The importance of touch as a form of (positive) mirroring, and therefore as a source of self-creation and ontological security, was explored very fully in one of the most significant essays to appear in the English language in recent years, The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff. Liedloff began to understand the role of being held in human identity-formation as a result of living with the Yequana Indians of Brazil for about two years' time. Yequana babies are held-"in arms," as she puts it-twenty-four hours a day for at least the first two years of their lives. The result is that they grow up not experiencing any gap, or sense of having an empty space within themselves. They do not, she says, spend their entire lives trying to prove that they exist, or trying to make up for a missing sense of Self. Confiscation is a rupture in the continuum of life, which is a biological continuum. The Yequana, apparently, get only very mild doses of this, or perhaps none at all. So where we moderns spend most of our lives trying, indirectly and unconsciously, to repair a ruptured continuum, the Yequana never have to think about it — they can just live and enjoy life.