From Instinct to Identity

The Development of Personality

Louis Breger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351518703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

From Instinct to Identity begins an account of personality development by tracing the legacy of the human species from its primate heritage to its present form. Findings from ethology, primate studies, linguistics, and other sources are used to construct an account of the unique features of man. The evolution of early cultures is shown through use of anthropological work. The ideas of Sigmund Freud, particularly as modifi ed by Erik Erikson, are presented together with the theories and findings of Jean Piaget and his collaborators in a series of chapters that follow the person from infancy to adolescence. Other chapters examine play, dreams, and fantasy; anxiety and its effects on the development of self; moral development; and identity. The emphasis throughout is on the growth of self, and its impact on social norms. The author blends together theories and findings from psychoanalysis, psychology, ethology, humanistic psychology, and child development, develops a model of human motivation in which the basic emotional systems of love, anxiety, aggression, curiosity and intelligence are traced from their primate background through the human life cycle. He brings together classic ideas on guilt and conscience with research on moral reasoning and ego development, and clarifies difficult ideas in a clear, direct prose style. This classic volume, now available in paperback with a new introduction by the author, will fi nd a new audience among anthropologists as well as psychologists interested in the evolution of human behavior.

chapter one

The Developmental Perspective

The development of human personality is one of those grand topics—the concern of philosophers, novelists, psychologists, and theologians (not to mention parents) for centuries. All cultures and societies contain beliefs or theories about the psychological development of their people. Such beliefs or theories, which are usually not stated in any formal sense, are embodied in child-rearing practices; social institutions such as schools; beliefs about human nature, man’s “instincts” and how they can be legitimately expressed or how they must be controlled; the sorts of expectations held for children; and a host of other ideas, laws, values, and social practices. Such views enable parents to raise their children, and institutions to influence them, so that they become functioning members of their societies.

There are, thus, a great number of theories and ideas about personality development, ranging from the most abstract philosophical views to the “theory” implicit in the way a peasant mother tends her child. There is no way in which all of these could be covered in a single book and I will make no attempt to do so. Rather, I will trace the development of personality as seen from a particular perspective. The overriding focus will be on the growth of self, from the sense- and action-dominated self of infancy to the formation of identity in adolescence and early adulthood. Attention will be directed at the evolutionary heritage of man, the centrality of emotion in human relationships, the role of fantasy, play, and dreams, unconscious processes, repression, and moral development. In dealing with these topics I will bring together observations and theory from Freud, Erikson, Sullivan, and others of the Neo-Freudian group, with the ideas and observations of Jean Piaget and his followers.¹ To these views will be added evidence from the broader field of child development, and from ethology, primate studies, anthropology, and such other areas as are relevant. The point of view will not be “psychoanalytic” in what has come to be the accepted usage of that term, nor will I survey various theories of personality or attempt to summarize the views of individual theorists or schools. Rather, I will attempt to synthesize the ideas of selected observers and theorists around key topics. If the book has an original contribution to make, it is not in reporting new discoveries, but in coordinating and synthesizing elements from the fields and theories mentioned above.

The thread that ties these various theories and fields of study together is what I am calling “the developmental perspective.” The concept of development is one of those seminal ideas that has influenced fields as diverse as philosophy, history, economics, biology, and psychology. Although early versions can no doubt be traced to Greek philosophers such as Heraclitus who likened life to a moving stream, always changing, never the same—the greatest impact of developmental thinking was felt in the nineteenth century. Developmental ideas appeared in the philosophy of Hegel and, from there, shaped the social and economic theories of Karl Marx. More central to our present concern, however, is the developmental model found in biology and epitomized by Charles Darwin’s (1859) theory of evolution. This develop-mental-evolutionary theory has had a profound influence—directly on biologists and workers in related fields such as ethology and primate studies, and also on psychologists such as Freud, Erikson, and Piaget. Let us now examine the general development model, and then trace its course through biology and psychology.

THE DEVELOPMENTAL MODEL

Persons in even the most primitive of cultures were exposed to development—the growth of human beings, other animals, plants, and trees. Their observations of growth prompted explanations, but these tended not to be “developmental” in the sense that I will define the term. Primitive ideas—and these have lasted until quite recently in many areas—viewed growth as a one-stage process in which something smaller gets bigger. The seedling is a miniature tree, the infant a miniature adult, and both will, over time and with the addition of food and water, reach their mature forms. This is a linear model of growth and it is also seen in primitive explanations for the origins of the human species. All cultures have myths, religions, or theories to explain the origins of their people. And most of these are essentially the same as the Book of Genesis: the first man and woman were plunked down somewhere by God or a great spirit in the same physical forms as the men and women familiar to contemporary members of the culture. Development, in such early “theories,” is simply a matter of getting from the first man to the present state by the addition of more people. Such single-stage or linear models of growth contrast with the more complex developmental model that grew out of biology and embryology, and which is seen in sophisticated form in Darwin’s theory of evolution.

As the early biologists looked more closely at the structure of plants and animals, it was gradually recognized that the process of growth was a more complex affair than was first imagined. As we now know, growth is not always a linear process in which something smaller becomes bigger. Rather growth, or what can now rightly be called development, involves progression through successive stages. What exists at one stage becomes transformed into something related to, but also different than, what existed earlier. Thus, an animal begins its life as a single cell (this is an arbitrary starting point, of course, since the cell itself develops from simpler elements); cells divide and group themselves into clusters with new forms and functions. Such clusters—for example, muscles, skin, bones, and other organ systems of the body—are related to the common cells from which they all originated, but are also different in ways suitable to their new groupings. The segregation of cells by function and grouping is called differentiation and it is one of the basic processes of all development. The various differentiated systems—nervous, skeletal, muscular, circulatory, digestive, reproductive—are interrelated at ever more complex levels of organization. These new arrangements illustrate integration, the other basic process of development.

The growth of an organism proceeds through stages during which there is differentiation and integration at successively more complex levels of organization. This model of development describes the growth of animals from single cell to mature adult form and, as we will see, is useful in understanding the development of species and the psychological development of persons. The model differs from a single-stage or linear growth model: the first cell does not simply get bigger or multiply; rather, development progresses through stages in which cells become both differentiated and integrated at more complex levels of organization.

It took biologists some time to arrive at this model of development. Early models of the sperm cell, for example, pictured a complete, miniature person inside, showing the persistence of the one-stage or linear growth model (see Figure 1.1). Gradually, the developmental model supplanted the earlier one-stage model. The general features of the developmental model may be summarized as follows, using embryological development as an example.

FIGURE 1.1

The stage-wise development in which cells become differentiated from each other and integrated into more complex organizations has already been noted.

Development proceeds in one direction only; what happens at any point in the process is dependent on what has occurred up to that point.

The process always goes from simple to complex and there is a fixed order to the development of the different body systems, the nervous system developing first, the heart and circulatory system later, and other systems still later.

Finally, events have significance depending on when they occur during development. The different body systems are specially sensitive during those embryological stages during which their development is rapid, and relatively insensitive before and after. An example of this would be the way in which German measles in the mother can lead to blindness of the fetus during the first three months of pregnancy. This is the time during which the nervous system, including those parts serving the visual apparatus, are undergoing rapid development, and, for this reason, the system is particularly vulnerable at this time.

The Theory of Evolution

The general model of development is also illustrated by Darwin’s theory of the evolution of species. Early views pictured man as “created” in essentially his present form. Darwin showed, by contrast, that the existing form of any species is the result of a long process of evolutionary development. The life of a species, just as the life of the individual organism, begins in a simpler form and then undergoes transformations over the many generations of species evolution. This evolution shows the same characteristics of integration and differentiation, as the different species of animals adapt to different environments, as well as the same increase in complexity, that one sees on the level of the individual organism. One can construct a developmental ladder of evolution with one-celled organisms at the bottom and complex animals such as mammals, at the top. Such a ladder is analogous to the development of the individual embryo: both illustrate the general model of development. We will look at the theory of evolution in more detail in the next chapter; it is mentioned here to show how the developmental model has been used to explain both individual growth and the evolution of species.

The Developmental Model in Psychology

The general model of development, as well as Darwin’s theory of evolution, are now well established in biology and related areas. Developmental thinking came later to psychology and has been incompletely absorbed in this field. Let us consider a few brief examples of essentially nondevelop-mental models in psychology, and then look at psychoanalytic theory which can be interpreted with both a developmental and a nondevelopmental emphasis. This will lead us to the more clearly developmental-psychoanalytic theories of Erikson and Sullivan and, finally, to Piaget, whose work is explicitly within the developmental-evolutionary framework.

Many psychological theories—like the one-stage or linear model of growth outlined above—are nondevelopmental in character. Explanations of personality in terms of “traits” and “types” are examples of such static models. The ancient Greeks explained differences in personality in terms of four basic personality types. You simply were one of these types or, perhaps, some mixture of them. Later type theories have focused on body-build or psychological predispositions such as introversion-extroversion. While such theories may become quite complicated, they imply the same model as that illustrated by the picture of the little person inside the sperm cell; the assumption is that a person’s type resides within and is stimulated to unfold with experience.

Probably the most widespread type theory still influential today is that embodied in the psychiatric classification system which categorizes disturbed persons as neurotic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, and so on. While the categorization of persons in all of these type theories describes certain important ways in which individuals differ from each other, the type model distracts attention from the evolving, developmental nature of personality. Although usually not explicitly stated, type models assume that one’s basic introversion or schizophrenia has existed from the beginning, like the miniature person inside the sperm cell. In a developmental theory, by contrast, an introvert or schizophrenic is not something that a person is but something that he may become as he develops.

Theories of learning that rely on models of conditioning are not static in the way the type and psychiatric diagnostic models are; indeed psychologists within this tradition have stressed the openness of persons to change. Some of them seem to assume that anyone can learn anything at any point in the life span. Most stimulus-response or conditioning models of learning, however, are based on a linear or one-stage model of growth. There is typically no conception of stages, of special sensitivity to certain kinds of experience during specific stages of development, nor of a nonreversible, hierarchical, developmental sequence. The assumption seems to be that infants, children, and adults learn by the same principles (reinforcement, rewards, and punishments) and that if there is any sequence to learning it is simply a process of starting with “little” (associations, stimulus-response connections, learned responses) and acquiring “more” as one gets older. Now let us consider some psychological theories which are developmental in nature.

Psychoanalytic ideas will be examined in a variety of ways in later chapters, so it will not be necessary to discuss them fully or critically at this time. Let us note very briefly some ways in which Freud’s ideas fit a developmental model. Freud was trained as a physician, worked at developmental-neurological research before turning to psychology, and was, in a general way, committed to biological-evolutionary thinking. His model of psychosexual development clearly stems from this biological background. Before Freud, human sexuality was thought of as something that simply appeared at puberty. With his theory of psychosexual development, Freud attempted to show how sexuality began in infancy as something related to, but also different from, adult sexuality and how it developed through a sequence of stages. Each stage is defined in terms of an area of the body which is presumed to be specially sensitive at the time of its predominance. Thus, during the first or oral stage, the mouth, lips and general oral zone are particularly sensitive, and the most influential experiences are those such as feeding and sucking—of oral pleasure and its frustration—which involve this zone. Stimulation or experiences involving other body zones are of less importance during this stage. Development then progresses to the anal zone during which experiences involving elimination and toilet training become central. Following this comes an initial genital stage, then a period of latency, and finally, after puberty, the emergence of adult genitality. The order of stages is always the same and each stage involves a transformation of the experience from the preceding stage. The impact of experience or learning is dependent on when it occurs during the sequence of development. It can be seen from these examples that Freud’s psychosexual model is a developmental one.

The psychosexual model is perhaps the clearest instance of developmental thinking within psychoanalysis, though there are other ways in which developmental considerations appear. Freud presents what is essentially a two-stage theory of thinking: he assumes that the thought of the infant is different in form from that of the adult. Infantile thought, which he termed the primaiy process, is visual or “hallucinatory,” and is dominated by the search for immediate gratification. It is also undifferentiated, tending to blur distinctions between the self and the outside world or between inner bodily experiences and outer reality. Such thought gives way to the secondary process which is more logical and differentiated. Other examples of a developmental model could be cited but these should suffice to show that such a model is consistent with major aspects of psychoanalytic theory.

From Psychosexual to Psychosocial

A point that should be stressed is the lag which typically occurs when a model developed in one field is applied to another. I mentioned earlier that the developmental model appeared in philosophical thinking and was initially used in biology to explain the growth of cells and animals. It remained for Darwin to reshape the model into a theory that explained the origin and evolution of species. Certain principles of the earlier model remain but the rest is analogy; a species of animals evolving over millions of years is not the same as embryonic development. The use of the developmental model in psychology requires a similar reshaping. The theorist must retain those general ideas that apply to both biological and psychological development but also recognize what are purely analogies and feel free to abandon them where necessary. Freud’s use of the developmental model is a sort of transition between biology and psychology and it remained for later psychoanalytic theorists such as Erikson and Sullivan to reshape the model to psychological development. For example, in Sullivan’s theory it is clear that developmental stages are to be defined in terms of crucial interpersonal experiences. Each stage of development—infancy, early childhood, and adolescence—contains its particular sensitivities, and the way in which each is affected by interpersonal experiences prepares the way for what happens in the next stage.

Similarly, Erikson reshapes Freud’s psychosexual stages into psychosocial stages. His work represents an important reformulation of psychoanalytic ideas which retains what is important—the developmental model, the role of different body areas—but which brings more clearly i...