Tomas: Kia ora. How was the funeral?
Anicca: Oh, good, as funerals go. Beautiful service. And nobody fell out of the sky.
Tomas: Ah, yes. Your airport piece. I’ve been thinking about Blue Blazer.
Anicca: (Laughing.) I bet he’d be delighted to hear that.
Tomas: Well, not him specifically. What struck me about that piece was how easy it is to recognize arrested development when someone’s behaving badly. We can look at a grown man throwing a fit at a gate agent because his flight’s delayed and think: child.
But then in Fault Lines you basically said the same developmental structure can be running someone who’s behaving beautifully.
Anicca: Absolutely. And that’s actually the more interesting case.
The Blue Blazer is easy to spot. If you’re screaming at someone because reality has failed to arrange itself around your preferences, the juvenile structure is pretty visible.
But what about the person who never screams? What about the person who’s learned that being calm gets rewarded? Or being generous, competent, agreeable, spiritual, independent, emotionally regulated?
The psychological child is capable of learning all of that. That was one of the main points I was trying to make this month. Arrested development doesn’t mean development stopped across the board. It means something very specific didn’t develop further while nearly everything else did. The psychological child grows more capable without being outgrown.
Tomas: Which is why it can be so difficult to see.
Anicca: Right. You can become enormously sophisticated while remaining existentially dependent.