationship between environmental contingencies and the psychic structuring of individuals. However, factors of conditioning must be taken into account much more than the rural landscape: all cultural constraints, especially those of education, morals, behavioural norms, norms of thought in general, influence psychic structure. Nutritional learning also plays a role, for example, it is different for the baby to chew as he pleases in the wild fruits shared by the group or to be forced to swallow the boil that is administered to him with the spoon.

The psychic structure can thus depend on different aspects of education: fencing, weaning, bottle, diapers, emmailing, slippers, prescribed foods, first words, stroller transport, type of toys, school constraints, sexual prohibitions, images of nature, family, home, livelihood, others, supply, universe, divinity etc. All these elements of childhood and adolescence determine very definitely our relationship to beings and things, our permeability to subsequent contingencies such as car cars, television advertising, relation to objects, work, housing, gastronomy, tourism, etc. So our adult relationships with the environment and consumerism.

In addition to psychic structures, biochemical factors also play an important role. The action of exciting or euphorizing in the food or other environment changes mood and excitability. Some impulses are exacerbated and may require limitations, in turn producing aggressive or even sadistic frustrations and tendencies, some of which may be expressed by latent destructiveness, including indifference to the destruction of the natural environment.

Thus, the basic idea of Shepard, namely the fact that environmental change can alter psychic structure and introduce all kinds of distortions against nature, leads to a gigantic field of research: that of human ontogenesis in all its dimensions…