Infantile Ideals1

The only dictionary definition of the ideal which does not prejudge the situation—as that it 'exists in imagination only'—is 'a conception of something or a thing conceived as perfect in its kind'. But used in its more absolute sense we can say it means the highest conception of everything—of a total situation excluding nothing of which we have or can have awareness, or of which we can conceive. When we speak of a something, of a particular situation, out of this everything as being ideal, we are obviously subtracting the enormously greater part of the total situation, and are using the word in a limited and secondary sense. But this is the sense in which I shall use the word in this paper, using the term absolute ideal for the unqualified and unlimited or total ideal. This ideal, in which everything reaches one's highest conception of it, is naturally the more nearly and easily attainable the more limited our 'everything'. Therefore infancy with its limited radius of desire and conception is the time when, other things being equal, the absolute ideal can, from that point of view, be most nearly realized, as well as most hopelessly threatened, with the exception of adult sexual relationships in which the conscious world is limited to two people become one. Those who do not put the whole stress on conscious formulation will not stumble over the word 'conception' in connection with infancy. The smallest infant certainly has some kind of awareness of the difference between happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, comfort and discomfort, content and discontent—whichever pairs of words best describe his type of awareness of contrasting states.

But I am also in this paper using the term 'negative ideal', which may seem a contradiction in terms. I do not think it is, if we keep to the definition 'the conception of something or a thing conceived as perfect in its kind, ' or, more shortly, 'the highest conception of anything'—that is, keeping it in the limited an