Even small children have identities and the ability to rationally manipulate social life.
There are deep structures in existence, like consciousness or the reality of the external world, that are thought to be philosophical or metaphysical or even just conceptual that in fact can be reduced to generalizations or inferences that people draw from experience rather than as inevitable or inherent. The evidence comes from consulting the experience of early age children as to establish what they themselves are able to find and what can be found about them even without the advantages supposedly offered about psychoanalysis about how the early child’s mind can be accessed. I am thinking of my commonplace observations of what I remember before I was four about things I now know as having already been discovered in the world. I remember, for one thing, learning to drink from a glass rather than from a bottle. I had been a late learner and my mothers ruse, as I realized it to be many years later, was to say that she could not get down to the village to buy bottles and so I would have to cope by using a glass to drink milk. An accommodating sort, I said I would do that if I drank from a glass in private and she acquiesced and we went into a private space and I drank from a glass and never went back to bottles. Think about that. I already had the ability to feel embarrassed about making what seemed a major transition and I was able to negotiate the terms of my acquiescence.
These are very human capacities which exist quite a way’s back, something any pediatrician is well aware of. Treat babies even as reasonable human beings who are concerned with respect and who engage in reasoning however limited may be the means and ends. My son did that about going to the toilet rather than a diaper. When his mother told him he had to go like a big person did, he said that he would do so next Thursday, which was a long way away but when the time came around he acquiesced because he had made a promise and he had already acquired the practice of the promise as well as having accomplished the idea of gaining some control by delaying the appointed time. Little children, I infer, get the idea of negotiation and control. My daughter dealt with the same things even if the story went differently. Her mother told her that it was time for her to pee in the toilet and she replied by peeing on her mother’s foot. Her mother thought, quite accurately, that her daughter was being hostile and shouted at her to stop that. Her daughter, not usually getting an angry response, must have decided her mother meant business, and the next time she had to pee she went to the toilet. So there was trial and error at a young age about what you could get away with.
Many of my own young memories have to do with a boarding house in the Catskills where my mother and I had a room and a community kitchen, which meant an icebox and a double burner next to the ones all the other wives had and a number of big tables where everyone ate, while my father worked nearby as a baker. I remember reciting a nursery rhyme that I had carefully prepared along with the other children at a joint birthday party. The mothers wanted each of the children to shine and I was very aware that the children were in competition with one another. I remember leading some other children though an uncleared part of the property to go through the trees and brambles so as to reach what was called “the big rock” and so satisfied an elementary sense of adventure, a concept constantly redefined to mean activities that impacted on history and still later my coming to terms with my own life as becoming old and fragile. I also remember one of the housewives dressing up and prancing around as Carmen Miranda, overly made up and wearing a hat with fruit in it and I found the experience unsettling though for reasons I could not in my latency or pre-latency experience grasp much less suppress. Everything was instructive, like finding the hilly concrete walks on that property too difficult to manage, and so waited to master walking until I met again with the flat and broad sidewalks of the city. I had so much to master, one thing after another, and these usually regarded as competitive, which is what the world inevitably seemed to be.
Georg Simmel said that such fundamental properties as cooperation and competition were aspects of sociation. That means that they arise from the very fact of people interacting. They could not be reduced to natural or physical forces. That seems to me to be the bedrock truth. Social life has to be understood in its own terms. But the way to learn about these processes can be psychological. A friend of mine who was a very good driver imagined doing so as a way all the people on the road had to be polite with one another just to manage a driver: letting people merge or stopping at stop signs or avoiding tailgating. For her, driving was a version of the Fabian Socialism to which she adhered but the sense of being cooperative was very deep, a basic sense of sociation acquired in childhood, I suspect, a perception of driving to be treated as a Rorschach test of her sentiments. I, on the other hand, was a terrible driver. I always speeded up to catch up with the next cluster of cars on the road so as to make time on my trip. My driver aggression may have revealed a hostility that was hidden but long lasting, all the way back to when I resisted giving up a bottle until my mother said bottles were unavailable and I bargained to drink my first glass of milk when no one but she was around..
How can you tell whether those trace memories about early childhood are accurate or were dreams or speculations or elaborations of facts amplified through hindsight? You reason it through. I remember seeing an even younger cousin in a baby carriage when I was just three or four years old, both of us in front of our apartment building where both of our families lived, but my mother said that it was impossible because the families lived apart from one another at the time. Memories may be reliable if you are sure footed enough to note discrepancies or find supporting contexts. I remember my memories of ration stamps which my mother turned over to the amply stocked kosher butcher shop she frequented and to which I accompanied her and the blackouts that led my mother to plug in a nightlight so that I wouldn’t be left in the dark. It was very unlikely that the Germans would attack America, everybody said, but the patriotic thing was to take precautions and there had been, I later learned, that there were U-boats off Long Island and a blacked out New York City prevented the enemy from seeing an illuminated background. Memory is not as fallible as it is taken to be and we reason a story out as plausible as does the hero of “A Beautiful Mind” who works his way back to sanity because he recognizes that his imaginary playmates are not real because they never get older. I knew that my childhood bullies were just ordinary people taking advantage of someone who was vulnerable rather than deep down mean people.
Shifting from the external world of objective places and people to the internal world of consciousness, that too is experienced as an empirical reality that is learned of through trial and error, a person becoming more proficient and appreciative as these experiences accumulate. One thing about consciousness is its tone which consists of a self a bit distinctive from the rest because it is made up of all the adjectives or modifications of combinations or degrees of adjectives that describe a consciousness. So some people are gloomy or choleric or brave or sad or introspective and are so like Hamlet describing the players as mixing up the various genres so as to get a sense of the mood of a play, people each one also a complex kind of genre or mood. So even when I was a child I experienced myself as internally subdued and thoughtful to the point of calculating and private and observant and non-confiding even as my presence to the world of others, what we might call my temperament, was amiable and outgoing and loquacious and over intellectualized, the last of which was both my tone and my temperament and so seem my true self, but not really because that was still just one characteristic, it adjoining a tone of sentimentality which I recognized as a prominent part of my temperament only over time.The thing about tone and temperament, though, is how consistent they are over time and so I recognize them, as the metaphor goes, of the sea in which I swam from the time I stayed in the boarding house. I already was what I became however much that was modified by love and marriage and my profession and I recognize my children, now middle aged, as clearly descendents of the moods and stances they held long ago.
Mythologizing provides the early events whereby a person’s tone and texture are destined to become set even if fate will visit later on. It was well known to me at an early age, told humorously so as to reflect those past and primitive times, that my grandfather had thrown his knife at my father and left a scar on his forehead because my father had wanted to do his school homework rather than go work in the bakery. My father was ever after a dutiful son. No Abraham absolving Isaac by providing a sacrificial lamb, but a Freud like father ever a danger to a son. My father wounded me as a teenager in a way of which I still can’t speak and I do not know I may have wounded my son but it would be for him to know. Mythologies are the collective memories of events learned in childhood that tend to turn up in later years, “The Brothers Karamazov”, just my angry and weird extended relatives rather than a philosophical puzzle.
The age of empiricism did not last very long, from Hobbes through Locke, and was replaced by Kant and most of since whereby innate categories or symbols mediate experience. That goes all the way to Noam Chomsky who rediscovers the Cartesian idea that the capacity for language is innate rather than learned. I want to rebalance the relation of experience to concept by suggesting that people learn later what I remembered which was a lot from experience but not so much from sensations impressed on a mental blank slate and more by learning concepts from experience, this ability to do so as vital for human beings as the capacity to make tools which were at one time thought to be the sine qua non of the human species.
Also, a Freudian observation. I remember when, I think, I was two or so, my mother and her sister showered with me in a metal shed and a concrete floor that was set against the boarding house. It was perfectly innocent but nonetheless memorable and never mentioned until I just did. I also remember a teenage girl coming to visit my boarding house when I must have been six or seven. I remember the shape of her body under her dress, how her voice sounded and how she walked and how differently she presented herself as a girl rather than as a boy. Don’t tell me that I did not notice those things even if I did not have the words to describe what I noticed.
My childhood experiences, which lead me to think that even small children are rational actors who follow their own ideas and inclinations and natures, already in character, conscious of their own beings, aware and even a bit self aware of themselves, these leading me to remain a Freudian, however much Freud is not in fashion, largely because his final premise hasn’t panned out. Moreover, Freud’s view of the world of childhood experience is a very dark one, full of violence and tragedy, while I think adult life is more pacific, more compromisinmg, as in Hume, but the core Freudian issues prevail.
Freud’s premises are the following. First, there is childhood sexuality in that parents can observe that children will play with themselves. Second, there is an Oedipus Complex in that men and women pick spouses similar to or very different from their opposite sex parents and sons are wary of their fathers while finding mothers to be companionable, this clearly highlighted by the fact that Bill Clinton liked to stray with big haired women like his mother while settling down with his serious minded wife. Third, there is the reality of the unconscious for why otherwise could thought percolate to the top, trace thoughts forming into ideas that can become objectified and hence manipulated? Fourth, there is possible an interpretation of dreams because the perceptions made in them can be complex renderings of a variation of reality as when I dreamed what my new wife would look like when she got old and that was pretty much right. The fifth is the kicker. Freud thought talk therapy would allow people to unburden themselves by reliving early childhood experience and that didn’t turn out to be true when clinical studies did not show positive cure rates and that, after all, was what patients wanted. Short of the Jacques Lacan idea that therapy was an end to itself, the idea of Freudian therapy was left ineffective, even if its way of seeing was accurate and much approved of by literary people because it was so in keeping with the wisdom of literature, as in Aujsten’s “Mansfield Park” and in Dickens’ “Great Expectations”, which is that children are wise and that their decisions prefigure their decisions in their adult lives.