Childhood Self Research Articles

Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Femininity

Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the Golden Age of Children's Literature as well as literature commonly considered grown-up, U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their tales. into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies. Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically.-Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture.-Library Journal

Foundations of a Functional Theory of Human Handedness

A functional theory of human handedness is introduced based on early childhood experiences and the neural plasticity of the brain. It assumes that very different factors may be involved in the development of an individual left-handedness. Imitation and social learning are major factors in the formation of both right- and left-handedness in normal early childhood development. However, the frequently claimed relation between left-handedness and pathology as well as exceptional giftedness can only be understood by taking into account the function or meaning of left-handedness for personality development. The functional approach conceives left-handedness as a ubiquitous symbolic aid for coping creatively with conflict in early childhood. A childrearing style that clashes with the child's body-mind needs can lead the socioculturally less favored left hand to serve as a symbolic frame of reference for a meaning-making action repertoire that is fundamental in protecting and stabilizing the childhood self and personality development. Suggestions are derived regarding brain lateralization and handedness and for the diagnosis of early childhood disorders.

家族システムと幼児の自己の発達 : 父親の性役割観, 母親からみた父親のソーシャルサポートと母性意識

家族システムと幼児の自己の発達 : 父親の性役割観, 母親からみた父親のソーシャルサポートと母性意識

Repression and Denial: The Absent Childhood Self in Sartre'sLes Mots

Repression and Denial: The Absent Childhood Self in Sartre's<i>Les Mots</i>

Repression and Denial: The Absent Childhood Self in Sartre'sLes Mots

Repression and Denial: The Absent Childhood Self in Sartre's<i>Les Mots</i>

Parental Representations Among Preschool and Fourth-Grade Children: Integrating Object Relational and Cognitive Development Frameworks

The aim of this research was the empirical study of the development of object representations among preschool and fourth-grade children. Psychometric properties and age differences on structural and qualitative dimensions of parental descriptions are reported. The relationships between the dimensions of object representations and children's self-perceptions and interpretations of situations depicting typical interferences of ongoing parent-child relations were explored. Our findings point to multidimensional representations, underlying the importance of the structural dimensions of the representation. More mature representations were related to more advanced conflict resolution strategies. More positive perceptions of self in middle childhood and less idealized self-concept among preschoolers were associated to higher conceptual levels of parental representations. The constraints, as well as the possibilities, inherent to research based on narrative models of object representations are discussed.

The captured world: the child and childhood in nineteenth-century women's writing in England

Contents: Introduction. Early Lessons for Life - Child of Reason. Sinners and Saviours - Child of Faith. Apprentices to Misery - Exploited Child. Happy Families - Child at Home. The One I Knew the Best of All - Childhood Self. Growing Up Wrong - Child of Conflict. Conclusion. Footnotes. Bibliography.

"Amor Matris": Mother and Self in the Telemachiad Episode of Ulysses

In Telemachiad episodes of James Joyce's Ulysses we first encounter in microcosm Stephen Dedalus's search for identity - a search which will color entire narrative. At heart of is Stephen's relationship with his mother, both real mother who nurtured him and is now dead, and an imagined symbolic mother who is a product of Stephen's fearful and anxious consciousness. Stephen desperately needs these two mothers to define him; his self hood derives simultaneously from unconditional affirmation which his real mother gave him and from his active struggle against all that imagined mother stands for - an all-encompassing fertility linked with nature which signals death to Stephen. What these two mothers have in common is their lack of subjecthood in Stephen's perception - that is, real mother is forbidden to be anything more than what Stephen wishes her to be, and imagined mother is nothing more than an object of Stephen's fears. Only by silencing and objectifying mother can Stephen satisfy his infantile craving for oneness and his adult need for autonomy. This allows Stephen to enter established paternal order which demands repression and domination of mother. But Stephen remains haunted by memory of his mother's self hood, represented by her death and revelation its graphic and grotesque memory forces on him. He is torn between need for mother and desire to imitate father; however, nagging reminders of mother's subjecthood revealed in Telemachiad continually undercut Stephen's attempts to participate wholly in paternal order. Consequently, Ulysses as a whole illustrates tension between law of father and self hood of mother, and this tension will by end point toward potential for a new sense of self. Stephen's need for his mother is established throughout A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man and continues into Ulysses. In A Portrait Stephen sees himself as weak and timid in childhood, longing for his mother to protect him from what Suzette Henke calls the brutal male environment of school life (84).(1) The affinity between weak child and nurturing mother is echoed in appearance of Cyril Sargent in Nestor episode of Ulysses, a boy in whom Stephen recognizes his childhood self: Like him was I, these sloping shoulders, this gracelessness. My childhood bends beside me (2.168-69). Even Stephen's rebellion at end of A Portrait is not so much to break away from his mother as to test her nurturing powers and push her love to limits. As Richard Ellmann points out, when [Stephen] rebels he hastens to let [others] know of his rebellion so that he can measure their response to it (292). This need for a response indicates that Stephen's conflict goes beyond what Jeanne McKnight refers to as the infantile conflict between desire to remain an undifferentiated part of mother and developmental wish to be separate and free (422). His conflict stems from this need for differentiation; however, centers not so much on his own struggle between nurturance and autonomy as on his perception of his mother, another basic element of differentiation. In psychoanalytic terms, successful differentiation relies not only on a perception of subjective otherness (simply recognizing physical difference) but also on what Nancy Chodorow calls the ability to experience and perceive object/other (the mother) in aspects apart from its sole relation to ability to gratify infant's/subject's needs and wants; [it involves] seeing object as separate from self and from self's This process, to Chodorow, means according mother her own selfhood (7). But because perception of mother is grounded in pre-Oedipal infantile sensations, this process is often resisted and experienced only conflictually and partially. Throughout life, perceptions of mother fluctuate between perceiving her particularity and self hood and perceiving her as a narcissistic extension, a not-separate other whose sole reason for existence is to gratify one's own wants and needs. …

Romanticism and Children's Literature in Nineteenth-Century England

In England at the turn of the nineteenth century, the advent of Romanticism coincided with major changes in ideas about children and childhood, eventually resulting in a great flowering of imaginative children's literature. In contrast to the previous century's stern moral tales, children's books began to appeal to the unsullied powers of perception, cognition, and creativity thought by the Romantics to reside in pre-adolescents, and also to the anxieties of adults who longed to reclaim their own lost childhood selves. These essays document and examine the transformation of children's literature during the Romantic period, and trace Romanticism's influence on Victorian children's literature. Using a variety of critical approaches, including neo-historicist, feminist, mythic, reader-response, and formalist, the contributors challenge established dichotomies in children's literature regarding morality and imagination. Rather, as they demonstrate, a complex interplay of instruction and delight ran throughout nineteenth-century texts for and about children. In addition, they document some of the ways the child was perceived and interpreted, secularized and spiritualized, by such writers as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Maria Edgeworth, Mrs. Sherwood, Hesba Stretton (Sarah Smith), Juliana Ewing, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and E. Nesbit.

Narrative practices and the social construction of self in childhood

Narrative, self, and face‐to‐face interaction all intersect in everyday storytelling practices in which children and caregivers make claims to personal experiences. This article examines such practices as a site for the social construction of self in early childhood. Drawing upon excerpts of narrative talk from a variety of cultural traditions in the United States, we describe the self‐relevant meanings and processes entailed in three particular narrative practices. [narrative, self, childhood socialization, language socialization, ethnopsychology]

The Self in Early Childhood

The Self in Early Childhood

The self in early childhood

Ryce-Menuhin reviews and revises psychoanalytic and Jungian theory; he maintains that a self theory is consistent with experimental data and that it is essential to analytical psychology, to the neo-Freudian contributions of Winnicott and Kohut and to the theory of autism, which has become a focus of clinical interest in the early self.

The Development of the Self in Childhood

The Development of the Self in Childhood

Hypnotic Age Regression and the Reparenting of Self

This article explores the efficacy of combining hypnotic age regression with a self-reparenting technique based on the work of Robert and Mary Goulding and Muriel James. It demonstrates that providing the adult client with a hypnotically-accessed experience of a childhood scene while supporting and nurturing the childhood self can be a powerful catalyst to change. The problems inherent in using the technique with severe character disorders is also explored.

The self in childhood: A kleinian point of view

Abstract A few years ago our friend and colleague, Agi Bene-Moses, died in Israel after what seemed a cruelly short time of marital fulfilment. Following her death the idea of putting together a book in her memory took shape. The intended title was “The Self in Childhood”, reflecting Agi's particular interest in borderline children and adults. Many of her friends volunteered contributions, and Isabel Menzies Lyth and Sydney Klein were among them. Unfortunately the high cost of printing and other practical difficulties eventually made the publication of the book impossible. The papers intended for the memorial volume are being published in various places, and I am delighted that some have found a place in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy.

The Balancing of Child and Adult: An Approach to Victorian Fantasies for Children

MUCH has been written on socializing aspects of children's literature, on this or that classic's promotion of maturity and healthy growth. Yet children's books, especially works of fantasy, rely just as heavily on artist's ability to tap a rich reservoir of regressive yearnings. Such works can be said to hover between states of perception that William Blake had labeled innocence and experience. From vantage point of experience, an adult imagination re-creates an earlier childhood self in order to steer it towards reality principle. From vantage point of innocence, however, that childhood agent may resist imposition of adult values and stubbornly demand that its desire to linger in a realm of magic and wonder be satisfied. Like Blake's two contrary states, these conflicting impulses thus remain locked into a dynamic that acknowledges simultaneous yet opposing demands of growth and arrest. It is no coincidence that self-divided Victorians who found themselves wandering between two worlds in their Janus-like split between progress and nostalgia should have produced what has rightly been called the Golden Age of children's books.' Earlier

Some Thoughts on Childhood Psychosis, Self and Object

Some Thoughts on Childhood Psychosis, Self and Object

The Genesis of Self in Early Childhood

The works of Cooley, Mead, and Piaget on the genesis and emergence of self in early childhood are examined in light of recent research in developmental linguistics and assessed in terms of the auth...

Children as individuals

The author's pioneering work on the archetypes and the self in childhood has spanned almost 50 years. This title includes descriptions from Fordham's practice, and experience of infant observation studies, and provides basic conceptions on which the Jungian approach to child analysis if based.

The self in childhood.

The self in childhood.