Human Development

An Introduction to the Psychodynamics of Growth, Maturity and Ageing

Eric Rayner, Angela Joyce, James Rose, Mary Twyman, Christopher Clulow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135454173
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

A new edition of a classic text

This new edition of Human Development has been thoroughly revised and updated to incorporate recent developments in the field. New material is introduced on the development of a sense of self, the social self and moral development.

Beginning with a discussion of birth and childhood, the reader is lead through each of the crucial stages in human development. The authors reveal the intricate interplay between physical, emotional and psychological factors that contribute to the individual patterns of development that make each of us unique. All of the major milestones of life are covered, including adolescence, work, parenthood and old age. Employing psychoanalytic theories of development, this book reveals the richness that these ideas bring to well-known everyday phenomena.

This highly accessible and jargon-free introduction to human development combines scientific objectivity with a sensitive and sympathetic approach to the subject. It will prove invaluable to anyone involved in the helping professions.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Eric Rayner

This book aims at being a primer for those needing to learn about the emotional and intellectual complexities that can come into people’s lives. It is mainly designed for students of the helping professions; but anyone—from parents to young people still at school—might find it worth reading. It is a simple exercise in combining cool scientific objectivity with the warmth of thoughtful sympathy for people. Its main point of view is that we humans get on best together when enjoying understanding each other; and that one way to start is to be interested in a person’s background.

Our enjoyment of looking back to the start of a person’s life—in biography—is probably as old as mankind’s speech itself. After many millennia of vocal communication came the written word, and then the publication of histories of people. For instance, about 2400 years ago, Xenophon, a Greek soldier and historian, wrote one of our first known biographies about the childhood and youth of Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, a renowned religious conciliator. The title of the book was ‘Cyropaedoeia’—‘The Education of Cyrus’.

However, focus upon a person’s individuality only fully arrived, in the Western world at least, about 2000 years after Xenophon. It seems to have come especially with the Renaissance, centred in Italy. For instance, about 500 years ago, Michelangelo wrote unequivocally what he thought about his own early development. He said ‘Whatever little talent I may have, I owe to the cool winds of Arezzo, the milk of my wet-nurse and the hands of her husband’. In fact, Michelangelo’s parents had placed him in fostercare near Arezzo for the first 10 years or so of his life, with a wet-nurse and her husband who was a stonemason.

Why are we so interested in our experiences of childhood? The answer is that developmental history is crucial because we humans have brains of great complexity and capacity, and these give us uniquely huge and flexible memories. We are great learners from experience. With regard to reference books, Beckett (1981) is useful for general physiology and Pally (2000) is about the mind and brain. Kindle and Smith (1991); Rutter (1993); Sroufe (1996) and Sugarman (1986) are about personality development—all tending to concentrate on childhood. In the Tavistock Clinic series ‘Understanding your Child’ (published in 2004/5), each book deals with one year of age. A baby’s brain starts with controlling simple muscular movements but, using its memory, it rapidly combines and coordinates activities in increasingly complex ways. Later capacities often depend upon earlier experiences. This means that it takes a long time to develop skills to maturity. But we can then often be wide-ranging, adaptable, socially cooperative, sympathetic, thence frequently idiosyncratic—even original and creative.

Of these characteristics, sympathy and cooperativeness are perhaps our most precious gifts—and the most frequently abused. Each person has a chance to end up with their own particular style of thinking and feeling—their own character or personality in other words. But we can be very vulnerable on the way. Humans usually flourish if kindly treated and looked after with fondness, especially when young and dependent. Learning is fastest then, but little children can be catastrophically and lastingly disturbed, not only by the loss of a loved one, but also by their carers’ unfairness, neglect, unpredictability, madness or cruelty.

Sympathy and science

Like other animals, we humans are by nature greedy and competitive; and unlike most other animals, we often find pleasure in killing others of our own species. Violence comes easily to us, but we are also group-living creatures, often crowding in families into villages, towns, suburbs and cities. Here, sympathy and friendliness, like that of Michelangelo’s foster parents, are vital for our survival. These crucial sociable and moral emotions have often been profoundly strengthened by religious traditions—which have, however, also often fostered violent prejudices and murderousness on a great scale.

At the same time humans, like all animals, have to feed to live. We must exploit the environment, and this needs an understanding of the elemental systems surrounding us. Nowadays, knowledge of the physical world is the domain of physics and biology. These are our most crucial sciences—and behind them stands the supreme theoretical discipline of mathematics.

Our desire for systemization probably came with the emergence of these empirical sciences, with their emphasis upon the collection of data. However, while the history of knowledge and reflective wisdom, or philosophy, is a long one, the desire to understand each other’s minds systematically has grown only within the last century or so. One stream of thought here began, largely in France, over a century ago with an interest in collecting data about intellectual functions; this then led particularly to intelligence testing. Here was one root of psychology; another root, also emerging in France, was psychiatry and the investigation of mental illnesses.

Sigmund Freud in Vienna was stirred by this work and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, began to develop his crucial ideas about emotional development, conflict and mental pathology. Freud himself was not particularly interested in spending time on the systematic collection of empirical data to verify his ideas. He was discovering new ways of knowing about how people’s minds worked. He called this psychoanalysis, and that was enough for one lifetime.

From this, a new dimension to human morality has probably arisen. For instance, the great moral command ‘love little children’ has been explicit for at least 2000 years, since the time of Christ. This command is still profoundly necessary, but it is no longer sufficient. We now know that love alone can choke a child unless his or her developmental needs are also recognized. The same applies throughout life. This is another way of saying that, to know as fully as possible about a person, you first need sympathy for them, and then also objectivity about them. For this, knowledge of their background is necessary—where and how they grew up—then, lastly, how they might have been affected by it.

Scientific thinking about the physical world holds its information together using consistent logical and mathematical rules. Thinking about emotions and sympathy is more elusive: our knowledge here comes through awareness of feelings about self and others. A combination of intellectual discrimination about another person’s thinking, together with emotional sympathy about self and others, is usually called empathy. It involves mental acts of identifying with, or feeling the same as another person, while also knowing about our differences from them.

We know now that empathy, crucial to humans living together, begins to take shape in the first days, weeks and months after birth. From the beginning, a mother and baby can be seen attuning to each other. They copy each other’s movements and expressions with mutual relaxed smiles, and later with laughing delight. Daniel Stern, an American psychiatrist, researcher and scholar, wrote about this attunement and how it is an essential precursor of speech and language generally (Stern, 1985). It is now recognized as vital to early mother-infant bonding and attachment, a subject introduced and systematically written about by an English psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and scholar, John Bowlby (1969, 1973, 1980), more than 30 years before Stern’s classic book. There is now widespread scholarly interest in the vital importance of human attachment (Fonagy, 2001; Karen, 1994; Marrone, 1998).

At the same time, pain, indignation, anxiety and misery can easily be communicated—as when we wince on seeing someone getting hurt, or when a baby breaks into tears on hearing another baby cry, or when we find ourselves sobbing at someone else’s tragedy (Klein, 1987).

Summarizing so far: sympathetic sensitivity and scientific objectivity need to be combined to create useful systematic thought about the experiences of people. This sort of thinking is needed over wide abstract vistas, as when thinking socially about cultures; and also in narrow focus, as when making sense of a particular family. Most intimately, sympathy is essential when trying to comprehend the predicaments of a single other person. This is the book’s main interest.

Sympathetic understanding has obviously gone on for millennia in everyday gossip, and in religion. But the development over these last two centuries of socially minded humanitarian ideas, and more systematic attempts to help others by understanding, have resulted in a multitude of innovations: in casework and counselling, in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, group therapy, encounter groups, family and marital therapy, and in many other meditative methods.

This book does not go into detail about these therapies. It is essentially concerned with some of the crucial experiences of people as they grow up, take on responsibilities and find new satisfactions, until old age and death. It focuses upon individual ‘single-selves’ and then sees how people may develop new structures of thought, feeling and action (Piaget, 1999) as they go through life. Psychological development seems often to have some rudiment of inventiveness or creativity in it—but this can often be stunted or distorted. A vital new region of knowledge (Beckett, 1981; Pally, 2000) is now showing us that learning things actually changes the structured patterning of the brain and its neural pathways.

It seems that cultural practices, let alone our personal relationships, need to be deeply attuned to individuals. If this does not happen, ordinary people can easily become playthings for the dreams of ruthlessly grandiose people holding political power. Only individuals suffer or are happy—never social systems.

Biological evolution

Understanding individual experiences probably becomes clearer if set in a wider background of biological evolution. Digesting food from the environment and excreting into it, each organism changes its chemical constituents, but, as a living dynamic system, it nonetheless keeps its own characteristic form until it dies. Some would describe this as having a spirit of its own. What is more, living things tend to perpetuate their own species, often to their own detriment and even death. It seems that many living organisms have inbuilt propensities to preserve their own species’ gene pool rather than themselves.

With the evolution of living things over millions of years, the variety of some species’ exchanges with the environment has developed profoundly. Vertebrates, for instance, can hunt, feed, rest and escape in complex ways that are impossible in simpler living beings. This flexibility is most striking with mammals: their combination of large brains and long infancy, during which time they learn fast, has enabled them to develop a range of activities that far exceeds that of lower animals. Their brains are central control systems. Their neural complexity allows innate reflex patterns to be modified and combined in nigh infinite ways, yet still have coherence for the animal as a whole.

Primates function at a more complex level of central control than any other mammal. Hundreds of thousands of years ago the early ancestors of us human beings seem to have been meat-eating, groupliving, nearly erect, large-brained primates. They were hunters and gatherers, intelligent about the environment, guileful with prey and wary of threats (Dunbar, 1996).

As they lived in groups, humans must have evolved into being sensitivelysympathetic—that is, friendly and cooperative with each other. Those who survived must usually have done so because they could easily attune and submit to group decisions while still keeping their individual skills, self-determination—and pride. Man’s huge brain, with its vast memory, also makes possible reflective thinking and self-consciousness. This is vital for human cooperativeness, and essential when living packed together in mutual dependence.

Attending to an individual

As we are group-living creatures, the need to help other people in difficulty must arise. Friendly concern—by pals, parents, teachers, colleagues, managers, counsellors, social workers and therapists—must come to the fore. Systematic conceptual abstraction and generalization—needed for theorizing by mathematicians, philosophers and research scientists—need to step into the background. However, we shall think abstractly a great deal about feelings and emotional characteristics.

‘Being personally helpful’ is a keynote of this book. We five writers are specialized workers with individuals. Angela Joyce and Mary Twyman were originally social workers, while Jim Rose and I were psychologists. Chris Clulow started out as a probation officer before specializing in couple work. Our underlying viewpoint will be psychoanalytic, although observations from other disciplines will continually be drawn upon. The book is thus largely based upon knowledge gleaned from intimate, detailed, emotional-verbal understanding; from therapy, casework and friendships with individual people.

As we have seen, Freud found a starting point for his own systematic thinking from the French psychiatrists—and psychoanalysis was born. Since those days, thinkers from across the world have modified his ideas. There is no need to go into these theories now, but it is important to be clear that this book is, in one way at least, like psychoanalysis. Both are concerned with an open-minded, relaxed way of paying attention to another person; then feeling along with them and thinking about what they are saying, doing, feeling and thinking.

Let us imagine an everyday example of a similar kind of relaxed attention, but of a non-professional kind. Say, we are having a cup of tea at the home of an old schoolfriend who is now a young mother. As she is cutting up some food and putting it into a pan, she comments with a note of exasperation in her voice, ‘Must get this damn stuff done before Jo wakes up. It won’t be done in time if I have to go off to collect the others from school first, and Bill always says he’s hungry when he gets home’. The baby stirs upstairs; the young woman looks drawn and purses her lips. She says nothing, then the cloud seems to lift from her face and she says, ‘Do you remember that first evening of the sixth form play, oh, that applause! I’ll never forget it. We were somebody then. But that old cow of a drama teacher—all she would do was tell us when we had fluffed our lines.’

We have here noticed the mother’s movements about the kitchen, the expressions on her face and so on. We have also empathized with her. We sympathetically felt along with her hurry, her weariness, her affection and sense of duty—and her anger. We identified ourselves with her. We also noted her shifting away from the present, probably in relief, to an enjoyable memory of the past.

We might go on to wonder whether her gloom was transient—or was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preamble
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Being pregnant
• 3 The first six months: the baby getting started
• 4 The second six months: the baby getting organized
• 5 One to two years old: junior toddlers
• 6 Two to three years old: senior toddlers
• 7 Three to five years old
• 8 Early school days
• 9 Adolescence
• 10 Work, identity and love
• 11 Partnership and marriage
• 12 Parenthood
• 13 Being alone
• 14 Mid-life
• 15 Old age
• 16 Dying, grief and mourning
• Conclusion
• Suggested films and videos
• References
• Index