"True" Infantilism

As a second post in my series of terminology rants (this was unplanned, but it seems to be what I feel like ranting about), I'd like to talk about the recent appearance of the term "True Infantilism."

As far as I know (someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the term was coined by Kathi Stringer of www.toddlertime.com; she explains it in the essay "What Is True Infantilism?" The basic idea (not sure I agree with it, but I can summarize what she says) infantilism is a fetish, but True Infantilism is an emotional condition that starts in childhood. Whereas diapers, pacifiers, baby bottles, etc. are fetish objects for an infantilist, for a True Infantilist they are transitional objects, which means that in childhood they were linked to nurturing feelings, and those links persist.

Now, none of this is anything I outright disagree with, but I just have a tendency to feel immediately apprehensive when anybody calls something the "true" or "real" anything, because it feels like they're calling everybody else false or unreal. "Maybe you're an infantilist, but I'm a True Infantilist." I'd have a much easier time with this concept if its name didn't seem designed to cause arguments. So you know what? I'm going to rename it for the rest of this post. What Kathi Stringer calls "True Infantilism," I'm going to call Regressive Personality Syndrome (RPS). Please note: I'm not saying that it should be called this, or that anything should have this name. This is just an exercise to see whether I agree with Stringer now that I've moved past the name. I'll still use "infantilism" to mean what I'm used to seeing it mean.

I'm not going to take cheap shots at typos and strange syntax, but Stringer could have used a proofreader. Stringer says that a child with RPS feels isolated and alone in these feelings and hides them from friends and family members. Sounds like me so far. She says that diapers are a common theme but that RPS expands to include other items. I'm not sure I agree with that; it hardly seems impossible to start out with items other than diapers, or to emotionally invest in a number of important objects from the beginning.

She differentiates fetish objects from transitional objects -- "The energized transitional object offers relief from separation anxieties from the maternal figure and/or provides a sense of recreation of a period lost in grief." This sounds exactly like me.

Her next paragraph talks about how a child who has suffered abuse or neglect may well identify with "toddlers in neighboring families and yearn for the same infantile attention." She omits what seems to me to be another obvious cause other than abuse and neglect, but it may only be obvious to me because I'm the case she left out: the loss of a parent, especially the mother. My mother died of cancer when I had just turned 6 years old, and I now see that as the root cause for my wanting to return to toddlerhood. I was neglected in a sense, but it's hardly as if my mother neglected me by choice. Stringer should perhaps have thought of the loss of a parent, especially since death is not the only way to lose one -- separation, divorce, or even changing economic conditions forcing both parents to work outside the home can cause a parent to disappear from a child's life in a traumatic way.

Her statement about observing toddlers in neighboring families interests me. This possibility may explain why I feel like I want to be a baby girl rather than the baby boy I was. Right after my mother's death, or so I recall, my best friend's mother had a baby girl, and so did my aunt and uncle, who did not live nearby, but we saw them frequently at holidays. Especially right after my mother died, my father brought my brother and me to visit the rest of the family as often as he could. I remember seeing my beautiful new baby cousin in her pretty baby clothes, smelling the evocative scent of baby powder, and watching all the attention and care she got -- I don't recall wishing I was her at the time, but the seeds of that thought might have been planted.

I don't want to thoroughly analyze every sentence and paragraph of Stringer's essay; after all, this is a blog post, not an academic paper. What I would like to say is that with the terminology substitution in place, I sound like a perfect example of RPS, if you make the allowance for Stringer's omission of the loss of a parent as a possible cause. She does talk about the appearance of the libido in adolescence and the transitional objects becoming something similar to fetish objects, but it seems to me that at that point there is little difference between infantilism and RPS. I suppose RPS might not always develop into infantilism at adolescence, and infantilism might not always have its roots in childhood RPS, so I can see that there might need to be separate terms for the two.

Kathi Stringer has no credentials in the mental health profession as far as I know, but then, neither do I. She does seem to try to present herself as some sort of mental health expert, however, although I suppose we are all experts on our own personal psychological environments. I agree with much of what she says, but I still have to disagree with her choice of the term "True Infantilism," which is unfortunately starting to propagate to a few other websites and seems tailor-made to cause strife and division.