Bowlby’s work concentrated on limited aspects of child development, above al the importance of emotional bonds between infants and those who care for them. How should we understand other features of children’s growth, especially the emergence of a sense of self – the awareness that the individual has a distinct identity, separate from others? During the first months of its life, the infant possesses little or no understanding of differences between human beings and material objects in its environment, and has no awareness of self. Children do not begin to use concepts like ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’ until the ago of two or after. Only gradually do they then come to understand that others have distinct identities, consciousness and needs separate from their own.

    The problem of the emergence of self is a much-debated one, and is viewed rather differently in contrasting theoretical perspectives. To some extent, this is because the most prominent theories about child development emphasise different aspects of socialisation. The work of the great psychologist and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, concentrates above all on how the infant controls anxieties and on the emotional aspects of child development. The American philosopher and sociologist George Herbert Mead gives attention mainly to how children learn to use the concepts of ‘I’ and ‘me’. The Swiss student of child behaviour Jean Piaget worked on many aspects of child development, but his most well-known writings concern cognition – the ways in which children learn to think about themselves and their environment.

Freud and psychoanalysis

    Sigmund Freud, a Viennese physician who lived from 1856 to 1939, not only strongly influenced the formation of modern psychology, he was one of the major intellectual figures of the twentieth century. The impact of his ideas has been felt in art, literature and philosophy, as well as in the human social sciences. Freud was not simply an academic student of human behaviour, but concerned himself with the treatment of neurotic patients. Psychoanalysis, the technique of therapy he invented, involves getting patients to talk freely about their lives, particularly about what they can remember of their very early experiences. Freud came to the view that much of what governs our behaviour is in the unconscious, and involves the persistence into adulthood of modes of coping with anxieties developed very early on in life. Most of these early childhood experiences are lost to our conscious memory, although they are the basis on which our self-consciousness is established.

Personality development

    According to Freud, the infant is a demanding being, with energy it cannot control because of its essential helplessness. A baby has to learn that its needs or desires cannot always be satisfied immediately – a painful process. In Freud’s view, infants have needs not just for food and drink, but for erotic satisfaction. Freud did not mean that infants have sexual desires n the same way as older children or adults do. The ‘erotic’ refers to a general need for close and pleasurable bodily contact with others. (The idea is not so distant from what emerges from Harlow’s experiments and the literature on child attachments. Infants do indeed have a need for close contact with others, including cuddling and caressing).

    As Freud describes it, human psychological development is a process involving major tensions. The infant learns progressively to control his or her drives, but these remain as powerful motives in the unconscious. Freud distinguishes several typical stages in the development of the abilities of the infant and young child. He gives particular attention to the phase – at around age four to five – at which most children are able to relinquish the constant company of their parents and enter a wider social world. Freud calls this phase the Oedipal stage. The early attachments which infants and young children form to their parents have a defined erotic element, in the sense noted above. If such attachments were allowed to continue and develop further, as a child matured physically she or he would become sexually involved with the parent of the opposite sex. This does not happen because children learn to repress erotic desires towards their parents.

    Little boys learn that they cannot continue to be ‘tied to their mother’s apron strings’. According to Freud, the young boy experiences intense antagonism towards his father, because the father has sexual possession of the mother. This is the basis if the Oedipus complex. The Oedipus complex is overcome when the child represses both his erotic attachments to his mother and his antagonism towards his father (most of this happens on the unconscious level). This marks a major stage in the development of an autonomous self, because the child has detached himself from his early dependence on his parents, particularly his mother. Freud’s portrayal of female development is much less well worked out. He believes that something of a reverse process occurs to that found in boys. The little girl represses her erotic desires for the father and overcomes her unconscious rejection of her mother by striving to become like her – to become ‘feminine’. In Freud’s view, how children cope with the Oedipus complex strongly influences later relationships, especially sexual relationships, entered into by the individual.

Criticisms

    Freud’s theories have been widely criticised, and have often met with very hostile responses. Some have rejected the idea that infants have erotic wishes, as well as the thesis that what happens in infancy and early childhood establishes unconscious modes of coping with anxiety that endure throughout life. Feminist critics have seen Freud’s theory as directed too much towards male experience, giving too little attention to female psychology. Yet Freud’s ideas continue to exert a powerful influence. Even if we do not accept them in their entirety, some of them are probably valid. There almost certainly are unconscious aspects to human behaviour, resting upon modes of coping with anxiety established first of all in infancy.

The theory of G.H.Mead

    The background and intellectual career of G.H.Mead (1863-1931) was in most respects quite different from that of Freud. Mead was primarily a philosopher, who spent most of his life teaching at the University of Chicago. He wrote rather little, and the publication for which he is best known, Mind, Self and Society (1934), was put together by students on the basis of their lecture notes and other sources. Since they form the main basis of a general tradition of theoretical thinking, symbolic interactionism, Mead’s ideas have had a very broad impact in sociology. But Mead’s work provides in addition an interpretation of the main phases of child development, giving particular attention to the emergence of a sense of self.

    There are some interesting similarities between Mead’s views and those of Freud, although Mead sees the human personality as less racked by tension. According to Mead, infants and young children develop as social beings first of all by imitating the actions of those around them. Play is one way this takes place. In their play, as has been noted above, small children often imitate what adults do. A small child will make mud pies, having seen an adult cooking, or dig with a spoon, having observed someone gardening. Children’s play evolves from simple imitation to more complicated games in which a child of four or five will act out an adult role. Mead calls this taking the roe of the other – learning what it is like to be in the shoes of another person. It is only at this stage that children acquire a developed sense of self. Children achieve an understanding of themselves as separate agents – as a ‘me’ – by seeing themselves through the eyes of others.

    We achieve self-awareness, according to Mead, when we learn to distinguish the ‘me’ from the ‘I’. The ‘I’ is the unsocialized infant, a bundle of spontaneous wants and desires. The ‘me’, as Mead uses the term, is the social self. Individuals develop self-consciousness, Mead argues, by coming to see themselves as others see them. Both Freud and Mead see the child becoming an autonomous agent, capable of self-understanding, and able to operate outside the context of the immediate family, at about age five. For Freud, this is the outcome of the Oedipal phase, while for Mead it is the result of a developed capacity of self-awareness.

    A further stage of child development, according to Mead, occurs when the child is about eight or nine. This is the age at which children tend to take part in organized games, rather than unsystematic ‘play’. It is not until this period that children begin to understand the overall values nd morality according to which social life is conducted. To learn organized games, one must understand the rules of play and notions of fairness and equal participation. The child at this stage learns to grasp what Mead terms the generalized other – the general values and moral rules involved in the culture in which he or she is developing. This is placed at a somewhat later age by Mead than by Freud, but once more there are clear similarities between their ideas on this point.

    Mead’s views are less controversial than those of Freud. They do not contain so many starling ideas, and they do not depend on the theory of an unconscious basis to personality. Mead’s theory of the development of self-consciousness has deservedly been very influential. On the other hand, Mead’s views were never published in a comprehensive form, and are useful as suggestive insights rather than as providing a general interpretation of child development.