Self-Knowledge • Trauma & Childhood
Why We Love Our Bears
We gathered at The School of Life to discuss something unusual: our teddy bears.
A group of us, all of whom had had deep attachment to their bears as children, wanted to understand… why? Why so much love? Why this bear and none other?
What soon emerged was sombre and moving: children tend to have a lot of love for their bears when, in a variety of ways, the surrounding environment lacks love.
Children who grow up in entirely well-adjusted families seldom get deeply attached to bears; people suffice. And correspondingly, the greater the deprivation, the more fanatical the devotion can be.
We marvelled at the ingenuity of the child’s mind. A child will invest all the love it is being denied from adults into a soft creature. It will correctly gauge the specific shortfall of affection, then project it into an inanimate object – and from here beam it back to itself.
We noted the specificity: the boy deprived of a father will find a mouse he can father. The girl lacking hugs will identify an especially huggable bunny. It made us think of religions; how humans invent gods to soften the absences of earthly life. Our bears were talismanic deities. We agreed they all deserved shrines.
At first, we were embarrassed to talk of our early loves in public. By the end of the evening, we felt we had shared an essential part of our private religions – and wanted to meet again.
