Childhood and Psychoanalysis

Prior to the Enlightenment, and more particularly prior to the immense impact of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the destiny of a child was largely held to be in the hands of a deity or the fates. The problem of free will had never been adequately resolved and, in any event, was not applied in any bold fashion to child development. Only with the advent of Rousseau's focus on childhood and its subsequent romanticization did there emerge increasing concern about how environmental conditions affect the lives of children. Once children could be considered valued creatures in the process of development and not simply adults in miniature, the possibility arose for those in the arts to portray children in a manner more akin to how we view them in the present day. Similarly, educators and psychologists could now consider childhood from a developmental viewpoint.

The question of how childhood leads to adulthood remained as a task for psychoanalysis and related disciplines. Our task is to appreciate how the individual emerges from childhood to adulthood, as well as to recognize how the interaction between adult and child influences the development of each, separately. Consider that some adults regard the process of maturation as one in which the individual becomes rigid, authoritarian, lifeless, unhappy, unloved and unloving, and exploitative. For them, maturing means avoiding identification with their own parents and not wanting to raise children-even including those they may already have. Their stated concern may be that their own neurotic conflicts will be imposed upon their offspring and a vicious cycle of unhappiness and humiliation will continue from generation to generation. They are drawn to the question raised by Hermann Hesse in “A Child's Heart”:

Would not God find a way out, some superior deception such as the grown-ups and the powerful always contrived, producing one more trump card at the last moment, shaming me after all, not taking me seriously, humiliating me under the