the roots of child philosophy, history, and religion

8/14/2019 The Roots of Child Philosophy, History, And Religion

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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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KENNEDY THE ROOTS OF CHILD STUDY

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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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


42/48

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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