Infantilisations

Abstract

Infantilisations is the fourth article in a collective writing project that includes ‘Infantologies’, ‘Infantasies’, ‘Infanticides’, and Infantologies II-Songs of the Cradle. It is a notion and paper directed to the treatment of others as infants, essentially a hierarchical relation of power that supports a functional and routine psychological dependence either by one individual to another or group, or as an institutional ideology that ‘talks down’, ‘dumbs down’ a specific population. In so far as infantilisation stems from the treatment of infants, the term can be used to reflecton on the nature of infant relations where caring for the infant is defined as a way of reducing all forms of psychological dependence with the corresponding (‘educative’) notion of enhancing individual and group functional autonomy through the cultivation of a philosophical and questioning mindset.