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matter. Their eyes darted back and forth across my face, not stopping at my eyes,
as though checking for danger. It felt like a strange mix of physical clinging and
interpersonal distantiation. Many articles in the International University Press’s
Psychoanalytic Studies of the Child book series, described these prematurely
formed child personality types: the paranoid scouts, the detached as /f children
pretending to feel, the desperate to please obsessionals, the charismatically
seductive hysterics and the unconscionable psychopaths.
Experiments simulating trauma and neglect in young animals also
demonstrate acceleration in biobehavioral development. Possibilities, the number of
available states, ©, brain entropies as S = log Q, become casualties of traumatic
and neglected early life. Like one trick ponies, these abused and abandoned
children take up singular patterns of behavior that seem to work and stick to them.
One doesn’t anticipate seeing such narrowly fixated personality patterns until late
adolescence or adulthood. They appear at ages too young to qualify for the
character pathology coding of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. Yet the
labels of adult personality disorder seem inescapable when one sees a four-year-
old child trapped in a compulsive hand washing ritual or a panty flashing five-year-
old girl with a seductive gait.
Four-year-old Alicia rubbed the lumps in my right hip pocket containing
caramel candies. Her blue eyes twinkled. Her long blonde hair was in bangs and
her lips in a pout. She kept a hand on her hip and tilted her pelvis as she spoke.
Listening to children’s stories, she straddled the reader's thigh and rocked. Alicia
had a history of sexual abuse in a home that was a hang out for drug dealers. There
were rumors that she talked to strange men late at night on the phone. On
admission to the Center, she was found to have genital herpes. Both of her parents
had been in and out of prison for drug-related crimes. The Center’s staff spoke of
Alicia’s seductive smiles, incessant demands, irritable complaints and tantrums.
With the back of her hand held against her forehead, she said that it was too hot to
pick up the toys she had scattered around the fenced yard. Ordered to comply,
Alicia took three steps into Florida’s summer heat and fainted. Each morning, she
spent the better part of an hour in front of the mirror, trying on all four of her dresses
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