Birth to Maturity: A Study in Psychological Development 9780300157802

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BIRTH TO

MATURITY

BIRTH TO A Study in Psychological

JEROME KAGAN

New Haven and London

MATURITY Development

HOWARD A. MOSS with a new preface by jerome Kagan

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YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

First published in 1962 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Copyright Cl 1983 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections I 07 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Printed in the United States of America by Lightning Source Library of Congress catalog card number: 62-19148

ISBN: 978-0-300-02998-7

To the Fels children and their families

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Preface to the Second Edition ix Preface to the First Edition xxvii Introduction 1 Methods of Assessment 20 The Stability of Behavior: I Passivity and Dependency 49 The Stability of Behavior: 11 Aggression 85 The Stability of Behavior: Ill Achievement and Recognition 120 The Stability of Behavior: IV Sexuality, Social Interaction, and Selected Behaviors 156 Maternal Practices and the Child's Behavior 204 Sources of Conflict and Anxiety 229 Summary and Conclusions 266 References 287 Author Index 293 Subject Index 297

Preface to the Second Edition

The opportunity to reflect on an early work and mentally cut away the thickets of prose that a generation has shown to be debris permits a special pleasure, not unlike the one that accompanies a rare autumn visit to a favorite but distant forest. Although it is not possible to recall moods and beliefs that are now over twenty-two years old, it might be helpful for younger readers of this book to appreciate the web of suppositions that occupied the center of American psychology when Howard Moss and I were putting Birth to Maturity into first draft. Environmentalism, the root premise, was sustained by a fruitful collaboration between closely reasoned elaborations on Pavlovian conditioning principles and ingenious transformations of Freud's ideas. This heady alchemy produced principles of psychological development that usually wound their way back to social interactions, replacing libido with motive, cathexis with acquired reward, symptom with habit, but more wisely leaving the displeasure of anxiety as a central incentive for thought and action. In this frame, the instinctively driven infant described by nineteenth-century observers was placed in a thick web of human relationships whose center was occupied by a mother who was the origin of both sanity and psychosis. Erikson's reinterpretations of Freud's first two psychosexual stages capture the change in perspective that matured between the two world wars (Erikson, 1963). Trust and autonomy imply a relationship to others that is missing in the historically prior concepts of oral and anal stages. Freud imagined a hungry, nursing infant while Erikson, and later Bowlby, standing in the same nursery, perceived an affiliative, apprehensive one. Dissemination of the new metaphor for the infant-a baboon rather than a bear-had been completed when Howard Moss and I were gathering the data for Birth to Maturity. So it was almost reflexive for us, as it was for most students of development, to search for the formative forces in the dose encounters between adults and children. IX

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PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The origins of the second presupposition are more difficult to specify because fragments can be detected in Western writings about the child from the height of Athenian culture to the present moment. But the premise of connectivity in psychological growth had a major renaissance during the Enlightenment when mind, the immaterial descendent of brain, was conceptualized as a canvas gradually covered with indelible strokes whose only possibility for change was to become part of another pattern. This image of psychological growth implied a material connection between the present and all of the past, an idea that is axiomatic for the large number of scientists who assume that no memory engrams are ever lost. Failure to remember an event that has become part of longterm memory is due to interference with retrieval, not loss of the original treasure. Nothing is lost, nothing wasted. The western scholar's assumption of the indefinite stability of early structures implies that every important disposition in the present contains enough of the past that one should be able to trace present behavior to its origins, no matter how far in the past the critical moments occurred. William Stem, a famous nineteenth-century observer of children, saw a connection between the babbling of the 5-month-old and the speech of the 2-year-old. Sigrnund Bemfeld, an early disciple of Freud-who supposed that all adult cognition had its origin in early infancy-wrote, "Historically all phenomena of adult mental life must be traceable to birth" (Bemfeld, 1929, p. 213). Some early twentieth-century theorists held that the adult's proprietary motive shared elements with the grasp reflex of the newborn; others suggested that an adult's aesthetic sense was shaped originally by the opportunity to play with attractive toys. In one of the most popular psychology texts of the first decade of this century, Edward L. Thomdike (1905) ended his final chapter with a ringing affirmation of the permanence of early acquisitions. Though we seem to forget what we learn, each mental acquisition really leaves its mark and makes future judgments more sagacious . . . . Nothing of good or evil is ever lost; we may forget and forgive, but the neurons never forget or forgive .... It is certain that every worthy deed represents a modification of the neurons of which nothing can ever rob us. Every event of a man's mental life is written indelibly in the brain's archives; to be counted for or against him (Thomdike, 1905, pp. 330-31). The possibility of a material connection between early and later phenomena takes two related forms. One requires only dependence of later structures on earlier ones. A second, stronger form holds that elements of the early structures are retained and participate in the later entities. It

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is the second, more materialistic assumption that has become a bit more controversial since the original publication of Birth to Maturiry. Although there are as many instances of change as of preservation in development-a fear of snakes is extinguished; respect for a parent eroded-the assumption of early childhood determinism remains popular. The supposition of connectivity imposes a nontrivial bias on what is seen and described. If an observer believes that a hidden structure is preserved over two points in time, he is prepared to search for actions on the later occasions that might be classified with those manifested earlier. Piaget grouped the newborn's grasping of a finger placed in its palm with the 18-month-old's imitative opening and closing of the hand and suggested that some residue of the reflex displayed on the first day of life participated in the more mature act. When we studied the beginnings of intelligence we were forced to go as far back as the reflex in order to trace the cause of the assimilating activity which finally led to the construction of adaptive schemas, for it is only by a principle of functional continuity that the indefinite variety of structures can be explained (Piaget, 1951, p. 6). Piaget was not alone, for most nineteenth-century scholars-philosophers, historians, and natural scientists-were faithful to the connectivity premise, maintaining that in order to understand any phenomenon, one had to have access to its entire history from origin to present, a position Mandelbaum (1971) has called the bias of historicism. The nineteenthcentury scholar, who had rejected the mechanical view of man held by Enlightenment philosophers, took biology as the most informative model and likened the history of society to the growth of plants and animals. This view assumed that any phenomenon that was part of a fixed sequence was a complex function of all that happened earlier. Each new stage grew out of a prior one, contained some of the past, and moved inexorably toward a stage that was better than the one before. Listen to E. B. Tylor on the history of civilizations: It is indeed hardly too much to say that civilization being a process of long and complex growth can only be thoroughly understood when studied through its entire range; that the past is continually needed to explain the present and the whole to explain the part (Tylor, 1878, p. 2). Although a connected view of the history of civilizations and societies has lost popularity among twentieth-century historians, it still reigns in developmental pyschology. Faith in a connectivity between the deep past and the present continues to be, as it was for Howard Moss and me, an

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essential premise in theories of development. Many declarations of connectivity have been based on a single, superficial similarity between one component of the behavior of the infant and a quality noted in older children or adults. But observers are remarkably adept at inventing similarities between fundamentally different phenomena simply by detecting one feature that is shared, or seems to be shared, by the two events. A century ago the protesting cry of the 1-year-old in response to the mother's temporary departure was classified with the willful disobedience of the adult. Today the same act is grouped with the anxiety and sadness that follow loss of a sweetheart, spouse, or parent. As this century began, Havelock Ellis suggested a similarity between an infant's nursing and sexual intercourse, to which Freud referred in the Three Essqys on the Theory ofSexuality. The erectile nipple corresponds to the erectile penis; the eager watery mouth of the infant to the moist and throbbing vagina, the vitally albuminous milk to the vitally albuminous semen. The complete mutual satisfaction, physical and psychic, of mother and child in the transfer from one to the other of a precious organized fluid is the one true physiological analogy to the relationship of a man and woman at the climax of the sexual act (Ellis, 1900, p. 250). This analogy, which seemed reasonable in 1900, is less compelling today because nursing has become symbolic of trust rather than passion. There are good reasons for our receptivity to the idea of connectivity in development. First, this doctrine renders original forms useful and rationalizes the maxim that one must prepare for the future. If the origins of important adult properties occurred during late childhood or adolescence, the first years of life would appear to have no future purpose, much like the embryonic notochord that vanishes after its mission is completed. The possibility that the products of a developmental era might be temporary is bothersome to those who want to ~lieve that all psychological products are permanent and that everything we learn is permanently housed in the mind. If a child's future is determined by the · present, tomorrow is to some degree knowable through careful attention to each day's actions. The hope that the adult's profile could be made a little more certain if one managed childhood properly became a creed for parents and social scientists, as it was for America's intellectuals prior to the Revolution, who urged mothers to care for their infants with the same conscientiousness they applied to gathering wood in August in preparation for December's frigid winds. Additionally, arguments for connectivity have the illusion of being mechanistic. It seems easier to write cause-effect sequences if each new

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phenomenon is preceded by another that makes a substantial contribution to it than if a new behavior emerges rather suddenly as a result of endogenous changes minimally tied to the past. In the second instance the theorist is left with an explanatory gap, a state not unlike that of the eighteenth