The Child:  Development, Archetype, and Analytic Practice.

Christopher Hauke

A paper first presented at the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Kent, England on November 19th, 1994.

Since the early days of psychoanalysis, the importance of the child and early experience in the understanding and treatment of adult psychopathology has been emphasised in different ways.  This emphasis has led to the current position, where some conception of the child the patient once was is seen as central to analytic treatment. In Britain especially, psychoanalysis - object relations in particular - and the developmental school of Jungian analysis, tend to privilege the child in their heirarchy of the psyche, so much so that analysing the "child in the adult" has become the royal road to the unconscious. Indeed, there is a danger that the unconscious itself will be seen, even in Jungian circles, as comprising nothing more than the repressed and repudiated contents of childhood experience. This view of our field may seem  exagerrated and, of course, most professional analysts, whatever their training, do pay attention to much more than the child when working with their patients. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable tendency in depth psychology to ape the  weltanschauung  that pervades modern culture when we seek to explain human behaviour as the result of childhood experience. This crude reductionism is only partly attributable to the attitudes and discoveries of Freud; it has other cultural sources I will go into later, but the point to note here is that depth psychology is not immune from its pull.

Freud's theory of ego development and functioning required the assumption of an original, primitive and unsophisticated psychic state that gradually becomes shaped or adjusted to more or less successful human functioning through the influence of parenting and cultural forces. Following a Darwinian emphasis on the linear evolution of the species, the model proposed an instinctual, animal-like nature within all human beings (with priority given to the sexual instinct), and it was this instinctive animal base that had to be accomodated or repressed for civilised human life to come about.

The human infant quickly came to be regarded as the model for the postulated original instinctual state of the psyche.The infant qualified well. The baby and young child, significantly without speech in a system where language defined what was human and what was animal, showed behaviour apparently dominated by instinctual drives, and these were quite distant, and distinct, from the adult norm.  I have used the word "model" to describe this use of the child, but perhaps I should have said "example" or "metaphor" for the original state of the psyche. To say "model" already begs the crucial question of whether we are dealing with the empirically true beginnings of a human psyche, or whether this is simply the best model we have been able to find for imagining an eternally present aspect  of the psyche, an aspect that is just one among the psyche's infinite facets.

Jung, of course, split with Freud over the nodal importance of infantile sexuality, and he differentiated his position further by not exploring the field of early development systematically, quite in contrast to his detailed psychological study of individuation in the second half of life. For this neglect of childhood he has been viewed as throwing the baby out with the hydraulics, and a significant post-Jungian development has been the efforts of Michael Fordham and others at the Society of Analytical Psychology to develop a model of the psyche, and of treatment, that once again situates early experience within the process of individuation. I see two limitations to this project. One is the prevalence, still, of a view of the "child as primitive". Although object relations theory sought to address the scientistic, overmechanical style of Freud's original views, instinct and infant are still somehow identified in contemporary theory, to the extent of being defined by each other. In Kleinian thought especially, it is still  infantile instinctual drives that are the motor of the object relating that is going on.  The second limitation is, I believe,  how Jung's theory of the archetypes already accounts for the instincts in a more satisfactorily psychological way,  not so dependent on chronology and diachrony, thus reducing the need for emphasis on the child as the locus of our instinctual nature and its struggles.

From this point of view there still seems to be a very real tension between post-Freudian/Kleinian models on the one hand, and developmental post-Jungian models  on the other, despite the attempts to synthesise them. This skew in theory is in addition to an acknowledged gap between post-Freudian and classical Jungian models. I believe we have yet to achieve a successful restoration of the child in Jungian psychology.

In working towards this goal we need to consider further how and why the child image retains its importance, and ask, in the teleological fashion emphasised in Jungian psychology, what is its purpose?  To fully assess the phenomenom of the inner child, we need to address practically some specific historical and socio-political issues around contemporary human reproduction. By practical, I mean to look at the actual role of the family, child-rearing, and the reproduction of culture as it proceeds in the West in present and recent times. I do not believe that depth psychology, and least of all its emphasis on the child,  can be discussed without addressing its social and historical context. For instance, the "child", in the present imagining of analysis and the psyche, is specifically the young infant.  This results in a model of the analytic endeavour structured around the metaphor of a mother-baby relationship, with implications for an unquestioned linkage between women and infants. I will look at the qualitative effect of this matrilineal approach later, but to begin with I would like to delineate some of the more obvious assumptions involved in maintaining the child in depth psychology. I have isolated three of these to discuss as the, so to speak, "areas of fixation" that ensure the gravitational pull of the child image.  They are:  i) The influence of biological theories in establishing stages of early development. ii)  The role of early experience, and  iii) The special case of early "trauma". I will follow these with my own view of the child archetype, and of the social and political contributions to the collective that reveal and structure the child motif in present day culture.  I will illustrate points relevant to analytic thinking by using observational material and, finally, I will address the current concept of analytic treatment, its claims and limitations, in the light of my discussion.

"Areas of fixation":   

(i) Biology, evolution and the stages of ego development.

Freud's account of the libidinal and ego development of human infants -  the oral, anal and genital stages or phases -  formed part of his effort to place psychoanalysis on a solid scientific base that was recognisable in the terms of his day.  In trying to base a science of the mind upon established biological, therefore "scientific" principles, Freud called upon two contemporary theories. One was the Darwinian model of the  evolution of species, which depicted stages of development within a linear progression. Another was the theory of biogenetics of Haeckel and Bolsche, who were, like Freud, part of the late nineteenth century's "materialist" effort to extend the application of evolutionary theory to human moral faculties and cultural institutions. Biogenetics, for instance, advanced the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, meaning that in "man", the development from fetus to adulthood - ontogeny -  provides a brief recapitulation of the entire history of the race - phylogeny.  Freud's emphasis is clear in 1916 when he says of the courses of ego and libidinal development: "both of them are at bottom heritages, abbreviated recapitulations, of the development which all mankind has passed through from its primaeval days over long periods of time"  (S.Freud.  Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.  Standard Edition,  Vol. 16.  London, Hogarth Press,  p.354).  Freud's initial groundbreaking model of the child's pregenital psychosexual development had from the beginning clearly less to do with observed  phenomena in real human infants, than with placing instinctual development within an established phylogenetic frame.

This overarching project becomes even clearer when we discover that the oral, anal, genital sequence itself derives from Haeckel's notion of the primeval gastraea.  Haeckel had noted that in the earliest stages of embryological development, multicellular animal organisms follow a common pattern. As Sulloway says in Freud, Biologist of the Mind,  'specifically (Haeckel) maintained that the fertilised zygote invaginates to create a primitive stomach, a mouth, and, later, an anal orifice", (Frank J. Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind. London, Fontana, 1980, p261). Bolsche, with his particular interest in the evolution of sexuality,  seized upon Haeckel's idea to depict sexual sensitivity as having been "gradually dispersed from the original 'skin" of the preinvaginated gastraea to the later-evolved....organs of sexuality" (Sulloway, p262), thus completing the phylogenetic sequence:  oral dominance, followed by anal, and the later development of the genital.  True sexual reproduction was originally  "a sort of higher eating" in Bolsche's characterisation, a view which perhaps influenced Freud's observation of the suckling infant enough to make him equate the baby's facial expression during feeding to the look of sexual enjoyment and satiation in the adult (in Sulloway, p259, footnote).  

In constructing a theory of ego and libidinal development which claimed that adult psychopathology arose from the clash between instinctual urges and repressive social norms, Freud was employing materialist biological ideas to grasp the unobservable psyche. For example, the gill-slits on the embryos of a range of animals, including humans, are a physical and observable phylogenetic recapitulation. Freud postulated a parallel in the theoretical "oral phase",  which is an unobservable phenomenon, only indirectly inferrable from the behaviour of infants, one which fits however with theories of phylogenetic recapitulation. It was out of this theoretical exigency that the child was originally prioritised in the psychoanalytic canon. This view of the child as the carrier of development differs from the child-in-relationship-with-its-environment that is the emphasis today, but the contemporary twist should not obscure the phylogenetic, evolutionistic origins of the theory. For instance, current depth psychological theory prioritises "oral" behaviour when in the development of the real infant a range of skills and "priorities" are proceeding simultaneously, such as grasping, recognition, memory, imitation and so on. Daniel Stern's The Interpersonal World of the Infant  (New York, Basic Books, 1985)  provides important evidence and discussion of this issue, while Andrew Samuels, writing on object relations theory, summarizes how  "The professionals have become fascinated, even hypnotized, by the very images that their professional skills uncovered. The numinosity of sex has been replaced by the numinosity of feeding."  (A. Samuels,  The Political Psyche. London and New York, Routledge, 1993, p.274).  It is clear how the influence of the early Freud persists in prioritising the "instinctual" and its course in early infant development.

It was Freud's excessive emphasis on the instinctual, and particularly the sexual, that led C.G. Jung to break away and develop his own theories.  Later, Abraham developed Freud's instinct theory with what became the classical notion of oral, anal and genital stages as potential fixation points identifiable through the adult pathology encountered in the consulting room.  Later still, this model came to be viewed by psychoanalysts as too mechanistic, and by the 1930s Melanie Klein, who had been analysed by Abraham, was developing ideas that would eventually form one basis for object relations theory.

In reviewing the cultural roots of the dominance of the child motif in depth psychology, we have perhaps come upon the point in the development of psychoanalysis when these hypothetical stages of ego development became more firmly established by being linked to flesh and blood infants, mothers and breasts, and eventually to the specific historical mother and the infant the adult once was.  I will say more about this when I come to discuss what we can claim for depth psychology as a treatment, and also when I discuss, separately, the influence of the social on how childhood is viewed and how this affects the emphases within European, and especially British, psychoanalysis and analytical psychology.

(ii) The aetiological significance of "early experience".

But now I wish to specify a second "area of fixation" that I have identified, that of the significance of early experience for later, adult pathology.  The significance of early experience, the weight given to the influence of a child's early environmental conditions upon later development, ability and personality, is a widely held belief, one that extends beyond the theories of depth psychology and can be detected historically as far back as Plato (428-348 BC), in Locke(1632-1704; 17th century) and James Mill (1816; early 19th century).  The 20th century, partly influenced by psychoanalysis, has witnessed an acceleration in the establishment of this belief  within much of the thinking that governs educational, psychiatric, medical, and even criminal justice policy, so much so that it is now very difficult to think outside this super-environmentalist paradigm. In this paradigm a direct correlation is proposed between adult behaviour and personality, and the adult's earliest experiences in relationship to his or her primary care-givers. The critical period being the first six years (for Freud), or first two (for Bloom), or first few months (for Klein and Fordham).  Common to all the views, whether from learning theory, ethology, or psychoanalysis, is how the environment is emphasised as the  major   variable in determining future outcomes. In the extreme version of these theories, such as those stemming from the study of children in institutions, the environmental influence is said to be irreversible, suggesting critical periods in development not subject to the influence of later, improved, environmental conditions. Bowlby's original views on attachment theory ( eg  Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health, Geneva, World Health Organisation, 1951) were derived from ethological studies and sought to prioritise the "attachment instinct" over  prevailing Freudian ideas which had prioritised the instincts for food and sex. Bowlby's  extremely influential views led to the proposition that significant harm would arise if the infant was deprived of its mother's full-time care. The notion of attachment versus loss had important social and political relevance which I will expand upon later, but meanwhile I wish to examine the use of this belief - in the essential harmfulness of maternal deprivation -  within depth psychology and its treatment of adult pathology.

Here is a brief "case illustration" which helps to pinpoint some problems. A pair of non-identical twin boys are born two minutes apart. They are born by Caesarean section, a month before term due to concern that one of them, as detected and measured by the ultra-sound scan, has been growing inadequately. This is quite a common intervention. Within thirty minutes of delivery, Twin A, the first to be removed from the womb, is seen to have breathing difficulties and he is removed from his mother's bedside and placed in an incubator in the Special Care Baby Unit where he is heavily sedated, intubated, monitored and treated for poor development to the lining of the lungs (a consequence of his being removed from the womb before term). Twin B is perfectly well and begins to feed from his mother's breast. After a week the mother recovers and is ready to leave hospital, but Twin A is only making slow progress in the Special Care unit and is in fact destined to remain there for a further three weeks.  It is the policy of the hospital not to allow the parents of twins to take only one baby home in these circumstances, a precaution against greater attachment occurring with one over the other, and so Twin B, who is perfectly well, is cared for in the nursery of eight cots, where he is fed mother's milk, which she expresses at home, by nursing staff, or he feeds from mother's breast herself on her two or three times-daily visits. After four weeks of this, Twin A is well enough to go home, and so both babies are released from hospital.

Twin A has spent the first four weeks of his life with no holding, no feeding except by nasal-gastric tube, the only touching by (or sight of) his mother or other carers being what has been possible through a six inch diameter hole in the incubator. Twin B, although kept in a nursery, has received frequent attention, holding, breast and bottle feeding, looks and smiles from his mother and father as well as nursing staff for the same period.

Following up these children at the age of two years and three years, a marked difference is observed in their behaviour with mother and father and in their personalities. One is more extraverted, independent, and volatile, possessed of a temperament that leads him to protest with loud screams when thwarted.  The other twin shows a marked lack of independence with a tendency to copy his brother, almost never initiating games or utterances. At three years he is happy to play being Robin to his brother's Batman. He likes to play the "baby" with mother and father and is more compliant when getting dressed.  He tends to lag behind the group and can get himself involved in solitary play more frequently. He displays a greater degree of neediness, turning inward to his parents for comfort or crying with distress more often than his brother's preferred strategy of screaming his protest. Although all these behaviours are within a healthy normal range of what we might expect from children of this age,  there is a marked difference between the two infants. I would like now to quiz the reader. I wonder if you can judge for yourselves which twin turned out which way. Was the incubated twin A the independent extravert or the needy one?  Was the nursery twin B the copying twin or the independent one?   How are you assessing the questions?  What criteria and reasoning are you using to correlate the early experience with the later  behavioural differences?   Put another way, how are you relating the apparent "evidence" of early experience and environmental conditions to the later 'symptoms"?

Perhaps this little excercise will help you to see how an analyst's thinking can be led. It is quite likely that if an analyst had a patient with these details of early history available, a great deal of attention and imagining would be paid by the analyst to the early experience.  In addition to making links between present adult pathology and the early history, all sorts of transference and countertransference phenomena would tend to be accounted for in this way. Such early events, especially when dramatically contrasted as in the case of these twin boys, can seem to have great salience and emotional impact. Andrew Samuels has repeatedly mentioned the way in which the numinous quality of images of early infancy and the relationship with mother interferes with analytical evaluation of such material (Andrew Samuels, The Plural Psyche, London and New York, Routledge,1989). I would add that the attention  to early experience is indeed out of proportion with what is known, or what can be claimed, for the effects of  the early environment.

Early experience can obviously have a crucial effect on development, but this effect is not at all consistent across the wide variety of possible experiences and possible results. Some experiences may be catastrophic and irreversible -  the deprivation of oxygen resulting in brain damage, for example; other experiences such as nutritional deficits may be more easily corrected. With certain psychological and motor developments, however, the studies of children formally locked away in isolation from all but minimal human contact suggest unequivocally that there are critical periods of language aquisition and  motor-coordination which, once passed, prevent these skills from ever being properly established.  However, these studies also show that there are many aspects of development that are not sensitive to any critical periods (in Ann M. Clarke & A.D.B.Clarke, Early Experience, Myth and Evidence, Somerset, Open Books, 1976).  

In the field of emotional and mental health, these studies of extreme deprivation reveal surprisingly few long-lasting effects relative to the extreme environmental factors in early life,  once the children are placed in  proper care and, in the study of development of personality and  the establishment of mental health, we know even less than in other fields which combinations of environment and apparent effect are important, which are impossible to reverse and which are trivial to development. This lack of specific is complicated by poor knowledge of constitutional differences and their effects. Some individuals survive well despite apparently gross failures in the early environment while others suffer terribly from seemingly trivial disturbances. Vaillant's longitudinal study of Harvard University students over 30 years led him to conclude that "successful careers and satisfying marriages were relatively independent of unhappy childhoods" (G. Vaillant,  Adaptation to Life, Boston, Little Brown, 1977,  p.300)  Petrushka Clarkson, in her critique of reductive emphases in psychotherapy (P. Clarkson, The Therapeutic Relationship, London, Whurr, 1995, pp.139-145) quotes Cornell's summary: "....reconstructed, retrospective explanations are fraught with distortions;...adaptive (defensive) patterns change both in childhood and adulthood; psychological evolution is often discontinuous; those judged initially to have the "worst" childhoods did not always have the "worst" adult lives; and significant, close adult relationships (spouse, friends, psychotherapist) had major influences on improved quality of life. Thus the Harvard Grant Study offers further evidence of the remarkable resilience, plasticity, and unprdictability of the human psyche. (W.F. Cornell, "Life script theory: a critical review from a developmental perspective," Transactional Analysis Journal, 18, 4, 1988, p.272).    

It is  when we have the adult "pathology" in front of us that we "look back" to see what might account for this.  This immediately prioritises the infant or child and their experience over other possible factors in life that may also need to be examined and treated.  As the psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft describes, "concepts which have been arrived at by backward extrapolation from adults tend to be formulated in terms of the forward development of a theoretical construct, "the infant" or "the child" who looms so large in the analytic literature." (C. Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, Harmondsworth, Penguin,1972, p.xxiii)  It is this distortion which I think has become urgent in our analytic work and I will expand on the alternatives later, but to conclude this section I wish to mention a third "area of fixation" - the concept of "trauma", and its significance for depth psychology and the focus on the child.

(iii) The concept of "trauma"

For psychoanalysis the concept of trauma, and later "cumulative trauma", has been central to the diagnosis and treatment of patients. Masud Khan (M.Khan, "The concept of cumulative trauma" in G. Kohon, Ed., The British School of Psychoanalysis - The Independent Tradition, New Haven and London, Yale  University Press,1986, pp 117-135) pointed out that in the first phase of Freud's thinking, trauma was seen as arising out of an environmental factor that intruded upon the ego and which the ego could not deal with, and also as a stage of restricted libidinal energy which the ego could not discharge. As Kahn put it, "The paradigm of this traumatic situation is sexual seduction" (Kahn, p117).  Given that this view stems from the beginnings of psychoanalysis and has been subject to much revision since, it is surprising how it reappears in contemporary psychotherapy.  

False Memory Syndrome is often the consequence of a psychotherapeutic style that places prime importance on a reductive, reconstructive approach to the psyche,  then literalises material apparently linked to sexual trauma - not only as if it were historical fact, but also as the "cause" of the patient's present distress. Recent discussions of this phenomenon reveal the potential for distortion that arises from maintaining a theoretical view which places prime emphasis on early childhood experiences, and the trauma-inducing power of the early environment. There appears to be an anxiety to find an answer to, or explanation for, troubling symptoms on the part of both the patient, where this is understandable, but also the therapist, who should know better than to claim more than can be verified, or than to simplify the basis for adult suffering. A wide range of factors contribute to the complex, messy and mysterious aetiology and meaning that lies behind most psychic pain. With the availability of a model of early childhood trauma, there seems to be a tendency to neglect later events and developments in patients" lives.  Also relatively ignored is the power of fantasy to create "history".  Analytic treatment should be paying attention to this action itself, as much as to any "history" apparently recalled.  As Andrew Samuels points out, " The past is constructed by the present, in fact, not the present is constructed by the past, (personal communication).

This may seem an extreme and unusual example that I have described, but a more widespread, and accepted emphasis on the primacy of the early environment persists in the concept of cumulative trauma. Masud Khan sums this up using Anna Freud's words, "subtle harm is being inflicted on this child, and...the consequences of it will become manifest at some future date" (Anna Freud, 1958, quoted in Khan, 1986, p135). Here the emphasis is on the long-term subtle effects of the environment on the developing ego, usually meaning the mother's conscious and unconscious attitude and behaviour towards the baby. This is either inferred from observation of the mother-infant pair or deduced from later "evidence", for, as Khan describes from the work of Kris, "even though an infant was observed by a team of highly skilled professionals, it was only in retrospect that the effects of such breakdown of maternal care began to be visible." (Khan, 1986, p135).

Clearly, trauma is not easy to grasp for its aetiological significance. If it appears clearer via the introduction of an analytical retrospective, the therapeutic effect of the reconstruction logically indicates that it is the retrospective stance that is giving value to what was not noticed before.  This shift in weighting is quite valid so long as what is detected is relativised against all other meaningful phenomena the patient-analyst relationship brings. The contribution to meaning that the investigation of biographical material  can bring is true, so long as this is not confused with a route to the causes of pathology.   

Jung, instincts and archetypes.

As is well known, C.G.Jung broke from Freud and psychoanalysis over the issue of the prioritisation of drives and specifically the sexual instinct, which was viewed by Freud as fundamental to the economy of the psyche. Jung certainly did not ignore the importance of biology and biogenetics and much of his writing draws upon biological phenomena and the same ontogeny-phylogeny model, but he did not have the same need as Freud to establish psychoanalysis within the mainstream of contemporary thought in an effort to get it accepted. Apart from his different personality, Jung was also nineteen years younger and from a different country and intellectual background, all of which factors, I believe, helped him to imagine the problem of the psyche more freely, and less materially. If Freud is viewed as seeking to ground the pysche by using a materialistic biology, Jung may be seen as using  biology as a metaphor to describe the contours of a psyche which is, by definition, non-material.

Jung's theory of the archetypes is a way of modelling instinct in a purely psychological form. The archetypes are knowable only by their images in the mind, including dreams and cultural products and customs, and their effect on behaviour.  Thus they serve as the organising principles around which the humanness of individuals revolves. It is this human emphasis that extends the Freudian position on instinct.  For Freud and the patients he saw, a major issue was the fate of a narrow range of very basic, even animal, instincts in an individual when that individual confronted the limitations and strictures of civilised social life. As I indicated earlier,  it can be seen how attractive the child is as a metaphor for this sort of problem. Put this way, who is more available as an example of the unsophisticated, impulsive, apparently instinctually driven and in need of social training than a little infant?  When Jung broadened his thinking on instinct through the theory of the archetypes, driven  by a need to explain all the psychic phenomena he encountered from a wide range of sources and not  a narrow range of local patients, the use of the child image, as metaphor or as literal phenomena, became less important - though it resurfaced  for him as an image of the enourmous potentiality of the psyche. Fully accepting the organic complexity of the mind, Jung could not be satisfied by reductive approaches that attempted to explain psyche from past experience. For similar reasons Jung emphasised the ongoing seeking nature of mind, producing itself, and its symptoms, in the life-long process he called individuation.

However, the developmental school of analytical psychology has seen the child as the locus of the first, and most fundamental individuation, and paid greatest attention to the archetypes as organisers and structurers of experience in the very earliest months and years of human life.  In this effort, members of this school are influenced by other theories of innate structures, primarily those of Klein (unconscious phantasy), and Bion (preconceptions), which come as much from a Platonic as a  Freudian tradition.  Their project is further shaped by  a technique of investigation derived from the social sciences and used by developmental psychologists - the observation of very young infants and their carers, where behavioural phenomena are noted and brought back for discussion and analysis in the "Infant Observation Group". This infant and child-weighted information then feeds back into work with adult patients, fostering a tendency to reductive approaches and the privileging of the effect of the early environment  when it comes to treating adult patients.

There is an irony in this development of Jungian practice that needs attention. If, according to archetypal theory, the psyche actively structures experience - the results of this process being image, fantasy, and associated behaviours - a powerful constitutional element is introduced that weakens the importance of "actual" experience. Secondly, because archetypal activity organises experience and memory, and will continue to do so throughout growing-up, the possiblity of diagnosing, or even less ambitiously understanding the adult from information about early childhood remains logically questionable.  

The archetypal shaping and structuring, distorting and enhancing of experience in an active, if unconscious, fashion is not fully accounted for in a paradigm where the infant is seen, for the most part, as a passive recipient of adult care.  Although this notion of passivity may include the idea that the infant indicates its needs to its carers and so guides and 'structures" the caring it receives, even this picture of development is not the same as the archetypal model where archaic internal patternings filter and structure the growing human's inner world and personality, as they interact with environmental events. As a general concept the archetypes can help us with the problem created by the post-Freudian emphasis on the environment, notably the mother, which has tended to impede research into the the lesser known or accessible constitutional qualities of the infant. To put this in its simplest form, where the historical parent meets the infant, there we also have the parental  imago, the crystalization of the archetype of the parent the child carries. It is this that the adult patient brings into the consulting room. Viewed in this way, the idea of an imago as an archetype evoked by earliest experience bridges and adds a dimension to the treating of early experience either as metaphor or historically causative.

Furthermore, as the structuring and interacting between archetype and environment is a continuing process that proceeds throughout  the life-span, producing a multilayered and faceted inner world where, indeed, recent experiences can also structure previous ones, how, from a psychological point of view,  can we ever propose to be working with the "child" in the adult? Are we not rather falling into the trap of collecting all sorts of psychic phenomena within the numinous image of the child, itself an imago, which, like diagnosis in psychiatry, can be misused to provide patient and practitioner with a spurious security in imagining they have a grip on the perplexing phenomena presented.  Archetypal theory presents us with the utter relativity of knowledge of the patient's actual early experience, and consequently questions the prioritising of such information in the treatment of patients.

Of all the archetypes, the child motif is especially linked with analysis and therapy because of its identity with the process of individuation. As Jung writes  ".. the clearest and most significant manifestation of the child motif in the therapy of neuroses is in the maturation process of personality induced by the analysis of the unconscious, which I have termed the process of individuation." (C.G.Jung, 'The Psychology of the Child Archetype' in Collected Works 9i. London, Routledge, 1959, para 270).

Jung follows this with several other points that indicate the special connection of the child motif with analytic treatment. When he notes that "In psychological reality... the empirical idea 'child' is only the means (and not the only one) by which to express a psychic fact that cannot be formulated more exactly"   (Jung, 'Child Archetype', footnote. p161),  he brings to mind the anxiety for clarity and 'answers' so often found in treatment. The tendency that  arises from this is to prioritise the image, when it is in fact just an image and, indeed, "not the only one" but one of many.

A third point is the link between the child motif and an over-conscious attitude or state of mind that is often typical of patients when they enter treatment.  Jung makes this connection thus:  "The child motif represents something that not only existed in the distant past but also something that exists now; that is to say, it is not just a vestige but a system functioning in the present whose purpose is to compensate or correct, in a meaningful manner, the inevitable one-sidednesses and extravagances of the conscious mind." (Jung, 'Child Archetype', para 276).  This follows his point that the child motif speaks to us not only of a personal beginning or origin, but collectively of the psyche's origins and original state which are "unconscious and instinctive" .  This seems closer to the Freudian linkage of the child and instinct but, importantly, here the link is emphasised as a property of the  collective  unconscious.

Again in the context of the anxious and baffling task that is analytic treatment, the 'child' tends to appear as the transcendent, irrational 'third' - a symbolic version of the irresolvable conflict of opposites, whatever these may be from time to time. The conflict between unconscious and conscious comes to mind and the projection of this onto the patient-analyst pair. The child symbol may emerge magically in dreams or more mundanely in the wish for a baby, often signalling a synthesis of the self that is arising out of the therapy. However the motif emerges we should be wary of literalising it into the concrete 'historical' (yet of course still imaginary in the present) child the patient grew from. There is such a temptation towards this as Jung describes: "Because the symbol of the 'child' fascinates and grips the conscious mind, its redemptive effect passes over into consciousness and brings about that separation from the conflict-situation which the conscious mind by itself was unable to achieve"  (Jung, 'Child Archetype', para287).  My concern is that depth psychology's emphasis on the child and early experience arises too often out of this fascination and a desire to bridge opposing forces in the psyche, including those of 'understanding' and 'no understanding', which interpretations based on the theoretical child can achieve. I realise that psychotherapists defend the idea of the child as metaphor, but, as Andrew Samuels has pointed out, the raw material of the metaphor cannot be discounted, and secondly, if the child was metaphor, we would not take regression in analysis so literally as regression to childhood (Samuels, 1994, personal communication). Just because the child motif is the nearest tool to hand does not mean that referring to childhood is going to do the work of understanding the psyche. As Jung warns us: "Psychology, as one of the many expressions of psychic life, operates with ideas which in their turn are derived from archetypal structures and thus generate a somewhat more abstract kind of myth" (Jung, 'Child Archetype', para 302).  Psychology's modern mythologem, including that of the developing, traumatised child, in fact constitutes one element of the larger myth known as 'science'.

What I am saying is , of course, not new, but its familiarity should not mask the particular emphases I am seeking to reestablish.  I now wish to expand my earlier  discussion of the child archetype to consider its collective expression in the twentieth century. My aim is to analyse  reasons for the dominance of the child motif as an explanatory tool in modern depth psychology, and so we need to move on from what Jung said. When considering an archetypal patterning or effect, we need to discover what contributes to its structuring as we find it in each individual or, in this case, each epoch. This idea will be familiar to those who suspect that the unconscious is not only structured by very ancient things, but also daily and presently by the social collective.

Social and political aspects of the child motif

The attention paid to the child and to child development during the 20th century reflects not so much a deepening of scietific knowledge about infants and their  issues, but  more a new valuation of the child and its needs. Such valuing, furthermore, has been variable with regard to the child but consistent in its linkage with beliefs about women's social roles and their prime destiny as mothers. It is noticeable that the attention given to the child  tracks changing socio-political expediencies which required women to fill other roles, and then later to abstain from these roles when circumstances changed.

For example, during World War ll women were required to join the labour force in roles previously thought exclusive to men. At the same time children were being evacuated to the countryside to live with families and parents that were not their own. After the war, Britain and America especially sought to build a new society based on stability and cohesion, where the roles of 'mother' and 'father' in the nuclear family could be reliably prescribed.  Although day nurseries, nursery schools and the concept of carers other than the mother were in operation, having been necessary to support women workers during the war years, the need to move women back into the home and so ensure job spaces for men and the returning army was supported by child-focussed research that came to conclusions which served the political purpose. In England we had the emergence of Bowlby's theories on attachment in the same year as a World Health Organisation Expert Committee which regarded the use of day nurseries and creches as leading to:  "permanent damage to the emotional health of a future generation". (orig.1951, in Ann M. Clarke & A.D.B.Clarke, Early Experience, Myth and Evidence, Shepton Mallet, Open Books, 1976, p23).  In America there was the work of Spitz and Mahler. The International Labour Review of 1954 carried an article by Baers entitled "Women workers and their responsibilities" where he claimed the child's normal development is dependent on the mother's full-time role in child-rearing, and that:  "anything that hinders women in the fulfillment of this mission must be regarded as contrary to human progress" (in Clarke and Clarke, 1976, p23).

The research that establishes the value of nursery classes in contributing towards healthy development has always been available, but not always suited to the times. Its recent revival within the debate around methods to reduce juvenile crime has seen it connected again with gender roles via the accusatory link between single mothers and juvenile crime, but it is the political paradigm of monetarism that devalues its importance these days on grounds of cost.

I cite this example to convey how sensitive are beliefs about the child to the prevailing social, political and economic milieu.  The linkage with women and gender roles throughout this century also makes me wonder about the function, on this broad social scale, of the compulsive attention paid to the child. Could it be that in this era of struggle between the socially created "opposites" of men and women, the child motif emerges as a psychological response in the role of the irrational, transcendent "third" - carrying the potential for resolution that consciousness seeks?  

But there is even more behind the turn to the child than the need to reconcile gender divisions. Modernity has tried to heed much of the Enlightenment's call for conscious human control and  responsibility, and this has brought  with it a compensatory Romantic yearning for lost roots and connection to the neglected unconscious parts of ourselves. At such times, more than any other, perhaps the child motif is compelling as a compensatory image, arising in the form of a reductive, "backward looking" emphasis. Perhaps beliefs about childhood are more a yearning for neglected parts of the psyche and of Western culture that have little place in an epoch dominated by the over-valuing of conscious instrumental rationality. It has been said that innocence, rather than being a property of childhood,  is something adults have to achieve to create the world fit for children to grow up in. This leads me to conjecture that much of what characterises "childhood" may be the result of adults' projections of truly adult qualities that have little chance to thrive in this era. This would mean that such human qualities as imagination, play, and spontaneity that  are attributed to and split off into the concept of the "child" (and in many families lived only in relation to the children) are in fact the very human qualities that are neglected by modernity. This view not only reflects the incomplete nature of the modern soul, but also locates the child, not as other to the adult, but as part of the person they both comprise. This cultural meaning to the rise of the idea of  the child has nothing to do with the determinism of a developmental view of human growth.  

The image of the child at work in culture today is shown most clearly, I think, when it is projected onto secular forms and modernity. Then we see how the transcendent qualities of the child motif can bridge conflict and signal growth. Examples abound, but particularly salient is the photograph of a young boy and a British soldier that appeared on the front of every British newspaper when the IRA ceased hostilities. In that picture, not only is the child confronting the symbol of open conflict, the soldier, but he is also surreally taller than the soldier and seems to be influencing him in a priest-like manner, (see illustration). Similarly, in Britain, the Commission for Racial Equality uses children in its publicity to counter racism.  One street poster of this campaign, which emphasises that racism is learnt, states "There are lots of places in Britain where racism doesn't exist"  abovea photograph of six babies, each with the word "Here" on their foreheads. The emotional weight of the argument for multiculturalism is carried by the image of the child present once again where oppositional conflict is seeking resolution.

Such social forms suggest that the child as we conceive it is more than a concrete presence in modern times, it is an image fraught with meaning. It should not surprise us that it has been projected with such force onto the still mysterious energies that manifest as depth psychology.

Abandoning the child to find the person; the implications for treatment

In my concluding remarks, I  wish to emphasise that in seeking to understand the peculiar dominance of the child motif in depth psychology, I am not suggesting that such a focus is entirely inappropriate, or that the conditions and treatment that children experience are irrelevant to their health and happiness.  For many years I have worked with families and children  in contexts outside my analytic practice, and I am well aware of how insecurity, inconsistent parenting, and the absence of love contribute in real ways to children's unhappiness and to the manifestation of this in troubled  behaviour.  Plainly, as for an individual at whatever age, some environmental conditions can be enhancing and others can limit or distort development. But when I am speaking with frustrated parents and teachers in an effort to offer some therapy for the situation, and I liken a six year old's challenging behaviour to that of a three year old, am I doing anything more than asking for a more tolerant  and less condemning attitude towards the child?  I do not think I am saying that some "growing" still needs to be achieved, or that a "stage" still needs to be passed, as the linear model of early development frames it.

I want to be honest about how the knowledge, or the fantasy, of the child and its early experience is used. Is it to uncover the roots of symptoms, suggesting an image of the adult personality as constructed from building blocks in a sequence of past experiences?  Or is it, rather, as I believe, that we take excursions into biographical history to amplify the present ,  to bring meaning so that, as the British psychoanalyst Charles Rycroft says, "healing can occur and connections with previously repressed, split off and lost aspects of the self can be re-established" (C.Rycroft, Psychoanalysis and Beyond, London, Chatto, 1985, p.123).

It is not that we should or shouldn"t pay attention to the child and early experience,  but more a question of how  we pay attention to this aspect of the psyche and treatment,

Daring to refer this problem to the early experience of our field, I believe the tangle over the "child", "causes" and "meaning" may lie in an unresolved issue stemming from Freud's earliest conception of the psychoanalytic project.

Two main concerns seem to characterise depth psychology from its very inception. The first is the search for what is fundamental  to the psychology of the individual, and the second is the search for a method  to treat the individual.  The question is: do these neccessarily coincide?  If early experience and the stuff of early relationships is fundamental  and  has to coincide with the method of treatment, the result, too often, is the "analyst-parent", offering some form of corrective emotional experience no matter how strenuously this may be denied within a profession which recognises the arrogance of this strategy in the face of long-standing suffering. It seems unlikely that a two to four hours a week therapy in adult life can somehow "undo" the powerful results of environmental impact on the infant, and moreover, that this  can be achieved through the analyst's greater agape, concern, devotion and love.  It is more likely, as Rycroft says, that analysts'  "capacity to help patients derives from their ability to understand them, and that this ability depends on their knowledge of the unconscious....The claim to possess professional expertise does not contain a concealed claim to moral superiority over the laity" (Rycroft, Psychoanalysis and Beyond, p.47).

But if that is so, what is to become of the attachment to the child as maintained through developmental ideas, and honoured, ritually, through the practice of infant observation? Again, this is not to denigrate valuable and valid areas of investigation, but rather to uncover an unconscious symbolic function served by a research emphasis, among analysts, on the child. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that such practices of research cannot be as easily  linked with the  method  of treatment of patients as has been assumed. The fault lies not with the child  as a field of investigation into what is fundamental to human psychology, but more with the linking of this to the method of depth psychological treatment.

This way of framing the issue reveals a religious use of the child motif. It is as if the child could save the treatment - an essentially religious idea. Were we to abandon our need to put the child in this role, perhaps we could restore it as the multifaceted image and aspect of the individuating psyche that it has been all along. Then, instead of imposing the gravity of literalism, the child could really energize our field.

Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Andrew Samuels, John Beebe and Martin Stanton for their generous help and encouragement in the writing of this paper.

Published in the San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, Vol.15, No.1, pp.17-38, 1995