What is a Child?

Childhood, Psychoanalysis, and Discourse

Michael Gerard Plastow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429923838
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

This book unravels the different notions of time and history that are implicit in the history of child psychoanalysis and in the clinical approach to childhood. It is based, in part, on topics that have been addressed in the seminar Psychoanalysis and the Child.

PART I

THE CHILD AND THE INFANTILE: HISTORY AND TIME

CHAPTER ONE


The child: between history and structure

What is a child?

This question, at first glance, might seem trivial and superfluous. Usually there is an assumption that remains unarticulated, that we know what a child is. The answer seems self-evident. Surely one can define a child by age? After all, this is how the question is most often approached. And the age of a child also suggests that the child is at a certain stage of development and maturity. From the perspective of the law, a child’s age implies that he or she is permitted to do certain things and not others. For there to be a child also suggests the presence of parents or carers who take responsibility for the child.

In the clinical setting the limits of childhood are not clear and the usual definitions of the child do not hold up when tested. They are also elastic according to political and other influences. For instance a group defined as infants has been separated out from child psychiatry to form a relatively new field now known as infant psychiatry. These terms infant and child no longer coincide as they did at times in Freud. At the other end of the age spectrum of childhood, some of our child and adolescent mental health services are being extended out from an upper age of eighteen, previously considered to be the limit of childhood and adolescence, to now encompass young people or youth up to the age of twenty-five. Moreover, it is a social reality that the period during which children continue to live with their parents is becoming more and more prolonged. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2009), for instance, discerned that in 1986, nineteen per cent of young people aged between twenty and thirty-four were living with their parents, whereas twenty years later, in 2006, the figure had risen to twenty-three per cent.

The dividing lines of such partitions are fought out in a type of culture war by invested parties who claim the superiority of their particular clinical approach. Thus some advocate that a different division be enacted whereby adolescents are removed from child and adolescent psychiatric services to be placed in adult-like services. Such decisions are made by politicians, albeit with input from some mental health professionals with political influence. What matters here is that the categories defined by age such as infant, child, adolescent, youth, and so on, are arbitrary divisions that are subject to the evolution in the discourses of clinicians, society, ideology, and politics. These apparently self-evident categories cannot be taken as givens.

Ages and stages for the child are also defined by law. The law, for instance, determines the age at which the individual is deemed to be legally responsible and therefore no longer considered a child. There are different ages at which the child or adolescent is able to vote, to have consensual sexual intercourse, or is deemed to be fully responsible for criminal acts, for instance. That such ages have also evolved over time demonstrates once again that the defining parameters of childhood and adolescence are fluid, and the categories that they define are subject to variation and manipulation. Before the law the child is a minor, in other words, something small and diminutive. The rights and responsibilities of the child are accordingly diminished in relation to the law. In particular, a child is not considered to be responsible for his or her acts in criminal law. This is a status that the child shares with the madman.

Even as far as the law is concerned, the notions of childhood and adolescence are quite fluid. The ages at which the minor gains rights and responsibilities have changed over time. This has generally been in the direction of a lowering of ages: the right to vote in many countries, for instance, was previously twenty-one and is now eighteen. The age at which the subject is legally allowed to consume alcohol has also decreased. Ages at which the adolescent is able to legally have sexual intercourse have changed, and can also be different from one sex to the other, and from one state or country to another. And ages regarding criminal responsibility vary according to particular crimes and different legislatures, as well as changing over time.

Moreover, there is a certain irony in the fact that if the overall trend is to lower the age at which the child or adolescent has rights and responsibilities, our society—and this is true here in Australia—has seen fit to extend certain child and adolescent mental health services to precisely the same group. After all, the age group that is now referred to as youth or young people is specifically one that, at the same time, is experiencing a more prolonged period of dependency. In putting these two facts together we could hazard a hypothesis that the increasing rights and responsibilities at younger ages come at a cost: that of a certain disarray and anguish.

Nonetheless, what is recognised as deserving of the attention of clinical services is not so much the anguish and distress, but rather their end result. It is only their final common denominators that are given credence in society by the psychiatric, psychological, and pharmaceutical industry: those of drug use, depression, accidents—including those of the road—and youth suicide.

To go along with a notion of the child based on the parameters of age and stage, then, is to be on very shaky ground. Philippe Ariès notes that in our era, “adolescence is the favourite age” (1960a, p. 30). And the emblems of adolescence which were first the mark of a revolt, such as the wearing of jeans and T-shirts, various aspects of one’s image including the contemporary trend of piercings, tattoos, and various hairstyles and colours, a taste for rock music, etc., have not only become institutionalised as popular culture and therefore commercialised, they have also been integrated into high fashion. Thus there is no contradiction in having a sixty-year-old adolescent. Even the term pre-adolescent has been invented for those who are adolescent before their time so that they need not miss out on this favourite age.

Let us give a couple of clinical examples of the difficulties and dissonances in endeavouring to separate out a notion of childhood based on age and stage.

In a group in a clinical setting for children with social difficulties, two boys were having a fight over who was the “boss” of the group. Another boy said to these first two, “Stop being childish,” to which one of the boys who was fighting said, “But we are children”. Of course this comment is amusing because of the literal way in which the word “childish” is taken. It draws our attention to the fact that one does not need to be within the ages of childhood in order to be childish. It also raises the question of what it is to be a child. What is it then to be childish? The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure puts forward that, “There is no difference between the literal and figurative meaning of words” (2002, p. 47). This is because, as articulated by Saussure, any meaning is a fundamentally negative phenomenon. The meaning of the word childish lies simply in its difference to all other terms such as naive, immature, irresponsible and so on. So, in this way, what amuses us in what is articulated by this young boy lies in a certain truth: that of the tenuousness of the whole question of what it is to be a child or to be childish. This is precisely what is being called into question here.

To take another clinical example, a sixteen-year-old girl was presented by her parents and the school as being very childlike. During her lunch break at school, she would play with mud and engage in other activities that were described as being childish. The girl was the only child of a mother who, as a child herself, had discovered the dead body of her younger sibling. The fragility of childhood had been emphasised by the multiple miscarriages the mother had incurred prior to the conception of this girl. But in the interview with the girl her childish stance and manner of presenting herself was belied by the fact that she constantly twirled her axillary hair, a so-called secondary sexual characteristic, a sign that she was no longer a child, at least physically, despite the appearance and behaviour that she cultivated.

The difficulty in considering the question, what is a child?, is also complicated by the fact that the child is imbued with the ideals of the parents and of society. It is not for nothing that Freud referred to “His Majesty the Baby” (1914c, p. 91), which in turn echoes his earlier formula of “His Majesty the Ego” (1908e, p. 150), whom he says is the hero of every daydream and every story. In other words, this baby, this child, always partakes in the ideal of the parents. And the ego, at whatever age, is the successor to the baby, in his idealisation by the parents, an ideal ego in the reflection provided by the Other.

The French psychoanalysts Jean Bergès and Gabriel Balbo note that for the parents, the child is “themselves, as they suppose themselves to have been as children” (1994a, p. 114). It is for this reason that it is possible for parents to say to their child that schooldays are the best days of your life. This retrospective nostalgia of the adult, projected back onto childhood, reconstructs this childhood as an idealised, trouble-free, and blissful period. Here we begin to perceive one of the discourses on childhood, a discourse that constructs a particular view of childhood, a particular type of childhood.

We can no longer take childhood or the child as what they are considered to be from a common-sense understanding. Childhood is, in one sense, a state determined by the societal, political, ideological, and even clinical discourses that prevail. Such discourses, implicit or explicit, weave our commonly held conceptions of the child in ways that are quite predetermined.

These considerations bring forward the whole question of how, in regard to clinical practice, we construe the notions of time and history. Usually, time is considered to be a linear dimension, and history, and consequently development, is taken as a type of process. If we are not to allow such customary modes of thinking to prejudice the way in which we are able to grasp the child and the notion of childhood in clinical practice, then we must call them into question.

The question of development

The common-sense notion that defines the child in terms of age is taken up in clinical practice and refined by a division into developmental stages and tasks. In most clinical disciplines concerning the child, the so-called developmental approach has become a touchstone in which clinicians believe as a doctrine. Far from being a modern notion as it is portrayed, however, the developmental approach is an inevitable— and symptomatic—fallback position, whenever the notion of ages and stages is not questioned. In some texts it is even proposed that the developmental model emerged from Sigmund Freud himself! The theme of the Ages of Man, which was already prominent in Ancient Greek and Roman times, however, is the font from which developmental theory springs. The developmental model was already present in Oedipus’ reply to the riddle of the Sphinx. While such an approach is promoted as being modern and scientific, it is in fact an elaboration of the ideology passed onto us from the Dark Ages.

Freud is most frequently read in a developmental manner but this is far from the only way in which his works may be taken up. In particular, it is his notion of sexual stages that lends itself to such a reading. Nonetheless, if we examine the text in which this notion is most explicitly elaborated, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, we find that although Freud speaks of “phases of development”, he describes these in relation to what he calls the “Pregenital Organizations” (Freud, 1905d, p. 197). This notion of organisation conveys the concept of a structure that does not limit itself to a particular moment of time in the development of the psyche. Rather, it is an organisation that persists over time, even if it might be more prominent at particular moments in the life of each subject.

On the other hand, the promotion of time as a linear process inevitably leads to the idea of infantile sexuality being a set of stages that the child must pass through in his or her development and in which he or she may remain fixated at certain points. Thus in the hands of many of Freud’s followers, the psychosexual organisations have become fixed as stages. With Anna Freud (1965), for instance, these have become reified into more and more stages and sub-stages that serve as objectifying criteria to determine normality or pathology. One of the effects of the developmental discourse is the insistence on a supposed normality. Or, with Erik Erikson (1950) and others, there are prescribed tasks to perform in order to pass into the next stage. These tasks, though, effectively become the commands of the superego.

The inevitable counterpart of the developmental logic is that the proposed fixations at certain points are seen as signs of an illness, or a delay in regard to the norm. Hence what creeps into this type of understanding is the deductive logic of objective science in which there is a linear notion of cause and effect. The symptoms and signs of the adult are projected back onto the putative causes of such fixations in early childhood. This is precisely the idea that predominates in clinical circles and determines the predominant place of the aetiological formulation, a concept that will be critically evaluated here.

The unquestioning endeavour to understand the child through a notion of ages and stages has led most streams of psychoanalysis after Freud to pursue a developmental line. This inexorable developmental bent, in not being questioned, has continued to plague psychoanalysis and other forms of clinical practice with children. It has afflicted both the history of psychoanalysis as well as the clinical apprehension of the child. Freud himself was not always clear and consistent about what was to be understood by the term child. Nonetheless, we can say that if on the one hand he did not explicitly subscribe to the notion of development, on the other hand he does not make of childhood a theoretical category.

The disciplines of psychology and psychiatry that emerged through the nineteenth century were imbued with a nineteenth-century notion of process. Freud’s psychoanalysis was also influenced by this idea. These ideas continue to permeate clinical practice, for example in the psychiatric concepts of organic process or psychotic process. Some streams of psychoanalysis propose that a psychoanalytic treatment is also a process. Today, however, the origin of this conception of process has been lost. We need to return to earlier texts in order to see this notion articulated more explicitly. Jaspers, for instance, expresses it in the following way:

Process. When some entirely new factor arises from a change in the psychic life that is in contrast to the development of the individual’s life so far, it may be a phase. However where this is a lasting change in the psychic life we speak of a process. (1913, p. 692)

Jaspers goes on to further articulate this notion in relation to the psyche:

Apart from theory and to create a term which will characterize the whole matter and do justice to the fact that we can only approach this from a psychological point of view, we have termed these processes ‘psychic processes’, as distinct from organic processes, using this concept as a marginal concept and not a classificatory one .... These phrases however express the riddle but do not explain it. (p. 693)

Here, in a footnote, Jaspers refers to another paper of his called “Eifersuchtswahn—a contribution to the problem of ‘development of a personality’ or ‘process”’ (p. 693). The notion of development here is synonymous with that of process in so far as it refers to the trajectory of the individual and his or her personality. As I have noted elsewhere (2000a), such a notion of development of the personality can refer only to t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Appreciation
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Part I: The Child and the Infantile: History and Time
• Part II: Psychoanalysis as a Child and Its Protagonists
• Part III Discourses on Childhood
• Part IV: The Child and the Subject
• Epilogue
• References
• Index