A Study of IMAGINATION IN EARLY CHILDHOOD

and its Function in Mental Development

Ruth Griffiths

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136313912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This is Volume IX of thirty-two on a series on Developmental Psychology. First published in 1935, this study looks at the development of imagination in children. Which uses a method in which observation of the free behaviour of children plays the principal role, but in which experimental technique is represented by a somewhat rigorous control of conditions, by a discreet use of question and answer, and by an emphasis on the necessity for accurate and full report, while psychoanalysis, at the same time, contributes a depth of insight, a realization of the importance of affective factors, and an alertness for the significance of detail.

Part I
Practical and Experimental

Chapter I
Introductory

Modern psychological science has during recent decades made vast inroads into hitherto unconquered territory of mental phenomena. In numerous directions progress has been conspicuous. There is among workers in every field an earnest desire to lift the science from the level of mere description to that of systematic explanation. Much has been achieved n the development of scientific machinery and technique. Knowledge has been extended in numerous directions and, although neither the methods used nor the results obtained are uniformly valuable, the threads of true progress wind their way through the chaos of new doctrines, new methods, rival theories, argument, and criticism.

There is at the present time here and there developing a new attitude on the part of psychologists. An increasing emphasis is being placed upon the study of the earliest years of human life, and upon a genetic approach to psychological problems. The science, owing to the breadth of its field, tends to split up into branches, each regarding the subject matter from a different angle; and in the desire which is the fundamental goal of science to find some unitary medium of explanation, some one scheme into which all mental phenomena can be fitted, many rival schools of thought have arisen. Yet it seems that however opposed the views of these several sections, however antagonistic the rival doctrines, this new attitude with its emphasis upon the importance of childhood, yet tinges their thought, and in a few cases claims their whole attention.

The search for a “general factor” finds its way into the lower reaches of chronological age. Theories of education seek to understand the native minds, and in particular the learning processes of the youngest children. Psychoanalysis searches for the cause of neurosis into the unconscious minds and accidental experiences of babes. Behaviourism studies the so-called “conditioning” and “unconditioning” of infants, and compares their reactions with those of animals. It seems that we have reached a stage in the scientific progress of psychology when we must pause and scrutinize the very foundations of human life as manifested in childhood. Later retracing our steps to the more complex processes of adult psychology, and to the specialized details of “applied” branches of the subject, we shall be in a better position to see upon what basis the structure of our science has been raised. Too much has in the past seemingly been taken for granted concerning those basic principles, which can only be made plain by a study of the early stages of mental development. It will require a long and painstaking search, and the efforts of many workers, before we shall have a true conception of the nature of the child mind as such. The evolution of new techniques for the study of the pre-verbal levels of experience is one only of the difficult obstacles, the overcoming of which will tax the ingenuity of future investigators.

We are discovering also that progress in other directions, in allied though separate branches of knowledge, can be made as a result of a systematic study of the earliest years of experience. For example, the study of infancy throws light in some directions upon the psychology of primitive races, upon the evolution of language, of art, of literature, of religion, and even possibly of science itself.

There is in general a growing recognition amongst psychologists of the importance of this period, stressed in particular as the result of several controversies. The doctrine of infantile sexuality as expounded by Freud has provoked much comment and criticism and, whatever the outcome may be, of what has been for many an unwelcome revelation, it has served to emphasize dramatically the necessity for greater knowledge concerning this period of life. More recently the extension of analytic technique to the study and cure of neurosis in children, and also to the possibility of prevention rather than cure of nervous illness, again directs attention to child psychology. The earlier analysts placed the period of greatest emotional stress between the fourth and sixth years of life, and thus stimulated interest in kindergarten children. Since, however, the actual analyses of little children have been carried out, it is believed that the second and third years are of more fundamental importance.

Another recent controversy is that concerning the nature of thought in early childhood. Probably the most outstanding work recently produced in this field is that of Jean Piaget and his collaborators at Geneva. Piaget’s doctrine of a non-logical or pre-logical stage of mental development has made further studies of children’s thinking an urgent demand upon the genetic psychologist.

The great educationalist Froebel has not yet ceased to have influence upon us in directing attention to the youngest children, and in our own century Dr. Montessori has done work with similar effect. We find the tendency for the public education of children to extend its authority and influence downwards into the “pre-school” years. Less and less are the homes responsible for the children. The kindergarten and Montessori schools provide education for children usually of about 4 to 7 years. With the popularization and extension of the Nursery School Movement, the child of the future will enter school at the age of 18 months to 2 years. This movement is the direct result of the realization on the part of educators of the fundamental importance of the first years.

It is probably true to say that the understanding of the learning process is the central and common objective of both psychology and pedagogy. At least it is at this point that these sciences overlap. The central factor of experience is learning or the acquisition of knowledge. How is learning achieved? What is the inner significance of this process? It is this question that the behaviourists, in spite of their neglect of the subjective, ask when they study the reflexes of men and animals. This is also from another angle the question of the analyst, and of the clinical psychologist, when they ask, “How did this man become neurotic? or delinquent? Is this attitude learned? If so, how was it acquired?” This also is the underlying question of the argument involved in the “inheritance versus environment” controversy. How many of our desirable and undesirable human characteristics are learned? How much is given in experience? What is the secret of the learning process itself?

Few psychologists nowadays subscribe to the older view of learning as a gradual addition of chance elements in experience. The tabula rasa theory is now merely of historical interest. Associationism at least in its older form offers no satisfactory explanation. The new doctrine of Gestalt or Form Psychology, or Holism, denying the older atomistic conception, places an emphasis upon the “whole” in experience, as primary to, and more fundamental than, the parts into which it can be divided. A more fundamental question appears, however, to be that concerning the acquisition of these wholes, and the way in which they contribute to developing knowledge. Behaviourism may be regarded as an atomism also, but unlike associationism it deals only with externals, endeavouring to show how complex behaviour patterns derive from the grouping together of reflexes. It is obvious that behaviouristic atomism can do little to explain, or even describe, the acquisition of knowledge, or the learning process as a subjective experience. The doctrine of noegenesis, as expounded by Professor Spearman of London University,¹ lying as it does between the extremes of associationism on the one hand and of Gestalt on the other, and being a clear exposition of what introspection can show to take place in human thinking, appears to offer the best available explanation at the present stage of our knowledge of the problem of human learning. Probably the touchstone even here will be the demonstration of its applicability in the realm of early childhood.

It was Freud who made the study of dreaming respectable. Previous to his investigations in this fascinating field, science ■ had not dared to be sufficiently aware of the existence of dreams to include them amongst observable mental phenomena. What Freud did in boldly putting forward as evidence the subject matter of dreaming was to show that the science of human experience was incomplete without a frank recognition of every aspect of that experience. However trivial or apparently irrelevant a series of mental facts may be, in so far as they are elements of experience, they become part of the subject matter of psychology. The same lesson may be applied in the field of study of early childhood. We have tended in the past to limit our study of this period to those aspects of the child’s conscious thinking that become manifest at the school age in connection with overt learning. The earliest years have been largely a closed book. The young child was regarded by the older educationalists as unworthy of education of any kind. The younger children needed to wait until they reached the “age of reason “, that is the age at which they were ready to commence the study of the classical languages of Greece and Rome, before they were of any interest whatever to the school. This stress upon the “intellectual” involved the fallacy of neglecting the largest part of experience in the early school years, as well as the whole of the pre-school period. To-day we aim not only to “instruct” but to “educate “, and to do this in any true sense it is necessary to understand “the whole child” and, from the beginning, his emotional as well as his intellectual life. Indeed we cannot begin to know the latter without a grasp of the former with which it is closely linked, and that both enriches and distorts it. We aim to know not only how at school the child acquires a knowledge of Latin verbs, but by what subtle and complex psychological and physiological means he learns from the earliest months to crawl and to walk, to run and to climb, and in general to overcome environment. The acquisition of speech early becomes the central factor indicative of, though not alone comprising, intellectual development. But we must also understand the causes of anomalies of behaviour, of likes and dislikes, bad habits, tantrums, fear and apprehension, inhibition in general, as well as boasting and aggression. What do these things signify? What is taking place in the child’s mind? Of what does he dream and day-dream? In short we need to come more closely into contact with “mental content” at this period.

But of all these aspects of childish experience there is none that, being universally recognized, is yet so little understood in any scientific sense as that of phantasy and imagination. This largely neglected aspect of childish experience appears to be of outstanding importance, not only for the emotional development and mental health of the child but as a significant factor also in intellectual development at this stage. It seems to hold a unique position, in so far as it is through phantasy that emotion is expressed, and, as we hope to show in the theoretical discussion in Part II, it is out of phantasy as a principal factor that an intelligent grasp of environment arises. Phantasy supplies the subject matter of thought.

The imaginative tendencies of early childhood have long been recognized as characteristic of these early years, which have indeed been called “the age of imagination The long periods of day-dreaming, the tendency to invent “ imaginary companions”, to construct a world of fairyland into which temporarily to retreat from the world of sense, to dramatize in play remembered scenes, to murmur aloud long conversations with toys and visualized, but non-present, objects or persons, all these tendencies have been observed but, being usually misunderstood, have been largely disparaged and dismissed as “play” in contradistinction to the more valuable “work” of school that comes later. At best these tendencies have been tolerated as harmless amusements, at worst they have been regarded as dangerous, unhealthy, or a waste of time. By the analytic school alone has due weight been placed upon these early subjective experiences, and this of course with the bias of the analyst towards a medical attitude and explanation. Yet here and there in the literature of childhood do we find indications of a more generous attempt to understand, and a more scientific insight into the true meaning of childhood. Sully says¹ with regard to the simple story-making of children: “I have treated the myths of children as a product of pure imagination, of the impulse to realize in vivid images what lies away from and above the world of sense. Yet, as we shall see later, they are really more than this. They contain, like the myths of primitive men, a true germ of thought.”

More recently in an article in Mental Hygiene, Line gives some interesting examples of children’s phantasies, and recommends that such be noted by parents, as they throw light upon developmental factors.¹ The Sterns also, finding a non-analytic explanation, recognize the importance of the tendency to phantasy in the earliest years, and stress the normality of this phase of development, and also its similarity in many ways to the rich blossoming of imagination in early adolescence. Healy again points out the harm that follows upon repression of imagination or phantasy in childhood, and blames upon such repression the development of many undesirable traits of personality.²

These are a few only of the indications to be found in the literature of a more generous and more scientific attitude among psychologists towards these natural subjective phenomena of early childhood. T...