The Early Years of Life

Psychoanalytical Development Theory According to Freud, Klein, and Bion

Gertraud Diem-Wille

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429920523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book provides a powerfully argued and beautifully constructed account of the early development of the child in the family context from a psychoanalytic perspective. It draws on the theoretical trajectory from Sigmund Freud to Melanie Klein and Wilfried Bion.

Chapter One
The nature versus nurture controversy

One of the fundamental questions about child development concerns the significance of biologically inherited genetic features and the influence of the environment. The different answers are based on varying assumptions about the nature of human beings, the research perspective, and varying interpretations of empirical data. Today, there is widespread agreement that the child’s development follows equally a universal pattern, exhibits individual differences, and is influenced by environmental conditions. How much importance is attached to each of these three influences is dependent on the theoretical orientation of the psychologist and the questions he or she asks.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, viewpoints were extremely opposing. Advocates of the racial theory emphasized biological heredity, implying an indisputable racial correlation. This was supposed to prove the superiority of the “Aryan race” as “superhuman”, above all other “inferior races” and the “subhuman”. Under National Socialism, this spurious “scientific” argument was used to legalize the extermination of “inferior lives”—all deformed and abnormal people and the Jews. The systematic and bureaucratically organized murder of more than six million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, and war prisoners in the concentration camps of the “master race” in Germany and Austria between 1933 and 1945 has proven forcefully that, under National Socialism, “racial superiority” served as a pretext for a dehumanized, systematic criminality.

But it was not only in the social sciences in Central and Eastern Europe that the nature of personality and intelligence was accepted as being of leading importance. In the United States, even today every marriage applicant has to fill in a health form with questions about psychic illnesses in the family and inherited maldevelopments. Due to the conviction that intelligence was primarily genetic, up to the Second World War it was the practice of the social services in the USA not to release infants for adoption, but to place them in orphanages for six months in order to find out if they possessed normal intelligence. As emotional relationships and intellectual stimulation in the orphanages were minimal and frequently resulted in delayed development, the children were often assessed as being mentally retarded and sent to corresponding institutions (Mussen et al., 1990: 16). What led to a re-thinking of the social agencies was René Spitz’s (1945: 53) groundbreaking investigation into American orphanages and his discovery of the “hospitalism syndrome”,¹ consequent of the infant’s emotional and intellectual neglect in institutions that were hygienic and correctly run but which did not provide constant offers of relationships. A slow apprehension of the psychoanalytic mindset and Piaget’s (2001) cognitive theories led to the realization that development represented the result of an interaction of maturity-contingent changes and individual experience.

Freud (1905: 179) assumed that children were active creatures who passed through a series of psychosexual development phases, in which they were confronted with certain inner conflicts, desires and fantasies; the manner in which they overcame these was critical for whether they became mature adults capable of work and love, or whether they remained fixated at an earlier stage of development. This thesis—that the early development and early relationship to the parents is highly significant—was revolutionary for its time, had widespread influence, and is generally recognized today. In the standard work on American developmental psychology, it is only in the third printing that Berk goes into the complex “bidirectional connection between biology and environment” and speaks of a “decoupling of the correlation between genetics and environment in psychological illnesses and antisocial behaviour” (Berk, 2004: XXXVI).

Freud (1905) spoke of constitutional factors that play a role in the development of the personality, in addition to experience. Exponents of psychoanalysis today emphasize individual disposition and family influences. The baby’s personality, its temperament, its inborn tendency towards robustness or sensitivity, towards impatience, envy, and tolerance of frustration, all these are factors in the development of psychic illnesses equally important as burdensome family relationships, traumatic experiences, or deprivation. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic pedagogics have effectively shown to what degree infantile behaviour is influenced by emotional encouragement or conflicts. After a therapy in which the inhibiting factors of fear, aggression, or repressed conflicts can be discussed, children who were classified as “stupid” are able to fully utilize their intelligence and social competence. However, before a therapy or child analysis can be recommended, a thorough investigation of the possible somatic and genetic origins of the disorder must be undertaken. Encouragement of the child’s intellectual and social capabilities can only take place within the scope of its given aptitudes; at present there is no way to measure this scope, there is only the psychotherapeutic-diagnostic experience, which shows whether a child demonstrates emotional inhibitions in its development.

In view of advances in biology and psychology, today both assumptions—a predispositional as well as an environmental determinism—are seen as equally naive. Research assumes that a combination of inherited potential and individual experience has made a person what they are and determined how they experience the world. Let us now turn first to the inherited dispositions and then to the environmentally contingent influences.

1.1 Inherited dispositions

The term “genetically contingent” is colloquially equated with a necessary transmission of a genetic factor from the parents to all of their children. This naive assumption will now be compared with several perspectives of biological research into heredity, in order to show that heredity is not a one-dimensional passing on of the parents’ genetic makeup to their children, but rather constitutes a highly complex phenomenon. After this, we will deal with both the beneficial and damaging aspects of inherited dispositions.

Each of us consists of billions of cells. Within each cell there is a nucleus (a control centre) which contains rod-like structures called chromosomes, which preserve and transmit genetic information. The human genetic equipment lies in the chromosomes, which originate in equal parts from the biological parents. Human cell nuclei contain forty-six chromosomes (diploid chromosome complement) in the form of twenty-three correlating pairs (an exception being the gender chromosome pair XY in men). Each half of the chromosome pair corresponds with the other in size, shape, structure, and genetic function. One half originates from the mother and one from the father. Every body cell has forty-six chromosomes, apart from the egg and semen cells. These have only one-half of the chromosome complement (twenty-three chromosomes). In fertilization, when the semen cell penetrates the wall of the egg cell, twenty-three chromosomes are released, just as the egg cell itself releases twenty-three chromosomes; the nuclei of both merge together, and a double chromosome complement exists again, that is, each individual starts life with forty-six chromosomes. Chromosomes consist of chemical modules which are banded together in a giant molecule, deoxyribonucleic acid—or DNA for short. In 1945, Oswald Averyn at the Rockefeller Institute investigated the previously unknown matrix. It took nearly 20 years, until 1962, for Nobel Prize winners James Watson and Francis Crick to discover the substance and structure of DNA, the basis of genetic material. They developed a DNA model that consisted of two molecule chains winding around a single imaginary axis, and built the so-called double helix (similar to a flexible ladder that winds around its own axis like a spiral staircase) (Fraser and Nora, 1986; Moore, 1982). Each rung consists of a specific pair of chemical modules, nucleotide base pairs, connected between the columns by a hydrogen bridge. The specific sequence of chemical elements forms a sequence of nucleotide bases forms—a so-called nucleotide. The varying sequences construct the specific genetic code of an individual, which is significant in protein synthesis and specifies the individual’s genetic programme. A gene is a segment of the DNA. Genes, which carry the genetic makeup, can be of varying lengths—from about one hundred to several thousand ladder rungs. One human cell contains about one million genes; on average, thirty thousand genes lie along the human chromosome. The entire biological inheritance is contained in these twenty-three pairs of chromosomes.

Each body cell has twenty-two pairs of homologous chromosomes at its disposal. The twenty-third pair consists of gender chromosomes, which are different in men and women. Normally, women have two X chromosomes (XX) and men one X and one Y chromosome (XY); the other twenty-two chromosome pairs are equal in both men and women. In cell division (mitosis) the genetic information is conserved and transmitted unchanged to the divided cells. A unique characteristic of DNA is that it can double itself (identical replication) during this process. A surprising result of DNA research was that the genetic makeup of human beings was largely similar to simple organisms such as bacteria and fungi, and was 98 to 99% identical to DNA in chimpanzees and monkeys. Genetic variation between one human and another is 0.9%. How did human beings, with only twice the number of genes of a worm or a fly, manage to develop into such complex creatures? The answer lies in the proteins of protein biosynthesis, a process performed in our genes. They break up and rejoin again in an unbelievable multiplicity—about ten to twenty million types—on the ribosomes, which also lie in the cytoplasm. The genetic information creates the biological data storage and by means of transcription this information is brought from the cell nuclei to the location of protein synthesis. The communication system between cell nucleus and cytoplasm, which fine-tunes gene activity, is substantially more complex in humans than in one-celled creatures. As factors from the environment influence gene formation within the cell, even biological circumstances are equally the result of genetic and non-genetic forces (Davis, Howell, and Gardner, 2001; Berk, 2005: 61).

The ladder like structure of DNA.

In cell division, the double (diploid) chromosome complement with twenty-three pairs is preserved. In the genesis of egg and semen cells (gender cells, gametes) the chromosome complement has to be halved (haploid complement). This occurs in the process of reduction-division (miosis). The “crossing over” in the first phase of this process is the most significant event. The homologous chromosomes—one maternal and one paternal—lie parallel to each other; each has already been divided lengthwise (duplicated) and they have a common “contact point”. Genetic material is exchanged in this “tetrade”. Further along in this process the divided chromosome halves draw apart from each other, resulting in the formation of four daughter cells, each containing half of a chromosome complement, although it is left to chance which chromosome half lands in which cell. In the case of a male there are two semen cells with X chromosomes and two with Y chromosomes; females have only the X gender chromosomes. In the process of fertilization, when the egg and semen cells merge, the resulting cell (zygote) again has forty-six chromosomes (double chromosome complement) at its command. In the cell division process (mitosis) the chromosomes pair off and exchange segments, so that the gene of one chromosome can be replaced by the gene of another. Then chance determines which part of each pair joins another and lands in the same gender cells (gametes). “If one leaves aside the possibility of crossings-over, the total number of different combinations of semen and egg cells of one pair of parents is about 64 billion” (Mussen et al., 1990: 52). So it is understandable how different siblings from the same parents can be, as each child inherits only half the genes from each parent and those in varying combinations. The number of different inheritances is larger than the entire world population. With the exception of identical twins, we can assume that each human being is genetically unique. The probability that the offspring of two parents (if they are not twins) are genetically the same is about one to seven hundred trillion (Gould and Keeton, 1997).

Physical characteristics are largely inherited: eye colour, skin complexion, hair quality and colour. What colour eyes a child actually inherits is not only dependent on the father’s and mother’s eye colour, but on how many genes (for example, for dark eyes) the father or mother has. It is important to point out that all physical characteristics are culturally evaluated. The ideal of beauty in each society has to do with ethnic association. Thus, in European cultural circles white skin colour is considered of positive importance, while dark skin is seen as foreign. The light-skinned ideal of beauty is often held in high esteem even among dark-skinned people. In mythology, the white skin colour is sometimes described as a deficiency. In the Balinese myth of creation brown skin colour is ascribed to “children of the sun”. In this myth, God created human beings by day; they had brown skin and were called children of the sun. Those humans which God created only later, by pale moonlight, had a lighter skin colour and were called “children of the moon”. The characterization of dark skin as good and strong is an obvious one, clearly related to creation in sunlight; whites are lacking something, they only have the weak light of the moon. The same is valid for the length of the nose. In China, Europeans are called “long noses”, a description which evokes sympathy and curiosity, as they do not correspond to the beauty ideal of a dainty nose. Therefore, it is important for personality development how exactly the environment reacts to physical characteristics, if there are socially discriminating or rewarding reactions. In Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling”, the theme is the cruelty of social exclusion based on different appearances. Only when the duckling becomes a swan and finds his parents and siblings is he accepted—a sombre world view, since the duckling/child cannot escape their destiny (Bettelheim, 1977: 101).

In child upbringing, it is therefore important to acquaint children with children’s books about different ethnic myths and fairy tales, in order to treat cultural variety as something natural. For example, in the African myth “The Turtle’s Dream”, included in the series “Folk Tales of the World”, children learn not only the Bantu story of the wonder tree, which bears all the world’s fruit and is discovered not by powerful animals but by the slow and more attentive turtle, but also the African grandmother Koko in her hut with brightly coloured dresses, who knows the secret name “Omumbo-rombonga” (Throughton, 1994: 12).

Parents’ support in view of inherited abilities or deficiencies

We bequeath our children good and bad physical qualities, talents such as musicality or absolute pitch, and greater or smaller impediments to seeing, hearing, and so forth. How children and parents deal with these physically inherited features depends on the quality of their relationship. Here are two short examples.

A nine-year-old girl was sent to the eye doctor because she screwed up her eyes while watching television. The doctor detected moderate short-sightedness and prescribed eyeglasses. The girl was appalled and did not want to wear glasses. She was afraid of being laughed at by the other students in her school. As both her mother and father were severely short-sighted, the mother remarked that the girl’s “impediment” was not surprising; the child had clearly inherited short-sightedness from them. Instead of being placated, the girl came to her mother, hit her on the leg, cried heavily, and complained that her mother had done this to her, that she had given her this defective sight during her pregnancy. The mother felt guilty and discussed the situation with her husband and the girl’s grandmother and aunt—all spectacle wearers.

Instead of laughing at her or wanting to talk her out of her fears, all the family members helped the girl to deal with this new situation. Her father accompanied her to the opticians and she chose six frames in order to decide on one of them at home. While she tried them on, her father told her grandmother that his daughter had a real spectacle face, that eyeglasses suited her well. The grandmother had all the frames shown to her. The girl’s brother, two years younger, also wanted to try on the frames, especially the cool Harry Potter glasses. Looking at himself modelling them in the mirror he laughed with joy and decided that he also wanted glasses. He finally calmed down when his father explained that later on he would also get glasses if he saw poorly and needed them. His sister tried on the different frames with noticeably increasing pleasure. Later, her grandmother told her about when she had tried to hide her shortsightedness, had moved to the front row in class, and nevertheless still had to copy everything from her neighbour. In the afternoon, her aunt rang up, spoke with the girl about the new glasses, and told her about when she had noticed her own short-sightedness. In the evening, the girl mentioned casually that she looked forward to seeing everything clearly with the new glasses.

At first the girl had protested and blamed her parents for her defective vision. With the help of the entire family she succeeded in accepting reality—an important emotional achievement towards bearing frustrations and dealing with restrictions or handicaps.

A second example: a music teacher, who had been a concert guitarist, noticed her daughter’s musicality very early on. At the age of three the daughter could sing many international children’s songs alone and without mistakes. As she observed her mother playing the guitar, she expressed a desire to play too. Her mother bought her a good instrument, taught her the basics of playing, and was delighted at how readily and gladly the little girl made music. Two years later, when the girl expressed a wish to play the violin just as the mother’s violinist duet partner did, the mother took this wish seriously. She hired a young violin teacher to teach the girl how to play. At the age of six, alone in her room, she played the violin with concentration for up to an hour, practiced various songs, and also played together with her mother.

How did the mother succeed in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION The relevance of the first years for personality development
• CHAPTER ONE The nature versus nurture controversy
• CHAPTER TWO The emergence of the body-ego—individuation through the experience of separation and closeness
• CHAPTER THREE Emotional development in the first years
• CHAPTER FOUR Development of thinking and the capacity to symbolize
• CHAPTER FIVE The psychosexual development of a child
• CHAPTER SIX Epilogue
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX