Smoking is an
outward signal of inner turmoil or conflict and most smoking has less to do
with nicotine addiction and more to do with the need for reassurance. It is one
of the displacement activities that people use in today's high-pressure society
to release the tensions that build up from social and business encounters. For
example, most people experience inner tension while waiting outside the dentist's
surgery to have a tooth removed. While a smoker might cover up his anxiety by
sneaking out for a smoke, non-smokers perform other rituals such as grooming,
gum-chewing, nail-biting, finger-and foot-tapping, cufflink-adjusting,
head-scratching, playing with something, or other gestures that tell us they
need reassurance. Jewelry is also popular for exactly the same reason - it has
high fondle value and allows its owner to displace their insecurity, fear,
impatience or lack of confidence onto the item.
Studies now show a
clear relationship between whether an infant was breast-fed and its likelihood
of becoming a smoker as an adult. It was found that babies who were largely
bottle-fed represent the majority of adult smokers and the heaviest smokers, while
the longer a baby was breast-fed, the less chance there was that it would
become a smoker. It seems that breast-fed babies receive comfort and bonding
from the breast that is unattainable from a bottle, the consequence being that
the bottle-fed babies, as adults, continue the search for comfort by sucking
things. Smokers use their cigarettes for the same reason as the child who sucks
his blanket or thumb.
Not only were
smokers three times more likely to have been thumb-suckers as children, they
have also been shown to be more neurotic than non-smokers and to experience
oral fixations such as sucking the arm of their glasses, nail-biting,
pen-munching, lip-biting and enough pencil-chewing to embarrass an average
beaver. Clearly, many desires, including the urge to suck and feel secure, were
satisfied in breast-fed babies but not in bottle-fed babies.
That correlates was
famous basic theory developed by Sigmund Freud, where there are five stages in
the early development of a child that give an unconscious drive to the child’s
actions. Spanning the life period from birth to the age of 21 months, the oral
stage is the first of the five Freudian psychosexual development stages: (i)
the Oral, (ii) the Anal, (iii) the Phallic, (iv) the Latent, and (v) the Genital.
Failure to receive sufficient
amounts of gratification or to overindulge during these stages leads to a
fixation that will follow the child through adulthood. “The sexual aim of the
infantile instance consists in obtaining satisfaction by means of an appropriate
stimulation”.
The first stage a
child encounters, the oral stage, is what gives the child the instinct to suck
for both physical and emotional nourishment. The suck helps an infant during
breastfeeding, the primary way for receive food. Therefore, failure to
completely gratify the urges during the oral stage will lead to oral fixations.
Such fixations range from nail biting to excessive eating, a sarcastic
personality to smoking. It is true, that Freud's theories are largely
criticized now by specialists as lacking in substantial corroborative data. However,
Freud was using a model to describe observed behavior and his ideas may thus
still be used as metaphors for actual developmental issues.
Based on these findings, some highly credible organizations,
such as UNICEF (1990), have recommended that women exclusively breast-feed for
at least six months before transferring to bottle feeding.
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