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DAVID KENNEDY
THE ROOTS OF CHILD STUDY: PHILOSOPHY, HISTORY, AND
RELIGION
Published in Teachers College Record102,3 (June 2000). All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT:
This paper offers an approach to child study that moves beyond the traditionalmodern domains of medicine, education and the social sciences, to explore therepresentation and symbolization of the child in philosophy, social and culturalhistory, myth and spirituality, art, literature, and psychoanalysis. It considerschildhood as a cultural and historical construction, and traces the ways inwhich characterizations of children function symbolically as carriers of deep
assumptions about human nature and its potential variability andchangeability, about the construction of human subjectivity, about the ultimatemeaning of the human life cycle, and about human forms of knowledge. Thechild as limit conditionas representing for adults the boundaries of thehumanthat is nature, animality, madness, the primitive, the divineis re-evoked continually in modern and postmodern symbolizations, and thentension between reason and nature or instinct, or Enlightenment andRomance, is never far from their surface. Finally, the extent to which theconstruction of child also implies a construction of adult is explored in thecontext of the history of culture and of child rearing, particularly in the rise ofthe modern middle-class European adult personality, which defined itself on
the basis of its distance from childhoodboth the child before it and the childwithin. An ideal of adult maturity which includes rather than excludeschildhood is capable of transforming our notions of optimal child rearing andeducation.
Introduction: What is the Philosophy of Childhood?
Child study as an academic activity is usually thought of as the natural
domain of pediatrics, psychology, sociology, and education. But with the
exception of education, none of those disciplines are more than a few
hundred years old, and children have been around somewhat longer than
that. Some philosophers of childhood go so far as to see the historical
hegemony of psychology and sociology in child study which arose at the turn
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of the 20th century as an impediment to genuine inquiry, because, like their
hard science counterparts, they are so implicitly wedded to socially
instrumental aims. Valerie Polokow, for example, speaks in The Erosion of
Childhood (1982) of "the plethora of social psychological epistemologies"
which "all attest in varying degrees to the impositional structures of
consciousness that an adult world of 'experts' has unquestioningly brought to
bear upon this life phase of childhood . . ." (p. 21) Gareth Matthews (1996)
warns us about the epistemological status of scientific models of childhood.
"We should be on the lookout," he says, "for what a given model may
encourage us to overlook, or misunderstand, as well as for what the model
may help us to understand better" (p. 26).
Neither Polokow nor Matthews are objecting to the scientific study of
childhood per se, but to a form of human science which is not philosophically
reflective--which does not examine its own assumptions, and thereby
becomes a form of cultural imposition. One task of the philosophy of
childhood is to reveal and clarify those assumptions. To do so promises to
disentangle the study of childhood from its institutional matrix in the
scientific establishment, at least to the extent to which the latter naively
serves the prevailing social, economic, and political order. The outcomes of
this project of distentanglement have potentially far-reaching practical
implications for the future of child rearing, education, and the way adults
think about children's rights.
The philosophy of childhood may be thought of as a sub-region of the
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philosophy of persons. It emerges at a moment in the history of the field
when the critique of Western metaphysics is paralleled by the critique of
white adult male hegemony in the philosophical tradition, and an opening to
"voices from the margins," including those of women and of non-Western
forms of knowledge, and tends to fall within two realms of discourse. First, it
is an inquiry into what adults can know about children and the experience of
childhood. This is represented by questions like: What is it to be a child?
Just what kind of difference is the difference between children and adults?
To what extent is childhood as we know it a historical and cultural construct?
What are the hidden or unexamined assumptions underlying the explanatory
constructs which adults apply to children? How does the construct
"childhood" function in adult self-understanding, and in the history of culture
and thought? What are the similarities and differences between the ways
children and adults know the world?
The second realm of the philosophy of childhood is related to the first
through this last question about knowledge. If children, for whatever
reasons, do know the world differently--if children's knowledge is not justa
weaker, or sketchier, or more rudimentary version of adults'--then what can
they tell us? This is where the notion of child as a voice from the margins,
hitherto excluded from adult discourse, and therefore from adult self-
understanding, comes in.
The concepts "child" and "adult" are a mutually necessary contrastive
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pair. As there is no notion of "old" without a notion of "young," "child" is
unthinkable apart from "adult." If everyone were born and remained as
"children," the term would no longer have any meaning; the same is true if
we were all born and remained "adults." Thus, any philosophical inquiry into
childhood is also necessarily an inquiry into adulthood. The concrete
implications of this reflexive aspect of the inquiry into childhood are
particularly significant, for it suggests that the adult who understands
children and the conditions of childhood better understands him or herself
better. Improved self-understanding leads to the possibility of a positive
evolution of the adult-child relation in society; and it follows from the polar
structure of the relation, that adults who learn to identify and serve the
needs of children with more sensitivity and precision, learn to do so for each
other as well.
The philosophy of childhood is both enriched and complicated by the
discovery that childhood has meant and can mean differently to children and
adults in different cultures and historical periods. The widespread
documentation of variations in the cultural meanings of childhood began with
the rise of cultural anthropology early in the 20th century; the historical
dimension has only begun to be investigated in the last 30 years, in the new
field of study called history of childhood (Hunt, 1970; Sommerville, 1982;
Elder et al, 1993) To discover that "childhood" is at least to some degree a
historically and culturally mediated social construct is to question, first of all,
to just what degree? How much can childhood change over time, or differ
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from culture to culture, and still be what we call childhood? Are there clear
and unambiguous universal criteria for calling someone a child? Is childhood
a "hard" category, or could we imagine a culture or historical period in which,
either children thought, felt and acted more like adults, or, conversely, adults
thought, felt and acted more like children? Just what do we mean by the
current phrase, "disappearance of childhood"? (Postman, 1982)
The questions raised by our contemporary situation of ever-increasing
cultural and historical intervisibility also touch on gender construction. Are
children "male" and "female" in the same way that adults are? What are the
limits of difference in the gendering of the two sexes, and what is the role of
childhood in the gendering process? Then there is the question of just what
drives and patterns historical change in the way adults construct and
reconstruct childhood. Can we call the change we have noticed so far an
"evolution"? (deMause, 1974) Can we make normative judgments about
what constitutes positive change? Finally, if "child" and "adult" are indeed a
polar conceptual relation, it follows that, if childhood changes and varies, so
necessarily does adulthood. If this is the case, what is the calculus of that
mutual change? Is there some normative balance between the two which we
recognize as inherently good, ethical, healthy, functional, etc.? Is there an
inherent teleology of the adult-child relation? Is there a "model" adult? Is
there a "model" child? If so, how are the two related?
The questions triggered by historical and cross-cultural inquiry into
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childhood move us beyond the philosophy of childhood in any narrow
academic sense of the term "philosophy." They imply a further inquiry into
the representation of children and childhood by adults in social and cultural
history, in mythology and the history of spirituality, in the history of art and
literature, in psychoanalytic theory, and in the history of science and of
education. The images that we find of children in these fields are myriad and
suggestive--for example the "divine child" archetype of ancient myth and
Jungian psychology (Jung, 1963); the character of Pearl in Hawthorne's
(1994/1850) Scarlet Letter; the representation of children in the photography
of Ralph Meatyard (1991), or Sally Mann (1991); ; Freud's notion of the
psychosexual stages of early childhood (Freud, 1957), or Emerson's (1965)
notion of infancy as the "perpetual Messiah." All of these images have an
iconographic function: in each characterization, "child" functions symbolically
as a carrier of deep assumptions about human nature and its potential
variability and changeability, about the construction of human subjectivity,
about the ultimate meaning of the human life cycle, and about human forms
of knowledge.
What follows is the result of a historical inquiry into the iconography of
childhood in adult Western representation. It represents only one region of
the philosophy of childhood, but one which it seems to me to be necessary to
explore before finding our way into others. It establishes a historical and
cultural context for further inquiry, and reveals to us the wealth of
prejudgments that we bring to any form of child study. It is a probe into the
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deep assumptions--the symbolisms--that we carry into our everyday dialogue
with the child's forms of life and thought. It demonstrates in a vivid, direct
way, both our distance from and our nearness to childhood, not only in terms
of our relations with children as parents, teachers, caregivers and
researchers, but of our own adult subjectivity. I will concentrate on
representations of childhood in philosophy, social and cultural history, and
mythology, religion, art, literature and psychoanalysis. One might as easily
focus on child symbolization in the history of educational thought and
practice, the history of science, legal history, or the representation of
children in the media. Each area of focus can lead us to better see how
children have been and are imagined differently by adults. It is assumed that
the deconstruction of the images which we so often take as foundational in
our contemporary approach to children, has implications for the way we
construct the world for them: in our day-to-day relationships, our
institutional structures, our educational theory and practice, and our
deliberations on and formulation of policy.
The Child of the Philosophers
Looking back to the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition,
the child does not fare particularly well in adult male construction (we do not
hear from the females). Plato (1941) considered children--along with
women, slaves, and the "inferior multitude"--to be liable to the "great mass
of multifarious appetites and pleasures and pains" (p. 125) of the naturally
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immoderate. In his influential construal of the human soul as a dynamic
combination--or "community"--of reason, will, and appetite, children are
exemplars of the untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will. "They are full
of passionate feelings from their very birth" (p. 138) The "boy, . . . just
because he more than any other has a fount of intelligence in him which has
not yet 'run clear', . . . is the craftiest, most mischievous, and unruliest of
brutes. So the creature must be held in check . . ." (1961, p. 1379). For
Plato, children's only virtue appears to be that they are "easily molded," i.e.
they are capable of being made into adults.
Aristotle ( (1962; 1966) develops Plato's argument by showing just how
the community of self is skewed in children. The preponderance of their
appetitive nature either leads to or is a result of the lack of the capacity of
choice, or "moral agency," meaning the ability to deliberately engage in an
action toward a final end, or "some kind of activity of the soul in conformity
with virtue." For this reason the child cannot be called "happy"; and if we do
call him happy, "we do so by reason of the hopes we have for his future"
(1962, p. 23).
Aristotle seems to be engaging in something like what Erik Erikson
(1965) called "subspeciation," or the attribution of ontological difference to
racial, ethnic or cultural variations, by the application of qualitative rather
than quantitative distinctions. If the differences between adults and children
are differences in kind rather than degree, the child doesn't so much turn
into an adult, as she is made into one. Aristotle's and Plato's analyses are
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first statements of a perennial symbolization of the child as both deficitand
danger. Aristotle's might even be read as an implicit theory of monsters, in
the sense that children are "like" humans--"human" understood as adult,
male, free-born, and governed by reason--but are not. They combine the
same elements in a different--and deficient--mixture. It is true that the child,
if not born a slave or a female, has the chance of becoming an adult--i.e.
reason in right relation to will and appetite--whereas the woman and the
slave never will. But the presence of deficit and danger make that transition
problematic. So Erasmus (1990/1529), 1800 years after Aristotle, tells
parents:
To be a true father, you must take absolute control of your son's entire
being; and your primary concern must be for that part of his character
which distinguishes him from the animals and comes closest to
reflecting the divine. . . Is there any form of exposure more cruel than
to abandon to bestial impulses children whom nature intended to be
raised according to upright principles and to live a good life? (p. 67)
We can be virtually certain that the tendency to place children on a
lower rung of the great chain of being was challenged--if not in common
sense or theory, then in practice--time and time again throughout history by
sympathetic parents, educators and other adult observers. But nothing
remains, to my knowledge, in the Western philosophical, medical, and
educational record to decisively challenge what we might call the "deficit
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theory" until the publication of Rousseau's (1979) Emile in 1763. Rousseau's
challenge is fitful and ambivalent, but it opens a space for the reversal of the
deficit theory. This reversal finds full expression in the Romantic
reformulation of the image of the child in the early 19th century as a type of
"genius," i.e. a unified or integrated human being, not yet fallen into the
psychological division which is characteristic of adulthood. The genius
symbolization reoccurs continually in Romantic literature (Abrams, 1971) but
is developed most forcefully by Wordsworth, Schiller, deQuincey and
Coleridge (Plotz, 1979). One of Novalis' (1989) aphorisms is representative:
The first man is the first spiritual seer. To him, all appears as spirit.
What are children, if not such primal ones? The fresh insight of
children is more boundless than the presentiments of the most
resolute prophets (p. 50).
For the Romantic imagination, the child prophecies the highest goal of
adult development. If the life cycle is understood as procession from a state
of unity into division, and through division to a higher unity, then the child
foreshadows and represents that higher unity. So Friedrich von Schiller
(1966/1795), in Naive and Sentimental Poetry, says:
They are what we were; they are what we should once again
become. We were nature just as they, and our culture, by means of
reason and freedom, should lead us back to nature. They are,
therefore, not only the representation of our lost childhood, which
eternally remains most dear to us, but fill us with a certain melancholy.
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But they are also representations of our highest fulfillment in the ideal,
thus evoking in us a sublime tenderness (p.85).
In fact, the Romantic reformulation of the early 19th century was not
new to the history of the image of the child. As any powerful symbolic image
is ambivalent, the counter-image of the child which Romanticism seized and
developed was also present as early as Plato, and before that in Taoism. It is
the other side of the deficit/danger symbolization: the child as somehow
more in touch with spiritual reality than the adult. In ancient Athens for
example, a child selected by lot played an important role as intermediary in
the Eleusinian Mysteries, where he or she went before the initiates, making
the first contact with the gods (Golden, 1990). As Mark Golden says of this
practice, "It is children's very marginality which makes their role appropriate.
Not yet fully integrated into the social world of thepolis, they are interested
outsiders, a status they share with the gods with whom they intercede" (p.
44). Jesus' sayings in the New Testamentregarding young children, in which
they were held up as exemplars of open spirituality, brings this counterimage
squarely into Christianity. As early as 600 B.C., The Tao de Ching (Lao Tzu,
1990) identified the infant with the spiritual master: "He who is in harmony
with the Tao is like a newborn child. Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,
but its grip is powerful." And Pierre Erny (1973) summarizes African images
of the child found in folktales: "Insensible, innocent, careless, unconscious,
well-acquainted with the full condition of man, since he lives it, an ignorant
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being close to supreme wisdom, the child is thus a complete being, but
closed, sealed, and impenetrable" (p. 88).
So there is a fundamental ambivalence--a double image--in the adult
symbolization of childhood and children. Both sides of the image turn on the
child as a liminal form of life, i.e. a being at the threshold, still connected
with "other worlds," whether it be the world of the animal or of the god. It
must be noted that this is characteristic of the prejudgments which cultural
insiders--in Western patriarchy anyway--bring, not just to children, but to
other forms of human difference. There is also a long tradition in the West of
seeing women, the insane, and "natives" as embodying both deficit/danger
anda connection with other worlds, whether those worlds be represented as
extreme sensuality, extreme spirituality, or some combination of the two.
The perennial power of this projective relation of cultural insiders to
the culturally marginalized is demonstrated yet again in recent postmodern
formulations of childhood. In Derrida (1976) for example, the child appears
to assume the same position of limit condition of the human, except that in
this case it is in the interests of the deconstruction of the modern subject:
Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from
the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality,
primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these limits
is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a life
without differance (p. 245).
In his concern to deconstruct human subjectivity, Derrida makes a
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synthesis of the child of Aristotle and the child of the Romantics, while
escaping the implications of both. For Aristotle, "man calls himself man"
because he is ruled by reason. Aristotle's "man" occupies a particular station
on the hierarchical chain of being, and to both fear and desire "nature,
animality, etc." is not according to the (true) nature of that station. For the
Romantics on the other hand, "rational man" is merely a shrunken image of
himself unless he is able to widen his subjectivity to the point where it
incorporates "nature, animality, etc.," if in a sublimated form. Derrida, on
the other hand, sees the human subject as constructed in contrast to what it
is not--its "other," i.e. "nature, animality, etc." Therefore it is never itself, but
only the production of a paradoxical relation. His "child" symbolizes both the
ultimate possible unification of the human subject--an "access to life without
differance"--and its loss to itself through that very unification. Lyotard (1992)
evokes the Romantic side of this paradox, without mitigating its pathos, in
his formulation of "infancy" as
. . . something that will never be defeated [by Western "emancipation"
or "Enlightenment," or "reason"], at least as long as humans will be
born infants, infantes. Infantia is the guarantee that there remains an
enigma in us, a not easily communicable opacity--that something is left
that remains, and that we must bear witness to it (p. 416).
The child as limit condition is re-evoked continually in modern and post
modern conceptions, and the tension between reason and nature or instinct,
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or Enlightenment and Romance, is never far from their surface. The most
influential philosopher of childhood of the twentieth century, Freud,
combines the two interpretions of childhood which I have been tracing by
identifying early childhood as the site of a struggle between what he calls
primary process and secondary process, or the pleasure principle and the
reality principle. For Freud, infantile narcissism, although doomed to
disappear in adulthood, represents a state of psychological unification--of
self and world, the within and the without--which is thoroughly, if
perversely, Romantic. Perversely because in adult terms this unification
appears as psychosis, i.e. "life without differance." To become a functional
adult these worlds must be divided and thus the child must be eradicated, if
need be through psychoanalysis, which he describes as "a prolongation of
education for the purposes of overcoming the residues of childhood" (1957,
p. 48). On the other hand, Freud's symbolization inevitably evokes the
counter-image of childhood as an adult ideal of original wholeness, spelled
out, for example, in N.O. Brown's (1959) classic interpretation of Freud's
basic meaning: "Our indestructible unconscious desire for a return to
childhood, our deep childhood-fixation, is a desire for a return to the
pleasure-principle, for a recovery of the body from which culture alienates
us, and for play instead of work." And he adds, "The possibilities adumbrated
in infancy are to be taken as normative" (p. 66).
Freud's insights, ambivalent as they too were, did manage to
synthesize the two perennial themes of child symbolization of deficit and
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wholeness. The power of his symbolization is suggested by the extent to
which Freudian and post-Freudian theory and practice have in fact
contributed dramatically to contemporary Western understanding of actual
children, as well as our understanding the "residues of childhood" in adults.
This, in turn, has influenced education--particularly early childhood
education--and our appreciation of the significance of play for psychological,
social, and cognitive development. Freud's philosophy of childhood has also
changed adult self-conceptualization, in showing us the role of primary
process in development throughout the life-course. Since Freud, we
understand more consciously that the continuum of the life cycle is both
diachronic and synchronic, and that both the child and the adult are present
in each person throughout (Nandy, 1987, p. 71).
The Psychohistorical Child
My account of the "child of the philosophers" would seem to imply a
projective and ambivalent relationship lying at the heart of the adult view of
childhood. Beneath a surface of common sense familiarity (what could be
simpler than a child?) there is for the adult a marginal other, the not-I in a
primal form, and as such, a natural screen for projections. One way to test
this account is to ask whether we find this ambivalence in operation in the
history of the adult-child relation. The evidence available for this is sketchy
and inconclusive--the record must be assembled from a wide variety of
sources, such as journals, legal and demographic records, tracts, stories and
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legends, etc.; but we do have several strong--and controversial--theories
which interplay with the account of child symbolization I have just outlined.
The first originated with Phillipe Aries' (1962) seminal volume on early
modern social and familial history, Centuries of Childhood. Aries makes the
case that childhood as we know it today did not exist in the medieval world,
and is in fact a cultural invention of early modernism. Aries supports his
arguments with accounts of representations of children in art, in which he
says they are portrayed as "little adults," as well as records of children's
dress, and the absence of differences between adult's and children's
pastimes.
Aries' analysis focuses on a moment in Western history at the end of
the high middle ages in which a confluence of social, demographic, economic
and commercial, scientific, technological, religious and political forces
combined to produce a sea-change in emergent Western middle-class
culture. He attempts to show us how the psychosocial atomosphere of public
and private life began a transition into a form of life which today we
recognize as "modern." He is joined in the general tenor of this analysis by
several major works in social history, historical sociology, psychohistory, and
the history of culture and technology (Elias, 1978; Ong, 1982; Foucault,
1979; deMause, 1974). Some of them speak directly of children and
childhood, some do not, but all of them have major implications for the study
of childhood in the early modern period.
The change in modal, or culturally-conditioned personality structure
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which marks the middle-class modern can be summarized as the rise of the
self-contained, boundaried self. The change involves the same psychosocial
shift that children undergo in "growing up"--a shift between internal and
external locus of control. From the standpoint of historical sociology, Elias
calls it "a change in human affect and control structures taking place over a
large number of generations in the direction . . . [of] the increased tightening
and differentiation of [emotional] controls" (p. 182). The medieval
personality, in Aries' words, lived in a psychosocial world of "polymorphous
sociability." Not only children and adults, but different classes, occupied the
common spaces of home, street and marketplace. This is demonstrated, for
example, by the domestic architecture of the period, in which space was
common and multi-functional. Canopy beds could be moved from room to
room, and often more than one person slept in one bed. Expressions of both
sexuality and violence were comparatively less restrained (Elias, 1978;
Gottlieb, 1993; Huizinga, 1969; Shahar, 1990).
The adult "polymorphously social" personality of the medieval world
occupied a different ratio between self and community, inside and outside,
private and public. European human subjectivity had not, in Elias' words,
begun to understood itself as "closed," separated off from all other people
and things "outside," as is more characteristic of modern persons, and
perhaps was also more characteristic of participants of the ancient Stoic and
Christian worldviews (Martin et al, 1988). Modern middle-class persons'
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increased identification with the "I" in relation to society parallels the shift in
the cosmological picture from a heliocentric to a geocentric universe, which
began in Renaissance times. The "spontaneous and unreflecting self-
centeredness of men" (Elias p.208), the human experience of living at the
center of the cosmos characteristic of the geocentric world picture, had
begun to fade (Koyre, 1957). The new world-picture demanded "an increased
capacity for self-detachment" (Elias, p.208) and objectivity; persons
increasingly found themselves alone and decentered in the universe (Pascal,
1962/1670), which correlated with "a new attitude . . . toward themselves,
new personality structures, and especially shifts in the direction of greater
affect control and self-detachment" (Elias, p.209).
What is significant about this for our understanding of the history of
the psychology of the adult-child relation is indirectly suggested by studies of
young children's thinking beginning with Piaget in the early part of this
century. What Piaget (1929) called "realism," "participation," "artificialism,"
"finalism", "animism," and "egocentrism," match in broad outline the social
psychology and epistemology of the geocentric world-picture. This analysis
is further confirmed by the research of historians of literacy such as Harold
Innes (1951), Marshall McLuhan (1962), and Walter Ong (1982), into what
the latter calls the "psychodynamics of orality." Ong characterizes cultures
like the medieval, in which the information environment is primarily oral, as
"close to the human life world," "empathetic and participatory rather than
objectively distanced," "situated rather than abstract." The oral personality
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understands language as whole sentences and stories rather than as
individual words: his thought "is nested in speech" (p.75). These noetic
modes also characterize, to a great extent, the child, and especially the
young child. This should not be surprising, given that most children are ten
years old or more before they are able, for example, to read a newspaper
comfortably.
Ong next characterizes the "psychodynamics of literacy" which
resulted from the dramatic transformation of the information environment
triggered by the invention of moveable print in 1450. This characterization
matches, in turn, the shift in the boundaries of the self described by Elias
and Aries. The more and more common activity of silent reading, which
"fostered a silent relation between the reader and his book, were crucial
changes, which redrew the boundary between the inner life and life in the
community" (Chartier, 1989, p.111). What is significant here is that the
psychodynamics of literacy, along with host of other material and social
influences, began to redraw the boundary between child and adult as well.
The child stayed the same, while the adult "grew up." Stories previously
enjoyed by everyone became "fairy tales," now thought suitable only for
children, and the same was true of what we now think of as children's
games. From the 16th century on, countless manuals of etiquette were
produced, and it is now "extremely difficult," Aries claims, "to distinguish
between those intended for adults and those intended for children" (p.119).
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They emphasize a new modesty and self-restraint in eating at table, in
sleeping habits, and in the performance of bodily functions which emphasize
discretion and privacy. In short, the modern middle-class adult becomes a
"reader" in the larger sense of the term: she reads both social situations and
her own interior state with a new sense of care, an act requiring a new self-
detachment and self-restraint. And as this happens, the relatively
undersocialized, instinctually unrestrained child is separated off, and
increasingly understood as a person whose most salient characteristic is that
she is not an adult. As Neil Postman (1982) has put it, ". . . the new
adulthood, by definition, excluded children. And as children were expelled
from the adult world it became necessary to find another world for them to
inhabit. That other world became known as childhood" (p.20).
That "other world" of childhood was not constructed by adults as a
positive world, with its own characteristics--for this we must wait until the
20th century, and the rise of a genuine interest in the child's construction of
the world. Rather, it was a world of deficit, of need, and even of danger. For
the new task of turning children into adults, a new institution became
necessary: the school. Not that the school had not existed before, but it was
transformed into a dimension of what Foucault (1979) has called "the great
confinement," or the rise of prisons, schools and insane asylums for purposes
of "moral reform and constraint" (p.138) in the early and mid-modern period.
Just as the new "disciplinary technology" developed for the criminal and the
insane involved confinement in institutions, harsh and systematic
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punishment, constant surveillance, and "treatment" in the form of rigid,
objectifying psychologies and pedagogies; so the same regime of description
and classification for purposes of control and manipulation was applied to the
child. Like the insane and the criminal, the child was understood to be in
need of being forged, as Foucault puts it, into a "docile body that may be
subjected, used, transformed, and improved" (p.198). What Polokow (1982)
refers to as "the impositional structures of consciousness that an adult world
of 'experts' has unquestioningly brought to bear upon this life phase of
childhood" (see p.1 above) is heir to this form of discourse.
What prompts the adult to need to control and manipulate the child--to
transform her into an adult through force, whether the rigid, punitive form of
schooling of the early modern period, or regular corporeal punishment in the
home? If we return to Elias' account of the rise of the modern adult as a shift
in the economy of instinctual life toward repression, at least one explanation
presents itself. The child, who is relatively unsocialized, has come to
represent that world of instinctual freedom from restraint which the modern
middle-class adult has, generation by generation, increasingly foresworn.
Therefore a new task is imposed on the adult--that of conscious, intentional,
even "scientific" child-rearing. This, according to Elias, is not so much out of
concern for the child--although that is certainly not lacking--as from the
adult's new construal of the child as a dangerous representation of the
"nature" which she has left behind in her cultural "coming of age." Elias
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account merits quoting at length:
The standard emerging [in the early modern period] is characterized
by profound discrepancy between the behavior of so called adults and
children. But precisely by this increased social prescription of any
impulse, by their repression from the surface of social life and of
consciousness, the distance between the personality structure and
behavior of adults and children is necessarily increased. . . . The
children have in the space of a few years to attain to the advanced
level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many centuries.
Their instinctual life must be rapidly subjected to the strict control and
specific molding that gives our societies their stamp, and which
developed very slowly over centuries. . . . The more Anatural@ the
standard of delicacy and shame appears to adults and the more
civilized restraint of instinctual urges is taken for granted, the more
incomprehensible it becomes to adults that children do not have this
delicacy and shame by Anature.@ . . . The children necessarily touch
again and again on the adult threshold of delicacy, andC-since they are
not yet adaptedC-they infringe the taboos of society, cross the adult
shame frontier, and penetrate emotional danger zones which the adult
himself can only control with difficulty. . . . In this situation the adult
does not explain the demand he makes on behavior. He is unable to
do so adequately. He is so conditioned that he conforms to the social
standard more or less automatically. . . . Anxiety is aroused in adults
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when the structure of their own instinctual life as defined by the social
order is threatened. Any other behavior means danger. This leads to
the emotional undertone associated with moral demands and the
aggressive and threatening severity of upholding them, because the
breach of prohibitions places in an unstable balance of repression all
those for whom the standard of society has become Asecond nature@
(p.167).
Elias' account of the widening divide between adult and child in the
early modern period finds interesting corroboration in some recent
scholarship on the history of child-rearing modes in the West. Llyod deMause
(1974) has proposed six such modes. He bases his argument on social,
cultural and family histories, memoirs, instruction books for parents, letters,
the history of pediatrics, ancient documents, biographical accounts, and
other sources. He proposes a cultural-evolutionary theory, according to
which the fundamental ambivalence which adults feel towards children is
gradually overcome, generation by generation, through "a series of closer
and closer approaches between adult and child" (p. 3). deMause's account is,
as we shall see, only apparently in contradiction with Elias's.
DeMause finds the psychological locus of the adult-child relationship in
what he calls, following a Freudian defense-mechanism account (Freud,
1946), a "projective relationship." Adults are prone to use the child as a
screen or vehicle for their own repressed instinctual affects of sexuality and
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aggression, or, as deMause puts it, as "containers for dangerous projections"
(p.51) The crucial moment in the adult-child relation comes when that
repressed instinct is aroused through confrontation, according to deMause,
"with a child who needs something"--i.e. who is making an instinctual
demand. Adults can react in one of three possible ways to the anxiety
triggered by this expression of instinct. In the "projective reaction," the adult
"voids feelings" onto the child, and sees the child as threateningly
aggressive, sexual, manipulative, or selfish. In the "reversal reaction," the
adult uses the child as a substitute for an adult figure from her own
childhood, and punishes the child for not meeting the needs which that adult
did not meet. In the "empathic reaction," the adult, in deMause's words, is
able to "regress to the level of the child's need and identify it without an
admixture of the adult's own projections. The adult must then be able to
maintain enough distance from the need to be able to satisfy it" (p.7).
The six modes identified by deMause--Infanticidal (Antiquity to 4th
Century), Abandoning (4th to 13th Centuries), Ambivalent (14th to 17th
Centuries), Intrusive (18th Century), Socializing (19th to mid 20th Centuries)
and Helping (mid-20th Century on)--are proposed as phases of a cultural-
historical evolutionary scheme. With each stage, the child is allowed to
"enter into into the parents' emotional life" (p. 51) further. The evolutionary
status of the theory has been questioned by Petschauer (1987; 1989), who
understands all modes to be present in all periods, with one emphasized
more than the others. Societal changes in attitudes towards children are the
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result of a complex, interactive web of economic, demographic,
technological, medical, religious, political, and ideological causal factors. But
this does not discount, either the possibility of an "advance," or the
plausability of an account of cultural change from the standpoint of depth
psychology, or "psychohistory" (Lifton, 1974; Cocks & Crosby, 1987) What is
particularly interesting about this theory in its relation to Elias' account of
the early modern adult, is the suggestion that the empathic reaction is made
possible, not through identifying with children through being like them, but
through separation, which is necessary for the withdrawal of projection. Only
when the adult is able to deal consciously with the anxiety produced by the
"emotional danger zone" which children trigger through their relative lack of
instinctual repression, can she learn not to be emotionally contaminated by
the child's raw instinctual expression or demand. When she has the ability
both to "regress to the level of the child's need" andto maintain separation,
she can avoid projection and correctly identify that need as other than
hostile, demonic, sinful, manipulative, etc. The ability of more and more
adults to see children as separate individuals--rather than as split-off aspects
of their own sexual and aggressive unconscious material--is the central force
in this advance.
This would seem to indicate a dialectical historical movement: the
possibility of closer psychological approaches to children on the part of
adults is only created as a result of an initial psychological separation. That
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separation reaches a noticeable level in the West in the early modern period,
and the rise of the "shame frontier" traced by Elias--i.e. the new balance of
instinct and repression in the modern middle-class adult. For it is through
that new balance that the modern adult becomes a hermeneutical, or
interpretive being. The interpreter must interpret because he is removed
from the situation. But it is only this situation of removal, or relative
disentanglement, which makes dialogue possible; and dialogue results in
rapprochement (Ricoeur, 1987), or a "closer approach." Applied to the adult-
child relation, the hermeneutical process is what deMause refers to as
withdrawal of projection through a newly acquired psychological distance,
followed by identification, or the ability to "regress to the level of the child's
need," followed by new understanding.
The historical moment (late 15th to early 18th centuries) of
differentiation between adult and child which Elias and Aries describe falls
across the centuries covered by deMause's Ambivalent and Intrusive modes.
The Ambivalent Mode is contemporaneous with a re-evaluation of childhood
in the high middle ages suggested by the increase of the cult of the Virgin
and the infant Christ, who on a cultural level, comes to represent the child in
general (Aries, 1963; McLaughlin, 1974). The Ambivalent adult sees in the
child both the amoral, uncontrolled energies of "nature," leading him to
reject him, and the possibility for making him over, through fear, shame,
guilt, punishment, and the process of education. The child is both
contemptible and newly representative of the promise of the future. The
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adult feels the need, as Aries describes it, "to love children and to overcome
the repugnance which they arouse in thinking men" (p.114). Yet children are
still routinely given up for oblation, abandoned to the newly burgeoning
foundling hospitals, and farmed out to wet nurses in the countryside for the
first few years of their lives (Boswell, 1988).
The Intrusive Mode appears paradoxical, in that it represents both a
closer approach to children and a systematization and institutionalization of
the discipline of which is its hallmark. As illustrated both in Calvinist theology
and the more liberal views of John Locke (1968), the child is understood by
his elders to be exemplary of the fundamental depravity which characterizes
the whole human race. On the other hand she is--as is the adult--a free
moral being, as capable of conversion, whether to God or to Reason, as is
the adult (Sommerville, 1992). For this reason the child needs to be both
loved and forcibly dealt with, or, as deMause describes it, "prayed with but
not played with, hit but not regularly whipped . . . and made to obey
promptly with threats and guilt as often as with other methods of
punishment" (p. 52). The Intrusive mode may be characterized as a
calculated assault on the child's will, with a view to "breaking," "subduing,"
"conquering," or "subjecting" it (Sommerville, 1992, p.106)--but for the
child's "own good," i.e. with the goal of internalization of the adult superego.
Rousseau's Emile (1979/1763) is the first public, popular statement of
the Socializing Mode, which calls for "shaping" and "channeling of impulses"
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rather than direct confrontation with the child's "nature" which is
characteristic of the Intrusive. Lawrence Stone (1979) identifies the change
as beginning in England around 1660, during the post-Puritan period, and
associates it with "a new interest in the self, a . . . recognition of the
uniqueness of the individual," and "decisively change[d] attitudes towards
authority, affection and sex within the middle and upper ranks of society" (p.
15). Around 1800, it becomes associated with the Romantic reformulation of
childhood mentioned earlier. The Romantic parent and educator show a new
respect for the child's energies, and a concern that education, as Coleridge
put it, function to "carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of
manhood" (Plotz, 1977, p.68), rather than forcibly replacing childhood with
adulthood.
Psychohistorically speaking, the Romantic reversal marks an important
moment in the history of the Western adult-child relation. It comes when
adult self-understanding has traveled furthest from its own "child." From a
dialectical point of view, this would be the moment when the overcoming of
this division through a new synthesis is most insistently latent. In
Romanticism, this adult rapprochment with childhood is expressed as both a
nostalgia for a lost unity of self--a return to one's instinctual life from
isolation in a "civilized," "Enlightened" repressive subjectivity--and as a
prophetic developmentalism. The first half of the nineteenth century also
witnessed the invention of the Kindergarten--the first institutionalized
example of child-centered, constructivist education, by the Romantic
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philosopher/educator Froebel (1974/1830), whose watchword, "Come, let us
live with our children," perfectly expresses the sense of return.
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Romanticism's child
has found her tortuous way, often in ambiguous, even ambivalent forms, into
20th century psychoanalysis and art--most particularly in the contribution of
Freud, for whom the inevitable passional conflicts of childhood became the
key to adult self-understanding. Freud's wide influence has led, in turn, to a
problematization of that repressed "adult" which it was the project of early
modernism to produce and reproduce. After Freud, the Western adult begins
to reinterpret her idea of a healthy balance between instinct and repression,
and raises the possibility--in spite of Freud's own conservative protestations
to the contrary--of "instinctual liberation" (Marcuse, 1966).
In terms of changing modes of child-rearing, the recognition of the
value and importance of the child's instinctual life leads to an adult who is
now more able to enter into dialogue with the forms of life of real children.
As the adult comes to understand the real and symbolic power of childhood
experience in his own psychosocial development, the child assumes a
psychological presence which can compel the adult's recognition. So
deMause (1974, p.52) identifies the Helping Mode of childrearing as
characterized by adults who invest significant time and energy, . . .
especially in the first six years, [in]. . . helping a young child reach its daily
goals [by] continually responding to it, playing with it, tolerating its
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regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting
its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving
interests (p. 52).
In summary: hermeneutically speaking, starting sometime in the 15th
century the child became an increasingly un-understandable other to the
modernizing culture of the West. The emancipated middle-class adult of a
Europe "come of age" constructed his self-understanding on a strong sense
of individuality, subjective privacy, and the suppression of affect, none of
which are particularly salient aspects of the developmental stage of
childhood. But this very psychological separation carried its antithesis within
it, and at the very height of "enlightenment," the adult began turning back to
the child. Through dialogue with the child's form of life, he received the
"word" of the child as a new message about himself. The outcome of this
fusion of horizons is both a new ability to really pay attention to children as
children and as individual human beings, and--necessarily--a new self-
understanding of what an adult is. The empathic reaction to children would
appear to lead to a felt need to reintegrate children into the psychological
world of adults; to accord, in spite of differences, the respect due all humans
to children, and to clarify and institutionalize their rights and privileges.
The Child in Myth, Art, Literature, and Psychoanalysis
As a form of archeological inquiry into the image of the child in adult
understanding, another aspect of child study is that rich intermixture of
images and themes of childhood that we find scattered through the history
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of Western art and mythology. These themes also suggest an inherent
teleology in the adult construction of childhood, and by implication the adult-
child relation: their development parallels the evolutionary movement which
I have just traced in the literature of psychohistory, psychosociology, and
emotionology (Stearns & Stearns, 1987).
We find some children in pre-Hellenistic Western art, but starting about
300 B.C., the most characteristic representations are in the form of a
multiplicity of young children, known to us as "cupids," but to the Greeks as
eroti, and to the Romans as amoretti. These Hellenistic eroti, in distinction
from the early hellenic god Eros, who was represented as a youth, are young
children in a variety of poses and activities, most of them having to do with
nature, the elements, love and death. They are the little "godlets" who
everywhere accompany the more instinctual human activities of life. Josef
Kunstmann (1970) says of them:
The erotes are to be found throughout the seasons; they make the
flower wreath of spring and tread the grapes of autumn; they bustle
about in Vulcan's forge and among the slaves working in cloth-mills;
they sail on the high seas and go hunting merrily; they watch over the
sleep of young lovers and provide old age with crutches. The erotes
combine the most unlikely contrasts and hold together body and soul,
heaven, earth, and the underworld. (p.13)
Kunstmann's interpretation of the erotes as liminal figures between
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conscious and unconscious, sacred and profane, instinct and repression,
matches the tradition I have already traced, which understands childhood as
in a different relationship to instinctual life than adulthood. The erotes evoke
that child, present from Aristotle through Derrida, who, is on the boundaries
between the animal, the human and the divine. He also evokes the
childhood of the god, of which we find several representations in Greek
statuary, most frequently Dionysius and Hermes (Jung & Kerenyi, 1963).
What is distinctive about the myths associated with these figures, and
with myths of child heroes like Taliesen in Irish mythology, or King Arthur, or
the storied biographies of saints of the middle ages, is that they are typically
represented as not only of miraculous birth, but as illegitimate, orphaned or
abandoned children, foundlings--apparently insignificant outcasts who are
actually of tremendous power. Jung & Kerenyi called this figure the "divine"
or "primordial" child. Such children are often hermaphroditica symbol of
divinity that unites opposites. In many stories they are pursued by
malevolent adults such as evil kings or jealous step-parents, and are taken in
and protected by nature figures, such as nymphs, or animals, where they
grow up in bucolic solitude. Although they are delivered into the hands of
powerful enemies, they are found ultimately to be invincible.
With the rise of medieval Christianity, the eroti disappeared from
Western art for a time, and all the mythic elements of the divine or
primordial child were taken into the figure of the child Jesus, who like these
prototypes, is of mysterious birth, "illegitimate," pursued by malevolent
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figures, protected by natural forces, etc. But it was a matter of centuries
before the figure of Jesus re-encountered the divine child. Although there are
some naturalistic representations of Jesus in the Roman catacombs, the first
images of the child Jesus which began to proliferate after the triumph of
Christianity are found in Byzantine icons of the ninth century on (Forsyth,
1976; Lasareff, 1938). Rather than resembling the eroti of Hellenistic art, this
Christ child is very much a little adult: he is stiff and hieratic, seated rigidly
on his mother's lap, often holding up one hand in a triumphal gesture. Here
is the word of god, arrived in triumph from afar, seated on the mother's--the
theotokos, or god-bearer's--lap as if on a primal ground out of which he
arises, the male god who is only coincidentally a child. Somewhere in the
13th century, in the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, this royal child
begins to soften. An examination of the representations of the divine pair
from 1300 or so on reveals a gradual process of increasing both physical and
psychological realism. The child who was first dressed in a flowing robe is
then represented in swaddling clothes, then in garments appropriate for a
child. During the 1400's he begins to be represented with fewer and fewer
clothes, and by 1500 with either a brief, gauzy piece of material around his
loins, or completely naked. With each development, his body is portrayed
with greater realism, and his pose and gesture as well. Eventually we find
him playing on his mother's lap, reaching for her mouth, or her breast, or
twisted in familiar infant kinaesthetic poses. By 1500, he begins to be
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represented with his head in its correct ratio to the rest of his bodyone
fourth, rather than the one fifth of the full-grown adult.
Coterminous with the humanization of the Christ child, the Hellenistic
eroti also re-enter Renaissance painting, under the influence of the
rediscovery of ancient pagan texts and antiquities (Kunstmann, 1970). We
find them hovering in clouds around the heavenly Father, or accompanying
the angels at the nativity, or present at the mystical appearance of the Virgin
and Child to devotees. They are also present in the increasing
representations of pagan themes, such as the trysts and dalliances of the
now-resurrected Venus/Aphrodite, or her emergence from the ocean.
Whether in Christian or pagan settings, the eroti continue to function as
transitional figures between the spiritual and the earthly, the sacred and
profane. They appear at the margins between worlds, both announcing
epiphany and embodying an element of it. Kunstmann describes the two
eroti who occupy the boundary of the picture-plane in the well-known Sistine
Madonna of Rafael as a "pictorial profession of faith. No abyss opens in the
background where life in the foreground comes to its end; on the contrary, it
is just here that the divine wisdom becomes manifest, playing in the shape of
an angel-child" (p. 23).
The confluence of pagan and Christian motifs in Renaissance art
results in a child who may be characterized as a synthesis of Christ and
Dionysius, or the spiritual and the instinctual life-- a recapitulation of the
Hellenistic eros and the childhood of the god in the Christ child. As Western
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art passes into Mannerism, Rococo and early modern realism, this same child
increasingly assumes aspects of flesh and blood, and even extreme
sensuality, as in the paintings of Parmigiannini. The Mother/Child pair is often
replaced by the holy family in familiar, homelike scenes. Eventually, with
increasing secularization, the aristocracy of Europe takes to commissioning
family portraits in which their infant child reclines in naked, divine child
splendor on their laps. If we look at this process from the point of view of the
changing image of the child in the West, it represents the transformation of
one relatively minor ancient pagan motif among many--the divine child--into
a central mythic structure of Christian European culture. In the cult of the
child Jesus, the childhood of the god, the divine child, the child hero and the
ancient countertradition of the child as "first spiritual seer" or "primal one,"
unite and preoccupy the European imagination for at least a millenium.
C.G Jung (1963) characterized the divine child as an archetype of the
collective unconscious, i.e. a "structural element of the psyche" (p.70), which
represents certain developmental themes and potentialities in each
individual human being. Following Jung, students of the relationship
between mythology, dreams, and the human unconscious (Franz, 1997;
Jacobi, 1959; Kerenyi,1977; Neumann, 1969) have traced the presence of
numerous motifs that occur in mythological narratives to that common store
of spontaneous symbolic images called the "collective unconscious." Each
motif--the male and female figures called the "anima" and "animus," the
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"wise old man," the "mother," the "shadow," the "maiden," etc. (Jung,
1959)--represents an element of the human psychic structure, and is
expressed in dreams, fantasies, and art. They also appear as unconscious
projections in our relationships with others.
Jung found that the archetype of the divine child appeared at a
particular point in the therapeutic process of adults. The child appears as a
symbol of anticipated wholeness, of the synthesis of opposites within the
personality, and the integration of conscious and unconscious elements of
the psyche which he calls "individuation." He concludes that the divine child
is the "representation of an as yet incomplete synthesis of the personality"
(1963, p.84). As a first announcement of the unification of the self through
psychological development, those aspects of the divine child already noted--
his apparent insignificance, exposure, abandonment, danger, as well as his
invincibility--signal both the fragility and the strength of this emergence. The
child archetype is that overlooked part of the self--"smaller than small but
bigger than big"a place where subject and object, conscious and
unconscious are not differentiated, an experience of unity out of which a
higher differentiation will develop.
Jung's interpretation of the divine child has interesting parallels with
the child of the Romantics. The perennial myth which Romantic thought
translated into modern, secular terms was that of an original fall from unity
into differentiation, followed by a process of development whose outcome is
the regaining of the original unity on a higher level (Abrams, 1971). The
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Romantics translated this myth from theological into psychological terms.
The child represents the original unity of consciousness and the unity with
nature, "before the fall"--a fall into the internal divisions which characterize
adulthood. This "fall" into division is necessary for the higher unity to
emerge. The child represents not just the "beginning" but the end, the goal
of the life cycle being a reappropriation of childhood on a higher level. As
Schiller said (see p. 8 above) "They are what we were; they are what we
should once again become."
If we connect the Christ figure--who in Jung's formulation is the
archetype representing the unified self--as divine child with Jung's child
archetype, the historical movement appears to be toward the increasing
psychological integration of the archetype over time by adults. This is
represented culturally in the emergence of the infant Christ as the divine
child, and socially in the evolution of child rearing modes, which deMause
refers to as a series of "closer and closer approaches" between adult and
child. It is also confirmed in Gaston Bachelard's (1971) interpretation of the
archetype as the "permanent child" which every adult has as a part of her
psychic structure. The permanent child, according to Bachelard, is that
"nucleus of childhood" which is not necessarily a reflection of one's actual
childhood. It seems to represent, if not a Jungian archetype, the
psychological residue of the experience of another sort of relationship to self
and world, a "fusion with the world" (p.136) in early childhood. This adult
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experience is still part of the adult psyche--"an anonymous childhood, a pure
threshold of life, original life" (p.125). Nor is it much of a step from
Bachelard's permanent child to the "inner child" of contemporary
psychotherapy.
The archetypal child that I have been tracing through Western art and
psychoanalysis also finds its way into the secularized, complex, embodied
mythmaking of Western literature, where it confronts the fundamental adult
ambivalence towards childhood which I described earlier in this paper.
Reinhard Kuhn (1982) has identified numerous texts in which there appears
what he calls an "enigmatic" child, i.e. an ambivalent and mysterious
character, who brings some important but incommunicable meaning to the
adults who surround her. These children, Kuhn says "seem to have a
message to convey that they forget just as soon as they are old enough to
transmit it" (p.64). The enigmatic child figure can be, in Kuhn's terms, either
"menacing," "redemptive," or some ambiguous mixture of the two. We find
these characters from Goethe to Hawthorne, to Hardy, to Gide, to Salinger.
The character of Pearl in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1994/1850) is
exemplary. Pearl acts as a vehicle for numerous dimensions of the enigmatic
child. She is an involuntary truth-teller--an uninvited, unconscious spiritual
master; she is an embodiment of vitality, or new life, and of elemental
energy; she is her mother's alter ego; she is in an intimate relationship with
nature, the playmate of animals and the elements; and she bears traces of
the demonic, the "fiendish." Pearl is a mysterious mixture of the
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"redemptive" and the "menacing" child, embodying and expressing in a
unified form the instinctual nature which the adults around her, locked in a
repressive libidinal economy, struggle with tragic inquietude to master.
In summary: the history of Western art and mythology may be said to
express and symbolize the history of the Western cultural unconscious.
Images of a mythic child already appear in Greek mythology and art, but
culminate in the figure of the Christ child, which comes to dominate
European Christian iconography from about the 13th to the 16th century.
This child represents for adults the instinctually unrepressed in its psycho-
spiritual dimension. Psychoanalysis understands the modern, relatively
repressed adult as in dialogue with her instinctual self, and the appearance
of the child figure comes to represent a stage in the maturation process,
which is inherently oriented towards conscious integration of unconscious
contents. The implications of this process for actual relations between adults
and children are suggested in the psychohistorical account of the adult-child
relation as evolving toward greater both differentiation and integration,
leading to greater capacity both for objectivity and empathy on the part of
adults towards children.
Conclusion: Whither Childhood?
The implications of an archeology of Western childhood for those
adults concerned with contemporary children are as varied as the disciplines
traversed here. The primary message of this material is that adults construct
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childhood, on the basis of deep-seated prevailing cultural images combined
with the residues of their own childhoods. The parent or caregiver brings her
construction into dialogue with real children, who, in turn, construct a world
within the opportunities and limitations provided by the adults' construction.
Children bring to the dialogue what Dewey (1916) referred to as an
extraordinary (relative to adults) "plasticity," or "the power to modify actions
on the basis of the results of prior experiences, the power to develop
dispositions" (p.44). The child brings the power to grow--a power which
adults have, more often than not, lost to one degree or another.
Perhaps the word "dialogue" is inappropriate, given the greater power
of the adult's positioning in the interaction. But it is just in this disparity that
the opportunity for growth among parents and caregivers lies. It seems to be
the case that the more adults recognize that aspect of themselves which is
still a "child," the more mature they become--i.e., the more both objective
and empathic they are able to be in relation to children themselves (Misgeld,
1985). The more adults are able to recognize that the human life cycle
involves a dialectical interplay between "adult" and "child," the less they see
childhood as something to be outgrown or eradicated, and the more they are
able to relate to children as persons, rather than as screens for projection.
A second, related implication of this inquiry is that there may be a
historical movement--if not an "evolution" then a progression ofsome kind--
in the history of the adult-child relation. This movement has radically
effected the actual history of childhood per se--i.e. the way adults construct
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KENNEDY THE ROOTS OF CHILD STUDY
the world for children, the attention they pay to them, the care they exercise
for them, the extent to which they seek their good. If our new ideal of adult
maturity includes childhood rather than excluding it, then our notions of
optimal child rearing and education will change.
The most significant metaphor uncovered by thinking about childhood
in this way seems to be a hermeneutical one. The adult is a "hermeneut" or
interpreter of childhood. Through dialogue with the forms of life of childhood,
the adult reappropriates, recreates, and re-constellates childhood as an
element of the teleology of her own life-cycle. This makes, not for more
"childish" adults, but perhaps for more "childlike" adults--a new relationship
to one's instinctual and affective life, and one's sense of integration of the
various elements of one's self. The adult's increased ability to overcome the
ambivalence which the child's relative instinctual freedom produces, leads to
a reconstruction of the child which allows the latter a greater voice in the
adult-child dialogue, which leads to a further reconstruction, etc. Adults who
are in dialogical relation with their own "child" have greater capacity to, in
Dewey's terms, "grow," and therefore to raise children who have that same
capacity.
Are there more of these adult "hermeneuts" in the world today than
there were in the past? It may be true that we cannot postulate a global
evolution. There may be just as many murdering, abandoning, ambivalent
and intrusive adults raising children today as there are socializing and
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empathic. But if the psychohistorical processes which have led to the
empathic mode have increased by even a small amount, there is reason for
hope, not only for childhood, but necessarily for human adulthood as well.
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