Mixed Feelings

Mixed feelings are very familiar ground for us in psychoanalytic work, with children as with adults. Ambivalence, which we will say much more about later, is one example, but there are many others. Jealousy, for instance, involves feeling enough love for someone to feel angry with them too when they pay too much attention to someone else. Our picture of mixed emotions in young children is based on psychoanalytic treatment of children and on observations of normal development, so we are interested in comparing it with the picture which emerges from the experimental work of developmental psychologists, and perhaps particularly interested when their views and ours do not fit neatly together, and the discrepancies give us something to think about.

We are all familiar with the way mixed or conflicting emotions are expressed in observed behaviour from an early age, e.g. when the toddler's cuddling of the baby turns to squeezing. The conflict may not be between love for the baby and aggression towards it, it may be between aggression and the wish to please mother by being loving and ‘good’; but conflict there is, of one kind or another. The issue, however, is: what kind of mental representation of such conflicting feelings can we expect children to have?

The work of experimental developmental psychologists (only one of various strands of current developmental psychology) suggests that until about the age of 6, children cannot imagine two different emotions being aroused by a single situation. Subsequently they can imagine feeling successive emotions, and simultaneous emotions with the same positive or negative valence; but only 9- to 10-year-olds can conceive of experiencing simultaneous opposite emotions arising from the same situation (Harter and Buddin, 1987; Harris, 1989). Yet in psychoanalytic work we expect even very young children, of three to four years, to be able to come to recognize and accept that they have simultaneous opposite feelings; and we find this mismatc