The 50th Law (with 50 Cent)

particularly visible in our mistakes and failures. But there is a different
way of looking at this concept: it is not spirits or gods that control us
but rather our character. The etymology of the word character, from
the ancient Greek, refers to an engraving or stamping instrument.
Character, then, is something that is so deeply ingrained or stamped
within us that it compels us to act in certain ways, beyond our
awareness and control. We can conceive of this character as having
three essential components, each layered on top of the other, giving
this character depth.
The earliest and deepest layer comes from genetics, from the
particular way our brains are wired, which predisposes us toward
certain moods and preferences. This genetic component can make
some people prone to depression, for instance. It makes some people
introverts and others extroverts. It might even incline some toward
becoming especially greedy—for attention or privilege or possessions.
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who studied infants, believed that
the greedy and grasping type of child came into the world predisposed
toward this character trait. There might be other genetic factors as well
that predispose us toward hostility or anxiety or openness.
The second layer, which forms above this, comes from our earliest
years and from the particular type of attachments we formed with our
mother and caregivers. In these first three or four years our brains are
especially malleable. We experience emotions much more intensely,
creating memory traces that are much deeper than anything that will

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follow. In this period of life we are at our most susceptible to the
influence of others, and the stamp from these years is profound.
John Bowlby, an anthropologist and psychoanalyst, studied
patterns of attachment between mothers and children and came up
with four basic schemas: free/autonomous, dismissing, enmeshed-
ambivalent, and disorganized. The free/autonomous stamp comes
from mothers who give their children freedom to discover themselves
and are continually sensitive to their needs but also protect them.
Dismissing mothers are often distant, even sometimes hostile and
rejecting. Such children are stamped with a feeling of abandonment
and the idea that they must continually fend for themselves. The
enmeshed-ambivalent mothers are not consistent with their attention
—sometimes suffocating and overinvolved, other times retreating
because of their own problems or anxieties. They can make their
children feel as if they have to take care of the person who should be
taking care of them. Disorganized mothers send highly conflicting
signals to their children, reflecting their own inner chaos and perhaps
early emotional traumas. Nothing their children do is right, and such
children can develop powerful emotional problems.
There are, of course, many gradations within each type and
combinations of them, but in every case the quality of attachment that
we had in our earliest years will create deep tendencies within us, in