Joseph Chilton Pearce is the author of many books including Crack In The Cosmic Egg, The Magical Child, and Evolution's End. For over thirty years he has lectured internationally on human development. Currently he is writing a book on the "biology of transcendence", and co-authoring Nurturing the Early Child, Family & Caregiver, a book and video series with Michael Mendizza. 

Enculturation, on the other hand, is enforced learning or adoption of ideas about survival, techniques believed needed in our environment to survive our environment. Enculturation depends to a great extent on "mimetic desire". Our mimetic or imitative compulsions arise from our oldest, reptilian brain system, are intimately connected with survival and flight-fight, and, in fact, provide the principle tools employed in enculturating the infant child. We are convinced we must pass this culture on and do so quite deliberately, pounding it into our offspring "for their own good" as it was pounded into us "for our own good."

Our sociality is instinctual and arises spontaneously of its own. Culture is intellectual, arbitrary, and must be induced, injected or enforced. Socialization is joyfully sought and accepted. Enculturation is instinctively resisted since we intuitively sense that it is a negative denial of life. Ironically, our natural resistance to enculturation requires and brings about intellectually derived techniques to overcome such resistance. These cultural techniques or tools involve threat, fear of deprivation, and the more primal anxiety over separation or alienation from others. That is, enculturation is induced by threatening us with a loss of our true and naturally spontaneous sociality.

Socialization is positive and based on pleasure. Enculturation is negative, based on pain and fear. Socialization opens to our higher intelligence of creative play. Enculturation plays on our most ancient instincts for survival. Paradoxically, our cultural ideation, or set of ideas, center around survival of and in culture itself.

We deliberately enculturate our children to protect them from their enculturated society, though this is never spelled out and seldom recognized. Very little if any enculturation centers on survival in its natural earth sense of sun, moon, wind, rain and such. This is the domain of our natural intelligence of the heart and, again ironically, these survival instincts we manipulate in our enculturation methods are the very drives which the higher heart frequencies can incorporate to actually provide for us if we could allow such provision. That is, if we could truly "take no thought of the morrow," knowing what we were doing, our higher intelligence could provide for us through these very foundations on which our life rests. This kind of allowing requires a basic trust blocked by enculturation, however, and a profound distrust of life itself results which is a key factor in sustaining culture.

Enculturation is a remedy prescribed by culture for the disease of culture itself and we are impelled to administer this prescription to our young out of our genuine concern for them. How many times do we hear parents, reflecting on their child's future, ruefully point out "Man! It's a jungle out there!" The jungle is cultural, the predators enculturated humans. Such cultural prescriptions mask culture as the cause of our pain and suffering and lock us into culture as the only remedy of itself.

Psychologists refer to the instinctive drive for tactile exploration and knowledge of the world as impulse behavior and insist it must be curbed if the child is to be socialized (civilized) and a self-sense is to emerge. In turn, the caretaker's breaking down the child's resistance to these restrictions, which is equivalent to breaking the child's will, constitutes what is conventionally called socializing that child. The techniques used in this "socializing" are fairly straightforward "behavior modifications."

The authorities Schore quotes assume axiomatically that this "socializing" must be enforced; they consider prohibiting the infant-child's self-generated "impulse" actions the most critically necessary socializing function, and agree unanimously that instilling a sense of shame is absolutely essential to such socialization, and the most powerful, efficient tool available to the caretaker to ensure such "socializing." This, I hold, is a primary evil helping to bring about our species downfall. It is a demonic enactment of the fall from Eden myth and one we all repeat blindly once so enculcated ourself.