Writer Lisa Appignanesi on the Love of Children

07/31/15 • 12 min

How should we love our children? Can we build on the feelings we experience when we see them for the first time, raise them by instinct and personal principles or should we consult the childcare gurus of the internet and the bookshelves?

Lisa Appignanesi, the novelist, biographer and author of 'All About Love' suggests that we should turn to the first childcare expert of them all, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The father of the Romantic movement was one of the first philosophers to consider the importance of the initial bond between mother and child, strongly opposing the fashionable habit of farming newborn babies out to wet nurses.

Rousseau failed to follow his own advice, abandoning his five children to the Paris orphanage, but his writing belatedly raised our children to a status worthy of philosophical debate.

Lisa is joined in her ruminations by psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, Rousseau expert Christopher Brooke and her own son and grandson.

This is part of a week of progammes asking, 'What is love?'.

Rousseau failed to follow his own advice, abandoning his five children to the Paris orphanage, but his writing belatedly raised our children to a status worthy of philosophical debate.

Lisa is joined in her ruminations by psychoanalyst, Adam Phillips, Rousseau expert Christopher Brooke and her own son and grandson.

This is part of a week of progammes asking, 'What is love?'.

Previous Episode

Psychotherapist Mark Vernon on Freud

What is love? Psychotherapist Mark Vernon looks at Freud's ideas on the Greek god Eros, which he saw as a kind of life force running through us, shaping our desires and passions

Freud is often thought of as reducing everything to sex, but in his view, for humans even sex isn't even really about sex. Although he started off thinking that sex was about biological release of pressure - like a steam engine - he quickly realised, from working with patients, that it was more about fantasy and imagination.

Humans want far more from sex than just reproduction or physical stimulation. Freud used the Greek god Eros as a metaphor for the unconscious forces that motivate us. He thought of Eros as a something like a force field of love, going beyond the simple one-to-one sexual attraction to a broader desire to get more out of life. Eventually he saw Eros as a desire for unification with the whole of humanity that is built into the dynamic of life itself - the yearning that wants to pass life on in children, the passion for creativity and discovery,

Presenter: Mark Vernon Producer: Jolyon Jenkins.

Next Episode

How Can I Know Anything at All?

A history of ideas. Presented by Melvyn Bragg but told in many voices.

Each week Melvyn is joined by four guests with different backgrounds to discuss a really big question. This week he's asking 'How can I know anything at all?'

Helping him answer it are physicist Tara Shears, lawyer Harry Potter, philosopher Clare Carlisle and neuropsychologist Paul Broks.

For the rest of the week Tara, Harry, Clare and Paul will take us further into the history of this idea with programmes of their own. Between them they will examine: David Hume's debunking of miracles; Wittgenstein's attempt to prove that other people have minds; Karl Popper's idea of falsification, which underpins the scientific method; and George Berkeley's approach to a famous philosophical problem - If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Producer: Melvin Rickarby.