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10th March 1969.
Dear Mr. Collinson,
I was very glad to hear from you from the centre of Tanzania, and it is fun for me to think that my book has reached Tabora. My greetings to your wife and to yourself and I hope that your ex-2-year-old is developing well.
It does not surprise me at all that you see some sort of connection between social anthropology and a study of babyhood, especially if babyhood is taken to include the dependence which is part of it. Perhaps some time or other I shall be able to read your article on universals of symbolism.
It is difficult to answer your very interesting questions in a letter. We need to meet and to discuss the ideas that we have in common and the places where we may find ourselves disagreeing. From my point of view, innate leaves it open more than the word inborn would do, for a concept of tendencies as inherited but not necessarily reached. I called one of my books The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment and you can see from this title that I find the inherited tendency cannot operate alone, and that in the developing baby and child it is the environment that facilitates individual growth. The opposite extreme would be to say that we teach our children everything, which of course is manifestly absurd. We cannot even teach them to walk, but their innate tendency to walk at a certain age needs us as supporting figures, and quite possibly your own child needed to touch somebody's finger while walking at an early stage, getting moral support for something which had already become a possibility for him or her in physiological and anatomical terms. I think you will find that it will not be difficult for us to agree in these matters but of course my use of words may pull red herrings across issues which, if better stated, would be quite simple.
In regard to the more difficult question of morality, I do feel that the same principles that I have just been discussing apply, but of course the whole thing is very much more