Psychoanalysis and Moral Development

For 20 years my wife and I have been trying to learn how children manage under a variety of circumstances: racial exclusion and efforts to undo it; extreme poverty or social and cultural marginality; the apparent rootlessness of a migrant life; religious and ethnic confrontation; and, not least, the ironically puzzling, even at times burdensome life that gets called “affluent” or “privileged,” among other names. As I look back at this work, I realize that I have had several different angles of vision with respect to it. At first I was interested in stress and its vicissitudes-an early research interest that developed out of medical (as well as psychiatric) responsibilities I had when in training at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. We had an epidemic of polio in the middle 1950s, maybe the last such outbreak this nation will ever see: iron lungs all over a hospital floor. Those people depended upon an electric cord for life itself; in time their minds became distinctively preoccupied with a particular range of worries, fears, and doubts. I regarded my work to entail a certain linear obligation: listen carefully; document the stresses and, in response to them, the defensive responses; write up a report which (one would hope) offers yet additional information on how a threatened, hurt mind deals with its given situation, if not fate.

In time I became more immersed in the overall lives of the individuals I was getting to know. I saw it my task to document the distinguishing psychological characteristics, as best I could ascertain them, of certain kinds of childhood-what it means, day in and day out, to be a child alive up in a hollow of Appalachia or “on the road” with migrant farmworker parents. I tried to write stories-factual narratives whose content and import, I hoped, would instruct the reader in the diversity of life, even within one or another region of the country and among this or that segment of its people. Later, I tried making comparisons-the wa