7.The socialisation of the infant

Bowlby’s original claim that ‘mother-love in infancy and childhood is as important for mental health as are vitamins and proteins for physical health’ has been in some part disconfirmed. It is not contact with the mother that is decisive, and neither is what is involved simply the absence of love. The security provided by regular contact with a familiar person is also important. Yet we can conclude that human social development depends in a fundamental way on the early formation of lasting bonds with other people. This is a key aspect of socialisation for the majority of people in every culture, although its precise nature and consequences are culturally variable.

8. Theories of child development

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.