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RELIGION
Published in Teachers College Record 102,3 (June 2000). All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT:
This paper offers an approach to child study that moves beyond the traditional
modern domains of medicine, education and the social sciences, to explore the
representation and symbolization of the child in philosophy, social and cultural
history, myth and spirituality, art, literature, and psychoanalysis. It considers
childhood as a cultural and historical construction, and traces the ways in
which characterizations of children function symbolically as carriers of deep
assumptions about human nature and its potential variability and
changeability, about the construction of human subjectivity, about the ultimate
meaning of the human life cycle, and about human forms of knowledge. The
child as limit condition—as representing for adults the boundaries of the
human—that is “nature,” animality, madness, the “primitive,” the divine—is re-
evoked continually in modern and postmodern symbolizations, and then
tension between reason and nature or instinct, or Enlightenment and
Romance, is never far from their surface. Finally, the extent to which the
construction of “child” also implies a construction of “adult” is explored in the
context of the history of culture and of child rearing, particularly in the rise of
the modern middle-class European adult personality, which defined itself on
the basis of its distance from childhood—both the child before it and the child
within. An ideal of adult maturity which includes rather than excludes
childhood is capable of transforming our notions of optimal child rearing and
education.
hundred years old, and children have been around somewhat longer than
hegemony of psychology and sociology in child study which arose at the turn
of the 20th century as an impediment to genuine inquiry, because, like their
bear upon this life phase of childhood . . ." (p. 21) Gareth Matthews (1996)
"We should be on the lookout," he says, "for what a given model may
childhood per se, but to a form of human science which is not philosophically
serves the prevailing social, economic, and political order. The outcomes of
implications for the future of child rearing, education, and the way adults
forms of knowledge, and tends to fall within two realms of discourse. First, it
is an inquiry into what adults can know about children and the experience of
Just what kind of difference is the difference between children and adults?
and thought? What are the similarities and differences between the ways
they tell us? This is where the notion of child as a voice from the margins,
hitherto excluded from adult discourse, and therefore from adult self-
"children," the term would no longer have any meaning; the same is true if
we were all born and remained "adults." Thus, any philosophical inquiry into
evolution of the adult-child relation in society; and it follows from the polar
structure of the relation, that adults who learn to identify and serve the
needs of children with more sensitivity and precision, learn to do so for each
other as well.
discovery that childhood has meant and can mean differently to children and
the rise of cultural anthropology early in the 20th century; the historical
dimension has only begun to be investigated in the last 30 years, in the new
to just what degree? How much can childhood change over time, or differ
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from culture to culture, and still be what we call childhood? Are there clear
either children thought, felt and acted more like adults, or, conversely, adults
thought, felt and acted more like children? Just what do we mean by the
children "male" and "female" in the same way that adults are? What are the
limits of difference in the gendering of the two sexes, and what is the role of
childhood in the gendering process? Then there is the question of just what
drives and patterns historical change in the way adults construct and
what constitutes positive change? Finally, if "child" and "adult" are indeed a
necessarily does adulthood. If this is the case, what is the calculus of that
mutual change? Is there some normative balance between the two which we
academic sense of the term "philosophy." They imply a further inquiry into
history, in mythology and the history of spirituality, in the history of art and
education. The images that we find of children in these fields are myriad and
about the ultimate meaning of the human life cycle, and about human forms
of knowledge.
explore before finding our way into others. It establishes a historical and
prejudgments that we bring to any form of child study. It is a probe into the
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deep assumptions--the symbolisms--that we carry into our everyday dialogue
with the child's forms of life and thought. It demonstrates in a vivid, direct
way, both our distance from and our nearness to childhood, not only in terms
children in the media. Each area of focus can lead us to better see how
children have been and are imagined differently by adults. It is assumed that
the child does not fare particularly well in adult male construction (we do not
women, slaves, and the "inferior multitude"--to be liable to the "great mass
of multifarious appetites and pleasures and pains" (p. 125) of the naturally
immoderate. In his influential construal of the human soul as a dynamic
exemplars of the untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will. "They are full
of passionate feelings from their very birth" (p. 138) The "boy, . . . just
because he more than any other has a fount of intelligence in him which has
not yet 'run clear', . . . is the craftiest, most mischievous, and unruliest of
brutes. So the creature must be held in check . . ." (1961, p. 1379). For
Plato, children's only virtue appears to be that they are "easily molded," i.e.
action toward a final end, or "some kind of activity of the soul in conformity
with virtue." For this reason the child cannot be called "happy"; and if we do
call him happy, "we do so by reason of the hopes we have for his future"
(1962, p. 23).
are differences in kind rather than degree, the child doesn't so much turn
into an adult, as she is made into one. Aristotle's and Plato's analyses are
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first statements of a perennial symbolization of the child as both deficit and
male, free-born, and governed by reason--but are not. They combine the
reason in right relation to will and appetite--whereas the woman and the
slave never will. But the presence of deficit and danger make that transition
parents:
To be a true father, you must take absolute control of your son's entire
being; and your primary concern must be for that part of his character
reflecting the divine. . . Is there any form of exposure more cruel than
raised according to upright principles and to live a good life? (p. 67)
lower rung of the great chain of being was challenged--if not in common
challenge is fitful and ambivalent, but it opens a space for the reversal of the
reformulation of the image of the child in the early 19th century as a type of
"genius," i.e. a unified or integrated human being, not yet fallen into the
The first man is the first spiritual seer. To him, all appears as spirit.
What are children, if not such primal ones? The fresh insight of
For the Romantic imagination, the child prophecies the highest goal of
of unity into division, and through division to a higher unity, then the child
They are what we were; they are what we should once again
eternally remains most dear to us, but fill us with a certain melancholy.
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But they are also representations of our highest fulfillment in the ideal,
In fact, the Romantic reformulation of the early 19th century was not
new to the history of the image of the child. As any powerful symbolic image
developed was also present as early as Plato, and before that in Taoism. It is
more in touch with spiritual reality than the adult. In ancient Athens for
the Eleusinian Mysteries, where he or she went before the initiates, making
the first contact with the gods (Golden, 1990). As Mark Golden says of this
practice, "It is children's very marginality which makes their role appropriate.
Not yet fully integrated into the social world of the polis, they are interested
outsiders, a status they share with the gods with whom they intercede" (p.
44). Jesus' sayings in the New Testament regarding young children, in which
squarely into Christianity. As early as 600 B.C., The Tao de Ching (Lao Tzu,
1990) identified the infant with the spiritual master: "He who is in harmony
with the Tao is like a newborn child. Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,
but its grip is powerful." And Pierre Erny (1973) summarizes African images
well-acquainted with the full condition of man, since he lives it, an ignorant
being close to supreme wisdom, the child is thus a complete being, but
symbolization of childhood and children. Both sides of the image turn on the
child as a liminal form of life, i.e. a being at the threshold, still connected
with "other worlds," whether it be the world of the animal or of the god. It
other forms of human difference. There is also a long tradition in the West of
to assume the same position of limit condition of the human, except that in
Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from
escaping the implications of both. For Aristotle, "man calls himself man"
on the hierarchical chain of being, and to both fear and desire "nature,
animality, etc." is not according to the (true) nature of that station. For the
the other hand, sees the human subject as constructed in contrast to what it
is not--its "other," i.e. "nature, animality, etc." Therefore it is never itself, but
only the production of a paradoxical relation. His "child" symbolizes both the
differance"--and its loss to itself through that very unification. Lyotard (1992)
evokes the Romantic side of this paradox, without mitigating its pathos, in
modern conceptions, and the tension between reason and nature or instinct,
or Enlightenment and Romance, is never far from their surface. The most
primary process and secondary process, or the pleasure principle and the
adult these worlds must be divided and thus the child must be eradicated, if
us, and for play instead of work." And he adds, "The possibilities adumbrated
understand more consciously that the continuum of the life cycle is both
diachronic and synchronic, and that both the child and the adult are present
projective and ambivalent relationship lying at the heart of the adult view of
simpler than a child?) there is for the adult a marginal other, the not-I in a
primal form, and as such, a natural screen for projections. One way to test
history of the adult-child relation. The evidence available for this is sketchy
sources, such as journals, legal and demographic records, tracts, stories and
legends, etc.; but we do have several strong--and controversial--theories
which interplay with the account of child symbolization I have just outlined.
The first originated with Phillipe Aries' (1962) seminal volume on early
modern social and familial history, Centuries of Childhood. Aries makes the
case that childhood as we know it today did not exist in the medieval world,
pastimes.
and private life began a transition into a form of life which today we
the history of culture and technology (Elias, 1978; Ong, 1982; Foucault,
childhood, some do not, but all of them have major implications for the study
shift that children undergo in "growing up"--a shift between internal and
calls it "a change in human affect and control structures taking place over a
sociability." Not only children and adults, but different classes, occupied the
room, and often more than one person slept in one bed. Expressions of both
occupied a different ratio between self and community, inside and outside,
private and public. European human subjectivity had not, in Elias' words,
begun to understood itself as "closed," separated off from all other people
perhaps was also more characteristic of participants of the ancient Stoic and
begun to fade (Koyre, 1957). The new world-picture demanded "an increased
young children's thinking beginning with Piaget in the early part of this
Innes (1951), Marshall McLuhan (1962), and Walter Ong (1982), into what
"close to the human life world," "empathetic and participatory rather than
individual words: his thought "is nested in speech" (p.75). These noetic
modes also characterize, to a great extent, the child, and especially the
young child. This should not be surprising, given that most children are ten
years old or more before they are able, for example, to read a newspaper
comfortably.
matches, in turn, the shift in the boundaries of the self described by Elias
and Aries. The more and more common activity of silent reading, which
"fostered a silent relation between the reader and his book, were crucial
changes, which redrew the boundary between the inner life and life in the
influences, began to redraw the boundary between child and adult as well.
The child stayed the same, while the adult "grew up." Stories previously
enjoyed by everyone became "fairy tales," now thought suitable only for
children, and the same was true of what we now think of as children's
games. From the 16th century on, countless manuals of etiquette were
between those intended for adults and those intended for children" (p.119).
They emphasize a new modesty and self-restraint in eating at table, in
"reader" in the larger sense of the term: she reads both social situations and
her own interior state with a new sense of care, an act requiring a new self-
she is not an adult. As Neil Postman (1982) has put it, ". . . the new
from the adult world it became necessary to find another world for them to
positive world, with its own characteristics--for this we must wait until the
20th century, and the rise of a genuine interest in the child's construction of
the world. Rather, it was a world of deficit, of need, and even of danger. For
the new task of turning children into adults, a new institution became
necessary: the school. Not that the school had not existed before, but it was
transformed into a dimension of what Foucault (1979) has called "the great
confinement," or the rise of prisons, schools and insane asylums for purposes
of "moral reform and constraint" (p.138) in the early and mid-modern period.
Just as the new "disciplinary technology" developed for the criminal and the
and classification for purposes of control and manipulation was applied to the
child. Like the insane and the criminal, the child was understood to be in
need of being forged, as Foucault puts it, into a "docile body that may be
What prompts the adult to need to control and manipulate the child--to
transform her into an adult through force, whether the rigid, punitive form of
home? If we return to Elias' account of the rise of the modern adult as a shift
represent that world of instinctual freedom from restraint which the modern
concern for the child--although that is certainly not lacking--as from the
"nature" which she has left behind in her cultural "coming of age." Elias’
account merits quoting at length:
level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many centuries.
Their instinctual life must be rapidly subjected to the strict control and
specific molding that gives our societies their stamp, and which
again and again on the adult threshold of delicacy, andC-since they are
not yet adaptedC-they infringe the taboos of society, cross the adult
shame frontier, and penetrate emotional danger zones which the adult
himself can only control with difficulty. . . . In this situation the adult
those for whom the standard of society has become Asecond nature@
(p.167).
Elias' account of the widening divide between adult and child in the
(1974) has proposed six such modes. He bases his argument on social,
cultural and family histories, memoirs, instruction books for parents, letters,
and closer approaches between adult and child" (p. 3). deMause's account is,
screen or vehicle for their own repressed instinctual affects of sexuality and
aggression, or, as deMause puts it, as "containers for dangerous projections"
(p.51) The crucial moment in the adult-child relation comes when that
demand. Adults can react in one of three possible ways to the anxiety
"voids feelings" onto the child, and sees the child as threateningly
adult uses the child as a substitute for an adult figure from her own
childhood, and punishes the child for not meeting the needs which that adult
did not meet. In the "empathic reaction," the adult, in deMause's words, is
able to "regress to the level of the child's need and identify it without an
admixture of the adult's own projections. The adult must then be able to
maintain enough distance from the need to be able to satisfy it" (p.7).
"enter into into the parents' emotional life" (p. 51) further. The evolutionary
status of the theory has been questioned by Petschauer (1987; 1989), who
more than the others. Societal changes in attitudes towards children are the
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result of a complex, interactive web of economic, demographic,
the early modern adult, is the suggestion that the empathic reaction is made
possible, not through identifying with children through being like them, but
when the adult is able to deal consciously with the anxiety produced by the
"emotional danger zone" which children trigger through their relative lack of
the child's raw instinctual expression or demand. When she has the ability
both to "regress to the level of the child's need" and to maintain separation,
she can avoid projection and correctly identify that need as other than
hostile, demonic, sinful, manipulative, etc. The ability of more and more
of their own sexual and aggressive unconscious material--is the central force
in this advance.
and the rise of the "shame frontier" traced by Elias--i.e. the new balance of
differentiation between adult and child which Elias and Aries describe falls
in the high middle ages suggested by the increase of the cult of the Virgin
and the infant Christ, who on a cultural level, comes to represent the child in
general (Aries, 1963; McLaughlin, 1974). The Ambivalent adult sees in the
reject him, and the possibility for making him over, through fear, shame,
the repugnance which they arouse in thinking men" (p.114). Yet children are
foundling hospitals, and farmed out to wet nurses in the countryside for the
and the more liberal views of John Locke (1968), the child is understood by
the whole human race. On the other hand she is--as is the adult--a free
the adult (Sommerville, 1992). For this reason the child needs to be both
loved and forcibly dealt with, or, as deMause describes it, "prayed with but
not played with, hit but not regularly whipped . . . and made to obey
child's "own good," i.e. with the goal of internalization of the adult superego.
the Socializing Mode, which calls for "shaping" and "channeling of impulses"
rather than direct confrontation with the child's "nature" which is
authority, affection and sex within the middle and upper ranks of society" (p.
childhood mentioned earlier. The Romantic parent and educator show a new
respect for the child's energies, and a concern that education, as Coleridge
put it, function to "carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of
manhood" (Plotz, 1977, p.68), rather than forcibly replacing childhood with
adulthood.
adult self-understanding has traveled furthest from its own "child." From a
dialectical point of view, this would be the moment when the overcoming of
nostalgia for a lost unity of self--a return to one's instinctual life from
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, Romanticism's child
has found her tortuous way, often in ambiguous, even ambivalent forms, into
Freud, for whom the inevitable passional conflicts of childhood became the
modernism to produce and reproduce. After Freud, the Western adult begins
value and importance of the child's instinctual life leads to an adult who is
now more able to enter into dialogue with the forms of life of real children.
As the adult comes to understand the real and symbolic power of childhood
especially in the first six years, [in]. . . helping a young child reach its daily
goals [by] continually responding to it, playing with it, tolerating its
regressions, being its servant rather than the other way around, interpreting
its emotional conflicts, and providing the objects specific to its evolving
childhood. But this very psychological separation carried its antithesis within
it, and at the very height of "enlightenment," the adult began turning back to
the child. Through dialogue with the child's form of life, he received the
"word" of the child as a new message about himself. The outcome of this
world of adults; to accord, in spite of differences, the respect due all humans
images and themes of childhood that we find scattered through the history
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of Western art and mythology. These themes also suggest an inherent
from the early hellenic god Eros, who was represented as a youth, are young
nature, the elements, love and death. They are the little "godlets" who
The erotes are to be found throughout the seasons; they make the
flower wreath of spring and tread the grapes of autumn; they bustle
they sail on the high seas and go hunting merrily; they watch over the
sleep of young lovers and provide old age with crutches. The erotes
combine the most unlikely contrasts and hold together body and soul,
that child, present from Aristotle through Derrida, who, is on the boundaries
between the animal, the human and the divine. He also evokes the
statuary, most frequently Dionysius and Hermes (Jung & Kerenyi, 1963).
What is distinctive about the myths associated with these figures, and
with myths of child heroes like Taliesen in Irish mythology, or King Arthur, or
the storied biographies of saints of the middle ages, is that they are typically
actually of tremendous power. Jung & Kerenyi called this figure the "divine"
malevolent adults such as evil kings or jealous step-parents, and are taken in
grow up in bucolic solitude. Although they are delivered into the hands of
Western art for a time, and all the mythic elements of the divine or
primordial child were taken into the figure of the child Jesus, who like these
before the figure of Jesus re-encountered the divine child. Although there are
images of the child Jesus which began to proliferate after the triumph of
1976; Lasareff, 1938). Rather than resembling the eroti of Hellenistic art, this
Christ child is very much a little adult: he is stiff and hieratic, seated rigidly
on his mother's lap, often holding up one hand in a triumphal gesture. Here
is the word of god, arrived in triumph from afar, seated on the mother's--the
arises, the male god who is only coincidentally a child. Somewhere in the
13th century, in the beginnings of the Italian Renaissance, this royal child
psychological realism. The child who was first dressed in a flowing robe is
child. During the 1400's he begins to be represented with fewer and fewer
clothes, and by 1500 with either a brief, gauzy piece of material around his
with greater realism, and his pose and gesture as well. Eventually we find
him playing on his mother's lap, reaching for her mouth, or her breast, or
the angels at the nativity, or present at the mystical appearance of the Virgin
transitional figures between the spiritual and the earthly, the sacred and
eroti who occupy the boundary of the picture-plane in the well-known Sistine
background where life in the foreground comes to its end; on the contrary, it
is just here that the divine wisdom becomes manifest, playing in the shape of
Hellenistic eros and the childhood of the god in the Christ child. As Western
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art passes into Mannerism, Rococo and early modern realism, this same child
family portraits in which their infant child reclines in naked, divine child
splendor on their laps. If we look at this process from the point of view of the
one relatively minor ancient pagan motif among many--the divine child--into
child Jesus, the childhood of the god, the divine child, the child hero and the
motif--the male and female figures called the "anima" and "animus," the
"wise old man," the "mother," the "shadow," the "maiden," etc. (Jung,
the psyche which he calls "individuation." He concludes that the divine child
invincibility--signal both the fragility and the strength of this emergence. The
child archetype is that overlooked part of the self--"smaller than small but
bigger than big"—a place where subject and object, conscious and
the child of the Romantics. The perennial myth which Romantic thought
translated into modern, secular terms was that of an original fall from unity
the regaining of the original unity on a higher level (Abrams, 1971). The
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Romantics translated this myth from theological into psychological terms.
The child represents the original unity of consciousness and the unity with
nature, "before the fall"--a fall into the internal divisions which characterize
adulthood. This "fall" into division is necessary for the higher unity to
emerge. The child represents not just the "beginning" but the end, the goal
Schiller said (see p. 8 above) "They are what we were; they are what we
archetype representing the unified self--as divine child with Jung's child
child, and socially in the evolution of child rearing modes, which deMause
archetype as the "permanent child" which every adult has as a part of her
and world, a "fusion with the world" (p.136) in early childhood. This adult
experience is still part of the adult psyche--"an anonymous childhood, a pure
psychotherapy.
The archetypal child that I have been tracing through Western art and
psychoanalysis also finds its way into the secularized, complex, embodied
Reinhard Kuhn (1982) has identified numerous texts in which there appears
adults who surround her. These children, Kuhn says "seem to have a
message to convey that they forget just as soon as they are old enough to
transmit it" (p.64). The enigmatic child figure can be, in Kuhn's terms, either
energy; she is her mother's alter ego; she is in an intimate relationship with
nature, the playmate of animals and the elements; and she bears traces of
unified form the instinctual nature which the adults around her, locked in a
Images of a mythic child already appear in Greek mythology and art, but
European Christian iconography from about the 13th to the 16th century.
This child represents for adults the instinctually unrepressed in its psycho-
repressed adult as in dialogue with her instinctual self, and the appearance
contents. The implications of this process for actual relations between adults
leading to greater capacity both for objectivity and empathy on the part of
traversed here. The primary message of this material is that adults construct
childhood, on the basis of deep-seated prevailing cultural images combined
with the residues of their own childhoods. The parent or caregiver brings her
construction into dialogue with real children, who, in turn, construct a world
dispositions" (p.44). The child brings the power to grow--a power which
adults have, more often than not, lost to one degree or another.
of the adult's positioning in the interaction. But it is just in this disparity that
the opportunity for growth among parents and caregivers lies. It seems to be
the case that the more adults recognize that aspect of themselves which is
still a "child," the more mature they become--i.e., the more both objective
1985). The more adults are able to recognize that the human life cycle
involves a dialectical interplay between "adult" and "child," the less they see
effected the actual history of childhood per se--i.e. the way adults construct
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the world for children, the attention they pay to them, the care they exercise
for them, the extent to which they seek their good. If our new ideal of adult
maturity includes childhood rather than excluding it, then our notions of
element of the teleology of her own life-cycle. This makes, not for more
"childish" adults, but perhaps for more "childlike" adults--a new relationship
to one's instinctual and affective life, and one's sense of integration of the
various elements of one's self. The adult's increased ability to overcome the
a reconstruction of the child which allows the latter a greater voice in the
are in dialogical relation with their own "child" have greater capacity to, in
Dewey's terms, "grow," and therefore to raise children who have that same
capacity.
Are there more of these adult "hermeneuts" in the world today than
there were in the past? It may be true that we cannot postulate a global
and intrusive adults raising children today as there are socializing and
empathic. But if the psychohistorical processes which have led to the
empathic mode have increased by even a small amount, there is reason for
hope, not only for childhood, but necessarily for human adulthood as well.
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