And as the child fights the mother fights. Sometimes she fights to keep her refractory child, and sometimes she fights to kick him off, as a mare kicks off her too-babyish foal. It is the great _voluntary_ center of the unconscious flashing into action. Flashing from the deep lumbar ganglion in the mother to the newly-awakened, corresponding center in the child goes the swift negative current, setting each of them asunder in clean individuality. So long as the force meets its polarized response all is well. When a force flashes and has no response, there is devastation. How weary in the back is the nursing mother whose great center of repudiation is suppressed or weak; how a child droops if only the sympathetic unison is established. So, the polarity of the dynamic consciousness, from the very start of life! Direct flowing and flashing of two consciousness-streams, active in the bringing forth of an individual being. The sweet commingling, the sharp clash of opposition. And no possibility of creative development without this polarity, this dual circuit of direct, spontaneous, honest interchange. No hope of life apart from this. The primal unconscious pulsing in its circuits between two beings: love and wrath, cleaving and repulsion, inglutination and excrementation. What is the good of inventing “ideal” behavior? How order the path of the unconscious? For let us now realize that we cannot, even with the best intentions, proceed to order the path of our own unconscious without vitally deranging the life-flow of those connected with us. If you disturb the current at one pole, it must be disturbed at the other. Here is a new moral aspect to life. CHAPTER IV THE CHILD AND HIS MOTHER In asserting that the seat of consciousness in a young infant is in the abdomen, we do not pretend to suggest that all the other conscious-centers are utterly dormant. Once a child is born, the whole nervous and cerebral system comes awake, even the brain’s memories begin to glimmer, recognition and cognition soon begin to take place. But the spontaneous control and all the prime developing activity derive from the great affective centers of the abdomen. In the solar plexus is the first great fountain and issue of infantile consciousness. There, beneath the navel, lies the active human first-mind, the prime unconscious. From the moment of conception, when the first nucleus is formed, to the moment of death, when this same nucleus breaks again, the first great active center of human consciousness lies in the solar plexus.