Latency

The Golden Age of Childhood

Gertraud Diem-Wille

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429818028
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Psychology

Latency: The Golden Age of Childhood concerns the child's emotional and cognitive development during the period of latency. It constitutes a bridge between the first stormy years of child development and adolescence. The conflicts and libidinous wishes of early childhood are relegated to the background and become latent: in general, an emotional and physical stabilization occurs. The child is attempting to find its place in the world. Accordingly, its primary interest is no longer in itself or its parents, but in the outside world. This is particularly manifested in forms of play typical for this age range, strongly influenced by imitation of the adult world and reality-oriented. At the same time, the body is explored (and its awareness is strengthened through numerous games involving movement, skill and competition). In all societies, this period is when school begins.

The latency development includes new physical and intellectual capabilities as well as the development of new ways to deal with problems of social hierarchy; gradually, tolerance of tensions and a stabilization of identity are developed as well.

CHAPTER ONE


Body and psyche in latency

The body ego

After the first years of dramatic physical development in a child’s life, the subsequent period of latency (six to twelve years old) represents a time of emotional and physical stabilisation. The newborn infant’s body, with its limited means of communication, vision, and smell, had developed rapidly into a baby who could raise his hands over his head, stamp, hold his toes, and turn over. Parents enthuse over their baby’s developing skills as he crawls, sits, or stands up, and begins to walk. Anyone following the progress of an invalid who once again must “learn” to walk knows how difficult it is for limbs to again become limber, regain balance, and embark on the task of walking. Yet a small child develops these skills easily through playful experimentation—fuelled simply by his desire for mobility. Each child has his own rhythm and dynamic process culminating in standing up and walking. The child’s world is indeed many-faceted, as can be seen in close examination through systematic psychoanalytic observation in play groups or the family; these psychoanalytic observations are subsequently described by the observer, who analyses them for their relevance regarding the child’s personality (see Diem-Wille & Turner, 2012).

From his hesitant first steps, the baby becomes a mobile, vital child experimenting with his steadily increasing mobility and movement skills. At six, children are constantly in motion: they in fact rarely walk, instead hopping, jumping, running, and climbing—with, as Anna Freud wrote, their Funktionslust, “pleasure in functioning”, that is, the desire and pleasure to have their bodies under control. Toilet training already constitutes an important accomplishment, requiring control over the sphincter muscles. At first, releasing bodily products was an act bound up in the baby’s relationship with the mother: submitting the stool is symbolically linked to giving the mother a gift, and in a struggle between child and mother, the child’s desire to retain the stool can lead to contretemps. Thus, both releasing and submitting are steps towards maturity.

Psyche and soma are intimately linked. In this section, I observe the child’s development from the somatic point of view—although the psychic level must always be taken into consideration. The way a child experiences her own body depends upon what has happened to her and how her parents treat their child’s body—whether or not they contemplate it lovingly, caress and care for it in joy and gladness over the child’s existence. Such a lovingly contemplated child will feel well in his own skin—“cathecting” (occupying) his body positively, in Freud’s terminology—and regard his body as do his loving parents, experiencing himself as something vital. When parents are in a difficult situation and cannot devote themselves lovingly to their baby, if they are overwhelmed by their own problems and caring for the baby becomes merely a matter of duty, their child consequently cannot “cathect” his body in a positive fashion: instead, he feels himself a stranger within his own skin, or avoids bodily contact with others.

The subsequent chapters focus on the development of feeling, thinking, and psychosexual development—as closely interlinked as in a symphony, where various instruments determine together the tonal colour. One could also say that the body is a mirror of the soul. Psychic blocks, guilt feelings, and fears are manifested through clumsy movements, frequent bruises, and inhibited forms of expression. An emotionally secure child with a good relationship to her parents moves with security and ease. She shows her lust for life by not just walking but jumping, estimating her own capabilities realistically and only climbing up where she can subsequently climb down. The inherent potential every child has for physical development can be tapped when parents trust their children to follow their inner programme for development. Here, it suffices for parents to be emotionally accessible, showing their joy and involvement with the child’s development—for instance, simply paying attention while he learns to crawl or stand up. Emmi Pikler (2001), a Hungarian paediatrician with psychoanalytic experience, strongly advises affording a child time, not overambitiously forcing him to acquire a skill (for instance, sitting or walking) before he has developed the requisite muscles. The psychoanalytic theory of development correlates with this basic attitude, emphasising in turn the underlying emotional quality of the parent–child relationship—particularly the parent’s capacity for absorbing and understanding the child’s primitive fears as projected into the parent, subsequently explaining those fears to the child in easily comprehensible language. In addition, the parents’ positive expectations that their child will indeed develop the necessary capabilities will furnish a positive influence. Overly fearful, unconsciously aggressive parents who constantly expect their child to hurt himself, have an accident, or fail can have an inhibiting influence. Psychoanalysis attempts to detect unconscious, suppressed feelings and motives behind parents’ manifest behaviour and feelings. We know that there are always ambivalent feelings within human relationships, that the baby can feel love and hate for the same sheltering person from whom she also desires independence. If parents are able to perceive the dark side of their relationship to their child, this can actually constitute a relief. Mother and father recognise that alongside their love for the child, they in fact desire to again be alone together in peace, at times experiencing the child as an intruder into their private intimacy.

We understand the body ego on the one hand as a medium for communication; movement expresses psychic and emotional moods, activities, and inhibitions. On the other hand, it is also of essential import how a person—whether child or adult—has emotionally cathected his body. The way a person feels his own body is a result of his original, primary relationship to his parents. When a child sees the “shine” in his mother’s eyes (as D. W. Winnicott put it), expressing her delight over his existence, he will accordingly build up a positive feeling towards his body and self and feel comfortable in his skin. “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego; it is not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface,” as Freud wrote in The Ego and the Id (1923b, p. 294). In a footnote to the English translation, Freud adds: “The ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as a mental projection of the surface of the body, besides as we have seen above, representing the superficies of the mental apparatus” (ibid.). The way we psychically cathect our bodies depends upon our self-image: can we perceive our body as belonging to us, or does it remain something foreign like a robot or mechanical machine? In my book The Early Years of Life (2013), I described the basic aspects of body cathexis as a reflection of the emotional relationship to the primary caregiver—when the child feels accepted, expected, and loved, or when he interprets his parents’ devotion, denial, joy, and irritation within his own fantasy world. We understand the child’s bodily self-image—and his acceptance of this self-image—as an internalisation of his experiences when his parents have treated his body either lovingly or dismissively. Although the complex interrelations between self-image, self-consciousness, and acceptance of the body are treated in separate chapters of this book, it must be emphasised that these various perspectives always overlap.

In the latency period between six and twelve years of age (the temporal definition of latency varies, beginning with either five or six and proceeding to eleven or twelve), the child’s peer group focuses on the acquirement of physical skills. Freud adopted his concept of “latency” from Wilhelm Fliess, who spoke of the “period of sexual latency”. Freud understands latency as a transition between early childhood and adolescence, bridging these two periods. Here, the term “latency” denotes that sexual ambitions are not as obvious as in the Oedipal phase or in adolescence, remaining relatively occluded. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud posits that the energy from sexual impulses “is diverted, wholly or in great part, from their sexual use and directed to other ends” (1905d, p. 178). All of the child’s prior experiences, her inhibitions, fantasies, and desires have already served to form the basic pattern of her personality, remaining immanent throughout her lifetime. Although they will be modified through later experiences, the deep structures remain constant. In latency, however, sexual impulses become subordinated to other goals.

Illustration 1:Boys on the beach.

The acquirement of bodily skills moves to the forefront. One biological manifestation of maturity is the loss of baby teeth and the growing in of “adult” teeth—an event children yearn for, impatiently wiggling their teeth at the slightest evidence of looseness. Now, the child shifts from infantile aggressions to more constructive activities.

Freud points out that “children feel a need for a large amount of active muscular exercise and derive extraordinary pleasure from satisfying it” (ibid., p. 202). This is borne out by the following poem by A. A. Milne:

Hoppity

Christopher Robin goes

Hoppity, hoppity,

Hoppity, hoppity, hop.

Whenever I tell him

Politely to stop it, he

Says he can’t possibly stop.

If he stopped hopping,

He couldn’t go anywhere,

Poor little Christopher

Couldn’t go anywhere …

That’s why he always goes

Hoppity, hoppity,

Hoppity,

Hoppity,

Hop.

(When We Were Very Young, 1924, pp. 60ff.)

Hopping and running are expressions of the child’s overflowing joy in life. He cannot help moving in this mode, taking pleasure in a newfound control over his own body, exercising his new skills.

With tremendous perseverance and stamina, the child proceeds through all manner of skilled games and sports: cycling, skateboarding, climbing, and gymnastics such as cartwheels and handstands, which are sometimes practised for hours on end. Particularly for boys, the measurement of strength, competition, and winning determine social prestige and hierarchical position. Here, the link to sexual pleasure is demonstrated in wrestling and fighting, which can cause sexual excitement as it affords boys considerable body contact in addition to exercising muscles (Freud, 1905d, p. 202).

Boys compete with each other, play wild games, hunt for objects. Action is important (see Brizendine, 2010, p. 39). They fight with swords, toy pistols, water pistols, shouting loudly and attempting to frighten one another. Group games require the capacity to take action and make group decisions. In one popular book for latency children, Harry Potter (1997), one game of skill (invented by author J. K. Rowling) is a form of competition: “Quidditch”, played on magic broomsticks, imparts to young readers the fascination and physical excitement of flying, embodying an intensified version of popular forms of transportation such as roller skating, skiing, or flying in an aeroplane, plus a strong hint of virtual computer games. With the term “condensation”, psychoanalysis understands an essential mechanism found in dreams, where various elements are represented together in a single image (Freud, 1900a, p. 3). As Laplanche and Pontalis describe this mechanism, “A sole idea represents several associative chains at whose point of intersection it is located” (1973, p. 82); Rustin and Rustin (2001, p. 266) note that the magic broomstick is just as much of a status symbol as any other piece of sports equipment—devices children from poorer families cannot afford.

Illustration 2:Girl on the rings.

Brizendine (2006, p. 24) contends that girls dislike rough games: when they are shoved about, they leave the game and seek a quieter corner. Girls also take turns with each other in games of skill “20 times more often than boys” (ibid.); apparently, it is just as important for a girl to watch her friends accomplishing a given feat as accomplishing it herself is. Girls exhibit great persistence in putting together puzzles, drawing, and painting. They also like role-playing—cooking, decorating houses, and caring for dolls. Children’s games in latency are more adapted to reality and less rich in fantasy than in early childhood. Melanie Klein (1952c) writes of a “compulsive overemphasis on reality”, with attendant repression of fantasy. Whereas small children playing with water express their desire for oral contact and oral dirtying, a child in latency will deal with water in a rationalised form—cooking, cleaning—as expressions of reaction formation, that is, Klein’s “compulsive overemphasis on reality”.

Clemens, eight, and Katharina, six and a half, are playing “restaurant”. Two years before, they played “cooking”, making soup out of grass, water, pine needles, and flowers, and serving it to the grown-ups out of play bowls. But for latency children, games are much closer to reality: this time, Clemens and Katharina carefully plan a menu, discussing in detail which dishes should be included and how much each will cost. The restaurant’s name—“Gasthof zum Attersee”—is written in colourful letters on the menu, and on the other side they draw an Attersee boat. This preparation lasts a full hour, with both children steadily devoting their full concentration to it. They construct a restaurant out of wooden benches where they can cook, then arranging cooking utensils, cutlery, and plates. Now, they approach their parents and other guests, asking what they wish to eat and taking their orders, then returning to the “kitchen” and preparing the dishes ordered. Finally, they serve the dishes, neatly arranged on child plates. When it comes time to pay, they cite a fantasy sum and are somewhat discomfited when the adults pay using leaves, asserting that they would prefer “real money”!

Illustration 3:Menu.

Discussion

This game is strongly characterised by imitation of the adult world. The children slip into the roles of restaurant owners, cook, and waiter. They have already processed their own observations and can represent the events in a restaurant. There is relatively little room for fantasy, but the game is still fun for both children. Their great energy, and the fact that they repeat the same game the following day, point to a libidinal connection.

Illustration 4:Restaurant Attersee.

That same afternoon, they also invent another game. After swimming and diving for a long time as well as going in an inflatable boat with their mother, they are allowed to play in the boat alone, since it is moored to the wooden pier.

This game, which last for over an hour and is continued the following day, consists of one fixed sequence: both children (who are both good swimmers) are in the boat; Clemens leans far out over the edge, puts his legs in the water, and calls out excitedly: “Man overboard!”; Katharina looks at him in surprise; he (intentionally) slips further and further into the water, as if he were truly falling overboard. Immediately, the girl helps him to get back into the boat—sometimes he manages this alone, sometimes she has to pull him with all her might. She takes up the game, calls out “Man overboard!”, and lets herself fall—not as far as Clemens did—into the water. Then she pulls herself out, rolling backwards and landing in the bottom of the boat. Each time one of them makes it back into the boat, both children laugh. Katharina then asks why people say “Man overboard” and changes the cry to “Woman overboard”. Clemens lands in the boat and plays dead until Katharina brings him back to life.

Illustration 5:Man ov...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Author
• Introduction
• Chapter One Body and psyche in latency
• Chapter Two Latency: the development of thinking and learning
• Chapter Three Latency children in therapy
• Chapter Four The significance of reading in the latency period
• Chapter Five Consequences and overview
• References
• Index