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The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education
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Kennedy00FM 1/11/06 10:34 AM Page i
THE WELL OF BEING

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SUNY series, Early Childhood Education: Inquiries and Insights

Mary A. Jensen, editor
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The
Well
of
Being
Childhood,
Subjectivity,
and Education
David Kennedy
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

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Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2006 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced

in any manner whatsoever without written permission.
No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted in any form or by any means including
electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher.
Cover photo © the Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of Califor-

nia, City of Oakland, Gift of Paul S. Taylor. Mexican-American Girl, San Fran-
cisco, 1928.
For information, address State University of New York Press,

194 Washington Avenue, Suite 305, Albany, NY 12210-2384
Production by Diane Ganeles

Marketing by Susan M. Petrie
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kennedy, David, 1943-

The well of being : childhood, subjectivity, and education / David
Kennedy.
p. cm. — (SUNY series, early childhood education)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-6825-9 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6826-7 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Children. 2. Children and adults. 3. Education. 4. Postmodernism.
I. Title. II. Series.
HQ767.9.K453 2006
305.23—dc22
2005025462
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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For my children—Irene, Sean, Anna and Joel—

in the form of a question
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Contents
Preface ix
1. Questioning Childhood 1
Whose Child? 1
Which Adult? 5
The Western Construction of Childhood 8
Theorizing Childhood 13
Adult-Child Dialogue 14
The Child Before Us: Education, Parenting, and the
Evolution of Subjectivity 21
2. The Primordial Child 27

The Divine Child 27
The Romantic Child 44
Romanticism, Education, and the New Humanity 56
3. The Invention of Adulthood 63

Adultism and Models of the Self 63
The Evolution ofAdulthood/Childhood 75
The Evolution of the Adult-Child Relationship 85
4. Childhood and the Intersubject 105

Boundary Work 105
The Ego Dethroned 116
The Emergence of the Intersubject 120
Psychogenic Theory of History and the Present Age 132
vii
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viii The Well of Being
The Dialectics of Reason and Desire 136

The Privileged Stranger 142
5. Reimagining School 151

The Purposes of Schooling 151
The Space of Dialogue 158
The School as Laboratory of the Third Way of Living 165
The Dark and the Light 183
Notes 187
Bibliography 211
Index 229
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Preface
On How This Book Got Its Name
This book represents an attempt at a synthesis of the multiple realities

and the discourses they spawn (or which spawn them), which have pre-
occupied me in one way or another for as long as I can remember. I
began by putting the words “postmodern subjectivity” in the title, but
decided that the new form of subjectivity, which I am at pains to tease
out of the welter of postmodernity might sit very poorly with any
number of self-professed postmoderns; that in fact they might find it, not
just naïve, but dangerous in its implications, and even consider it pre-
modern or another hopeless twist of modernity itself. So I determined to
back off from any claims on postmodernity and to own the fundamental
discourse that guides the work, and that in fact has provided for me a
context of belief that has endured behind or underneath all the permuta-
tions of belief (or lack of it) that have characterized various periods of
my life—Romanticism. I decided I would call the second half of the title
“Childhood and Subjectivity in the Romantic Imagination.”
But of course Romanticism is a name applied after the fact. Those
who considered themselves “Romantics” during the Romantic period of
roughly the first half of the nineteenth century might have held any
number of beliefs about what it meant to “be” one, and by a principle
that evokes the Cretan Liar Paradox, those who most firmly professed
to be so were probably least so, and those who are now remembered as
prime examples may, in their lifetimes, have either scorned or been
ignorant of the term. In addition, the Romanticism with which I so
deeply identify—as demonstrated by the scholar of Romantic literature
M.H. Abrams, whose major work, Natural Supernaturalism, plays such
ix
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x The Well of Being
an important role in this one—is a perennial one, to be found both in

the past and the future of that particular epoch in the nineteenth cen-
tury. It is found both in ancient religious and hermetic traditions, eso-
teric and exoteric philosophers, artistic and literary movements, depth
psychologies and political philosophies from both before and after the
period called “Romantic.” As a case in point, probably the most impor-
tant acknowledgment of a broad intellectual debt incurred in this work
is, among several others, to Herbert Marcuse, the German-American
philosopher who in his later work—in particularly Eros and Civiliza-
tion—reclaims the Romantic vision of personal and cultural transfor-
mation on the other side of Marx and Freud. I consider this work—as
closely reasoned as it is—to be an example, along with N.O. Brown’s
masterwork Love’s Body, of High Romantic Genius. But given the
scope and influence of Romanticism, the self-interested use I make of its
arguments, and the extent to which my use is—in that it is interpretive
and critical—already post-Romantic, I decided that to place the word in
the title of this book would be pretentious.
This left me with what I began with—children, childhood, and the
worlds constructed for children by adults, and in particular that pri-
mary site where children and adults meet in the modern world, school;
a decidedly un-Romantic place, where so often, in the twentieth century
Romantic poet Rilke’s words, “Time . . . drags along with so much
worry, and waiting, things so dumb and stupid.”1 To place the child
and childhood, as they are conceived by Romantic theory, in the quin-
tessentially dreary institutional environment of bells, loud speakers,
drab colors, and fluorescent lights, permission slips for the toilet, end-
less worksheets decorated with mawkish cartoons, teachers with no
particular intellectual, ethical, or aesthetic interests, many of them tee-
tering on the edge of burnout as they deliver “teacher-proof” curricula
to groups of children too large to handle except through threats of indi-
vidual or collective punishment of one kind or another, in spaces too
small and unimaginative for anything but seatwork, and those children
themselves engaged in all manner of collaboration with or subversion of
the bureaucratized, quasi-military authority, which sits like bad air in
the lungs of teachers and children alike. . . . For the Romantic imagina-
tion, for which the perceptual and intentional structures of childhood
are prophetic of the highest potentialities of human development, this
form of schooling is utter travesty, and takes the greatest theoretical
restraint not to interpret as a calculated act of social oppression.
If we consider Rousseau as the first, fitful exemplar of the Roman-
tic imagination, then we can say that the primary business of this new
impulse in the West was the reconstruction of education. His Emile of
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Preface xi
1763 cleared the educational decks in a dramatic way for a vision of

reconstruction of the adult-child relation, and the rhetorical energy of
his reformulation traced a clear and increasingly articulate path through
Pestalozzi, Froebel, and Montessori, arriving in the early twentieth cen-
tury in Dewey shorn of obscurantism and covert adultism, and ready
for dialogue with children. The problem is that the school that Emile
deconstructs did not yet exist: universal compulsory public education
arrived forty years after its publication, with the rise of the reactionary
post-French revolutionary nationalistic states in Europe, of which
Napoleon’s was the first example—the culmination of the Revolution in
a police state, and public schooling inaugurated as a national monopoly
administered with an iron hand by the Grand Master of the Imperial
University. Public schooling has either ignored, suppressed, or co-opted
the Romantic reconstruction of schooling ever since. Even the practical
force of Dewey’s philosophical reconstruction, put to the test during the
Progressive Education movement of the first three decades of the twen-
tieth century, ended in mostly cosmetic change and, with the rise of the
Cold War, reaction and repudiation.
But the impulse will not go away. It reemerges periodically, when
the times allow it—often, we might hypothesize, in periods when the
pressure for change from within culture and society is stronger than the
pressures exerted by external forces. In the latter case, the fears and
insecurities that those external forces inspire are manipulated by ideo-
logues, demagogues, and cultural opportunists who implicitly—and, in
times of “danger,” explicitly—construct universal compulsory education
as the first line of national defense and job security. This appears to be
the case today. The only consolation for those who stubbornly hold to
the possibilities that the institution of the school offers for personal self-
actualization and social transformation is the testimony of history,
which assures us that another moment of opportunity for reconstruc-
tion will emerge, and, further, that this opportunity will carry with it
the resources developed in past periods of emergence.
This consolation is guaranteed, not by some law of history but by
another sort of internal necessity that informs the first part of the title
of this book. It is a phrase taken from Gaston Bachelard’s extraordinary
chapter, “Reveries toward Childhood,” a sort of prose poem, both cele-
bratory and strangely melancholic, an extended meditation on the Jun-
gian “archetype” of childhood, which is explored here, in Chapter 2,
from another, mythological and historical angle. For Bachelard, child-
hood—whatever the experience of one’s particular childhood—
“remains within us a principle of deep life, of life always in harmony
with the possibilities of new beginnings.” “We cannot,” he says, “love
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xii The Well of Being
water, fire, the tree without putting a love into them, a friendship which
goes back to our childhood. We love them with childhood. When we
love all these beauties of the world . . . we love them in a new found
childhood, in a childhood reanimated with that childhood which is
latent in each of us.”2
Bachelard confirms for us that the childhood of the adult is an
invention of sorts, but also the impossible memory of a perceptual con-
dition, of a form of subject-world relation that we can observe in the
actual children with whom we are in relation but never experience
again, except perhaps in flashes. The adult-child relationship, even in
such a socially and psychologically degraded atmosphere as the one so
often produced by universal compulsory schooling, will always carry
this complex relation between what we were and what they are, what
they might become and what we might have become, what they are and
what we might become, and what they might become and what the
world might become as a result. This book is about the possibilities that
inhabit the interstices of these relations and, finally, about the sort of
school that would be capable of mining their depths.
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Questioning Childhood
I cannot reach it; and my striving eye

Dazzles at it, as at eternity.
—Henry Vaughan, from “Childe-hood”1
Whose Child?
It is now about one hundred years since the child became an official
object of Western science. Child study was institutionalized in the uni-
versities, the media, and the government extension offices at the
moment that the Darwinian explanatory paradigm was sweeping West-
ern self-understanding, and the notion of Progress had not yet been
fatally complicated by the Great War. Its birth coincides with the birth
of the disciplines that have regulated its discursive space ever since—
psychology, sociology, and pedagogy.
Child study is traditionally thought of as the domain of these three
forms of discourse. The questions these discourses ask of the child are
determined by their historical self-understanding as aspirants to “hard
science,” i.e., a science that can make the same universally verifiable
knowledge claims as physics or biology say they can about the world
and how it works. In order to bend the object of understanding to the
method of understanding, the human sciences fall into the unavoidable
trap of objectifying children in the same way that hard science must
objectify its objects in order to know them. The object of the discipline
is born with the discipline—in this case, the child as a natural kind, and
the study of the child as an extension of the science of biology. The
1
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2 The Well of Being
questions that get asked of children and of childhood are the same ques-
tions that get asked of any organism in its environment. And further,
these questions get asked as if by one species—the adult—of another—
the child.
This inquiry is not so much directly about the negative conse-
quences of this view of the child and of childhood, of which there are
several,2 as about the questions of and to children and childhood that it
leaves out. Those of us in search of a thicker, more dynamic view of the
phenomenon of human childhood are regularly disappointed by the
absence of any questions that cannot be answered in terms of the nar-
rowed framework of the search for statistical norms, arrived at through
standardized forms of research, leaving us with a child who has been—
at the very moment we thought we had accessed the “thing itself”—
neutralized by the techniques used to study him or her.
The problem is not just epistemological—not just about what
adults can know about children and how—but political. Modern sci-
ence is as hegemonic a knowledge framework as was the theocentric.
Like the theocentric, it presumes to be an epistemological bottom line;
in the end, all other knowledge claims must meet its criteria for legiti-
macy. When a big knowledge framework assumes that kind of self-
importance, its fundamental beliefs become elements of perception
itself, and are put beyond question. So enframed, we no longer feel the
need for identification of and ongoing inquiry into the founding philo-
sophical assumptions that undergird our knowledge claims—we no
longer understand ourselves as interpreters, but as direct knowers.
In the case of child study, the interpretations that provide research
frameworks for the “child” of normal science are, on the surface
anyway, the result of the philosophical constructions of childhood of
one or another massively seminal thinker—a Darwin, a Freud, or a
Piaget. These thinkers—who are sometimes but not always more aware
of their philosophical assumptions than their followers—provide
normal science with the big picture for its local research agendas, which
take decades to play out, hedged about as they are with self-contained,
internally developed methodologies. Typically enough, all three of the
giants mentioned above considered themselves scientists rather than
philosophers, but the further we are from them in time, the more we see
them to have been speaking in the context of ontological, epistemologi-
cal, and anthropological assumptions that they never felt obliged to
fully articulate or clarify. To put it bluntly, the “child” of the modern
scientists is a culturally and historically mediated, philosophical con-
struct disguised as the hard object of experimental science.
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Questioning Childhood 3
If one of the aims of this critique is to contribute to the deconstruc-

tion of the philosophical assumptions underlying any positivist “sci-
ence” of childhood, it is only in the service of a richer, both more
diverse and more complete view. Only by decentering from the standard
normative account can we allow other perspectives to interplay, and
find the discursive location from which to ask how and why children
have meant, mean, and might mean for the world of adults. The ques-
tions that drive such an inquiry can only be described as philosophical,
because no matter how many insights or even concrete solutions these
questions may lead to, they are themselves ultimately unanswerable.
There are questions to ask about and of children that are logically prior
to any particular positive model we might hold to as to the nature and
experience of childhood, the child’s similarities and differences from
adults, the structural dynamics of the developmental process, and even
the mechanics of learning.
One such founding question is epistemological: what can adults
know about children, and how? It is, after all, always as adults that we
regard children and childhood. What we call “child” is first of all a
child-for-an-adult, and as such, a construct. When we describe the child,
we are in one very important sense not directly describing his or her
nature, but one characteristic of the relation between the adult and the
child. There is no such thing as a “child” apart from an “adult” to
observe it. Children only begin to reflect on themselves as children
when they are aware there is something called “adulthood,” which they
are not part of, and to that extent they have already reached beyond
childhood. Childhood and adulthood are two terms of one bipolar con-
cept. If all humans were either children or adults, both terms would lose
their meaning.
This observation becomes more obvious once we step out of our
own cultural or historical context. Then we find that the boundary
between the two terms of this bipolar concept has been drawn differ-
ently in different historical epochs, and it is drawn variously along cul-
tural and subcultural lines, and within each individual. All the human
sciences—whether psychology, anthropology, sociology, or history—are,
in this age of global intervisibility, increasingly aware that, as Kenneth
Keniston so neatly put it, “the relationship between historical context
and psychological development is far more intimate than we have
heretofore suspected.”3 One culture may seem “childlike” to adult
Western eyes. On the other hand, Western “adults” may seem curiously
obsessive, overly serious, unidimensional beings to some non-Western
adults, as well as to certain Western countercultures. In fact the boring,
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4 The Well of Being
unimaginative “grown-up” has been a major motif in Western children’s

literature since the nineteenth century.
In classical Athens and in some aboriginal cultures, children were
regarded as messengers of the gods—beings, as Pierre Erny says, “still
full of emanations from the beyond.”4 The theme of the child as an
opening to the divine is also invoked in the Romantic formulation of
the “infant sensibility, great birthright of our being,” a line from per-
haps the most popular poem of the nineteenth century—Wordsworth’s
“Ode—Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Child-
hood.” Emerson also stated the theme in his proclamation of infancy as
the “perpetual Messiah which comes into the arms of fallen men and
pleads with them to return to paradise.”5 For Plato, children exempli-
fied untamed appetite, the soul out of balance. Aristotle concurred. For
him, children were incapable of happiness in his sense of the term,
because they lacked judgment, or reason.6 More recently, late-twentieth-
century children are most often invoked as “future citizens,” which is
often used as a code word for resources—much like oil reserves, or
stands of future timber harvest—for the modern nation-state/economy,
which shapes them to its purposes through universal, compulsory
schooling. The cost of the state’s educational system to its adult citizens
is most typically justified on the assumption that, once fed through the
mill of cultural and social reproduction, they will eventually become
economically and politically “productive.”
Each of these various ways of knowing children depends on a con-
struction that emerges from a particular balance of the adult-child
polarity. Each, in defining “child,” defines “adult.” Some historians of
childhood suspect that medieval adults had no concept of “child,” at
least after the age of seven or so, because they themselves shared so
many characteristics that today we would call “childlike” or “child-
ish.”7 The Romantic view of the child as an original openness to being
is based at least partly on adult memories of childhood; very often the
memories are either selective, or shaped by a religious or cultural-histor-
ical discourse. The genre of adult autobiography called the “Child-
hood” arose in the West at the moment in which the massive social and
cultural dislocations of the Industrial Revolution removed large seg-
ments of the population from the possibility of a “homeland,” thus
driving the latter to a homeland within, to a psychological rather than a
geographical location.8
The notion of developmental stages itself is not just a biological,
but a social construct as well—or a social construct that uses biology as
its ruling metaphor. Freud’s “latency” stage, for example, has been
described as an invention of late-nineteenth-century educators and child
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 5
psychologists under the influence of social, economic, and political pres-

sures, which made it expedient to remove children from the workforce,
and to suppress their sexuality.9 A stage theory of childhood fits very
nicely with the practice of modern schooling, which had its origins in a
larger project of “discipline” of the marginalized—the military, the
insane, the native—in the interests of social control.10 Conversely,
during the early Industrial Revolution, as Max Wartofsky pointed out,
“the sliding scale of what constitutes ‘childhood’ was adjusted to the
political and economic realities of a rapacious factory system.”11
Which Adult?
The concept adult is equally liable to historical and cultural deconstruc-

tion. As the historian John Boswell demonstrated, there were few
“adults” in our sense of the term until relatively recently:
During most of Western history only a minority of grown-ups

ever achieved . . . independence: the rest of the population
remained throughout their lives in a juridical status more com-
parable to “childhood,” in the sense that they remained under
someone else’s control—a father, a lord, a husband, etc. . . .
Words for “children” designate servile adults well into the
High Middle Ages, and it is often impossible to be sure, with-
out adequate context, whether the appellation is based on age,
or status, or both.12
Boswell finds widely varying criteria for determining when adult-

hood began in ancient and medieval cultures—from biological consider-
ations to legal responsibility, to attributions of a moral sense, to release
from paternal authority, to a concept of psychological maturity. Most
often, and befitting the shifting bipolarity of the concept “adult-child,”
adulthood represents an end to certain incapacities of children—as in
Aristotle, their inability to acquire knowledge and to exercise sound
judgment—that is, the overcoming of a deficit condition, whether cog-
nitive, psychological, physical, moral, or legal. Norbert Elias confirms
this judgment in his narration of the rise of the modern adult subject in
the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance as an incremental process of
instinctual and affective separation from the impulses and feelings of
childhood, in the interests of a “private self,” for whom a main concern
is the development of clear, closely watched boundaries in relation to
other private selves.13
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6 The Well of Being
It could be that the twentieth century West is experiencing yet

another historical shift in the adult-child balance. There are those who
suggest that, as the child as we have know him or her “disappears,” the
classical modern adult—the one for whom “growing up” or “coming of
age” meant leaving his naive, childlike medieval counterpart behind in
order to brave the lonely Copernican universe—disappears as well. The
most suggestive accounts single out as the prime variable in this shift a
new postliterate electronic information environment, which tends to
give rise to not only a child privy through the media to the mysteries
and brutalities of sex and death, but what has been referred to as the
“adult-child”—an adult whose emotional and discursive capacities
approximate those of a thirteen year old.14
The ideal adult of the ancients is the “contemplative” man (sic) for-
mulated by Aristotle and developed by the Stoics and Epicureans. The
ideal adult of the early modern period and beyond is the “active” man,
the one who acts from a firmly based individual perspective.15 The late
modern adult has acquired an “inner child,” thus signaling a new con-
cern with a revision of the boundaries of the contrastive pair.16 And it is
only since the 1960s that Western adulthood has been increasingly con-
ceived as a period of potential psychological, vocational, and conjugal
disruption and change, rendering grownups as liable as children to the
risks, opportunities, and vicissitudes of “growth and development”—
that is, more like children.
We also find historical and cultural variability, not just in the adult
construal of children, but in the ways adults and children interact in
real time and space—in the adult-child relation. Adults deal with two
kinds of children—both the flesh-and-blood child, which the adult is
called on to protect, nurture, and lead forth into adulthood; and the
child the adult once was, whether interpreted as the child of memory
or the child within. These two children are mutually determinative, in
that the way adults relate to their own “child” strongly influences how
they see children, and correlatively, their child-rearing attitudes, theo-
ries, and practices. But child-rearing attitudes and practices seem to be
in a process of evolution: they change as medicine, religion, politics,
technology, economics, and demographics change; whereas the adult’s
relation with the “child within” seems to persist in certain archetypal
characteristics.
Perhaps as an outcome of the ambiguous relation between the his-
torical child and the “child within,” or mythic child, the concept
“child” has a way of both attracting and continuously escaping adult
projections, and this projective ambivalence makes for a wide variety of
adult attitudes toward children, some of them perennial and some of
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 7
them changing according to cultural fashion. In our time at least, some

adults fawn over children; some treat them as if they were hardly there;
some become strangely nervous and distant in their presence; some
engage them with a naturalistic gusto they would never demonstrate
with other adults; some feel obliged to quiz them on their status—how
old are you? Where do you go to school? What grade are you in?—as if
childhood were some prolonged military training episode. A historical
gallery of child-rearing philosophies and practices would run the gamut
from Locke’s recommendations for cold baths in the morning, to the
renowned distancing of the nineteenth-century British upper classes
toward their offspring, to the radically child-centered parents of late
twentieth-century USA, who attribute levels of cognitive and psycholog-
ical maturity to their children that they can only maintain through a
concentrated focus on their own “child within.”
All of these examples point again to the extent to which the adult’s
construction of the child is at the same time his or her self-construction
as an adult—whether through mechanisms of distancing children or
attempting to relive, re-evoke, or exorcise his or her own childhood
through them. This projective, involuntarily transgressive relation to the
other may be true of interpersonal life in general, but it has particular
poignancy and significance in the case of the adult-child relation, because
the child is not just any other for the adult, but an exemplary one.
It is, for one thing, an asymmetrical situation: the child does not
influence the adult with her projections as much as the adult does the
child with hers—she is less powerful. And because of the child’s differ-
ence—in height, weight, organ size and function, hormonal configura-
tion, and neurological state, as well as, although in a weaker sense than
the latter, cognitive, linguistic, affective, and motoric distinctives—she
lends herself to being used as a screen for adult projections in the same
way that, for white patriarchal civilization, women, “natives,” the
insane, animals, and the gods do. Her distance from adults makes of
her a liminal figure, the representation of a limit condition of the
human. Like those other liminal figures, she is easily subspeciated—
whether divinized, bestialized, or demonized. She comes to represent a
lost totality, a sense of presence—of the marriage of the for-itself and
the in-itself that haunts adult consciousness, in which presence and
absence are in inseparable interplay. She stands for what Derrida char-
acterizes as a life “without differance,” which adults both dread and
long for: “Man calls himself man only by drawing limits excluding his
other from the play of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animal-
ity, primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to these
limits is at once feared as a threat of death, and desired as access to a
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8 The Well of Being
life without differance.”17 But like those other liminal figures, she also
represents an opening for psychological development. She is the other
who finally cannot be gotten around: her radical alterity demands
either violence or dialogue in response. We do not have to look far for
the former; the latter, I will argue, offers an enormous promise for the
possibilities of personal, social and cultural evolution.
The Western Construction of Childhood
In the realm of alterity and interhuman projection, the child typically

serves adults as a sort of cipher, proof-text, or icon for their fundamen-
tal assumptions about human nature—or absence thereof—and for the
politics of the human condition. Is the child a “person” from the begin-
ning? If not, at what point, and through what processes, does he
become so? What does children’s pregenital, polymorphous sexuality
tell us about our own? Are girls really born girls, and boys boys? Are
children inherently good, or is there a root of evil, or at least of pro-
found egocentrism, which shows itself undissimulated in children? Does
humanity—starting with children—require violence, whether “the rod”
or the electric chair, in order not to slip into personal and social chaos?
Is psychological development a relatively organic, individually driven
self-correcting process, or a form of social reproduction? Children draw
visceral, involuntary projective answers from adults to these fundamen-
tal and unanswerable questions—they evoke them like lightning rods.
Interestingly enough, the question, are children different across cul-
tures? rarely evokes such responses. Adults tend to believe implicitly in
the universality of childhood.
If we look at the history of those answers, we find a fault line of
ambivalence running through the way childhood has been signified in
Western classical and Judeo-Christian traditions. On the one hand, chil-
dren get excluded from full personhood at the very start of the Western
rationalist tradition. As has already been mentioned, for Plato and Aris-
totle children, although they have free will, lack the ability to choose,
and are strongly associated with the “appetitive” nature. For Aristotle,
. . . what desires the base and what grows wild needs to be

“checked” or “pruned,” and that is, above all, appetite and a
child. For, like self-indulgent men, children live as their
appetite directs them, and the desire for pleasure is especially
strong in them. . . . For it is true that children and beasts are
endowed with natural qualities or characteristics, but it is evi-
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 9
dent that without intelligence these are harmful. [The free

male, the slave, the female, and the child] all have the requisite
parts of the soul, but they have them in completely different
ways: the deliberative element is completely lacking in the
slave; the female has it but without authority; and the child
has it but in incomplete form.18
Plato also often associates children with slaves, women, and animals,
and both he and Aristotle group children with the “the sick, the drunk,
the insane, and the wicked.”19
But even here—in the invocation of the human limit condition of
animals, the mad, the intoxicated—the positive side of the ambivalence
glimmers, for a perennial tradition identifies the drunk and the insane
with the “wisdom of the gods.” “Drunkards and children tell the
truth,” quotes the (drunken) Alcibiades proverbially in the Symposium
(then slyly blurts out—”drunkards anyway”).20 Children were indeed
associated in Greek mythic lore with nature and the gods, and played
parts in festivals and ceremonies to which this association gave them a
natural right. Like the gods themselves, children were marginal to the
adult world of the polis, and so could act as intercessors with beings
from other worlds. In Athens, a child was chosen each year to act as
intermediary between the initiates and the divine presence in the Mys-
teries of Eleusis.21 The otherness of nature and the otherness of the
divine meet in the child archetype in art, myth, and ceremony—not just
in the ancient world, but in the medieval, modern, and postmodern,
under various tropes.
The ambivalent and even polarized iconic location of “child” both
evokes and locates the fault line running through the history of Western
subjectivity—between body and mind, flesh and spirit, instinctual
expression and repression, license and control, unconscious and con-
scious, profane and sacred. To the extent that children act as screens
for adults’ projections of the first term of each of these contrastive
pairs—body, flesh, instinct, license, the unconscious, the profane—they
represent the dangerous otherness of the left hand, or “sinister” in the
Western discourses of self—the shadow, the unconscious, desire—with
which our rationalist tradition heroically struggles, wielding the
weapons of what Michel Foucault called “technologies of the self.” As
representations of desire, their status—like the status of women, the
terminally nonrational (the mad), and the “primitive”—in Western
patriarchal culture is both marginal and prophetic. Traditionally, these
groups evoke both destructive chaos and the transformative potential
of desire. The child’s location in this paradox of subjectivity will play
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 10
10 The Well of Being
an important part later in this book, in a discussion of the role of the

adult-child relation in the evolution of Western cultural values, and
children’s status as “privileged strangers” in the politics both of culture
and of subjectivity.
The perennial ambivalence toward children travels forward in
Western cultural history with greater point and focus in the Judeo-
Christian formulation of childhood than in the ancient Greek. The Old
Testament tradition is more or less the same as the latter; for both,
“Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child.”22 The Old Testament
notion of child as “fool” in the negative sense—undisciplined, lacking
in judgment, in need of strict and careful shaping—is carried into Chris-
tianity in Paul’s Epistles, where we are admonished to “no longer to be
children, tossed about by every wind of doctrine,” and to “grow up to
the mature man.” But the Gospels take up the other side, thus building
ambivalence toward children into the most universal founding text of
the West. Jesus presented the child’s epistemological difference as a spir-
itual advantage, and offered her as a model of receptivity to the Word.
First, he alludes indirectly to the one evidence of the “left-hand” tradi-
tion in the Old Testament (Psalms) when he says, “I praise you father,
Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from
the wise and learned and revealed them to infants.”23 Then, as if to
make it clear that he is making more than a rhetorical gesture, “. . . he
called a little child and had him stand among them. And he said, ‘I tell
you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you
will never enter the kingdom of heaven . . . See that you do not look
down on one of these little ones . . .’”24 Finally, when he enters the
Temple, it is children who publicly identify him as the Messiah. In
answering the shocked and angry adults, he then refers directly to the
prophetic motif of child as knower that is present in their own sacred
and immemorial tradition: “Do you hear what these children are
saying?” they asked him. “Yes,” replied Jesus, “have you never read,
‘From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise’?”25
Christianity, as Peter Fuller has pointed out, “exalted childhood
and held it up as an exemplar for living . . . that a child should be put
forward as an example is something quite new in the history of reli-
gions, and equally new in the history of cultures.”26 Yet the early
church fathers seem to have followed Paul’s view of the child as deficit
and danger, and interpreted Jesus’ injunction to become “as little chil-
dren” in a strictly metaphorical way. The child as negative exemplar
was perfected by the next greatest influence in early Christianity, Augus-
tine, for whom—as he lamented his own jealousy, selfishness and
deviancy even as an infant—she became the proof-text of original sin.
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 11
Jesus’ evocation of the ancient tradition of child as unconscious

master—already articulated by Lao Tzu five hundred years earlier, and
present in world mythology—has had a much more gradual, more
secret influence. In the real world of cultural politics, recognition of the
personhood of children grew with Christianity—the Church was the
first to take a consistent, articulated stand against infanticide—but it
was not until the High Middles Ages, in Saint Francis, Bernard of Clair-
voix, Anselm, and the increasing influence of the cult of Mary, that the
radical dimension of these Jesus sayings started bearing cultural fruit. It
is in the medieval mystical tradition that the child starts being men-
tioned as a model for positive understanding in the sphere of spiritual
life and discipline, rather than just ignorance of evil.27
The Jesus sayings on childhood, while they can be placed in a more
ancient wisdom-of-the-child tradition, also set another theme for West-
ern self-understanding in terms of the child as exemplar of instinct, the
unconscious, and desire. Christ embodies a number of mythic arche-
types and motifs of the divine that had already been stated in the
ancient world: the dying and rising god of ancient agricultural religions
(Attis, Adonis), the god of miracle and intoxication, or the “new wine”
(Dionysius), the childhood of the god (Hermes, Dionysius), the myth of
the hero’s descent to the underworld (Orpheus, Jonah). It is in his role
as divine Fool, however—the ragged, holy wanderer with “no place to
lay his head,” whose involuntary, necessarily cryptic wisdom is misun-
derstood by the adults around him—that he identifies most closely with
children. Both the Fool and the Divine Child effect a reversal of an
established patriarchal wisdom tradition. Both assert the claims of a
form of knowledge that comes from the margins, and therefore is para-
doxical, enigmatic, even garbled, and spoken in a “prelapsarian
tongue.” This prelapsarian language is not conscious, but a secret lan-
guage of the world that is expressed unconsciously in play. In King
Lear, for example, only the Fool can speak the whole truth of the situa-
tion, but in riddles and nonsense, or he will lose his head. Augustine’s
conversion is triggered by the voice of a child chanting playfully on the
other side of a garden wall. The Fool and the child differ in that one is
post-adult and one pre-adult, but both point to the same thing—a trans-
gressive wisdom, the wisdom of the liminal and the marginalized, of
reversal and play and subversion of conventional norms and under-
standing.28 This theme does not lack practical significance for the evolu-
tion of the adult-child relation in the West.
In addition to the fundamental ambivalence that runs through
Western adults’ construction of children and childhood, the child has
also served as a screen for specific historical projections based on
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 12
ambivalence, none of which seem to have very much to do with the

actual conditions of childhood, or adults’ treatment of children. The
high medieval period had its holy child; the Calvinist Reformation used
the child to prove original sin, or “total depravity.” For the Romantics,
the child represented genius and the unity of being and knowing, or
nature unconstrained. For Darwin and his followers, the child shows us
the childhood of the race; for behaviorism, the child is proof-text for
the tabula rasa, or blank slate, or drives-waiting-to-be-shaped. For
Freud, childhood is present through the whole life cycle, for it is the
moment of formation of a permanent style of relation between primary
narcissism and the reality principle, and thus the point of origin of adult
health or neurosis. For Piaget, the child demonstrates a structuralist
account of the ontogenesis of rationality.29 In all cases the child’s differ-
ence makes of her a text that is just distant enough in time and experi-
ence for theory to not just appropriate, but to colonize.
Piaget, whose cognitive child was as influential in the second half
of the twentieth century as Freud’s affective child was in the first, also
marks a clear set of preunderstandings about the fundamental issues for
which children are proof-texts. Piaget’s child is modeled on lower
organisms engrossed in adaptive, evolutionary processes. Implicit in his
developmental hierarchy is the assumption that, as Stephen Toulmin
puts it, “the child’s ‘native capacities’ are specifically pre-adapted to
construct one and only one final conception of ‘reality’ and to reinvent
the same concepts of causality, conservation, etc., in all situations—so
recapitulating the cultural experience of the species.”30 Further, this
“final conception of ‘reality’” is, as the philosopher Charles Taylor
points out, based on two directing ideas—decentration and reversibil-
ity—both of them elements of a particularly Western conception of
objectivity.31 We attain reversibility when we grasp our object as a
coherent system of potential transformations, and hence as an ideally
manipulable object, whose operations we therefore dominate, intellectu-
ally if not in act. For Piaget, cognitive objectivity is a result of normal
development, and overcomes childhood’s “egocentrism,” just as for
Freud the mature adult overcomes “the residues of childhood” through
a “prolongation of education,” that is, progressive rationalization.32 Yet
both of these analytic giants, although they maintained a deficit theory
of childhood, opened the way for insights that have contradicted it, thus
maintaining the tradition of ambivalence.
As a characteristic of an adult white male form of interpretation, the
modern “science of childhood” tends consistently to represent the young
child’s own perceptions of and judgments about the world as not the
adult’s, and to distort them in the image of the bipolar adult projections
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 13
sketched above—projections which remain, if not unconscious, at least

suppressed. That the “child” of child psychology is as much a portrait of
the adult observer as of the observed is a perfectly normal situation, were
it recognized as such and explored bilaterally rather than unilaterally.
The classical positivistic scientific model denies or ignores it. But the
anterior unity of knower and known that the adult-child relation illus-
trates so well is actually paradigmatic for the human sciences, if not, as
modern physics is making increasingly clear, for science in general.
Theorizing Childhood
As a form of interpretation of the other, modern scientific theory is

structurally impositional and non-dialogical, since it associates truth
with objectification. When it is applied to groups of exemplary others—
children, women, “natives,” etc.—such theory can become violent.
Because it is philosophically unreflective, it is difficult to locate the
divide between theory and the educational practices it legitimates,
which are so constructed as to reinforce, in turn, the theory. Both theory
and practice work in the service of an overarching ideology whose fun-
damental assumptions are more or less masked or unconscious. This is
glaringly obvious in various historical racial and gender theories. The
latter provide a legitimating discourse for the ideology of colonialism,
which, as the postcolonial scholar Ashis Nandy has pointed out, is a
close relative to what he calls the “ideology of adulthood.”33 The ideol-
ogy of adulthood underlies mainstream theory and practice in educa-
tion, child rearing, and children’s law. Nandy’s point is that the ideology
of colonialism, like the ideology of adulthood, construes the “native” as
“child”—immature, dependent, and incomplete. Children—if they are
male and non-native—hold the promise of journeying out of this deficit
condition into fully socialized adult human normality. Natives hold the
promise of developing into Westerners.
The ideology of adulthood is reflected in the practices of state-man-
dated and provided universal schooling. Here theory works in the serv-
ice of objectification and disempowerment of both children and their
teachers in several ways. Theories of child development, which are char-
acterized by a stage model, make it easy for a capitalist—a competitive,
extrinsic-motivation—model of education to go unchallenged; if we
already know where children are going and how, then we have arrived
there before them, and can plan their journey for them. Theory also pro-
vides convenient labels—ADD, ADHD, ED, SLD, ODD, etc.—for child-
hood disorders that are exacerbated if not brought on by disempowering
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 14
practices of traditional schooling itself. There is no dimension in imposi-

tional theory that allows for dialogue with children, so when it gets
translated into educational practice, the result is not transformation
through the dialectics of the theory-practice relation, but rigidification
and stagnation of that relation, and intensification of habitual practices.
Like any ideology, the ideology of adulthood, which depends on
and interacts with a theory of childhood, has its origins in larger issues
than just those of education or child rearing. An ideology of adulthood
implies a set of cultural norms that determine beliefs—and therefore
institutions and behaviors—about the relationship between good and
evil, autonomy and heteronomy, justice and injustice, individual and
community, instinct and repression, freedom and control, the biological
and the cultural, nature and supernature, a view of persons and of the
nature of cosmos. If this is the case, then change in how adults see the
deeper issues that inform ideology should lead to change in how they
view themselves as adults, and therefore how they view children. This,
in turn, should lead to change in the sort of theory that is applied to
children, and to the forms of life of adults and children together, includ-
ing the one we call “school.” The question is whether this is a necessary
causal chain. Could it work backward, or in some other combination of
causes and effects? Could, for instance, a change in schooling follow
from a dialogical rather than an impositional theory, leading to more
widespread change in the adult-child relation, and thereby to ideologi-
cal change? This direction places the burden on theory. My assumption
is that the five variables just mentioned—how adults see the deeper
issues, how they understand themselves, how they view children, which
theory they apply to children, and adult-child forms of life—are in a
relationship of mutual causality; any one or more can trigger any other
or others. When theory becomes dialogical, prevailing ideology is chal-
lenged by new information, which leads to social and cultural transfor-
mation. When children are no longer reified, colonized subjects—when
their voices are heard—the ideology of adulthood will change. As ideol-
ogy changes, the theory of childhood and therefore the form of life of
children will change, which will lead to changes in the form of life of
adults. The issue is how to find a theory—that is, a form of interpreta-
tion—which allows children voice, which is where dialogue begins.
Adult-Child Dialogue
Adult-child dialogue is distinguished from adult-adult dialogue by a few

complicating factors. All adults were children once, and this makes it
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 15
easy for them to assume a kind of first-hand knowledge about child-

hood and children—an attitude that tends to preclude dialogue, for the
latter involves the bracketing of commonsense knowledge in the recog-
nition of difference. Adults live with their own childhoods in an
ambiguous state of memory and forgetting. Most experience what
Freud called “childhood amnesia,” the near total loss of memory of the
events and the mental and emotional states of one’s early years. The
adult finds himself with few categories into which his early childhood
experience, which seems to precede the development of conventional
memory, can fit in order to be retained. Yet not only does he know he
was a child once, but often still feels like a child—treated like a child,
for example—or in a child’s position of what Dieter Misgeld calls
“having to start over”—even if he can’t quite connect it with his own
experience as a child. Misgeld says, “. . . being an adult, if treated as a
matter to be achieved again and again, makes us take note that we, as
adults, must sometimes think of ourselves as being like children in order
for us to say that we are adults.”34 This creates a situation of both
familiarity and strangeness that makes it easy for adults to use children
as screens onto which they project their own unacknowledged psycho-
logical complexes. It sets the stage either for projective reactions to chil-
dren, or for dialogue.
The child also lives ambiguously in the world of adults. She is born
into and grows up in a world physically scaled to adults,35 and sched-
uled, planned, ordered, and controlled by them. Until her capacities for
categorization and inference are fully developed, she can only take it on
faith that she will some day grow out of her childhood and into a world
that fits her sense of growing autonomy and her hunger for mastery. As
the adult is but is not a child, so she is but is not an adult. She herself is
often impatient of, and sometimes in contempt of, her own childhood.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty evokes this ambiguity: “It is true, both that
adult functions are already represented in children, and that they don’t
mean in the same way as they do in adults.”36 Although she shares and
participates in the adult’s life world, that participation is not as straight-
forward as it seems. Often she demonstrates a style of lived experience
that differs significantly from adults’. Not only her physical vulnerabil-
ity, but her emotional and behavioral lability make of her what
Merleau-Ponty described as a “polymorph,” neither “an absolute
‘other’,” nor “‘the same’ as us.”37 She is only discovering, or has just
discovered death—first that of other living things, and in a slowly dawn-
ing way, the logical inevitability of her own. She is only just discovering
murder, war, criminality and the police, theft, natural catastrophe, the
intentionality of evil, human cruelty (including her own), and her own
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 16
vulnerability to physical and emotional pain. She is only just acquiring

the adult language games that interpret the limits of cause and effect, the
definition of what is alive and what is not, the boundaries between self
and other, and the metaphysics of the self-body relation.
Children’s sense of time does not seem to be just the same as
adults’—there is not the same balance that adults have struck between
objectivized time and lived time. Children’s strong drives to touch
things, their intrinsically playful use of the physical environment, their
sometimes startling attention to detail, their often dramatic emotional
lability, their diffuse, or “polymorphous” form of sexuality—all of these
and more start, as we give our attention to them, to show subtle differ-
ences, which add up to a form of life that is related yet different from
adults. We recognize it, even find it within ourselves, yet also find it
alien, sometimes even disturbing. Some of these differences have to do
with organic factors like the neuronal environment of the brain, some
with experience or lack of it, and some with culture and historical
worldview. Culture and historical worldview can either play up the dif-
ferences in biology and maturation between children and adults or min-
imize them, depending on where and how they draw the line between
“child” and “adult.” We gather, for example, that medieval adults
shared more of the characteristics of children alluded to above than do
modern adults.38 But wherever the line is drawn, there are differences.
Whatever causal factors bring these differences about, and whether
they are differences of kind or degree—or some of both—they are effec-
tive differences within the human lifeworld. They make for conflict,
misunderstanding, delight, astonishment, awe, frustration, anger,
attachment, etc. between adults and children, in somewhat the same
way two similar cultures might have differences (e.g., Spanish and Ital-
ian) or two different cultures might have similarities (e.g., African-
American and tribal African), and never really be able to distinguish
what’s quite the same and different. This ambiguity of difference and
similarity between the lifeworlds of children and adults presents us
squarely with what Alfred Schutz called the “dialectical difficulty” that
arises in their attempts at mutual understanding. The passing from one
“province of meaning” to the other can only be performed by what he
describes as “a ‘leap’, . . . a specific shock, which compels us to break
through the limits of this [adult] ‘finite’ province of meaning and to
shift the accent of reality to another one.”39 This is complicated by the
fact that the difference between the two provinces of meaning can vary
across culture and historical period. In an epoch or a culture in which a
significant distance has not opened up between children and adults—as
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 17
we shall see is thought to have been the case in Europe until the early
modern period—there was hardly a leap to be made. The factors con-
tributing to the opening of this distance in the West—along with the
implications for cultural development that this distance represents—will
be taken up further along.
The “dialectical difficulty” that Schutz mentions is in fact the very
difficulty that hermeneutics, or interpretation theory—which is a theory
of dialogue—works to overcome. Hermeneutics was originally about
reading texts, but it emerged from a situation analogous to the adult-
child relation: people were seeking to understand texts written during
one historical epoch that had become distant and even strange to
another. In other words, the hermeneutical situation begins when we
(adults) confront a text (child) from which we have become distant,
thus creating a relation in which we encounter both familiarity and
strangeness, and a certain level of alienation and misunderstanding.40 If
this were not the case, the whole interpretive process would not even be
called for. “The aim of all hermeneutics,” according to Paul Ricoeur, “is
to struggle against cultural distance and historical alienation. Interpreta-
tion brings together, equalizes, renders contemporary and similar.”41
Like the Schutzian leap, interpretation has, as Hans-Georg Gadamer
says, “to cross the abyss of historical consciousness.”42 As there is an
abyss between us and our historical past, so there is a potential abyss
between each individual and her childhood.
Forgetfulness is the pervasive context of our experience of finitude,
and it is forgetfulness that works to create the distance between adult
and child. Hermeneutics operates in a space of difference between, not
only reader and text, but subject and object. It is dialogical in that the
reader/subject places himself within that space of difference, in what
Martin Buber called “actuality,” that is “participation in a being that is
neither merely a part of him nor merely outside of him,”43 and takes it
as his task to interrogate this “between.” The hermeneutical relation-
ship is particularly apposite to the adult-child relation because it denies
in its very structure the possibility of the situation of objectivity that is
exemplified by modernist theory. It represents a move beyond the West-
ern objectivity-myth, in that, for interpretation-theory a science free
from prejudice is impossible. There is always a set of preunderstand-
ings—a historical-cultural horizon—from which we view the text-other.
This is not only a historical-cultural horizon, but an ontological situa-
tion, which Ricoeur describes as “belonging.” The “allegedly
autonomous subject and the allegedly adverse object,” he insists, are
actually two terms of a “prior relation of inclusion” that encompasses
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 18
them both.44 It is through the subject coming into dialogue with the
object rather than isolating it in theoretical constructs that understanding
emerges. As such, hermeneutics is theory as affinity and participation,
rather than as distance and domination. It resists the idea that through
subjecting nature—in this case in the form of the child—to mathemati-
cal/statistical construction nature can be known except partially.
It is central to the dialogical relation that the knower is changed by
the known in the act of knowing. Through opening oneself to the object
and its different meanings, one comes, not only to a new understanding
of the object, but to a new self-understanding. There is no overview that
would enable us to grasp in a single glance the whole of the object, or
even its complete context, but only the horizon of the play of our rela-
tion, and the discipline of the dialogue. “To understand,” says Ricoeur,
“is not to project oneself into the text [read “child”] but to expose one-
self to it; it is to receive a self enlarged by the appropriation of the pro-
posed worlds which interpretation unfolds”:
To appropriate is to make what was alien become one’s own.

What is appropriated is indeed the matter of the text. But the
matter of the text becomes my own only if I disappropriate
myself, in order to let the matter of the text be. So I exchange
the me, master of itself, for the self, disciple of the text . . .
This radical and final form of distanciation is the ruin of the
ego’s pretention to constitute itself as ultimate origin.45
The movement of distanciation and appropriation in encountering

texts is directly analogous to what occurs when the adult engages in
hermeneutical dialogue with children. The resulting “fusion of hori-
zons”—to use Gadamer’s well-known phrase—involves what he calls a
“moment of negativity” before another form of life, or manner of being
in the world.46 This is equivalent to Ricoeur’s notion of disappropria-
tion of (adult) self in order to let the “matter of the text” of the child’s
form of life be. It could also be described as the withdrawal of projec-
tion, in order to allow the phenomenon of the child’s form of life to
appear. It is to enter the province of meaning of what Aristotle called
thaumazein, or “wonder,” before the “text” of the young child. In
wonder, the stereotypic world of projection is stopped momentarily, and
things appear as if for the first time.
The appropriation of the child-text that follows the moment of
negativity is also a letting go: “It is in allowing itself to be carried off
towards the reference of the text that the ego divests itself of itself.” 47
For the adult in hermeneutical relationship to childhood, the latter has a
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 19
revelatory power. It involves a new self-understanding, which includes

at the least an understanding of the child as a positive phenomenon—a
real interlocutor, a full-fledged other. The adult self, thus enlarged by
the appropriation of the form of life of the child, is a self to which
childhood speaks more coherently from its place in the life cycle than
before; correlatively, it is a self that has begun the process of re-appro-
priating its own childhood to some greater degree.
The adult appropriation of childhood is also the appropriation of
a new or rediscovered form of knowledge. Through my dialogue with
children and childhood, I am provided with a new pattern for reading
experience. Gadamer associates this with the Platonic anamnesis or
“recollection,”48 in the sense that “what is known in the event of
understanding is made present again, but not as a mere retrieval or a
repetition of a past actuality.”49 Rather, it is an event into which we
are continually being drawn, and which is never completely ascertained
in some final understanding. The characteristic of the fusion of hori-
zons between the adult and the child is, as in all dialectical relation-
ships, that ultimately the “tension between the other and oneself is
unsurpassable. . . . The first guiding insight is to admit of the endless-
ness of this task. . . . The very idea of a definitive interpretation seems
to be intrinsically contradictory. Interpretation is always on the
way.”50 The fusion of horizons is never complete.
The hermeneutics of the adult-child relation is a primary, arche-
typal example of the “belonging” between subject and object, and in
fact calls into question the primacy of the individual subject. It acts to
demystify the notion of the autonomous, separated adult consciousness,
and of adulthood as an end state of development. It is also a hermeneu-
tics of recollection—a restoration, or reappropriation of the meaning of
childhood for the whole life cycle, and a “revelation of new modes of
being”—new capacities for knowing oneself through exposing ourselves
to the “text” of the child.
Even the notion of approaching the young child as a text, perhaps
on the surface a most unlikely analogy, has confirmation in the modern
understanding of not only myth and literature, but the unconscious
itself as structured like language. This is particularly true of early child-
hood to the extent that its forms of life are relatively unreflective,
involuntary, and spontaneous—that is, more direct expressions of
unconscious structures. The form of life of early childhood can be
understood as an inscription by existence itself a human text with cer-
tain universal characteristics that we find across history and culture.
The young child, not yet fully aware that he is present to himself from
some location beyond himself that keeps time and marks the spot, is
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caught up in his early childhood as in a dream. The years until six or

seven are typically ones that, as Herbert Read said in his memoirs, “we
seemed not so much to live as to be lived by forces outside of us, by the
wind and the trees and moving clouds and all the mobile engines of
our expanding world.”51 We may even loosely characterize early child-
hood as a universal, original form of life. Gaston Bachelard, in his epic
meditation on childhood, referred to it as a “well of being”—“an
anonymous childhood, a pure threshold of life, original life, original
human life.”52
The universal characteristics of the form of life of early childhood
are perhaps expressed most dramatically in children’s art and play, but
are present to us more directly as linguistic, perceptual, cognitive, affec-
tive, and relational patterns. We sense the vulnerability and lability of
this form of life, and both the beauty and the terror connected with it,
as if to be a young child were often to be in a sort of fugue state. This
poignant immediacy is captured by Rilke in the poem “Childhood,”
both in his evocation of “miraculous time,” when “the streets are
gleaming and ringing, all the fountains flash up from the squares,” and
the “senseless grief. . . dream . . . dread . . . bottomless abyss” of child-
hood anonymity. The young child, kneeling beside the “great gray
pond,” forced by something he doesn’t yet recognize as himself to “have
to think about the little pale face that shone up from the water, sink-
ing,” is alternately freed and imprisoned by the personal anonymity and
universal humanity of childhood.53
The form of life of early childhood was of great interest to Mer-
leau-Ponty, because it also represented for him an “original life,” a life
lived more closely in the subject-world unity founded in perception. He
characterized this unity prior to reflection variously as the “tacit
cogito,” and ouverture au monde or “opening on the world,” as a fun-
damental “intimacy between vision and the visible” and in his final for-
mulation, “wild being.” If, as he says, “the body belongs to the order of
things as the world is universal flesh,”54 the young child’s perceptual,
noetic, and affective modes are the text authored by this universal flesh,
and it is this text we are concerned to read through our dialogue with
the child’s form of life. The task is to read it, not as a decipherment—as
if it were a code for something that, through a formula of transforma-
tion, we could translate into adult perception, cognition, affect, or rela-
tion—nor reductively, as if it were the accidental human face of a
nonhuman process of organismic development. Both of those readings
are possible, and perhaps even necessary to approximate a complete
account. Rather, we may read it like a narrative or poetic text—the rep-
resentation of involuntary imaginative child life, which presents to me,
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 21
the adult, what Ricoeur refers to as “new possibilities of being-in-the-

world opened up within everyday reality.” For me, the adult reader of
childhood, the text of the child’s form of knowledge is a redescription
of reality, an “imaginative variation . . . on the [adult] real.”55
The adult drive for reappropriation and imaginative variation is
most often expressed in the play of art and literature, of myth, of reli-
gious symbolism and iconography. The hermeneutical movement of rec-
ollection is a long-standing theme, in the Western tradition at least, of
adult psychological and spiritual development. The child is a central
symbol for this theme, which in religion and psychoanalysis is the
archetypal story of an original unity, followed by a necessary voyage
into disunity or “fall,” followed by the search for the recovery of that
unity on a higher level. This story is a key paradigm, not just for adult
development, but for the evolution of child rearing and educational
practices as well, because through seeing optimal adult development as
in some way a reappropriation of childhood, it links the process of
adult development with our relations with the real child, the child
before us, whether as son or daughter, student or friend.
The Child Before Us: Education, Parenting, and the

Evolution of Subjectivity
Objectivism in whatever form is the appropriate and inevitable theoreti-

cal mode for education as mere cultural reproduction, because it
remains strategically ignorant of its grounding beliefs—an ignorance
made possible by an incalculable mixture of “common sense” and sci-
entism. It is theory as force and as violence, whether that violence be
personal or structural, and however it may be palliated by the presence
of dialogical persons attempting naively to wield it, or simply to survive
the instrumental structures it creates and maintains. It is a system that is
structured according to the ideology of adulthood. We are all familiar
with the force that permeates the structures of our world56—but to con-
sider it inevitable in the world of education and child rearing is to fore-
close on one of the most crucial possible contexts for transforming the
world in the image of something other than force.
A hermeneutics of childhood calls for a form of education based on
dialogue, in the notion of which is implicit the development and the
“leading forth” (educare) of the adult as well as the child. What we
have called “school” at least since the advent of universal, compulsory
schooling, is in the vast majority of cases a locus of reproduction—a
machine through which there is inscribed on the body and in the
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 22
discourse of the child the codified violence of a society whose main

engine is force. In the language of dialogical education, “school” is, on
the contrary, an adult-child collective—a locus for the reshaping of
adult habit and self-understanding through dialogue with the impulse
life of the child as much as the shaping of the child’s impulse life into
habit associated with adulthood.57 It is a place of mutual reconstruction
through the forms of life of a community whose main preoccupation is
the intergenerational reconstruction, through project and inquiry, of
philosophy, art, science, and politics. Its overarching social goal is the
formation of, not rationality but reason—in the sense that rationality is
objectifying, monological, and impositional, while reason is based on
reciprocity, intersubjectivity, dialogue, and negotiation.
Such a school implies understanding education as an ongoing social
experiment, where child meets adult in the interests of mutual transfor-
mation. That exactly the opposite is generally the case—that the tradi-
tional school is a place where the law is inscribed on the flesh, where
possibility is curbed and curtailed in the interests of efficiency and “fit”
to existing norms and patterns—is no reason to commit the genetic fal-
lacy, as the majority of practicing educators do, and assume that
because it is that way it ought to be that way, or that it can be no other
way. Education is not the only Western institution that toils in the serv-
ice of larger structures of domination that continually betray its possi-
bilities. We have comparatively few models of education as social
experiment in the intentional community of an adult-child collective,
and many of them, because they are “excluded others” to the educa-
tional establishment, are boundary cases.
The ideology of adulthood—if we follow the psychohistorian Lloyd
deMause’s account of the evolution of Western child-rearing modes in
the direction of the “empathic”58—is already under deconstruction, and
perhaps has been since Rousseau was moved to write Emile, if not
before among the British upper middle classes of the late seventeenth
century.59 The fact that schools have not been in the vanguard of this
evolution suggests that they were founded in the early modern period to
function as mechanisms of social reproduction and state control60—a
suspicion amply confirmed in Michel Foucault’s analysis of the rise of
“discipline” during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies61—and will only change under the influence of much larger
changes from outside of them. Although it would be naive to seek a
model of profound social change that depends on anything but multiple
influences in reciprocal interaction, the fissure that has been opened in
adult self-understanding in the postmodern West is perhaps the most
promising—and the most volatile—of the five variables involved in
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 23
major change mentioned above (p. 14) for the deconstruction of the ide-
ology of adulthood and the decolonization of education. For it is how
adults understand themselves and the structure, limits and possibilities
of their own subjectivity that determines how they understand children
and childhood.
Postmodern adult subjectivity is laboring under a number of influ-
ences that act to deconstruct the ideology of adulthood. The original
template for the Western notion of the adult subject, stated clearly by
Plato in his utopian treatise Republic, not only excludes childhood
altogether—which Plato seems to have implicitly understood as a kind
of deformity of self—but is founded upon relations of internal hierar-
chy and domination. His seminal characterization described the self as
composed of three elements or dimensions—appetite, volition or will,
and reason—which in order to function optimally, require the domina-
tion of the first two elements by the last and smallest. Appetite must
come under the rulership of will, and will of reason, or the conse-
quence is personal and social chaos.62 Plato’s conception is a static,
hierarchical one—at least from our position in the history of subjectiv-
ity—which defines optimal adulthood (i.e., the successful self) as a
nested structure of domination, directly analogous to the traditional
Indo-European tripartite class structure of royalty, military, and peas-
ant.63 This model of self traveled into the modern West through Stoic
and Christian traditions, and was rendered into a radical dualistic
ontology in early modernism in Descartes’ res cogitans and res extensa.
Not only is it a coercive notion of self-formation, but from Plato until
now it forces children—whom it characterizes as naturally dominated
by appetite and self-will—in the position of chaotic, even monstrous
beings, in need of specific discipline to bring the dimensions of the self
into successful balance.
Perhaps the most influential Western model of subjectivity after
Plato’s—Freud’s—deconstructs this hierarchy, and places the elements
of the self not just in a more complex, but in a dialogical and even
dialectical, relationship.64 There is still an internal politics of self in
Freud, but it is a politics in which ambiguity and mutual influence and
even interpenetration of contradictory elements predominate. Relation-
ships of hierarchy are reinterpreted as relations of repression, displace-
ment and sublimation—none of which presuppose conscious mastery of
one element by another, but rather fluid negotiations—and the possibil-
ity is at least acknowledged65 of cultural influences that can minimize
repression. Most importantly for child rearing and education, Freud’s
model leads to the redefinition of the human life cycle as multi- rather
than unilinear: all the phases of the cycle are represented in each one,
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 24
whether—as Erik Erikson has shown us—in prefiguration or recon-

struction.66 This shift indicates that childhood is now understood as a
permanent or perennial aspect of adulthood, a dimension of subjectivity
with which the adult is in continual, lifelong dialogue.
It is this dialogue within adult subjectivity that distinguishes the
parent or teacher as “hermeneut” from the one for whom childhood
still represents a buried or undiscovered aspect of self. In the semiotics
of intersubjectivity, the character of my relations with the child before
me is linked with the character of my relations with the child I still am,
with whom other dimensions of my selfhood are in a continual process
of dialectical reconstruction. As a subject-in-process, for whom change
and development are the very conditions of subjectivity, and who has no
developmental terminus beyond a continuously receding horizon of ulti-
mate integration, the child I still am comes to represent the promise of a
self that is a permeable structure, open to dialectical transformation and
less liable to the habituated ruts of adult subjectivity. The vertiginous
character of this shift from self as closed to open structure in the post-
modern West is lost neither on its advocates nor its conservative critics.
The politics of subjectivity is the deep undercurrent of the culture wars
of our time, and the school has become a strategic field of battle—per-
haps even, for now, more strategic than the family, for it is here that
children are initiated into the forms of intersubjectivity of the culture as
a whole.
Questioning childhood means questioning adulthood, and ques-
tioning adulthood means reconsidering the goals, processes, and funda-
mental values of the life cycle—which means, in turn, reconsidering our
mutual relationships, both individual and collective, whether economic,
political, or sexual. Childhood represents one point of convergence of
these reconsiderations, and signifies the ever-recurring possibility for
social and cultural transformation. To repress that possibility is to
repress our own possibilities as a species and its capacity for reconstruc-
tion. The chapters that follow take up that possibility along multiple
lines of inquiry—historical, mythological, artistic, literary, psychoana-
lytic and, finally, educational. What emerges from their interplay is,
simply put, a sketch for cultural evolution based on the evolving adult-
child relationship. On a biological level, the phenomenon of neoteny—
the prolonged childhood of the human species—could be considered to
be the key ingredient in that evolution, for it represents the plasticity of
the species. My argument revolves around the assumption that the lived
world of childhood is the open space in the human experience for cul-
tural transformation; and that as children are progressively accorded
Kennedy01 1/11/06 10:35 AM Page 25
the status of full-fledged interlocutors with adults, that space will bloom
in ways that have been characteristically suppressed until now, and the
human experience will, however slowly, change to allow—as the
Romantic poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it at the
moment of the discovery of childhood in the modern West—each of us
to “carry the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood.”67
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Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 27
The Primordial Child
“Comment vivre, sinon édeniquement?”

—Eugene Ionesco1
The Divine Child
The passage from childhood to adulthood is one of the grand narratives

of the modern West. Its subplots are various and complex, and can be
traced in the history of manners, in the transition to universal literacy,
in colonialism and all its hidden and explicit assumptions, in the ideol-
ogy of evolutionary theory, in the eternal politics of what is knowable
and what is not, in forms of spirituality, in attitudes toward the body
and the natural world, and in the ongoing reconstruction of subjectivity.
The story Enlightened Westerners tell each other about themselves is
about “growing up,” about leaving childhood behind. Paradoxically
enough, but in keeping with the hermeneutical relation sketched in
Chapter 1, it is also about discovering (or inventing) childhood, to
which the designation of the twentieth century as the “century of the
child” attests. This apparent contradiction seems to indicate some sort
of dialectical movement.
The modern West received its original command to “grow up”
from the same tradition—Christianity—which heaped honors on child-
hood in its own right by connecting it with divinity. Both can be seen as
psychocultural messages that traveled from the ancient into the modern
world through their formulation in Judaic and Christian scriptures and
Stoic philosophies. St. Paul’s injunction to “put away childish things,”
27
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 28
and his emphasis on watchfulness and self-control carry forward the

classical Greek and Roman disdain for, even impatience with, child-
hood. Paul’s adult as not-child became a subjective template for Christ-
ian adulthood that did not reach full effect until the rise of the modern
world in Protestantism, the centralized state, “Enlightenment,” univer-
sal education, capitalism, and the emergence of a form of subjectivity
characterized by different self-other and self-world boundaries.
On the other hand, God came as an infant in Jesus, thereby exem-
plifying the archetype of the puer aeternus, or primordial child—that
recurrent motif of myth, scripture, dream, and fairy tale—as an infant
or young child, often of divine origin, usually an orphan or a foundling,
who, in C.G. Jung’s formulation, is a “paradoxical union of lowest and
highest.”2 The adult Jesus also identified himself clearly with the poor
and the marginalized—among whom he counted children, who were
characteristically minor, lesser, not worthy of full adult attention. This
unequivocal identification with the underclass, in a world in which only
freeborn Greek or Roman men were recognized as full persons, was rev-
olutionary, and may be understood as a legacy that the West is still
struggling to appropriate. Certainly it problematized childhood, which
could no longer be seen as a state—like the animal’s—without reason.
In fact Jesus’ famous saying “for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such
as these,”3 suggests a higher reason—something akin to the Platonic
intellectus, which is beyond ratio, or mere reasoning. The form of
knowledge that Jesus associates with young children is taken up again
by Paul in 1 Corinthians, where he develops the inversion further in the
notion that the wisdom of God is “hidden,” and “spoken in a mystery,”
and that it is “foolishness” to the Greek rationalist tradition. Paul calls
on the one who “thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, to
become a ‘fool’ so that he may become wise.”4 Thus in the life and
practice and teaching of Christ, the child and the fool—both of whom
subvert adult models of knowledge and conduct—become models of
spiritual knowledge and development. This particular epistemological
tradition of an other, subversive knowledge, held by those who seem to
be least in the adult world, is not only perennial in the West—where it
has taken philosophical as well as theological forms—but is found in
cultures throughout history.5
Like the tendency to view children either as quasi-animals or little
adults, that tradition which sees childhood—and in particular early
childhood—as either embodying, or as prophetic of, a form of knowl-
edge that is qualitatively different from that of adults, is also based on
experience, although perhaps of a less common variety. The tradition of
the young child as knower of an expanded world that shrinks and frag-
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 29
The Primordial Child 29
ments in adulthood is typically associated with religious or spiritual tra-

ditions, whether expressed in scriptures, gnomic sayings, folkloric and
mythological motifs, psychoanalytic data, various wisdom traditions,
literature, art, or mystical experience. It even insinuates itself into the
confessions of the man who contributed most to the association of the
child with original sin: Augustine’s (354–430) famous conversion expe-
rience in the garden has all the characteristics of this tradition of the
child as unconscious spiritual master:
I was asking myself these questions, weeping all the while with
the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the
sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the
voice of a boy or a girl I cannot say, but again and again it
repeated the refrain ‘Take it and read, take it and read.’ At this
I looked up, thinking hard whether there was any kind of game
in which children used to chant words like these, but I could
not remember ever hearing them before. I stemmed my flood of
tears and stood up, telling myself that this could only be a
divine command to open my book of Scripture and read the
first passage on which my eyes should fall.6
This incident strongly conveys one of the characteristic marks of

the tradition that understands the child as expressing a form of knowl-
edge lost or mostly unavailable to adults. What distinguishes “infant”
from adult is her inability to speak (in=“not”, fari=“speak”)—that is to
make sense, to reason, to frame discourse. Like the wise beast in the
fairy tale, the infans is the unconscious guide of the adult mind cut off
from its own intuitive ground by the inherent limitations of its own dis-
cursive framework. The same figure operates in the classic Western
Fool, whose babbling riddles conceal true knowledge. The child’s very
marginality to rational discourse is a form of discourse itself—the dis-
course of nature before the Fall, of a being directly in touch with its
source and ground. The child is so profoundly and unconsciously
grounded in her own existence and free of the tyranny of speech and
reason, that truth proceeds from her every word and action as from an
oracle. This archetypal knowledge theme assumes a connection between
innocence and wisdom; the child represents Edenic consciousness, a
state of psychic equilibrium such that even—and especially—her appar-
ently nonsensical play expresses a sort of knowledge that shows forth
the essence of things, and reveals us to ourselves.
The “primordial child,” “child god,” or “divine child”—found in
religion, myth, literature, film, and dreamwork is a symbolic expression
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 30
of this kind of knowledge. Because of the way it symbolizes, Jung added

it to his taxonomy of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. The
motif is characterized in mythic narrative as an infant or young child,
often of divine origin, and usually an orphan or foundling—thus a
“paradoxical union of lowest and highest, weakest and strongest”—
who survives abandonment, trial, and persecution through extraordi-
nary, elemental sorts of powers, representative of the powers of the
unconscious. The mythologem of the child god is usually hermaphro-
ditic or androgynous (note Augustine’s “whether it was the voice of a
boy or a girl I cannot say”), a primary being: its elemental origins make
of it a representation of “a state of being not yet separated from not-
being, yet still being,”7 a form of psychic nondifferentiation that mani-
fests as a numinous form of integration.
In the infant god or hero, the mythologem of the puer aeternus or
“eternal child” expresses a form of intentional consciousness character-
ized by psychological wholeness and integration of which the adult is
aware as a memory and a potentiality, but perceives himself as not pos-
sessing. The figure appeared to Jung’s patients both in dreams and
through his therapeutic technique called “active imagination.” Jung
understood this “bisexual, primordial being” as “a symbol of the unity
of personality, a symbol of self, where the war of opposites finds peace.
In this way the primordial being becomes the distant goal of man’s self-
development, having been from the very beginning a projection of his
unconscious wholeness. Wholeness consists in the union of the con-
scious and unconscious personality.”8 Often it manifested as the Christ
child; but it also emerged from earlier, altogether non-Christian levels—
out of chthonic animals such as crocodiles, dragons, serpents, or mon-
keys. Sometimes the child appears in the cup of a flower, or out of a
golden egg, or as the center of a mandala. In dreams it often appears as
the dreamer’s son or daughter or as a boy, youth, or young girl; for
white Westerners, it occasionally seems to be of exotic origin—Indian or
Chinese—with dusky skin; or, appearing more cosmically, it is sur-
rounded by stars or wearing a starry coronet. Sometimes it appears as
the king’s son or the witch’s child with daemonic attributes.9 Jung inter-
preted the appearance of the archetype in dreams and psychotherapy as
a herald, “smaller than small and bigger than big,” which appears in
anticipation of future psychological development, initiating the individ-
uation process—an emergent synthesis of unconscious and conscious
elements of the personality which Jung refers to as the Self. As such this
symbolic child is also a mediator and a healing figure, representing a
form of psychic energy that unites the opposites and thereby makes
whole.
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 31
The apparent insignificance and powerlessness of the mythic child

figure—its characteristic history of abandonment, exposure, and
danger—testifies, not only to a world where, well into the eighteenth
century, child abandonment was routine, but on another (and perhaps
analogous) level, to the precariousness and difficulty of the self’s
attempt at wholeness and integrity. But as in the mythic narratives
nature itself cradles the abandoned child hero—as, for example, the
infant Dionysius was hidden and protected from an infanticidal Zeus by
the nymph Leuca—so our instinctual life secretly nourishes this “inner
child,” which represents the ineluctable drive in each being to realize
itself, however small and vulnerable its origins. “Child” also recognizes
an original psychological—and to a certain extent cognitive—state of
indissociation between subject and object, knower and known, an
unconscious identity of self and universe that is inscribed in perception
itself.
The original wholeness out of which human development cuts a
limited, if functional field of action and meaning through processes of
separation, distinction, hierarchization, and typification, is for the adult
both a pre- and a postconscious condition—a place of origin and a ter-
minal state. As such, it represents the unity of consciousness implicit in
the drive for self-realization. One emerges from and returns to child-
hood. “Child” must always accompany “adult” as its contrastive pair.
So for depth psychology, “child” is what is too small to see emerging—
a form of knowledge lost through the vicissitudes of development but
always in the process of being regained dialectically through further
development, which is the key to the integrity, or wholeness, of the self.
The child archetype found its most universal and compelling West-
ern historical statement in representations of the infant Jesus with his
mother; but that infant-mother dyad, which became a major theme in
the medieval and Renaissance epochs, and which stated the archetype in
a definitive way, is a confluence of several themes that were already
present in the ancient pre-Christian world. The idea of the humanation
of God in an infant is found, if in a relatively confused and idiosyncratic
form, in the infancy of Dionysius, and the Jesus/Mary pair is already
foreshadowed in goddess/child pairs from at least 2000 BCE in Cycladic
idols, in Mycenean statuary, and classical representations of
Aphrodite/Eros, Isis/Horus, and even Demeter/Triptymelos. Although
early Egyptian, Greek, and Roman representations are usually idealized
portraits of children as parts of families, the divine child is a psycholog-
ical icon, a sacred character—anonymous, numinous, and universal.10
The naked eroti who flooded the Hellenistic world of art are the
primordial child multiplied and genericized—the iterative, fractalized
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 32
body of Eros, or Love, who in ancient myth unites heaven and earth.
Their trademark is an innocent sensuality that was later reappropriated
in the putti, or “cupids” of Renaissance art, where they find their way
into both pagan and Christian themes. There they accompany both
Aphrodite in her amours, and the Holy Child and his mother—and even
God the Father, or the adult Jesus as he comes from heaven to carry off
a dying or enraptured saint. Often they appear in legion, filling the sky.
In their representation in pagan themes, these naked, playful super-tod-
dlers are often depicted in contact with the elemental forces of nature—
wrestling playfully with a swan, riding a dolphin, or even riding rams,
panthers, lions, officiating serenely over preliminaries to the act of love
or accompanying the dead to the underworld. Some are winged. Josef
Kunstmann connects them with “daemons,” or intermediaries between
heaven and earth, creatures who connect the above and the below, the
holy and the profane. The naked toddler, in his uninhibited play,
releases and secures the connection between the sensual and the sacred.
Like their original prototype Eros, who was first represented as an ado-
lescent, the eroti, according to Kunstmann, “combine the most unlikely
contrasts and hold together body and soul, heaven, earth, and the
underworld.”11
The Orphic sect worshipped Eros as the creator of the world. For
Plato he represented the desire to create in beauty—he who evokes in
the soul the memory of the primal Ideas. But there is also, from the
beginning, a curious ambivalence about this naked youth. The mythic
tradition identified both a lofty (Uranios) and a base (Pandemos) Eros,
matching the dual aspects of his mother Aphrodite. Boethius (480–524)
said of the god whom Homer ignored, he is “the most beautiful of the
immortal gods, who loosens the limbs and restrains the temper of all
men and gods, but who also overthrows wise counsel.”12 The eroti rep-
resent both the fleshly nature of the spiritual and the spiritual nature of
the fleshly—opposites that, when not promoting ecstatic unity, tempt
excess and bad judgment.
But in fact they were appropriated by Christian art—if not with the
gusto of their pagan counterparts—quite early. They are found on early
Christian graves and sarcophagi playing with hoops and balls (symbols
of the soul), or placing wreaths on the heads of husband and wife. They
are identified with the guardian spirits of early Christianity, but retain
their erotic function as the element that knits things up in love and
makes them flow, while their demonic element—the possibility for
“pandemonium”—is muted or elided. They appear to have no symbolic
connection with the child Jesus—who first appears in late Hellenistic
times as well—but in this case with his mother, nursing, in a second-
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 33
century fresco in the catacomb of Priscilla.13 The representation of the

nursing mother was already present in the worship of the Egyptian Isis,
who is generally represented nursing Horus; in fact the form of icon
called Virgo Lactans appears to have traveled to Byzantium and the
West from the Egyptian church.
Thus, both the toddler-eros and the mother-child pair existed before
Christianity. The former dropped out of Christian art in the late fifth and
early sixth century14; the mother-child pair was consolidated in Byzan-
tine Christian iconography, where the divine pair assumed the stiff,
formal, hieretic posture that we associate with early Christian art. Until
the end of the twelfth century, the divine child of the Byzantine icon is
much closer to a puer senex, an “old man child,” than an eros. This is
not surprising, given that the purpose of Byzantine iconography is to
represent an ideal of adulthood—the Divine Wisdom, the Word (and by
implication, Reason) Incarnate. This child, seated on his mother the
God-bearer as on a throne, one hand extended in blessing, is the timeless
adult Person of the Christ, and his expression is very similar to that of
the equally popular icon of the Christ Pantocrator or “all powerful,”
which represents Jesus as manly hero. To argue that the Byzantine Christ
child is a “little adult,” as some historians of childhood have done, is to
at least partially misread the icons.15 However, they do seem to indicate
that for patristic Christianity, the identification between the infant Jesus
and either real children or the primordial child had been muted.
It is commonly accepted that it was in the transition from the
Romanesque to the Gothic period in the late eleventh and twelfth cen-
turies that the stiff, hieretic mother and child pair began to soften, and
their humanization began. Actually it was a process with its roots deep
in earlier centuries. Representations of the Virgo Lactans in which the
infant Jesus was represented with sensitive realism can be found at least
from the ninth century on.16 These images of Jesus as an actual infant,
done with observant subtlety, were both the first representations of an
emerging naturalism in Western art, and a restatement of the associa-
tion between early childhood and spirituality so strongly marked in the
Gospels. Truth had already been represented as an infant during the
Carolingian Renaissance, and the soul is also typically represented as a
child in medieval art—often shown as a tiny, naked infant emerging
from the mouth of a dying person.17 But the association of Jesus with
real human infancy signals the activation of the child archetype as a
spiritual and developmental ideal in Western psychohistory.
The growing emphasis on the “appealing humanity” of the divine
pair which started in the twelfth century is both a cultural reappropria-
tion of the Jesus sayings about children and their natural spirituality,
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 34
and the fruit of attention to real children. The increased prevalence of

oblation—the giving over of children to monasteries to be raised up for
the Church, at least from the fifth century on18—led to increased sensi-
tivity to their characteristics. St. Anselm (1033–1109) was particularly
sympathetic toward children, and Bernard (1090–1153), founder of the
Cistercian Order, based his teachings on the connection between the
real, human infancy of Jesus, and adults’ needs to “become as little chil-
dren” and be converted.19 The revolutionary spirituality of St. Francis
(1182–1226), which exploded on the world in the early 1200s, summa-
rized the medieval tradition of the “holy innocent,” and the Christian
identification of the young child with homo religiosis. The Franciscan
movement was a powerful, summative statement of the medieval (i.e.,
Christian and Platonic) epistemology of the sacred: in a world turned
upside down, where doxa (opinion) and ratio (mere reason) ruled, the
higher knowledge (intellectus, noesis), apprehended nondiscursively,
becomes a subversive knowledge, the domain of the Fool and other
marginalized ones.20 Francis encouraged a childlike spontaneity and
lack of decorum in his Christian practice that combined the notion of a
“foolishness for Christ’s sake” with that of the simple faith and depend-
ency on God of a little child on its parent. The knowledge of the Fool
for Christ was dangerous, in that it was anarchic, existentially charged,
and threatened established practices.
The end of the Middle Ages and the emergence of the early modern
world in Renaissance art and thought saw the reemergence of the tod-
dler-eros—a result both of an ever-increasing naturalism in Western art,
and of the Renaissance rediscovery of antiquity. In the Renaissance, this
figure appeared again both in the image of the traditional classic eroti—
who were now found crowding the borders of paintings, or hovering in
clouds of infant flesh—and also in depictions of the Christ Child as
infant or toddler with his mother. In fact it is instructive to follow the
artistic representations of the Christian Mother and Child through this
period, because it shows, as if in a photographic time-lapse, a process of
naturalization of the divine child culminating in the High Renaissance,
which then moved on, in Mannerism and the Baroque, to a sort of
reversal, through which the natural child was in turn divinized, thus
forming one iconographic basis for the nineteenth-century Romantic
image of the young child.
The early Renaissance representations of the divine pair, true to the
model provided by the Byzantine icon, present mother and child as both
looking gravely outward at the viewer, as befits the divine Word and its
human matrix, the Mother. The first softening and naturalization of the
image appears when the child turns to his mother, and they gaze at each
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 35
other. This motif is actually first suggested in the Byzantine Eleousa or

“mercy” icon type, in which their cheeks are pressed poignantly
together. But the motif, along with the Virgo Lactans (the mother nurs-
ing the child) and the Hodegetria (the mother carrying the child, who is
seated on one arm), traveled to Italy in the twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, where its gradual naturalization began the trend that finished
in the Mother and Child portraits of Rafael and Michaelangelo. In the
Italian painting of the Dugento and Trecento, the Eleousa throws off, in
the words of art historian Victor Lasareff, its “Byzantine austerity and
abstractness.”21 For example, in the Lorenzetto altarpiece in Pieve,
Arezzo, 1320, mother and child gaze at each other in intense mutual
regard. In Fra Filippo Lippi’s Madonna and Child of 1455 (Uffizi
Gallery, Florence), the child is shown reaching for his mother with out-
stretched arms. In Hans Holbein the Elder’s Madonna and Christ Child
of 1510 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), the child is seen holding
or reaching for a ball, symbol of the universe. And gradually, in a
steady, traceable progression, the child is represented with fewer and
fewer clothes: in Fra Angelico’s Madonna of the Star (c. 1430, San
Marco, Florence), the child is in royal dress; in Lippi’s Madonna of Tar-
quinia of 1465 (Barberini Gallery, Rome), the child is clothed only from
the waist down; in Quentin Massay’s Madonna with Cherries of 1490
(Flemish, Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota), the child wears only a
wispy loincloth; in Rafael’s Cowper Madonna of 1505 (National
Gallery of Art, Washington), the child is completely naked.
As the Renaissance progresses, the familiar postures and gestures of
the real child became increasingly recognizable in the Holy Infant. Here
he is reaching for an object or for the breast, there grasping the mother’s
breast and looking up into her eyes as if in the first or last moments of
nursing, or pressing into the mother’s body in a cuddling motion, or
stretching away from the mother while in her arms, often with his arm
out as if indicating something. The Divine Child appears with a finger
in his mouth, or with the recognizable alert smile of the six-month-old
infant, or demonstrating the startle reflex, or involuntarily mimicking
the mother’s expression, as infants do. The child grasps the mother’s
neck with one hand, as if to kiss her or rub cheeks, or reaches to touch
her mouth, in typical infant fashion. Offered a gift by the Magi, the
child reaches forward very realistically to grasp it with both hands. A
close reading of the iconography shows increasingly detailed and sym-
pathetic observation of infant behavior and affect by the painters of the
divine pair. All that is lacking, curiously enough, in this gradual natural-
ization, is a realistic representation of the proportionate size of head to
body among infants, which is different from that of adults. Even in the
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 36
High Renaissance, painters still represented the head-to-whole body

proportion as the adult ratio (1:8) rather than the larger ratio of infants
and toddlers (1:4 and 1:5). The adult head-to-body proportion is the
last vestige of the Word of God as homunculus—of the Infant Christ as
an adult in a child’s body.
This movement of increasing realism, corresponding to the gradual
secularization associated with modernity, reached, in the High Renais-
sance depiction of the Mother and Child, a balance between the natural
and the divine which stated the archetype of the divine child with a
power and immediacy that is still profoundly influential in Western
mythic iconography. In its early sixteenth-century formulation, the
archetype is completely humanized, but expresses none of the sentimen-
talism or sensuality that accompanied its further naturalization from the
mid-sixteenth century on. Its power as an image is a reflection of the
fact that in the emergent Christian incarnational theology of the Renais-
sance, the infans, rather than the Christ Pantocrator or the Christ Cru-
cified, became the primary icon and psychological symbol of self. This
is accomplished, as is characteristic of the period, through a synthesis of
Christian and pagan themes: the child has the sensual beauty and play-
fulness of the ancient eroti, and the Queen of Heaven has the qualities
of Aphrodite Urania, goddess of celestial love. Thus the pair evokes, as
striking a note evokes a harmonic, the pagan through the Christian pair,
and summarizes thousands of years of images of the archetypal dyad.
The naked child god is, for a Christianity reencountering the Her-
metic tradition, an alchemical philosopher’s stone. He is spiritual flesh
and fleshly spirit, and so represents the coniunctio oppositorum of both
Christian and pagan spirituality. As Jesus is the second Adam, the
“Messiah of Nature,”22 the naked infant Savior is the first icon of the
cosmology of Renaissance incarnational theology: “a world restored to
admirable perfection.”23 The Incarnation announces a rectification and
sanctification of the created order, which implies the restoration of the
Adamic body in its original, sexual glory, made in the image of the glory
of God.
In his polymorphic love-play with his mother, the child also evokes
Eros—both the licentious Eros of the Olympians in the arms of his
mother-consort Aphrodite, and the Eros of the Sixth Book of Plotinus’
Enneads, whose beauty lures Psyche (the soul) back toward the One and
the “true life.”24 So in some representations, Christ the Infant Spouse
reaches to cup the chin of the mother with his palm—a conventional
erotic gesture in ancient iconography.25 As an evocation of both Amor
and Psyche and Eros and Aphrodite, the naked child in amorous interac-
tion with his goddess mother is central to the Renaissance attempt at a
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 37
synthesis of Christian and pagan themes. Christian neo-Platonism set

about to find the hidden Christian prefigurations in the pagan mysteries,
and the pagan elements expressed in the Christian, and one of its main
vehicles in this search was art. As Leo Steinberg has suggested, “What
the Christian art of the Renaissance took from pagan antiquity was the
license to plumb its own mythic depths.”26 The visual symbol became of
prime importance to this search, for it was assumed to have the capacity
to reveal realities that are not expressible in discursive speech. In the
Renaissance, this principle of church iconography began to be applied
beyond the church, leading, as the historian of art Erich Gombrich has
said, to “the opening up, to secular art, of emotional spheres which had
hitherto been the preserve of religious worship.”27
Marcilio Ficino (1433–1499), a major voice in the Renaissance
synthesis, adopted the Platonic idea that the highest knowledge is not
properly described as cognition, but as love, which “embraces” cogni-
tion.28 He wrote: “Since the good is far superior to the intellect, and its
fruition is hence not correctly named intelligence, it appears that it also
should not be called cognition: for it is more natural and more desirable
than cognition.” What distinguished Ficino’s use of the Platonic noesis,
or direct intuitive knowledge of the whole, was his characterization of it
as a kind of “frenzy,” a being taken beyond oneself, a form of joyful
experience strictly analogous to the “joy of the senses,” or voluptas. On
this account, the rigor of spiritual will or voluntas actually becomes
voluptas when it expands from finite to infinite. This is only in keeping
with the thought of his master Plotinus himself, who, according to
Edgar Wind, “repeatedly advised his disciples to model their expecta-
tion of spiritual joy on what they knew of the delusive joys of the
senses.”29 The drive for spiritual knowledge is appetitive, and based on
a love and a desire for the beauty of the world that is sacramental.
What the Christian neo-Platonism of the Renaissance sought was a rev-
elation of the fundamental connection between eros and agape, the two
forms of love that had been separated in the Christian tradition. And
the vehicle for this revelation of knowledge as appetite, will and reason
integrated became the child, who, as the divine child, is sacramental
flesh, the resolution of Plato’s tripartite self without resort to internal
hierarchy and domination.
In the history of the Western dialogue between reason and desire,
the divine child and the Queen of Heaven communicate this ecstatic
balancing of pagan eros and Christian agape through representing the
divine archetypes in increasingly realistic form. The process of the secu-
larization of the mother-child icon during the Renaissance reflects a
psychohistorical internalization of the archetypes. Instead of being
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 38
worshipped “out there” in a statue or icon, the gods and goddesses—

including the divine child—are discovered within, as both individual
and cultural possibilities. They are recognized as archetypal patternings
of the unconscious—thematic elements in the process of psychological
and spiritual development that Jung called “individuation,” whereby
conscious and unconscious dimensions of the self are brought into ever-
further integration, with a corresponding decentering of the executive
function, or ego.
The child-mother icon of Renaissance incarnationalism communi-
cates its fundamental meaning “in a flash”—not through a direct one-
to-one correspondence, laboriously unpacked, or within a doctrinal
framework, but given all at once. Nor does it have only one identifiable
meaning, but carries, as Gombrich described such symbols, multiple
meanings, apprehended nondiscursively in the interaction with the
symbol itself. It is what he called an “open sign,” which “penetrates to
new and unexpected categories of experience,” and has a magical qual-
ity that derives from its character as an intermediary in a cosmos of cor-
respondences and sympathies, where microcosm and macrocosm are
understood as a “series of concentric circles surrounding the ineffable
unity in an ever widening distance.” Through the mediation of the
analogies between these levels of being, the archetypal symbol has,
according to Gombrich, the power to “impart to the image something
of the power of the spiritual essence which it embodies.”30
Beyond—if implicit in—the Christian and hermetic motifs that
overflow in the luminous naked child archetype, the image represents
for the psychology of persons a total, unashamed world-openness, a
form of being in which the self-consciousness that characterizes the
adult is overcome—in which “inside” and “outside” are one. The
naked child evokes self revealed in a unity, an integrity that is regained
for consciousness only through the long and arduous journey into the
division of adulthood and beyond. And if we understand—as is
common in dream analysis—child and mother as aspects of one
person, together they comprise the primal unity of the androgyn—the
“bisexual primal being” that characterizes the divine pair Aphrodite
and Eros.31 Philosophically, the pair represents the unity of knowledge
and being, of mind and nature; psychologically, the “primary narcis-
sism” that Freud characterized as the infant state, which for the adult
is a lost paradise. Phenomenologically, it evokes the form of knowledge
of the child, which is immediate and nondiscursive, and not dependent
on the stereotypifications of language and cognitive schemas. Each of
these evocations is central to the nineteenth-century Romantic formu-
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 39
lation of childhood and its importance in the life cycle, which will be
taken up below.
When the naked child is not in amorous interaction with the
mother, but held among other adults—particularly in depictions of the
Adoration of the Magi, and the paintings of the Madonna and Child
with the saints, another symbolic aspect emerges. Nothing could better
communicate the stunning glory of the flesh revealed in its restoration
than setting it off against a surrounding group of fully clothed, intensely
concentrating adults. All the bodies of the adults, in various stages of
age and experience, are hidden, but stand in astonishment and grave
wonder before the insouciant, gleaming nakedness of Desire. If, for pur-
poses of analysis, we bracket out the narrative of this child as God-King
of the universe—or even keep the narrative but assign to it a psycholog-
ical and archetypal rather than a purely historical or theological empha-
sis—the extent to which the divine child is the “inner child” of all the
observing adults becomes more insistent. On the psychological level,
these scenes are object lessons in the developmental command of the
Western wisdom tradition that calls on each adult to be “born again,”
and “become like a little child.”
Finally, the divine child of the Renaissance reemerges, as we have
already seen, in the eroti of the earlier Hellenistic period, now become
cupid-angels, who reassert their function as mediators between flesh
and spirit, earth and sky. We find them particularly in paintings where
heaven opens up, and they are seated, hovering, or flying just on the
boundary between earth and heaven. In his analysis of Raphael’s widely
reproduced Sistine Madonna (1514, Royal Picture Gallery, Dresden),
Kunstmann compares the two eroti posted on the picture plane to “sen-
tries” at the transition point between the real and the visionary worlds,
mediators between time and eternity, inner and outer space.32 They are
expressions of the elemental sympathy by which the whole cosmos is
held together in the divine love, the “impossible” union between eros
and agape. Nor have they lost the ambivalence that they had in Hel-
lenism, for they are also present wherever erotic pandemonium suggests
itself—as in the effulgent Venuses of Titian, or the woodland revels of
Silenus and his entourage.
The direction of the representation of the divine child from the
Gothic onward was one of ever increasing realism and naturalism.
Although “real” children were depicted relatively infrequently and usu-
ally as marginal figures in Renaissance art, the trend toward realism
was part of an emergent secularism in a West “coming of age” in early
modernism, which understood itself as no longer preoccupied with mere
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 40
“myths.” Yet at its point of balance in the High Renaissance, the new
realism was used in the service of the mythic—to justify the faith in the
divinity of Christ, and to summarize the archetype of the divine child
with a new, not just theological, but psychological immediacy. In its
struggle to integrate pagan and Christian spirituality, Renaissance art
found that the more realistic the body and behavior of the divine child,
the more the mystery of the “humanation of the divine” is revealed, and
the better incarnational Christian theory makes its point. The more the
child acts and looks like a child, the more astonishing and significant
his divinity appears, and the more we recognize in his own psychologi-
cal unity the goal—set before us rather than in our past—of our own
development as adults. The “little child” that the paintings instruct us
wordlessly to become is here represented, not as a limitation or even a
return, but as a further synthesis, beyond the necessary fall into the divi-
sion of adulthood. The child announces the unification of the oppo-
sites—flesh and spirit, mind and heart—which is the goal of human
development. And it is of particular dialectical significance that it was
here, at the onset of an epoch in which “adult” became a cultural, psy-
chological, and epistemological ideal, that the child archetype took on
this personal, psychological interest for adult development, and that
God—the primary image of wholeness—was stated not as an adult but
as a naked, playing infant.
In keeping with the growth of a naturalistic ideal in modernism,
the mythic elements of the child archetype experienced a subtle but
increasing obscuration as the art of the Renaissance reached its apogee
and was transformed along with the world it was representing. This
was already reflected in the legendary psychological accuracy of
Leonardo’s (1452–1519) work, whereby even the figures of the holy
family, while presented in a fully traditional manner, show with an
almost uncanny immediacy their individual, idiosyncratic personalities,
which tend to deemphasize the mythic and archetypal elements. In
Michaelangelo (1475–1564), the brooding interiority of the human
began to make earlier painters like Raphael (1483–1520) look psycho-
logically naive.
This more radical naturalism of the High Renaissance increased
steadily through Mannerism and the Baroque. In the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries, painters like Carravaggio (1573–1610), Parmigian-
ino (1503–1540), and Rubens (1577–1640) created transitional forms
between the iconography of the humanation of the divine and a natura-
listic iconography from which the divine seems to have withdrawn. In
Parmigianino’s Madonna with the Long Neck (c. 1540, Florence, Uffizi
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 41
Gallery) the flesh of the divine pair itself is numinous, rather than evok-
ing or expressing the noumenon. Ostensibly, it assumes the icono-
graphic tradition of Renaissance incarnational theology, but there is a
not-so-subtle change toward the glory of the carnal in and for itself,
rather than the glory of redeemed or redeeming carnality. A spiritualiza-
tion of pure immanence begins to replace the naturalization of the spiri-
tual that incarnation implies. Rather than the divine taking on body, the
body in itself comes to be seen as divine—or, if not as divine, as com-
plete in its immanence, represented in its erotic beauty, through which it
comes to reference only itself, rather than to point beyond itself. When
the sensuality of the eros-agape union is portrayed in this increasingly
naturalistic style, it becomes—for example in the Madonna with the
Long Neck—sexually provocative. Heaven has drawn away from the
divine pair, leaving them as direct, unequivocal objects of desire.
In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European art, the infant
Christ-Eros, although he by no means disappeared, began to lose his
symbolic power, and to become—as for example in Jose Ribera’s The
Holy Family with Saint Catherine (1648, Metropolitan Museum, New
York)—merely the youngest member of a rather mundane-looking holy
family, now portrayed as a unit, in idealization of Europe’s emerging
middle class nuclear family. In Northern Europe, children began to
appear in family portraits, which, for the Protestant bourgeoisie became
a new sort of icon. The golden age of seventeenth-century Dutch art
reveals the modern, newly “invented” child of the middle classes, typi-
cally portrayed with her mother, as in Hooch’s (1629–1684) portraits of
domestic life, or dressed up for a family portrait. These portraits, which
at first glance seem to portray children as “little adults”—an impression
created by the fact that they wear the same clothes as adults—when
given close attention, show a sensitivity to the nature of children—their
gaze, their posture—which is in continuity with Renaissance naturalism,
but which has escaped the melodramatic sensuality of mannerism. The
archetype of the divine child is muted, if only in the fact that the child is
portrayed as a part of a larger group, or when with her mother, in a
mundane activity setting. When the divine child motif does appear, par-
ticularly among the French and English aristocracy, it is either as an
occasion for a refined prurience or as a legitimation of royal power; it
has become an iconographic marker in the politics of class.
The rise and ascendency of the bourgeoisie made of the painter a
social observer rather than a theologian. The Dutch child dressed in his
father’s clothes is no less a child, but his new, more prominent but also
more strictly controlled role in the adult world is what the paintings
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 42
convey. This child is the subject of much more attention—she has

entered history. She now carries the clear marker “child,” with the
corollary assumption of one who is being socialized, with the help of
child-rearing manuals and schools, into adulthood. Children have
become important to parents in a new way, as necessary actors in a new
social project—whether Protestant pietism, early capitalism, or some
combination of the two. The Reformed vision of piety emphasizes the
priesthood of the believer, the home as spiritual locus, and the necessity
(given the now universal availability of the Bible, and its importance) of
literacy, and therefore of education, for proper development. All of
these factors place the child in a new position, both of fond attention
and of a new constraint.
The direct, unequivocal expression of the divine child would not
appear again in Western art—and then with a quite different sort of
emphasis—until the English aristocratic portraiture of the late eigh-
teenth century that heralded Romanticism. In these completely secular
portraits of the children of the aristocracy, the archetype is still present
as a certain otherness, signified in the paintings of a Reynolds
(1723–1792), a Gainsborough (1727–1788) or John Hoppner (1758–
1810) by paradisiacal or haunted woodland settings, full or partial
nudity, and dreamy or exalted facial expressions—for example in Hopp-
ner’s portrait of his own children (The National Gallery, Washington).
Shrouded as it is in the new meanings of childhood that had by then
been imposed on children for about a century, the representation of the
archetype moves toward, not the proclamation of a goal of adulthood,
but a melancholy critique of the rationalized Enlightenment adulthood
of the late eighteenth century—a form of adulthood that feels itself
increasingly to be cut off from its own childhood. This critique would
become a major theme of early-nineteenth-century Romanticism, and a
trigger for a movement that reinstated the divine child as a prophet of
psychological integration.
Child alienation in a newly adultocentric world already haunts
Velasquez’s late seveneenth- and early eighteenth-century paintings of
Spanish royalty. Although Velasquez was used as a propagandist for
the court, his paintings aspire to tell the truth. Among others, the great
psychological painting Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor, 1656, El
Prado, Madrid) captures with dreamlike precision the felt world of the
child placed in this new cosmos. Here the Infanta Dona Margarita is
both the central figure of the painting and an outsider to her own
childhood. She provides a prophetic glimpse of the final production of
modernism—the Freudian child. Her parents’ appearance in the mirror
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 43
behind her (and the absent presences at whom she is looking) suggest
they are introjected images, and her retinue, so both slavishly and
indifferently attentive (including a faithful animal) can, by a slight dis-
placement of the imagination, be seen both as the real people they are,
and as creatures of her imagination, dream-figures in the tortuous nar-
rative landscape of childhood.
Las Meninas can also be understood as a first statement of a
modern twist on the divine child—the “enigmatic child,” the child who
has become a mystery to the adult, who is too removed from childhood
to experience it as anything but an ambiguous message from another
world.33 The Infanta’s watchful, removed facial expression, her stiff,
adult dress, her gaze fixed on an absent presence, her encirclement by a
troupe of retainers who, given her overwhelming centrality, appear
almost as other aspects of herself, reflect that different sort of wonder
that, from the mid-nineteenth century on, surround fictional and poetic
representations of children. This too is a divine child—an enigmatic
symbol of intimate otherness—but it is a symbol of alienation, akin to
madness and animality, both of which are also “divine,” rather than
unity. It reflects a new distance between adulthood and childhood,
rather than a recognition of the psychological centrality of childhood
throughout the life cycle. Thus, the ever-emerging iconography of mod-
ernism finally closed around the mythological theme of the divine child,
and expressed it negatively, rather than positively.
The periodic neoclassicisms of the modern world, when they do
invoke the ancient themes, do so with either a sentimentality or a self-
conscious eroticism that is a mockery of the power of Renaissance sym-
bolism. The “cute” erotic child of the world of advertising34 may be
said to be yet another image of this child, in which the spiritual evoca-
tion of divine carnality, or “innocent flesh” has become all flesh, and
the Eden to which she points an Eden of soaps, diapers, and baby
foods. But the divine child also appears periodically in spontaneous
images, for example in William Zorach’s Affection which evokes the
Hellenistic putti riding dolphins, or wrestling with geese. And Phillip
Evergood’s Lilly and the Sparrows (1939, Whitney Museum, New
York) portrays the edenic unity in a tenement window. There is no
longer a tradition like the Christ Child to carry the archetype, but it
emerges spontaneously in images that are, as they were in the High
Renaissance, also the most phenemonologically accurate, in that they
tend to express characteristics of the young child’s lived experience
which we recognize from our observations and interactions with chil-
dren themselves.
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The Romantic Child
The primordial child is an image of our own forgotten, monumental,

half-remembered and half-projected childhood,35 of the child that the
adult still is, and on another symbolic level—the level of the arche-
type—of all new beginnings, of the promise of future wholeness, a con-
dition of psychological integration that many adults experience as both
a lost and an emerging continent. The mythos is a cultural and histori-
cal construct, based on a fundamental Western theme of the human life
cycle as a fall into fragmentation and a restoration to unity—death and
rebirth, the loss and recovery of a primary unity. It is a mythos that in
fact has broken into historical, cultural time during certain periods, and
shaped the thinking of artists, poets, and a few philosophers. Since its
banalization in the Victorian middle-class construction of childhood, it
has lived a sort of half-life in popular sentimental art and advertising,
where its revolutionary implications are captured and tamed, and it is
used as yet another instrument of the colonization of childhood, and of
the legitimation of class and gender stereotypes.
The Romantic child of the modern West does not, as is commonly
thought, appear for the first time in the late eighteenth and early nine-
teenth century, but in the seventeenth. In fact we can locate three peri-
ods in the history of the West during which the child became a subject
of special interest among adults: the fourteenth century as expressed in
St. Francis and his Order; seventeenth-century Anglican England as
expressed in certain of its poets; and in the Romantic tradition of the
early nineteenth century.36 Like the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries on the continent, seventeenth century England was a time and
place of violent, often incoherent change and cultural conflict. A preoc-
cupation with childhood has in fact been identified with periods of
rapid, unsettling change, and explained as an urge to regress to a hap-
pier, more stable time. This may be true; in fact modernism itself, in its
deepest character, is identified with rapid, transformative change. It is
also true that the modern preoccupation with childhood is continuous
with a long tradition of formulations of the archetype.
It was the major Anglican poets of seventeenth century England—
specifically Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, Thomas Traherne,
Andrew Marvell, George Herbert, and Robert Herrick—who first
explored the archetype as a modern theme, which is to say from the
point of view of self-conscious adulthood. The themes that emerged in
strength in nineteenth-century Romanticism are first expressed here:
childhood as a lost paradise, childhood as a form of knowledge no
longer accessible to adults, “growing up” as a diminution of a native
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 45
world-openness, and the unbridgeable distance between childhood and

adulthood. These poets undertook the first important exploration of the
lost paradise of childhood from the perspective of the adult separated
from his childhood in a new way, and hence a first example of the
modern hermeneutics of childhood.
Except for Andrew Marvell, all of them approached childhood
within the framework of the Christian exhortation to “become as a
little child,” but with a new sense of discontinuity from childhood that
was not present in its medieval expression—whether in Francis, Anselm,
or Bernard. Crashaw (1613–1649) revels in images of a return to the
mother’s breast, and understands salvation as a divine play before God.
For Vaughan (1622–1695), as Leah Marcus, in her study of the seven-
teenth century English poets of childhood has pointed out, “childhood
and adulthood are separated by a tremendous gulf.” The poet knows
himself only as one cut off from his source in the “white designs” of
childhood, and thereby separated from the sacred as well. Childhood is
for Vaughan an “age of mysteries, which he must live twice that would
God’s face see.” But the poet, whose “soul with too much stay is drunk,
and staggers in the way,” searches in vain to feel again “through all this
fleshly dress bright shoots of everlastingness,” which he identifies with
childhood.37
This new sense of the spiritual isolation of the adult, to whom the
child becomes an often enigmatic messenger from a lost realm of uni-
versal connectedness (which, as the “enigmatic child,” could sometimes
be a universal pathology), is taken up with a precociously modern irony
in Marvell (1621–1678), in his exploration of how growing up is also a
losing of one’s “home” in the natural world. The adult’s is a fallen
world—a world of time, decay, death, and the alienation and psycho-
logical division introduced by sexual experience. The adult’s “double
Heart” makes of him a creature divided against himself, and every
attempt to regain singleness and unity of self through sexual passion
simply increases the sense of division. As a counterpoint to this newly
alienated adult, the child is a figure and an expression of the Adamic,
androgynous person, in whom body and soul, heart and mind, are still
in harmony. But to contemplate the unity of consciousness of the child
is in itself ironic, because of the adult’s knowledge that it passes, and
that any attempt on his part to reenter this world is doomed. This new
melancholy understanding comes to self-conscious expression a century
later in Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”
(1742), where adulthood is understood as a metaphor of a doomed
state, a fallen condition, but a necessary one. The poet is trapped in a
paradox, in that to be an adult, he must accept the painful knowledge
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 46
of the loss of a richer world; while to remain a child is to renege on the

possibilities for growth.38
Thus is first heard the theme, prevalent in the West thereafter, of
adulthood as a condition of being “outcast from Paradise,” and of
childhood, as Robert Pattison has put it, as a “medium through which
the poet can look to gain perspective on man’s fallen place in a fallen
world.”39 For the poet Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) on the other
hand, the unity of consciousness represented by early childhood is not
merely one stage in the life cycle, passed through and forever lost, but
a form of knowledge obscured in “coming of age,” and is in fact the
goal of spiritual development. Traherne re-evokes the Christian
notion—which finds secular expression roughly a century later in
Wordsworth—that the childhood “paradise” is not just one stage of
the life cycle, but an ever-present psychological reality capable of
informing every stage of our lives, and which in fact is the origin of the
poetic imagination.40 As for the exemplary Romantic William Blake
the poetic genius, or “Imagination,” is the essence of our spiritual
nature, so in Traherne what he calls “Glory”—the goal of psychologi-
cal development—is a condition in which subject and object, perceiver
and perceived, form a unity in which the distinction between real and
imagined becomes meaningless, with the result that the world is seen
and understood as the paradise it is.
Traherne’s view of the child stands between the Gospel tradition,
which associates childhood with religious conversion (“I must becom a
Child again,”41), and Romanticism, which understands the imagination
as the power through which we unify experience, and the child as para-
digmatic of the “innocent eye,” in whose unity of vision all objects take
on the paradisiacal meaning and beauty of first creation. Traherne’s
child is both exemplar and first citizen of the living, personalistic
cosmos that was falling in ruins during his lifetime, a “naked, simple,
pure Intelligence,”42 whose primal, visionary “Infant-Ey” perceives in
direct immediacy the lineaments of a spiritual universe of which nature
itself is a luminous expression. Each human infant repeats Adam’s expe-
rience in Paradise: his union with the world, before his fall into the
sinful condition of human custom, is so complete that “every sense/Was
in me like to som Intelligence.” For the infant Traherne,
The World resembled his Eternitie,

In which my soul did walk;
And every thing that I did see
Did with me talk. . . .
My naked simple Life was I. . . .
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 47
The Sense its self was I. . . .

This made me present evermore
With whatsoere I saw.
An Object, if it were before
Mine Ey, was by Dame Nature’s Law
Within my Soul: Her Store
Was all at once within me; all her Treasures
Were my Imediat and Internal Pleasures, . . . .43
At first glance, Traherne appears to be presenting an idealized

vision of childhood. A closer look suggests that in fact the subject-world
interpenetration he is describing in this passage and in many more is a
commonplace in the twentieth-century psychological interpretive tradi-
tion of infancy and early childhood. Melanie Klein described the funda-
mental movement of the Infant-Ey as “introjection,” J.M. Baldwin as
adualism or indissociation, Freud as “primary narcissism,” Heinz
Werner as “fusion,” D.W. Winnicott as “transitional” or “potential”
space; and in the phenomenological tradition, Merleau-Ponty evoked it
when he spoke of that primary coexistence or reversibility of body-sub-
ject and world that he called chiasm, or “wild being.” Traherne also
neatly characterizes young children’s animistic world view, their qualita-
tively different mode of temporalization, and what Piaget characterized
as epistemological “egocentrism”:
The East was once my Joy; and so the Skies

And Stars at first I thought; the West was mine:
Then Praises from the Mountains did arise,
As well as Vapors: Evry Vine
Did bear me Fruit; the Fields my Gardens were;
My larger Store-house all the Hemisphere.44
Whereas for Piaget “egocentrism” is an index of cognitive deficit,

later to be overcome in the development of the capacity to “decenter”
and entertain multiple perspectives, Traherne’s infant egocentrism does
not exclude others, but is in fact a form of boundarilessness—an acen-
trism or “infinity,” which lives in compelling immediacy the fluid, rela-
tional unity of the subject-object field. It recognizes itself in the world
and the world in itself. This is a central element of what Ernst Cassirer
called “mythical thought,” in which, as he describes it, “. . . the rigid
limit between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, the ‘subjective’ and the ‘objective’
does not subsist as such, but begins, as it were, to grow fluid. The
inward and outward do not stand side by side, each as a separate
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 48
province; each, rather, is reflected in the other, and only in this recipro-
cal relation does each disclose its own meaning.”45
What in fact Traherne is projecting in his work is an image of the
lived experience of early childhood as a form of knowledge that could
be called “sacramental,” in that it operates in a participatory mode, and
grasps its object through a unifying act of the imagination, rather than
through the division implicit in analytic knowledge. It is this form of
knowledge that Romanticism, in reaction to the objectifying epistemol-
ogy of modern science, undertook to explore more than a century after
Traherne, and which reemerged in psychoanalytic theory yet another
century later in Winnicott’s notion of “transitional space.” Traherne’s is
a preliminary statement of Romantic epistemological themes, and a
bridge between their religious and psychological expressions. And the
uses he makes of infant awareness—to see it as both a founding, origi-
nal state and as a goal of adult development, is a first psychological
interpretation of Jesus’ command to “become as a little child.”
Traherne also stated other major themes that later preoccupied cer-
tain Romantics.46 One was the loss of continuity between childhood
and adulthood, and the sense that they represented two separate mani-
festations of the self. The adult not only must attempt to explain the
relationship between that self and this one, but to explain how they
could be so different. For the modern adult, childhood is a lost world;
for the poets of childhood of the seventeenth century, a lost paradise. To
regain it was not a matter, as it may have been with Crashaw or
Vaughan, of a regression, but of a dialectical reappropriation, involving
the journey out of what Traherne called Innocence, through the stages
of Sin and Grace, and on to Glory, which recovered the original open-
ness to the world that was given in childhood. So Traherne could say, “I
perceived that we were to live the life of God when we lived the true life
of nature according to knowledge: and that by blindness and corruption
we had strayed from it.”47
The way was prepared for the Romantic theme of finding the lost
connection by the decline, at the end of the eighteenth century, of the
literary genre called Pastoral and the rise during that same period of the
childhood autobiography, or Childhood.48 Both genres deal with an
original innocence, destroyed by a fall. In the earlier Pastoral, a primary
world in which nature and society are in perfect harmony—Arcady—is
interrupted. In the Childhood, the arcadian world has long since
receded beyond the view of social possibility and all that remains of it is
one’s childhood. The process of memory and the project of reappropria-
tion occurs, not—as in the Pastoral—in the mythic history of the race,
but in the history of the individual, and it happens in real time and
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 49
place, in the story of each individual’s passage out of childhood. This

primitivist myth is associated in turn with the grand narrative of the
dialectical cultural evolution of the species, stated in Christian myth as
the expulsion from Eden—followed, after much travail, by a restoration
in Christ, the “second Adam.” For this tradition the fall is a necessary
moment of development, and hence in retrospect a “happy fall.” The
original unity must be broken in order for development to take place:
the fall into division is part of a process analogous to the one identified
in modern organismic developmental theory of differentiation in the
service of the articulation and reorganization of parts in “higher”—
meaning in this case more adequate to the environment—unities.49
This guiding myth of development took on increasing poignancy
and power with the social, economic, and psychological dislocations—
and the resultant new aspirations—which reached a new intensity in
connection with the French and the Industrial Revolutions. Before that
time, childhood was considered unworthy of any but the most cursory
mention by memoirists. The disclaimer by the mid-eighteenth-century
French writer, Antoine Bret, is representative: “I shall pass,” he writes,
“rapidly over my first years of life. There is nothing in them savory
enough for the curiosity of readers; almost all childhoods are alike.”50
Later in the same century, that attitude was changing under the influ-
ence of what Lawrence Stone termed a new “affective individualism,”
which he identifies with the rising middle classes. This, in turn, was
connected with two other related aspects of modernism—a growing
concern with personal identity, and a pervasive sense of religious crisis.
If the roots of identity were no longer to be found in kinship, a tight-
knit social structure, or, for an increasingly mobile population, geo-
graphical stability, it meant a crisis for the individual, who now sought
his or her personal resources within the nuclear family—of which chil-
dren were an essential part. The new interest in the child that emerged
in the eighteenth century was related to all those forms of middle-class
life that we recognize as characteristically modern: an emphasis on per-
sonal privacy, on warmer affective relations between husband and wife
and parents and children, an increasing separation of the nuclear family
from the surrounding community, and thus an increasing separation
between public and private life.51
The search for self undertaken by the progressively deracinated
adult led him or her back to childhood, which now represented the
possibility of finding a sense of identity independent of the fugal char-
acter of the secularized life cycle. The search for identity became an
obsessive theme in modern literature, and the search for one’s own
childhood in the memoir a primary exercise in self-recovery. This is
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 50
already present in Traherne, for whom the Infant is, if not the higher,
truer self, then the originary, prophetic manifestation of that true self,
to be recovered through adult spiritual discipline. As the poet Georges
Bernanos said, “The deadest of the dead is the little boy I used to be.
And yet, when the time comes, it is he who will resume his place at the
head of my life.”52
The religious crisis that was symptomatic of the Western middle
classes in the ages both of Enlightenment and Romance, made of child-
hood the Eden from which the adolescent, experiencing the loss of faith
in Church and creed, was expelled. It is significant that childhood came
to represent religious experience, because such experience, given the
young child’s place before religious discourse, is necessarily not one that
can be described in terms of confessional doctrine. So, as in Traherne’s
account, the spiritual experience lost in leaving early childhood is the
existential experience of the numinosity of the natural world—the
“glory” of wildflowers and grains of sand. It is a condition of percep-
tion rather than an exercise of the will, as Christianity more typically
was for the adult. Traherne says:
Everything was at rest, free and immortal . . . The corn was

orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor
was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to ever-
lasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as
gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green
trees when I saw them first through one of the gates trans-
ported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty
made my heart to leap, almost mad with ecstasy, they were
such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what vulnera-
ble and reverent creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cheru-
bims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and
maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls
tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I
knew not that they were born or should die; but all things
abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity
was manifest in the Light of Day, and something infinite
behind everything appeared.53
The spirituality of early childhood identified by the Childhood is

just that unity with the world that the adult can hardly remember, but
which is offered as a state to be reattained. So Traherne said, “I knew
by intuition those things which since my Apostasy I collected again by
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 51
the highest reason.” To mistake this spirituality for an other-worldli-

ness, as in the Victorian popularization of the “cult of childhood,” is to
misunderstand the fundamental intuition of Romanticism, and what
Romantics saw in early childhood. In probably the clearest statement of
the significance of childhood for Romantic thought, the German drama-
tist, historian and first philosopher of childhood Friedrich von Schiller
identified children directly with “nature,” by which he understood the
existence of things “in accordance with their own immutable laws,”
and which he associated with “genius.” We love in the elements of
nature—under which he includes children—“the serene spontaneity of
their activity . . . the inner necessity, the eternal unity with themselves.”
We recognize that, like other elements of nature, they are creatures of
necessity, whereas we (adults) are “free,” and so we do not envy them,
but we “see eternally that which escapes us, but for which we are chal-
lenged to strive, and which, even if we never attain to it, we may still
hope to approach in endless progress.” Schiller clearly articulates the
reversal that characterizes the hermeneutics of childhood: childhood
comes to lie, not only behind the adult, but in his future, as something
to be reappropriated. “The child,” he says, “is therefore a lively repre-
sentation to us of the ideal, not indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is
enjoined.”54
This is the case because, in the crisis of modern Western subjectiv-
ity, the adult is almost by definition denatured. This is both an ontolog-
ical and a historical situation. For Schiller, “We”—Western Faustian
moderns—“impetuously fled abroad in the arrogance of our freedom”
into a form of civilization that has become our prison. “Nature in us
has disappeared from humanity,” we “are not at one with ourselves”55;
“the essential bond of human nature was torn apart, and a ruinous con-
flict sets its harmonious powers at variance.” The child assumes great
importance for the implications of this fall, because “our childhood is
the only undisfigured nature that we still encounter in civilized
mankind.”56
This sense of a being stranded outside nature—feeling for nature
“like the feeling of an invalid for health”57—is not represented by
Schiller as a falling into corruption, or decadence, or the straying away
from an original innocence to which we can return by a simple reversal,
but as a necessary self-alienation associated with the life cycle, that is, a
developmental phenomenon. The “sensuous harmony” of the child—
the “correspondence between his feeling and thought which in his first
condition actually took place, exists now only ideally; it is no longer
within him, but outside of him, as an idea still to be realized, no longer
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 52
as a fact in his life.” In fact in the Romantics, the limitations of child-

hood as “nature” are fully realized and accounted for. It is the develop-
mental calling of humans, both the individual and the species, to
abandon nature and undergo division. The hidden agenda associated
with the conflict between “sense and reason, passive and active facul-
ties,”58 is the reunification of mind and nature, which can be attained in
no other way. Mind must abandon nature in order to recognize its own
individuality, its autonomy, its infinite, unconditioned character in order
finally to be reconciled to nature in freedom and the moral order. It is a
tragic calling, in the sense that we give up a limited perfection, undergo-
ing a “dismemberment of . . . being,”59 in order to strive for a perfec-
tion which we understand to be an infinitely receding goal. “The goal to
which man in civilization strives is infinitely preferable to that which he
attains in nature. For the one obtains its value by the absolute achieve-
ment of a finite, the other by approximation to an infinite greatness.”60
Like Traherne, Schiller reformulated the child archetype in psycho-
logical terms. If more ironically than Traherne, and with a new secular-
ism, he re-included the child in the life cycle—not as an absence, a
deficit, or even just a lost paradise, but as an original statement of a
form of knowledge that it is the goal of the human journey to reappro-
priate. The final goal—if infinitely receding—of the adult is in fact a
state of “innocence” that is characteristic of children, but which in
Romanticism is stated as both an individual and a social condition. It is
a secular restatement of Christian millenialism, the idea of, not a return,
but a progression to paradise. The gates of the original paradise of
infancy are barred by the angel with a flaming sword: the Eden of child-
hood is broken by the self-consciousness, the double-mindedness repre-
sented by the tree of knowledge. The goal of human development is
reunification.
Schiller is critical of Rousseau, whom he accuses of “preferring to
restore man to the spiritless uniformity of his first state in order simply
to be rid of the conflict within him, rather than to look for the termina-
tion of that conflict in the spiritual harmony of a completely fulfilled
education.” Speaking of the modern poet, who in Romanticism replaces
the mystic or the saint as the hero of psychological and social develop-
ment, Schiller says, “Let him not lead us backwards into our childhood
. . . but rather lead us forward into our maturity in order to permit us
to perceive that higher harmony.” Humanity, which cannot now go
back to Arcady, must be led “forward to Elysium.”61
For the Romantic imagination, the second unity is a revolution of
consciousness whose final goal Schiller states succinctly as a reconcilia-
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 53
tion of the opposition between “actuality and the ideal”—that is, an

actualization of the ideal and an idealization of the actual, a condition
towards which Hegel, the grand philosopher of Romanticism, saw all
historical time as ultimately moving.62 The child stands for this end
state, and signifies it in a number of ways. The young child, for exam-
ple, is premoral, and free from fixed social roles. She lives the ideal in
the actual in the sense that the boundaries between the time and space
of the unconscious and the time and space of the self-aware ego are still
permeable and interactive. As has already been pointed out, the child
psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott referred to the psychological space
between self and world in early childhood as “transitional” or “poten-
tial”; it occupies a psychological terrain that is “outside the individual,
but . . . is not the external world.” It is a space into which “the child
gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses . . . in the
service of . . . inner or personal reality.”63 Correspondingly, in the
recovered psychological Eden of the Romantic imagination, the opposi-
tion between “inner” and “outer” has been entered, fully experienced,
and overcome. This ideal was carried for centuries by Christian mil-
lenialism; in the Enlightenment, it was posited politically and socially—
by Reason rather than by God—and in Romanticism it became a
psychological and cultural developmental ideal. As a social and psycho-
logical vision, it is equivalent to the end of history. As Reinhard Kuhn
characterized it in his discussion of the Surrealist movement of the early
twentieth century, “a triumphant childhood will be the model for life”
in a society “based on the transparence of its inhabitants and the subse-
quent perfection of their inter-relationships.”64
The Romantic ideal, at whose heart the “Infant-Ey” dwells as a
sort of talisman, is put in more concrete if no less ambitious psycholog-
ical terms by William Wordsworth, whose adult, upon leaving a child-
hood balanced perfectly between the “elemental polarity of mind and
nature” discovers nature as an alien reality, severed from mind. Their
reintegration, which is the goal of the life cycle, is equivalent to a mari-
tal union between the two. Through this union, nature, which was a
victim of the ontology of death of Western philosophical materialism, is
reanimated, and becomes again as it was in the universe of childhood,
where in “all things I saw one life, and felt that it was joy.”
Wordsworth’s marriage is not a step outside of time, but the outcome of
human process, temporally determined. In the union, “Paradise, and
groves Elysian” are experienced as “a simple produce of the common
day.” The redeemed world is the ordinary world of life’s everyday
appearances, in which perception itself is renovated, and the seeing and
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feeling eye itself, “wedded to this goodly universe in love and holy pas-
sion,” experiences the joy of unconditioned existence, and thereby finds
the world transformed.65
The reanimation of the perceptual universe characteristic of
Wordsworth’s vision is a reappropriation of the panvital cosmos of the
premoderns, based on a psychological rather than a theological ration-
ale, although it certainly could have theological implications. Perception
transformed in joy now “reads” the book of nature—the ancient Chris-
tian liber naturae—and finds “all things there look[ed] immortality,
revolving life, and greatness still revolving, infinite.” This renewal of
mind in nature through the imagination results, in turn, in a society of
persons that “is here a true Community, a genuine frame of many into
one incorporate. . . . One household, under God, for high and low.”66
Like many of his generation, Wordsworth was in his youth a pas-
sionate supporter of the ideals and goals of the French Revolution. His
desire for social transformation was not secondary to his thought, but
was deeply influenced by the failure of that most crucial of social exper-
iments. Having experienced the end of Enlightenment in the Terror, he
rejected the possibility of a planned utopia based on social engineering,
and henceforth assumed that the inner transformation of the individual
can be the only basis for a society redeemed from endemic structural
evil—which is nothing more (or less) than the principle of radical sepa-
ration. Romanticism is the Revolution internalized, a transformation of
consciousness in each adult, prefigured for each adult in his own child-
hood, which points to the infinite task of the formation of a human
society in which, as in early childhood, the distinction between public
and private self is abolished, we “live and feel in the present,” and live a
“unitary, undivided existence.” The polarities that make for the “divid-
edness, alienation, and inner deadness of modernity”—polarities
between spirit and matter, mind and nature, desire and contingency—
are overcome, leading, in Schiller’s words, to “a conflict fully reconciled
not only in the individual, but in society, . . . a free uniting of inclination
with the law, of a nature illuminated by the highest moral dignity,
briefly, none other than the ideal of beauty applied to actual life.”67
The developmental goal of the Romantic adult is also profoundly
informed by childhood through its relationship to play, which is the
modus operandi of children. For Schiller, the human ontolological voca-
tion is to build—in a dialectical overcoming of the polarization of spirit
and matter, of reason and the sensuous—a “third joyous kingdom of
play and of semblance, in which man is released from all that might be
called constraint, whether physical or moral.” The “aesthetic state” is
the form of consciousness of a “‘new age’ in which mankind will achieve
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 55
on earth the fullness of freedom, community, joy, and intellect.”68 In fact

Winnicott calls the form of subjectivity characterized by transitional or
potential space the “third area of cultural experience” or “third way of
living,” “sacred to the individual,” which he opposed to the subject in an
instrumental relationship with an external world in which the object is a
fixed reality; or, conversely, in which the subject is a “unit self,” charac-
terized by the “limiting membrane” of discrete boundaries. He founds
this intermediate area of experience in the mother-infant relationship,
and describes it, as we have seen, as a form of subjectivity in which the
inner and the outer are still in a fluid relation, a “potential” space
“between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived.” Winni-
cott associates the “third way of living,” not just with the experience of
infancy and early childhood, but with culture and creativity, and with
art, religion and philosophy in adult life.69
Both Schiller and Winnicott described the primary dimension of
this form of subjectivity as play. Play, in the words of the former,
describes “everything that is neither subjectively not objectively contin-
gent, and yet imposes neither outward nor inward necessity.”70 As a
form of knowledge it is paradigmatic of the active universe of
Wordsworth’s “first poetic spirit of our human life,” a mind that “cre-
ates, creator and receiver both, working but in alliance with the works
which it beholds”71—that is, a form of dialogue between knower and
known, and thus a radical constructivism. This first poetic spirit is given
(or, according to Winnicott, not given, depending on the mother’s
capacity to provide a “good enough” environment for its development)
in the first relationship—in “mute dialogues with my Mother’s heart,”
in the experience of a form of communion with the world in which “all
knowledge is delight”72—which is to say, the primary narcissism that is
our first condition, and to which all experience is implicitly compared
thereafter.
Play most perfectly represents the balanced, interactive unity of self
and world in which the internal division of the inner person has been
reconstructed as a higher, more articulated subjective equilibrium. The
adult will reach again her complete humanity when she has reincorpo-
rated the “infant sensibility . . . great birthright of our being,”73 in
which intentionality will again become structured as play. Historically,
Westerners have, according to Schiller, “surrendered the wholeness of
their being to pursue truth along separate roads.” But this very surren-
der was in the interests of a higher state of development that is mani-
fested in the realm of play, for “in every condition of humanity it is
precisely play, and play alone, that makes man complete and displays at
once his twofold nature.”74 The play impulse exemplifies the union of
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mind and nature that was Wordsworth’s ideal, and which made of the
young child, for him, a symbol of greatest significance for an inquiry
into subjectivity, and thereby the basis of a philosophy of human
nature.75 Once it is understood, as Eugen Fink put it, that “Being in its
totality functions like play,”76 then play becomes an ontological frame-
work for our understanding of the subject-world relation, and an indi-
vidual and cultural ideal.
Romanticism, Education, and the New Humanity
The Romantic uses of childhood involved not only its emblematic char-
acter as prophetic of a psychological and sociocultural goal, but, more
practically, the actual historical work of the creation of that goal—the
“third joyous kingdom” or “third way of living”—and the social con-
struction of a style of human subjectivity which makes it possible. The
history of the Romantic period in Europe and even the U.S. is filled
with extraordinary social experiments—experiments that extend to the
level of the reconstruction, not just of economy, but of family and sexu-
ality. The communist impulse and aspiration was in no way created by
Marx, but he provided it with a grand theory of history. The two social-
ist visionaries St. Simon and Fourier were spiritually affiliated with
Wordsworth and Schiller to the extent that they understood the funda-
mental reconstruction of social forms as in mutual causal relationship
with the reconstruction of subjectivity.
The efficient cause of Romantic social and political theory was the
social nemesis of rapid industrialization, the accumulation of capital in
the hands of the few, and aggressive centralized state control of popula-
tions. Universal compulsory education, which emerged during the early
nineteenth century, was fueled, not by a concern for a marriage of mind
and nature, but by the ambition of the increasingly hegemonic and reac-
tionary nation-state and its dominant elites to shape the world to their
political, social and economic interests. The reproductive goals of state
and economy and the technological ambitions of the Industrial Revolu-
tion made early and increasingly binding alliance: the “factory model”
of schooling is virtually synonymous with universal education in the
West. Seen dialectically, this harnessing of education to individual and
social repression and economic exploitation may have been necessary in
order to create a society with enough economic surplus to allow for the
leisure necessary for the universal emergence of the “third way.” If this
is the case, the West is now in a prolonged and difficult transition, for
the circular problem that plagues this hope is that the economic justice
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 57
necessary to distribute the surplus in a way that is necessary for the

transition is not possible except as a result of the transition itself.
Romanticism was the first revolt against the society of what Her-
bert Marcuse called “surplus-repression,” which he defined as the
“modification of the instincts” required by the particular “reality prin-
ciple” of the modern Western social and economic system, which is
characterized by the unequal distribution of resources and economic
and political and class domination by particular groups or individuals,
resulting in dramatic economic inequalities and a large proportion of
alienated labor. As he puts it:
. . . while any form of the reality principle demands a consider-

able degree and scope of repressive control over the instincts,
the specific historical institutions of the reality principle and
the specific interests of domination introduce additional con-
trols over and above those indispensable for civilized human
association. These additional controls arising from the specific
institutions of domination are what we denote as surplus-
repression.77
Marcuse refers to the prevailing form of the reality principle in

Western civilization as the “performance principle,” which he associates
with a specific, unequal organization of scarcity, the existential attitude
this organization requires, and the domination by privileged groups nec-
essary to keep this particular reality principle in place. Under the per-
formance principle, both body and mind are transformed into
instruments of alienated labor, and they can function in this way only if
they renounce the “freedom of the libidinal subject-object” that is the
fundamental characteristic of the human organism.78 The signs of sur-
plus-repression and the performance principle have hung over state-
mandated, universal compulsory schooling from the moment of its
emergence. As such public, universal state-mandated and/or provided
education must be understood as an instrument of repression in the
hands of the specific interests of domination. The institution of the
school is the site where the body and mind of the child are subjected to
the existential attitudes and dispositions—most specifically in the rela-
tion between work and play, and analogously, reason and desire—nec-
essary for the maintenance of those interests.
The Romantic vision of social reconstruction, in which, as Schiller
said, “conflict [is] fully reconciled not only in the individual, but in soci-
ety, . . . a free uniting of inclination with the law,” may seem hopelessly
utopian, but in fact it represents a dialectical response to a form of life,
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 58
emergent in capitalist industrialist economies in the early nineteenth

century, of growing social dystopia in the onset of an instinctual econ-
omy characterized by surplus-repression, splitting, and alienation. As
early as the publication of Rousseau’s Emile in 1764, the subjugated
“citizen,” or “mass man,” had already been counterpoised against the
“man”—the individual in whom mind and nature, law and freedom,
reason and desire are in creative, transformative relation. In his classic
statement, “We must choose between making a man and making a citi-
zen. We cannot make both,”79 Rousseau prophesied humanity colonized
by the state, the subjected, “docile body” of the individual domesticated
by the technologies of that new form of the distribution of power that
Foucault later called “discipline.” Discipline inscribes the culture of sur-
plus-repression deeply in all human institutions, then represents them as
embodiments of liberated rationality.
What is significant about Rousseau’s prophecy of mass man in
Emile is his implicit claim that any culture in which the experience of
childhood is not allowed its place will be a culture in which the devel-
opmental possibilities of adulthood will be stunted. His educational
anti-theory, which swept the British and European intelligentsia at the
moment of the Revolution, has nothing to do with curriculum or peda-
gogy. The point of transformation for him is the adult-child relation.
The effective teacher is the one who legitimates childhood as a life
phase and empowers children through allowing their forms of knowl-
edge full play in the world. “Childhood has its place in the scheme of
human life. We must view the man as a man, and the child as a child.
. . . Nature wants children to be children before they are men,”80 he
insisted; and Friedrich Froebel—who carried Romantic thought directly
forward into educational theory—added “the boy has not become a
boy, nor has the youth become a youth, by reaching a certain age, but
only by having lived through childhood, and, further on, through boy-
hood, true to the requirements of his mind, his feelings, and his body;
similarly, adult man has not become an adult man by reaching a certain
age, but only by faithfully satisfying the requirements of his childhood,
boyhood, and youth.”81 A form of education is necessary that allows
the child to “live through”—only in this way will an adult emerge who
is able to reappropriate the “third joyous kingdom” through the dialec-
tics of the lifelong developmental process.
For Romantic thought, the ideal education would then reestablish
the continuity between childhood and adulthood that was felt to have
been lost, and make it possible for the feelings and perceptual modali-
ties of early childhood—now obscured in amnesia because they are so
radically different from adult modalities82—to be retained into adult-
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 59
hood. This is a first statement of that reevaluation of the role of child-

hood in the life cycle that, two centuries later, the influence of Freud has
turned into a normative assumption, and which has the greatest signifi-
cance not only for the future of child rearing and education, but for the
evolution of adulthood as well. The Freudian revolution in human self-
understanding has convinced us that childhood and adulthood are in
fact not two distinct periods of the life cycle, destined to supplant each
other, but parts of a continuum that is both diachronic and synchronic.
Each is always present to the other within the whole, and it is the
dialectical relation between the two that drives development.83 To the
extent that Freud suggests a form of human subjectivity whose dimen-
sions are in interactive, dialogical relation rather than in relations of
hierarchical domination, so the question of childhood becomes essential
to an understanding of adult subjectivity; and the question of education
becomes essential to the historical problematics of this understanding.
If we reconceive the life cycle as no longer only sequential and
diachronous, but as a process of dialectical, developmental change
among dimensions that are always present in some form,84 childhood is
indeed emblematic and exemplary for the reconstruction of adult sub-
jectivity, for the child is caught up in rapid and continuous change, as
much biologically as experientially. It makes sense that a cosmos that is
now being reinterpreted in terms of growth and transformation, takes
as its new representative the stage of life in which explosive, breathtak-
ing growth is the most manifest. The goal of this process is neither to
remain a child nor to return to childhood, but to grow into an adult
whose childhood is still active within her and available to her, and this
adult is represented for Romanticism in the artist, or “genius.”85
Genius, as Baudelaire claimed, is “childhood recovered at will (“retrou-
vée a volunté”).86 In the artist, the child’s freshness of sensation survives
in the powers of the adult, and manifests itself in the perception of nov-
elty in old and familiar appearances. The genius, like the child, enjoys
the power to take a lively interest in all things, even those that seem to
be the most trivial. The Romantic notion of genius represents, not so
much the extraordinary gift as, in modern terms, self-actualization; and
“artist” signifies the artist of one’s own life. In this sense, the genius is
the fulfillment of childhood, a realization of its prophetic world-open-
ness. This new ideal adult is in fact, according to Novalis, the “highest
synthetic degree of the child,”87 for he or she incorporates an original
simplicity into a higher harmony, reached through a process of develop-
ment that involves continual self-reconstruction.
Genius as self-actualization is generic and universal—Marx’s
“species being”—and represents the entrance (or rather the ongoing
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 60
process of entering) a new subject-object relation. Like the young child,

the genius lives the universal in the concrete, through work on the
boundaries between the inner world of the imagination and the actual
conditions of the world. The “third way of living” is, as Wordsworth
claimed, the “great birthright of our being” if only because it is the
characteristic noetic style of infancy. Norman O. Brown, that other
(with Marcuse) post-Freudian Romantic, characterizes it as the funda-
mental unconscious goal of the human to live in what he calls “the
erotic mode of activity,” play—activity “governed by the pleasure prin-
ciple”: “Our indestructible unconscious desire for a return to child-
hood, our deep childhood-fixation,” he claims, “is a desire for a return
to the pleasure principle, for a recovery of the body from which culture
alienates us, and for play instead of work.”88
The third joyous kingdom of play is the realm, not just of art, reli-
gion, and philosophy in the service of recovery of the body, but of social
and cultural reconstruction, because the subject who retains the capac-
ity for deep play into adulthood is in active, transformative relation
with the world. The playing child encounters external phenomena in the
service of the dream. The play space is a sacred one to the individual,
because it is here that she encounters the subject-object relation as a
form of creativity—here subjectivity is understood as creativity per se.
And for this very reason it implies a social vision—the boundary phe-
nomenon of a society having reached the condition of collective and
institutional life lived and shaped and reshaped within the transitional
space of creative play. The social vision implied by the individual’s cre-
ative relation to the world is an ever-receding horizon of human collec-
tive possibility, but the phenomenon of transitional space from which it
springs is a human birthright. It does not imply a repudiation of the
reality principle—a world of objects which, in Winnicott’s words,“the
individual has decided to recognize (with whatever difficulty and even
pain) as truly external”89—but a reconstruction of the reality principle
through a transformation of instinctual structure, that is, the dialectical
relation between repression and instinct, reason and desire. The “erotic
mode of activity” is in fact such a reorganizational mode—a move
beyond the fixed form of genital sexuality, which we usually identify as
a terminal form in adults, to a further stage. This stage, which Marcuse,
following Freud, identified as pregenital and polymorphous eroticism—
that is, a whole-body sexuality—is a dialectical reappropriation of
infant sexuality. It is represented in the iconography of the Divine Child
as an original bisexuality. Brown describes it as “the pursuit of pleasure
obtained through the activity of any and all organs of the human body.
. . . delight in the active life of all the human body.”90 It is the decon-
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 61
struction of the “tyranny” of genital organization and the erotization of

the whole body that makes possible what we will encounter later in
Marcuse’s thought as “non-repressive sublimation.” The latter refers to
a form of the reality principle which has moved beyond surplus-repres-
sion and the performance principle—and thereby implicitly beyond
domination.
In summary, the goal of the recovery of the primordial child is
expressed in the human vocation of continual reconstruction of the sub-
ject-world relation—a vocation associated with art and play—in order
to render the external (or nature) internal (or thought), and vice versa.
Play is exemplary of the transitional nature of the subject-world rela-
tion, and the recognition that the boundaries between the two are fluid,
historically, culturally, and individually mediated, and productive of
plural forms both of subjective, social, and even physical reality. For
Romantic educators since Froebel, and for those who, like John Dewey,
were deeply influenced by its anthropological convictions, the inten-
tional community of children and adults we call “school” assumes
major importance for the hope of the transformation of adulthood in
the image of the transitional subject-world relation, and the possibility
of nonrepressive sublimation as a characteristic style of subjectivity. As
a community of dialogue and negotiation, purposeful project, celebra-
tion and the practice of justice between adult and child, it is the location
where the diachronic and synchronic dimensions of the life-cycles inter-
play—a place set apart for the meeting of the two, in a context marked
by the creative imperative. In the school reconstructed in the image of
the “third way of living,” children undertake transformative action on
the world through art, science, and philosophy—forms of inquiry that
are already implicit and formative in their early play. They are both ini-
tiated into these adult cultural institutions (which, in turn, are continu-
ally formed and reformed through adult transitional play)—and
influence these institutions through their own capacities for constructive
play and inquiry.92 The school is an institution that has generally so far
been used to the most limited purposes to which civilization could put
it—for the “normalization” of human subjectivity in the service of a
repressive system that requires low-grade alienation in order to func-
tion. For those who recognize the role of childhood and—as will be
seen in the next chapter—of the adult-child relation in cultural evolu-
tion, the school becomes an institution of the greatest significance for
individual and social change.
In its current condition, the school might be described as a machine
of the state and the economy for writing the “law” on the flesh of its
future operative units. It could never be put to those purposes unless the
Kennedy02 1/11/06 10:36 AM Page 62
adults who worked there thought that children could or should be thus
sacrificed—that they were expendable, or that they had nothing more to
offer than to be shaped by such a system. Such adults either don’t rec-
ognize the primordial child—themselves or the child before them—or
consider the “third way of living” to be a narcissistic, decadent ideal,
impractical, hubristic (“spoiled”), dangerous, and better expunged
through mechanical habituation. This returns us to the questions posed
in the first chapter concerning the characteristics, causes, and implica-
tions of the ideology of adulthood, or “adultism,” which lies at the
heart of the stubborn and pervasive mediocrity of the theory and prac-
tices of traditional schooling.
To get a sense of the range and depth of this particular and near
universal—however sentimentalized—form of the adult-child relation, it
is necessary to at least look into the history of adulthood, particularly in
the area of adult self-understanding. If “adult-child” is an inseparable,
contrastive pair, then any adult construction of subjectivity will imply a
construction of the child subject—both within me (“inner child”) and
outside of me (the child before me). If the child is colonized in the
modern Western structures of schooling, she is colonized within the
subjective structure of the adults who are her caretakers. And if the
adult-child relation is changing, then a different adult-child balance or
economy is being created within modal adult subjectivity, and adult
subjectivity is changing. The next chapter is dedicated to exploring fur-
ther both that chiasmic structure adult-child, and its implications for
individual, cultural, and social transformation.
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 63
The Invention of Adulthood
Have I ever been a child

I who know how to speak of childhood
As I speak of death
—Paul Eluard1
Adultism and Models of the Self
It has already been suggested that early modernism was the historical
moment at which there began an increasing social separation between
adult and child through age-graded institutions, economic and domestic
isolation, and, over centuries, psychological theories of childhood that
acted to objectify children as a separate class. One could go further and
claim that, just as Philippe Aries, in his seminal study of the history of
childhood2 made the phrase “invention of childhood” famous, so this
moment in Western history was also the moment of the invention of
adulthood, or at least the form of adulthood of our age.
The history of adulthood in the West—in the privileged, patriar-
chal West anyway, which is mostly what we have a record of—is char-
acterized by an attitude toward childhood and children that I have
called “adultism.” Like racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism, adultism is
based on what appear to be empirical differences—in anatomy, neural
development, ego-structure, psychoculture, size, and physical strength.
These “real” differences very often lead to “subspeciation,” or the ten-
dency to regard and to treat certain human others implicitly as if they
were members of a separate species. As a psychological phenomenon,
63
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 64
subspeciation is projective, which means that the subspeciator—the

one with the power—attributes his or her unconscious, unresolved
sexual and aggressive material to the subspeciated. The projection is
typically bipolar, in that the subspeciated receives both the dark and
the light side of the subspeciator’s unconscious material—hence the
divine child/deficit child, the goddess/whore, and the noble/bestial
“savage.”
Subspeciation is a form of psychological colonization that acts in a
vicious circle with social, sexual, political, and economic colonization.
The subspeciated status of the child is slightly more complicated than
that of either women or the “savage,” since the child is, relative to the
full-grown member of the human species, an undeveloped being. Aristo-
tle, as we have seen, fudges the question of whether children represent a
congenital or a developmental difference from free male adults. The
child, he claims, has the deliberative element of the soul—which is what
makes one an adult—but in incomplete and therefore nonfunctional, vir-
tually useless form. But if the child is a woman, she will never have it
with “authority,” and if a slave never have it at all. The categorical con-
fusion that this formulation demonstrates mirrors the existential confu-
sion of adultism, which experiences the child as difference, deviation,
deficit, the unformed, and unshaped. For adultism, the child may not
quite represent a difference in kind as does “woman” and “slave,” but
she still lacks the requisite part of the soul—the one that makes us adult;
so whether the difference is of degree or of kind becomes moot. The
child is not just an incomplete, but an imperfect form of subjectivity.
Aristotle’s theory of the nutritive (plant), sensitive (animal), and
intellective (human) hierarchy of the parts of the soul,3 however com-
pelling, formalizes another common adultist perspective that influenced
the science of child study from the advent of Darwinian evolutionism to
approximately the mid-twentieth century. This is summarized in the
theory that the journey through childhood to adulthood recapitulates
the journey of the species from its nonhuman origins to civilized
humanity. So the child in the womb is analogous to the fish, the infant
to the primate, the young child to the monkey, the teenager to the prim-
itive hunter-gatherer.4 Each individual human history is a recapitulation
of the history of the race. It follows that a good way to understand—
and to treat—a five year old would be as one does a monkey.5
Analogously to this evolutionary model, Aristotle’s child is some-
where on the continuum between sensitive and intellective soul, and
thus is something more than an animal and something less than a
human. She lacks the faculty of prohairesis—choice or resolve or pur-
pose—and thus cannot be “happy” in Aristotle’s deep, morally infused
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 65
The Invention of Adulthood 65
sense of that term. Choice would appear to be a necessary aspect of rea-

soning, or the power of deliberation, which is the essential aspect of the
intellective soul. Aristotle would probably grant that children—at least
male children—possess it in potentia, but in a “confused” state.
For we do not say that a child acts, or a brute either; only

someone who is already doing things from reasoning. . . .
[T]he really pleasant things are not those pleasant to children
and animals, but those pleasant to the adult. . . . And as a
child or animal stands to an adult human being, so the bad
and foolish man stands to the good and wise man.6
A child is a transitional being, and as such a sort of monster, in the

sense that a monster is a mixture, or amalgam. Nor, though we can give
and receiven “affection” from her, can we call a child “friend”: “It
would be absurd for a man to be the friend of a child.”7
Aristotle’s three levels of soul of de Anima are roughly analogous
to Plato’s tripartite soul of the Republic, at least in the sense that both
trade on a hierarchy of form and function. Plato seems to hold that, in
the child, the balance between the three dimensions of self—appetite,
will or “the spirited element,” and reason—is ontogenetically out of
balance. The child lacks reason, or reason is represented so minimally
that it amounts to the same thing. So Plato considered children to be
exemplars of the “untamed appetite and the uncontrolled will.” They
are liable—along with women, slaves, and the “inferior multitude”—to
the “great mass of multifarious appetites and pleasures and pains” of
the naturally immoderate. “They are full of passionate feelings from
their very birth.” The “boy, . . . just because he more than any other has
a fount of intelligence in him which has not yet ‘run clear’, . . . is the
craftiest, most mischievous, and unruliest of brutes. So the creature
must be held in check . . .”8 Children’s only virtue appears to be that
they are “easily molded,” that is, they are capable of being made into
adults. This calls for a certain form of education as a personal and
social necessity—so the Republic is the first Western educational tract.
In keeping with the principle that “child-adult” is a contrastive
pair, there is implicit in this first reasoned view of the child that we have
from the ancients, a theory of the adult. For Plato (as, later, for Piaget9),
although only free men can become adults, even they can fail of this
developmental goal. Plato’s—and by analogy Aristotle’s—tripartite self
is a structural community of functions for which the attainment of
adulthood is represented by the three parts coming into a normative
balance. Development toward adulthood means bringing, in Plato’s
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 66
words, the three “elements into tune with one another by adjusting the
tension of each to the right pitch,” which he most often expresses as a
situation of internal hierarchy. The child of Western patriarchal ration-
alism represents the ambiguity and ambivalence of what is given as the
human at the beginning of the life cycle, and the possibility of the con-
struction of an ideal self in which “each part of his nature is exercising
its proper function, of ruling or of being ruled.”10 The disciplinary con-
struction of the Platonic self is carried on into adult life in the history of
Western subjectivity in what Foucault has called “the technologies of
the [male adult] self.”11 Unity of self is accomplished only through the
eternal vigilance of reason over appetite and will, a product of constant
self-examination and readjustment through self-discipline. This system
of internal relations of domination was replicated macrocosmically, not
just in the utopia of Plato’s Republic, but in the very real Indo-Euro-
pean social political class system as a whole, where kings (reason) con-
trolled warriors (emotions, spirited will), who in turn ruled over the
agricultural classes (appetite).12 Once this domination model is internal-
ized as an ideal of intrasubjective power relations—an internalization
that has its first statement in the Republic—a technology becomes nec-
essary in order to accomplish adulthood. This technology is education,
which Aristotle defines as being “brought up in a particular way from
our very youth, as Plato says, so as both to delight in and to be pained
by the things that we ought; for this is the right education.”13 Education
as habituation by adults then presents itself as a ritual of force and
inscription, and an absolute cultural necessity.
Those who speak of the “invention” of childhood in the Renais-
sance and early modern period might more safely use the term “reinven-
tion,” for children have always been as much imagined as experienced
by adults. And the post-medieval reinvention of childhood is necessarily
an aspect of the reinvention of adulthood, in this case with similarities
to the adult of Greco-Roman antiquity, albeit in a dramatically different
cultural context, and with a different form of adult self-explanation.
The attitudes and behaviors Foucault describes as the “cultivation of
the self,” common among Stoics and Epicureans in the first two cen-
turies CE, have much in common with the psychosocial set of emergent
middle-class values of adulthood in early modern Europe. In both cases
there is a new emphasis on the individual as a discrete and separated
subjectivity, on impulse control, on self-examination, or—as befits the
new, print-based information environment of modernity—“reading”
oneself.
Foucault described the first two centuries CE in the Hellenistic
world as “the summit of a curve: a kind of golden age in the cultivation
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 67
of the self—it being understood, of course, that this phenomenon con-

cerned only the social groups, very limited in number, that were bearers
of culture and for whose members a techne tou biou [technology or
craft of life] could have a meaning and a reality.”14 Care of the self as
an ideal of subjectivity is present in the Greek tradition at least since
Socrates’ injunction to “know” oneself, and has deeper if less individu-
alistic roots in the wisdom traditions of earlier Mesopotamian civiliza-
tions. It appears to be associated with religious or philosophical
monotheism. A pagan or polytheistic model of subjectivity would seem,
as Julien Jaynes’ speculation on the structure of the Homeric psyche
suggests, to involve an internal pluralism, of which the pantheon of
gods and goddesses is a projection onto an outer world that is not yet
fully distinguished from the inner.15 Read in this way, Plato’s (which is
not quite Socrates’, who still had his daemon) rejection of the gods
through reinterpreting them into “myth” represents a unification of
subjectivity in Hellenic psychohistory equivalent to the advent of
Hebrew monotheism in the history of religion.
If the first two centuries CE were the first golden age of the
monotheistic self, the decline of Rome was the moment in which this
ideal of privileged male-adult subjectivity was passed on into Christian-
ity, where, as the story goes, it survived in monasteries and ecclesiastical
centers of power as the church militant moved north to win the polythe-
istic psychocultures of the Celts and the Saxons to monotheism. If we
stick to this account, the middle ages represent a dialectical moment of
negation, in which the monotheistic, unified self-ideal of the classical
era buried itself in the soil of northern “native” culture, a seed that
emerged as a distinctively European culture in the High Middle Ages,
and—in Renaissance, Reformation, and the rise of the centralized
state—reached back to reappropriate its classical elements.
This in fact is the story Westerners tell themselves. One of its chief
narrative themes is the idea that the Western middle-class notion of the
successful adult as maintaining a relationship of ego-mastery within his
own internal psychological economy—as balancing the self through
mental force, with reason as a dominant element over recalcitrant and
rebellious “lower” functions—is one of our millennial themes. And if
this is the case, it would seem that adultism, which is associated with a
view of self that trades on rejecting and excluding child-subjectivity, has
always been present in Western culture. To say this is not to claim that,
because this model places child-subjectivity under erasure, any model
that does not do so will not be adultist. One can also not recognize chil-
dren because one is too much like them. In fact it is the broad argument
of this chapter that any general improvements in the adult-child
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 68
relationship made in the West are the result of a dialectical process—

that it is the recognition of differences between adults and children as
much as similarities, which eventually leads to adult-child dialogue, for
dialogue is impossible between either identical or fused interlocutors.
Dialogue is always with an other.
The adult who was reinvented in the early- modern period appears
to have had a different developmental goal than the adult of antiquity.
One basic model for modern adult subjectivity is derived from Christian
teaching and practice, for which desire—the emotional and the appeti-
tive—represents a different kind of problem than it did for the Greeks.
It may be fair to say that for the Greeks, whose anthropology was based
on a more polytheistic sense of the whole, the problematic was not
“moral” in the sense we now understand it. Inderdiction of sexual acts,
for example, was not based on the fear of eternal torment by a right-
eous king-god, but was a local strategy in the service of life as art—as
an aesthetic whole that required mastery in order to construct.16 The
Christian problematic, on the other hand, has to do with subordination
of desire not just to a practical form of reason (or phronesis) but to
Reason in the person of the Logos, the Word of God—indeed, to the
Law. On this model, alignment of the parts of the self is in the interest
of a total transparency before a w(holy) Other who is also one’s father-
judge.
Successful Christian adulthood, accomplished through the same
techniques as the Stoic and Epicurean—careful and continuous self-
examination and acetic regimen (with the addition of meditative
prayer)—seeks to shift the locus of visibility toward the Father, toward
a subjectivity outside of oneself that includes oneself—understood as
the origin and ground of one’s own subjectivity, and as knowing one
better than one knows oneself. In the case of the Greco-Christian ideal,
the all-encompassing gaze of the Father represents an exaltation of
reason to the point where reason is no longer simply the helmsman, as
in a more polytheistic model of self, but “all in all,” a light of con-
sciousness with no admixture of darkness, “no shadow of turning.”17
This grandiose ideal has had an extraordinary effect on Western subjec-
tivity. It might be said to have acted as a goad for consciousness, as cre-
ating the highly personalized form of objectivity that has brought the
West to its present ethical both crisis and opportunity—that is, to where
its concern for individual autonomy and self-determination is matched
only by its concern for social justice and equity. But its neurotic intoler-
ance of pluralism and multiplicity—both inter- and intrasubjective—and
its commandeering of instinct and emotion in the interest of a higher
Truth has left us in a cultural situation of polarization, where a sterile
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 69
rationalism is confronted by the “return of the repressed.” At least from

one point of view, Christianity may be said to have betrayed Christ—if
we conceive Christ as the archetype of a form of self-unification beyond
internal and external relations of domination, and as the integration of
conscious and unconscious elements of the personality rather than the
mastery of the latter by the former.
Whatever its religious or philosophical discourses, the monotheistic
model of selfhood understands the child as danger and deficit, and has
historically embraced a model of education as necessary coercion—as
either forcible construction of a product (adult) from an inchoate,
unshaped, unregulated material (child), or else, as in Calvinist anthro-
pology, the forcible re-construction of an ontogenetically “fallen”
nature. Correspondingly, the child has always offered—as has the
“native” or “wild man,” as has woman, as has the madman or mad-
woman—an alternate model of subjectivity, but one marked for obliv-
ion (or at best nostalgia) in patriarchal self-understanding. It is only in
the last two centuries that the cultured classes have experienced—slowly
during the nineteenth, and with increasing, almost dizzying intensity
during the twentieth—a loss of confidence in the hierarchical, domina-
tion-model of self. Those models that emerged with the advent of psy-
chology as a systematic inquiry at the end of the nineteenth century—in
particular the Freudian—have gradually replaced an ideal of internal
mastery by one of internal dialogue.
The historical deconstruction of the Platonic tripartite model of
subjectivity represents, at its worst—as the conservative Western imagi-
nation would understand it—a decline, a cultural corruption, a failure
of nerve. A mastery model must always fear decline, insurrection, regi-
cide, internal and external chaos, because it is a model in which light
must drive out its own necessary shadow rather than live with it—in
which reason, or logos, aspires to the shadowless. The drive for totality
that is symbolized, embodied, and expressed in Western monotheisms,
must do away with the partial, the developing, the regressive, the
ambiguous, and the ambivalent with an ontology of being rather than
becoming. The model matches, as we have seen, ancient Indo-European
social and mythological structure, and also is in analogical relation with
the tripartite structure of the human brain—where reason, or cerebral
cortex, must rule limbic system or emotion, and brain stem, or appetite.
It is also characteristic of colonial social and political structures, in
which the “native” or the lower classes are understood as children,
leading, as Nandy has said, to “the frequent use of childhood as a
design of cultural and political immaturity or, it comes to the same
thing, inferiority.”18
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 70
Adultism, like colonialism, classism, racism, sexism, and homopho-

bia, is a relation with an other that is dominated by projection. The
ambivalent, the ambiguous, the liminal, the unresolved, the negative,
the undeveloped aspects of subjectivity—what Jung characterized as the
“shadow”19—are projected onto an other. The shadow is most easily
projected onto an other who is different in obvious and consistent ways,
whether physically, culturally, or sexually. In the case of adultism, the
shadow projection on children is reified in theory by Plato and Aristo-
tle, who ground it ontologically and epistemologically, and thereby
implicitly create the child as a bearer of volitional deficit and dangerous
instinct. In thus excluding the child from full personhood and in the
exclusion from the ethics of dialogue that implies, the adult succeeds
(but never succeeds completely) in splitting off the shadow and coloniz-
ing it in childhood. The sentimentalization of childhood that we usually
associate with Victorianism is not an alternative to but a variation of
adultism. The child understood as everything good, pure, and innocent
is as much a deficit model, and as unproductive of dialogue with the
real child, for it still aspires to the shadowless. Its only association with
the primordial child is as a distancing through cooption, and it disem-
powers real children as much as does the shadow projection.
Jung’s theory of the process of adult individuation—which involves
the ongoing reconstruction of subjectivity through the integration of
conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche and the repositioning
of the ego (or reason) in the whole constellation of the self—holds that
the first stage of the work is confronting the shadow.20 Once the
shadow is recognized and owned, the first archetype of the unconscious
to emerge is the child archetype, or primordial child. The latter is a
symbol of unification and the promise of psychic wholeness; it
announces a process whereby, in Jungian psychologist Erich Neumann’s
words, “the centre of the personality is gradually shifted away from the
ego and the conscious mind towards the Self and the phenomenon of
the wholeness of the psyche.”21 It is this process that informs the grad-
ual deconstruction of adultism (and all other forms of marginalization
of the other through projective mechanisms), and assures the emergence
of the healthy, evolving adult-child relation.
A form of adult self-understanding that evades the polarization and
consequent marginalization of the child as a projected element of the
adult unconscious cannot emerge until—as it is said in psychoanalytic
parlance—there is a “withdrawal of the projection.” This is something
of an unfortunate term, for the dynamics of perception itself are projec-
tive, so the notion of a projection-free consciousness is nonsensical.
There is, finally, no “objective” other waiting for the withdrawal of the
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 71
projection to be seen as he, she, or it really is—only, as the philosopher

Emmanuel Levinas put it, “an alterity which is always on the verge of
presence but never comes to presence.”22 One might better speak of the
cultivation of the ability to “dodge” the projection, or to “bracket” it—
to hold it at bay, to remain in an attitude of suspicion toward it. The
major element in the process is that one becomes aware of it—that one
realizes it is there and at work, even if one can never experience it
directly, for it always appears as the actual appearance of the other. To
recognize and acknowledge the shadow in oneself is, for the ego, “to
step down from its pedestal and realize the state of individual, constitu-
tional and historical imperfection which is its appointed fate.”23
Through the ego’s new position of self-reflection and growing self-
awareness, the personality is able to work toward reintegrating those
split-off and contradictory dimensions of subjectivity, and to regain,
through an ongoing structural reorganization, its implicate wholeness.
The outcome of the withdrawal of projection is not the objectifying
gaze—that too is a projection—but rather dialogue, which means that
the field of interrogation and judgment and reflection vis a vis the other
has opened to include myself. Any dyadic relationship is a structure in
which there are no ultimately clear genetic distinctions between self and
other, subject and object, here and there. What psychoanalysis refers to
as transference and counter-transference are normative aspects of inter-
personal structure. Projection can be discerned and challenged only in
the “between,” the field of dialogue. All of these principles of relation-
ship apply just as much to the child-other as to the adult-other.
The adult-child relationship is a unique interpersonal structure, cer-
tainly as powerful—and as much a challenge to commonsense notions
of the structure and dynamics of subjectivity—as the erotic. Levinas
considered it to be the one human relationship that clearly disproves the
common assumption of the Platonic and Cartesian ideal of the unity of
personal identity, or the “identical subject.” He put it this way:
In a situation such as paternity [sic] the return of the I to the

self, which is set forth in the monist concept of the identical
subject, is found to be completely modified. The son [sic] is
not only my work, like a poem or an object, nor is he my
property. Neither the categories of power nor those of knowl-
edge describe my relation with the child. . . . I do not have
my child; I am my child. Paternity is a relation with a
stranger Who while being Other is me, a relation of the self
with a self which is yet not me. In this “I am” being is no
longer Eleatic unity. In existing itself there is a multiplicity
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 72
and a transcendence. In this transcendence the I is not swept

away, since the son is not me; and yet I am my son. The
fecundity of the I is its very transcendence. 24
The adult-child relationship is the relationship that first, like the

sexual relationship but in a different way, offers the adult the existen-
tial experience of the multiplicity of selfhood across rather than within
personal boundaries. This seems to be what Levinas means by “multi-
plicity and transcendence.” This experience of alterity has the effect of
initiating what he calls the “rupture of the egoist I,” and its “recondi-
tioning in the face of the Other, the re-orientation despite-itself of the
for-itself to the for-the-other.”25 The rupture and reconditioning pro-
vide the context for the psychological development of the adult
through her relationship with the child—a development based on the
experience of dialogue.
The result of this development is an adult who is in touch with the
child-dimension of her own subjectivity—its forms of feeling, intention-
ality, and cognitive style. Being more in touch with myself as a child
means being more in touch with the child before me; being more in
touch with the child before me allows me to make child rearing and
educational decisions that are both the instigators and the consequences
of dialogue—that is, of the skills and dispositions of painstakingly care-
ful listening to the other, of considering the other’s perspective, of recog-
nizing my interconnectedness with the other, of arriving at values and
decisions that take myself and the other into account equally, in short of
the “re-orientation . . . to the for-the-other.”
Adultism—like sexism, racism, and homophobia, all of them forms
of marginalization and colonization—is held in place in self-understand-
ing by an implicit theory of subjectivity and the intersubjective relations
that theory implies. It is in the transitional spaces across the boundaries
of the subject, in the realm of “multiplicity and transcendence,” where
the projective mechanisms that lead to subspeciation operate. The
deconstruction of adultism requires a normative form of adult subjectiv-
ity that is aware both of its own shadow—all that is abject, needy,
grasping, solipsistic, over-sexualized, out of the control of the ego—and,
as a result of that awareness, is capable of moving beyond it, into the
common intersubjective space of dialogue. The subject who recognizes
her shadow and withdraws its projection onto the other has entered
into another, permanently transitional form of subjectivity, based on a
value of world-openness that assumes an ontological potential for ongo-
ing personal—and by implication social—transformation, the basis for
what Neumann called “a new ethic.”
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 73
Social transformation—by which may be understood the ethical

transformation of collectives in the postmodern West—promises to
emerge in a culture in which the modal personality, that is, the norma-
tive style of subjectivity of the epoch, understands itself as an open,
developmental structure, as a subject-in-process rather than a presump-
tive finality or a static tension produced by an internal zero sum game.
Such a structure, which works from a sensed implicit wholeness toward
which one is always moving rather than a self-imposed totality, is the
only one capable of that “re-orientation despite-itself of the for-itself to
the for-the-other” that for Levinas is the main axis of the ethical, and
which overcomes adultism. The preoccupation with childhood that
began with the Romantic revolt against the Platonic and Cartesian self
two centuries ago implicitly puts the question: are we in a position to
accomplish this new self-understanding, which is always promised in
and through child rearing and education, as a cultural reality? Just what
would have to be in place for the emergence of a form of personal and
collective life in which the transformative influence on adult subjectivity
of a new sort of adult-child relation—a relation based on dialogue—
was generally as powerful as it is among a relative few today?
That there has been if not an evolution at least a change in the cul-
tural construction of the adult-child relation over Western historical
time seems incontestable. My assumption is that an alternative theory
of childhood, and—since they are mutually determinative—of adult-
hood, will have two major cultural and social implications. Dialogue
with that first and closest other, the child, promises to result, first, in a
change in the implicit historically mediated normative model of subjec-
tivity—one that finds a different sort of dynamic between Plato’s three
elements of the soul; second, in practical changes in child rearing and
education that act to generate and reproduce that different sort of
dynamic. This returns us to the questions posed earlier related to the
problem of causality in processes involving broad cultural change. Does
it take a different form of child rearing to produce a different style of
subjectivity? But wouldn’t a different style of subjectivity need to be in
place in order to be produced through child rearing?
This vicious circle is based on a linear and reductionist view of
causality in the social world. In fact historical inquiry indicates an intri-
cate network of an indeterminable number of mutually determinative
causal factors contributing to changes in how childhood and adulthood
are understood by adults. Social and cultural change, and its long and
short-term effects on individuals, including children, emerges from a
host of structural variables: economic, religious, political, cultural,
demographic, epidemiological, technological, class and gender related
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 74
and relative to family structure, not to speak of historical events and

epochs like migration, war, epidemic, cataclysm, climatic fluctuation,
famine or moments of unprecedented economic prosperity or depres-
sion, etc. Together, these form a matrix of variables whose chaotic inter-
actions bring forth new cultural and personal styles, new balances
between order and disorder, instinct and repression, freedom and con-
straint, individual and collective identity. And if there is an “evolution,”
as the psychohistorian Lloyd deMause has claimed, of child-rearing
modes that evolution depends as much on the “sport”—Rousseau for
example—who through his or her own vision and intelligence and/or
neurosis, presents an alternative for the culture to consider. We could
even imagine an evolutionary collective “sport”—for example an inten-
tional commune with an innovative child-rearing style—which repre-
sents a further evolutionary form that is too different to survive, but
does provide the normative culture with precursors of future transfor-
mation. To confront this myriad of variables in search of the sources
and crucial junctures of change is perhaps the task of a speculative his-
toriography informed by chaos-theory.26 What I am concerned to do
here is to sketch in broad outline a narrative theory of just one aspect of
these changes that is not in contradiction with whatever facts and rela-
tions between facts we have, and to identify a further direction of
change that might be implicit in those experienced so far.
If the only issue here were the effects that relations with children
sometimes have on the psychological development of the adults
involved in those relations, an inquiry into the possibility of broad psy-
chohistorical change would be quite a bit simpler. We could then specu-
late that when people “grow up,” many tend to become adultist—that
is, they tend to think of children as the dangerous or deficit other—but
that when they have children themselves, the influence of child rearing
“reconditions” them “in the face of the other,” leading to a more dia-
logical personality. We could in fact make this hypothesis about a fairly
significant number of people who become parents. It is not, however, a
significant enough number to protect children from child abuse, from
abandonment in various forms, and, most significantly, from an educa-
tional system that historically suppresses the developmental potential,
and stymies the motivation for growth and personal transformation of
vast numbers of young people, and thereby of adults. The evidence of
twentieth-century psychology would suggest that, although there are
many factors contributing to what kinds of adults children turn out to
be, the most important causal factor in the production of adults with
enough both autonomy and sense of interdependence to be capable of
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 75
dialogue with their own children is the extent to which their own par-
ents and teachers were in dialogue with them when they were children.
The present Western historical moment contains—like any histori-
cal moment—a number of contradictions: an educational system that
still largely colonizes childhood; a growing culture of adults who believe
in and practice dialogue with their children and expect the educational
system to do so as well; either increasing incidences of or increasing dis-
closure of incidences of sexual abuse of children; the cultural phenome-
non of the “disappearance of childhood”—that is, the putative breaking
down of “the dividing line” between adulthood and childhood—and an
emergent reformulation of adult subjectivity, goaded forward by a
myriad of influences, the most obvious of which is a new individual and
cultural intervisibility made possible by an increasingly global, intercon-
nected electronic information environment. In the search for a narrative
capable of recognizing and including all of these phenomena, I want
first to circle back yet again, in a closer approach, to the historical
accounts we do have of the adult-child relation in the West, and search
for their logic in a narrative that combines the accounts we have both of
the history of childhood and of adulthood. I want to try to show what I
have already suggested—a dialectical movement leading to the present
situation, which assumes the necessity of each previous moment to the
one succeeding it.
This dialectical narrative is symmetrical with the hermeneutical
theory presented in Chapter 1, which is a narrative about the conditions
and possibilities of dialogue per se. I want to consider adult-child dia-
logue both as a possibility within each cultural epoch of history, and as
the metadialogue represented by the interrelations between succeeding
cultural epochs—their themes, their emphases, and the dialectical logic
of their transformations. What motivates this consideration is the
search for an understanding that can guide a normative inquiry into the
praxis, not just of child rearing and education, but of the cultural and
social and political transformation that optimal child rearing and edu-
cation always promise.
The Evolution of Adulthood/Childhood
As we have seen, the ancient world already had “grown-ups” who

remind us very much of our own normative notions of maturity, but
there were, it appears, fewer of them than today. Practically speaking,
unless one were both free born and male, one could not become an
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 76
adult in the modern sense of the term—an independent, autonomous

individual. If one was a child, one shared what the historian John
Boswell called the “general similarity between the status of children and
slaves in ancient and medieval Europe.” Just as in modern racist, sexist,
and colonialist discourse, so in the ancient world the terms for child,
boy, and girl were also regularly employed to mean slave or servant.
The fact that a majority of people remained what we would today con-
sider “children” in terms of rights and status, was balanced by the fact
that in other ways people left what the modern middle classes think of
as the marked-off world of childhood much earlier than they do in the
contemporary West. Anglo-Saxon law, for example, considered males to
be adults at ten, at least in terms of responsibility for their actions. The
age of seven, the start of the period following what the Middle Ages
called “infancy” (0–7 years), was considered by some to be the earliest
age of consent to marriage. Custom, opinion, and level of consensus
varied, of course, all over the ancient and medieval world, by period,
culture, class, and gender; but we can probably draw the general con-
clusion that, if social and legal and economic “childhood” never ended
for all but the small ruling class, then childhood as a lifeworld distinct
from and protected from the adult lifeworld, ended quite a bit sooner
than it does now.27
Philippe Aries’ influential historical formulation of the medieval
world of childhood confirms this picture of a life cycle in which, at
around age seven, the child “went straight into the community of men,
sharing in the work and play of their companions, old and young
alike.”28 Aries’ work has been used to legitimate the historical construc-
tivist slogan “the invention of childhood,” with its implication that
childhood did not exist in the medieval world, and emerged as a result
of religious Reformation and the rise of the bourgeoisie, the centralized
state and the nuclear family. In fact it might be more accurate to reverse
the wording of this formulation, and characterize the medieval world as
a world of near-universal childhood, followed by the emergence in the
modern world of near-universal adulthood, resulting in turn in children
being separated off from adults, and placed in a class by themselves.
Childhood as we now understand it could only have come into exis-
tence when adulthood had been separated from childhood, so there was
something to compare it to. On the basis of the scholarly research of
Aries, Johann Huizinga, and Norbert Elias,29 we can infer that until the
Renaissance and Reformation in Europe, adults and children had more
of an existential world in common. What are now fairy tales for chil-
dren were heard and appreciated by all ages; what are now children’s
games and dances were indulged in by the whole community. Physical
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 77
privacy and modesty, whether in sleeping arrangements, eating, elimina-

tion and bathing behaviors, or attitudes about exposure of the body,
were characteristically “childlike,” that is, unselfconscious. If we are to
believe Elias, the same was true for sexual expression and the expres-
sion of affect.
Elias bases his research on the etiquette manuals that began
appearing in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, advising read-
ers on socially acceptable ways to perform natural functions—manuals
that only became necessary with a new self-consciousness about man-
ners, or civilité. Prior to the end of the medieval world and the rise of
the modern, “the degree of instinctual restraint and control expected by
adults of each other was not much greater than that imposed on chil-
dren. The distance between adults and children, measured by that of
today, was slight.”30 Beginning in the sixteenth century, and cotermi-
nous with the onset of the new reality principle of capitalism and radi-
cal Protestanism, rising middle-class adults began imposing restraints on
instinctual expression, involving new standards of shame and self-con-
sciousness, new “thresholds of repugnance,” which, through gradual
social change, became part of normative adult self-awareness. The new
regulation or molding of instinctual urges acted to separate adults—
who (forgetting their own childhood) saw themselves as having grown
naturally into these levels of repression of bodily instinct and impulse—
from children, who had to be trained into them. With increasing levels
of “social proscription of many impulses, and their repression from the
surface both of social life and of consciousness, the distance between
the personality structure and behavior of adults and children is neces-
sarily increased.” This, in turn, led to the necessity for greater attention
to education and to the raising up of children. Gradually it came about
that “the children have in the space of a few years to attain the
advanced level of shame and revulsion that has developed over many
centuries. Their instinctual life must be rapidly subjected to the strict
control and specific molding that gives our societies their stamp, and
which developed very slowly over centuries.”31
Elias understands there to have been a major turn among certain
classes in the early modern West toward a modal personality character-
ized by higher levels of self-restraint and personal shame, increased self-
consciousness, and greater control of affect. This new, rationalized form
of subjectivity was demanded by new economic realities—the division
of labor, growing economic opportunities, competition, and an increas-
ing tolerance of the forms of discipline necessary to capitalist
economies—and represents the regulation and restraint of drives neces-
sary for modern “work,” which was assuming a new identity apart
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 78
from play. Elias is in fact identifying a pattern of affect-control associ-

ated with the emergence of a capitalist-engendered and engendering
reality principle, based on the performance principle and the cultural
and social imperatives of surplus-repression, and associated in turn with
domination by new groups of individuals interested in maintaining or
gaining privilege. Surplus-repression describes the instinctual econ-
omy—or what Elias called “the interplay between drives and drive
controls, between conscious and unconscious levels of the personal-
ity”32—characteristic of the new middle classes, which at this moment
were engaged in challenging the social, political, and economic hege-
mony of the aristocracy in an atmosphere of an increasing centraliza-
tion of political power, the rise of the nation state, and the emergence of
capitalism fueled by expanding colonization. It is characterized by rela-
tively high impulse control, a strict separation of work and play, the
almost compulsive control and regulation of emotions, stricter habits of
hygiene, and an emphasis on a newly “mannered” form of public inter-
action, which is both created by and creates what Elias called “the wall
between people, the reserve, the emotional barrier erected by condition-
ing between one body and another.”33 The affect control, the repression
of bodily impulses and pleasures, and the creation of barriers between
individuals that prevent the flow of affect, are reified in an understand-
ing of self as an individual ego in its “locked case,” separated by an
invisible wall, an “inside” facing an “outside.” This new normative sub-
jectivity was in turn reified in scientific, philosophical, and psychologi-
cal formulations—whether the new empiricism in science, the Cartesian
cogito, the Lockean self for whom memory is the only guarantee of per-
sonal identity, the Kantian subject who knows the world only through
the implicitly theoretical toolkit of the categories, the Humean subject
afloat in an empirical universe with no provable causal connections, all
of them enframed in the revolutionary Newtonian cosmos of strict
mathematical determinism. From the point of view of a dialectical
theory of psychological development, this new self-construction repre-
sents the height of the ego’s drive for perfection and central control of
the personality, which involves an emphasis on conscious over uncon-
scious elements of the self, and a repression of the latter, whereby, as we
have seen, they are projected onto others, and especially marginalized
others. This in fact is the central characteristic of the Western European
colonialist personality.
The emergent modal personality of the modern West accompanied
the cosmological change triggered by scientific discovery and technolog-
ical development. Elias identifies in particular “the development of the
idea that the earth circles round the sun in a purely mechanical way in
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 79
accordance with natural laws”34 as another key element in the new

ideal of self-consciousness and restraint. Self-detachment was necessary
in a universe of which one was no longer the center, and which now
seemed to possess no intrinsic meaning traceable either to humans or
gods. The ancient and medieval worldview was constructed as a holistic
web of interconnections based on analogical relations between all its
elements, and driven by sympathies and antipathies writ both large and
small throughout.35 Such a system of micro and macrososmic relations
of mutual influence assumed an animate universe, moved by principles
that today we might characterize, in comparison to the mechanical uni-
verse of modernism, as psychological rather than physical. But the
ancient and medieval worlds drew the lines between “psychological”
and “physical” differently. It took repression of the involuntary mean-
ing-making of the body, and of the intrinsically projective, chiasmic
nature of perception itself—a form of knowledge that has begun to be
excavated in this century by gestalt and phenomenological psychol-
ogy—for people to be able, as Elias points out, to “conceive of [physi-
cal] processes as an autonomous sphere operating without intention or
purpose or destiny in a purely mechanical or causal way, and having a
meaning or purpose for themselves only if they are in a position,
through objective knowledge, to control it and thereby give it a mean-
ing and a purpose.”36 The rise of modern adult modal subjectivity is
associated with the rise of cosmic and psychological mechanistic theory.
The ancient and medieval cosmos was characterized by what the
philosopher Hans Jonas termed an “ontology of life,” according to
which “soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all
things.”37 The concept of “dead” matter was unknown. Panpsychism,
or the idea that life is everywhere and pervades everything, made the
problem of the ancients one of explaining, not that there is life in the
universe, but that there is death. This living cosmos was childlike, not
so much in the sense of being naive or foolish, as in the sense that it was
an oral/aural world—a speaking world in which participation and
mutual influence was the felt reality. The primary information environ-
ment was the spoken word, and writing was still considered a limited
and limiting form of communication, appropriate for runes and sacred
texts, but not for the discourse of the natural world. The ideal man was
not the scribe but the rhetorician, the one who spoke rather than wrote
his mind. Formal teaching was built on a question-and-answer format,
on dialectic rather than propositional discourse. In this interlocutive,
sounded cosmos, neutral mathematical space had not yet been fully
developed, or the modern notion of “objectivity,” or the extreme
emphasis on the privacy of thought that can create pseudo-problems
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 80
like the “problem of other minds.” Like the cosmos of the young child,
the oral/aural cosmos was “egocentric” in the sense that, as the histo-
rian of culture Walter Ong has pointed out, a speaking and hearing
world “situates man in the middle of actuality and in simultaneity,” and
does not even entertain the notion of a knowledge that is separated
from the deepest sort of personal commitment. In this psychoworld,
knowledge is communication, an active principle within things—com-
municating from their life rather than from an understanding of cover-
ing laws, or principles outside of the things they regulate or describe.
This world is whole and self-communicating and for this kind of under-
standing, being is event—hence personal and interactive—rather than
something neutral, impersonal, or simply “there.”38
The invention of moveable print came in 1450, fifty years before
Erasmus’ etiquette manual—the text upon which Elias bases his analysis
of the transformation of adult subjectivity—became the first best seller
(after the Bible), in an information environment that had been trans-
formed, relatively speaking, as rapidly as the computer transformed the
late twentieth century’s. The argument for the critical effect of informa-
tion environment on the construction of modal personality is based on
the assumption that, as Ong puts it, “intelligence is relentlessly reflex-
ive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its work-
ings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process.”39
With the rapid growth of the printing press, the external tool of not just
the written, but the mechanically printed (i.e., standardized, universally
distributed) word was fully internalized by Western culture. This inter-
nalization led, according to Ong, to a widespread reorganization of the
“sensorium,”40 whereby the primacy of the oral/aural sense axis was
replaced by that of the visual, with a corresponding shift in the value
and even function of the senses in knowledge-construction.
What Ong has referred to as the “psychodynamics of orality”—the
psychological characteristics or style of subjectivity of oral as opposed
to literate cultures—bear an interesting resemblance to the psychody-
namics of young children. Primary oral culture’s emphasis on the magi-
cal, illocutionary aspects of language, its emphasis on communication,
on formulaic expression, its tendency to “totalize,” its closeness to the
human lifeworld, its empathetic and participatory mode of apprehend-
ing the world, its concrete, contextual, complexive forms of categoriza-
tion, the mythic and agonistic qualities of its characteristic narrative, its
“conservative holism” toward persons and situations, its form of tem-
poralization41—all of these modes are familiar to students of the young
child. By contrast, the psychodynamics of literacy that swept sixteenth-
century Europe evoke the modal subjectivity of the modern, egosyn-
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tonic adult: removal of self from the existential present; attention to

symbols, propositions, and representations rather than things; reflection
(since texts are stopped in time and can be returned to again and again
in different ways); individualism and a new privacy (since in silent read-
ing, which gradually replaced the transitional phase of reading aloud,
one must of necessity read alone, and withdraw from others in order to
do so); an emphasis on logical and propositional thought (since writing
follows an “argument” in a sequential direction, and can be evaluated
logically more easily than speech, since it is exactly the same every time
it is returned to); abstraction (since written symbols have no necessary
correspondences to nature); decontextualization (e.g., sitting in New
York City reading a book about daily life in ancient Egypt); separation
of the knower from the known (since in writing, words are translated
into digital symbols, and reconstructed in the reader’s mind through
complicated processes).42 The change in subjectivity associated with lit-
erate culture corresponded with as dramatic a change in worldview: the
end of the organic, personalistic, oral cosmos of the ancient and
medieval worlds, and the rise of a cosmos rationalized by a new sense
of space, time and causality, and concerned with the new sort of objec-
tivity that issued from a new subject-world relationship. The “new sci-
ence,” according to Ong, amounted to a “campaign for a visually
conceived cognitive enterprise.”43
The visual cosmos is silent. One stands before it rather than in it. It
has become an object, and the things and people within it have become
objects, things—whether living or dead—thrown up against me
(ob=toward, against, in the way of; iacere=throw). In this cosmos,
knowledge is accomplished through separation rather than participa-
tion. The modern, empiricist notion of objectivity makes the assump-
tion that something can be known in and of itself only through the
systematic withdrawal of affective, psychological, and even perceptual
projection by the knower. Everything tacit, everything transitional,
every trace of the “between”—the body itself, which represents, in fact
is the unconscious—must be expurgated or, at least bracketed. This
kind of knowledge is accomplished through empirical theory, which is
different from the ancient and medieval, Aristotelian notion of theory as
contemplation (from the Greek theoria, “to behold”).44 Empiricism,
which is most closely associated with the new, decentered Copernican
self-world relation, is a way of controlling, formalizing, and standardiz-
ing the human projection through depersonalization. The hope of
modern theory is that slowly, through successive attempts at applica-
tion, and a purgative process of falsification, it is emptied of personal,
affective, projective elements, and eventually describes the world with
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an exactitude that is confirmed by our ability to manipulate the thing

thus described by predicting what will happen to it using the theory.
Hence the connection between modernist theory and technology: the
strategy of complete absence of felt identification with the object—
whether animate or inanimate—is associated with mastery and control
of that object. The Baconian project of “leading nature by the apron
strings” requires a form of subjectivity associated with separation and
objectification. Read through twentieth-century feminist psychoanalytic
theory, it appears as a form of subjectivity modeled on the male rela-
tionship with mother/nature—for the male child must define himself
through separation, not identification with the mother45—and is there-
fore based on a culturally valorized reification of the natural develop-
mental phenomenon of splitting and projection of psychic elements. In
other terms, this is a cultural reification of a subject-object relation in
which the experience of transitional space—the “between” of subject
and object—has entered a new era of repression.
The modern, silent “reader,” removed from his “text,” must
repress the instinctual and affective ties with the object of his vision in
order to know it as it “really” is. He approaches the cosmos from the
point of view of what Jonas called an “ontology of death,” or the
assumption of “panmechanism.” For panmechanism the universe,
including its animate elements, is composed of combinations of inani-
mate elements, and so the task is not to explain death, for matter is by
definition lifeless. Now “the problem posed to thought,” according to
Jonas, is “that there is life at all, and how such a thing is possible in a
world of mere matter.”46 Mind becomes Descartes’ res cogitans, a
ghost, depending for its ontological status on a God who is outside
matter. The thinking subject is placed outside the universe as well. The
result is what Jonas called “split-personality theorizing”: the theorizer
reduces all phenomena to instances and parts of nature, determined by
causal laws, except, necessarily himself, “while he assumes and exer-
cises his freedom of inquiry and his openness to reason, evidence, and
truth.” Soul, once a universal principle of life—and thus of action—
once both ground and expression of everything, is now isolated in per-
sons, and becomes a principle of pure subjectivity. “Life” is reduced to
“a fact of physics alone . . . a particular corporeal behavior following
from a particular corporeal structure which distinguishes a class of
objects in nature, viz., the natural automata.”47 Thus modernism per-
forms an ontological reduction of nature, through which it becomes,
no longer his filial interlocutor, but his cryptic text, his radical other,
which he must learn to read with the controlled projection of mecha-
nistic theory.
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The child—particularly the young child—in that her orality is

genetic rather than cultural, was necessarily left out of this shift in the
Western sensorium and the correlative ontological reduction of nature.
The result was that children no longer shared “world” with adults, and
were assigned an increasingly different role in a Western culture “come
of age.” Young children stayed behind, in the cosmos abandoned by
philosophers and scientists during the 1600’s. Both the young child’s
world picture and premodern cosmology are marked by anthropocen-
trism, animism, and laws of correspondence between micro and macro-
cosm. Both inhabit an organic, teleological cosmos in which there is a
magical, dynamic participation between its elements.48 If this is the
case, then the young child was much more at home in the world of the
adult (and vice versa) before the Copernican revolution and the rise of
panmechanism, and the demise of oral culture meant a new outsider
status for the child. From now on the child must be inducted into the
new cosmos through a process of training and education. She must be
instructed in the form of subjectivity that allows, justifies, and main-
tains the new ontological convictions—the distances between persons
demanded by the new adulthood, and its taboos on certain language
and behavior. The child is also instructed, if through the subtlest of lan-
guage games, about the new adult beliefs––about what is living and
what is not, about the nature of, and especially the limits of causal rela-
tionships, about the degree of goal or purpose inherent in the life cycles
of individuals or of nature itself, about how things came to be in the
first place, about the nature of self and of persons in general, and above
all about the ego’s relations with the unconscious, and the “necessary”
relation between instinct and reason.
Because subjectivity is in great part about boundaries and limits—
within self, between self and other, and by extension, between self and
world—and because boundaries and limits are the topological coordi-
nates of morality, the instruction that children received in the new form
of subjectivity was couched in moral terms. And, because adults have so
completely internalized their own training in the new social principle
marked as civilité, their anxiety is aroused when the now-involuntary
shame limits are breached, even by children. As Elias put it:
The more “natural” the standard of delicacy and shame

appears to adults and the more the civilized restraint of
instinctual urges is taken for granted, the more incomprehensi-
ble it becomes to adults that children do not have this delicacy
and shame by “nature.” The children necessarily touch again
and again on the adult threshold of delicacy, and—since they
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are not yet adapted—they infringe the taboos of society, cross

the adult shame frontier, and penetrate emotional danger
zones which the adult himself can only control with difficulty.
. . . And the peculiarly emotional undertone so often associ-
ated with moral demands, the aggressive and threatening
severity with which they are frequently upheld, reflects the
danger in which any breach of the prohibitions places the
unstable balance of all those for whom the standard behavior
of society has become more or less “second nature.”49
Given the new atmosphere of the possibility of transgression and

moral danger between adults and children, there arose a need to sepa-
rate children from the public world of adults. In a social world where
there is strict control of affect and instinctual expression in public, chil-
dren are too natural for comfort, and they offend against the unspoken
rules of surplus-repression. Thus they were increasingly relegated to the
status of a separate class and isolated in the institutions of the new, pri-
vate middle-class home, and the school. The separation between adults
and children among the middle classes was happening even as those
same middle classes moved to colonize the mad in asylums, aboriginals
on reservations, and, it could be argued, women in the home. The social
technologies that Foucault identifies as “discipline”—“normalization,”
the “examination” of one sort or another through which the “normal”
is defined, and hierarchical observation—are, as he argued, forms of
“subjection,” or technologies for the production of a certain form of
individual subjectivity: a “docile body” that “may be subjected, used,
transformed and improved,” a “body . . . in the grip of very strict
powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations.”50
The subjection of the child through the machinery of power of the insti-
tution of the school was—and remains—a project for constructing a
universal, standardized form of subjectivity suitable for the purposes of
an increasingly hegemonic centralized state and economy. This project
shaped the goals and methodologies of state-administered universal
compulsory education from its most obvious debut in post-revolution-
ary Napoleonic France, and throughout its growth and entrenchment
during the nineteenth century.51 The child had become a new kind of
“native” for modern adult subjectivity, and one of the most dangerous
sort, for it came from one’s own ranks.
If the effective cause of the increasingly universal isolation of chil-
dren in schools was the set of exigencies of the new information envi-
ronment, the formal cause was state colonization. In a nonliterate world
there is little need to distinguish between children and adults or to treat
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them that differently, whereas in a world in which information travels

through print, there is a split between those who can read and those
who cannot. Since children cannot read, in a literate world, they must
undergo a qualitative shift in order to become adults, a shift that
involves labor and discipline. In addition, the silent, removed world of
print, inaccessible to children, creates what Neil Postman called a “non-
observed, abstract world of knowledge”—a world apart from the
common world that adults and children once shared. The split led to
what he described as the “re-invention of the school” in Europe.52 Uni-
versal schooling, combined with the separation of home and workplace
effected by the Industrial Revolution, completed the separation of the
worlds of children and adults. The movement was coterminous with the
movement among the middle classes to isolate women in the home,
removing them as well from a male world in which instrumentalism and
separative individualism became the ideal. Like children’s, women’s
ways of knowing were split off from the normative ideal, which Ashis
Nandy has described as “the adult male as the ultimate in God’s cre-
ation and as the this-worldly end-state for everyone [which] was
endorsed by the new salience of the productivity principle and
Promethean activism”53 of modernism.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the traditional, commonsense
view of childhood as a preliminary state to adulthood, and the unreflec-
tive understanding of childhood as a lesser, deficit-ridden condition, a
period of excess and obscurity—that is, adultism—had thus been
worked out historically and enshrined, not only in the modern institu-
tion of the school, but in the forms of life of modern middle-class cul-
ture. Children were no longer just functionally but psychologically and
discursively marginalized. Dominant Western male genetic epistemolo-
gies had split off the child (and the woman) both internally and exter-
nally, and no longer recognized the child’s form of knowledge except as
sentimentality, superstition, or naivete. For the modern adult, inhabiting
a silenced cosmos—its organic, unitary, elemental relations replaced by
mechanistic, atomized ones—the child, who represented the old, partici-
patory cosmos, became problematic, a stranger, another representation
of danger, from within and from below, to the new instinctual economy
of surplus-repression in the service of the performance principle.
The Evolution of the Adult-Child Relationship
And now another story, an even grander narrative, which claims that
the adult-child relation has in fact been evolving over Western cultural
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time, and that each stage in this evolution represents a closer approach
between the two. The direction of this evolution has—seen from the
psychohistorical perspective just presented—been toward separation.
Seen from a dialectical perspective, this separation is understood as a
moment implicitly oriented toward overcoming separation in a more
highly developed unity, or unity-in-difference. This is the story of adult-
hood separating from, then journeying toward a reencounter with child-
hood on another level. It is based on an understanding of both
collective and individual development as beginning in undifferentiated
fusion, followed by splitting and separation of elements, and leading
through periods of growth and crisis to a reintegration of those ele-
ments as a differentiated, articulated unity. In psychoanalytic parlance,
they are reconstellated under what Jung called a “transcendent func-
tion,” a dialectical third that “resolves the tension—of energy and con-
tent—existing between the ego stability of consciousness and the
contrary tendency of the unconscious to overwhelm it.”54 The story
leads to the hypothesis—to be taken up in the next chapter—that the
West is currently a century or two into a historical moment in which
adultism is being overcome in those same middle classes in which it
arose, and that there is emerging, not only a new form of adult-child
relation, but a new form of adult subjectivity that results from this rela-
tion, since it is based on the adult’s relationship with his own child-
hood, which is to say a new relationship between the elements of his or
her own subjective structure.
In antiquity, as this story—developed by psychohistorian Lloyd
deMause55—goes, adults were fused with their children to such an
extent that they not only projected their shadow contents onto them,
but acted upon those projections, and commonly battered and even
murdered them as a result. According to deMause, infanticide was
common in the ancient world, and what we would call child abuse—
both physical and sexual—was a norm. The child was the “toilet lap”
for the unresolved sexual and aggressive contents of adults. Children
who expressed instinctual needs or aggression evoked those same
poorly contained contents in adults, leading to murderous reaction,
or—what is virtually the same thing—to considering them as scarcely
human, accepted into life at the discretion of the head of the family
(pater potestias). This was the “Infanticidal Mode” of the adult-child
relation, which prevailed well into the first millenium.
The second mode, Abandonment, represented a partial withdrawal
or containment of the projective reaction of adults to children. Now,
especially under the influence of Christianity, infanticide was no longer
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socially acceptable. Adults were emotionally separated enough from

their children that they dealt with their projective reactions through
abandonment instead of battering or murder. This pattern was related—
as was the first—to the dramatic fluctuations in the food supply to
which whole populations were constantly liable, but whether this
chronic instability caused or allowed the psychodynamics of infanticide
and abandonment is moot. The abandoning parent distances his child—
in our times often through television, day-care centers, nannies, or
boarding schools—for the level of instinctual need the child evokes and
surfaces in him or her is too dangerous, and the ethics of relation that
the child’s very presence calls for is too much self-work.
The ninth century saw the rise of the Ambivalent Mode. Parental
love and tolerance of children was now a more accepted social value.
The psychodynamics of selfhood were such in this period that the adult
began to experience the projective reaction as the felt need to “disci-
pline” his own projected contents—to “drive them out of” the child.
Here are the roots of what came to ideological fruition in Calvinism:
the conviction that human nature is inherently depraved, and that
without the saving discipline of a higher power—the parent as a stand-
in for God—we are condemned to our own selfishness and evil.
Human subjectivity is here understood as permanently—unless dramat-
ically converted—under the sign of the shadow, and children are its
proof-text. One need only look at the nature of children—who don’t
conceal as adults do their cupidity, their egocentrism, their aggression,
and the ease with which they are corrupted, whether by servants,
pedophile priests, or peers—to see what human beings are really like.
This was the age of the myth of the “changeling,” a look-alike infant
demon that the devil and his minions substitute, under cover of night,
for the infant in his crib.
In the Ambivalent Mode the adult’s shadow-projection is barely
contained, but in fact it is contained, and translated into at least the
beginnings of a strategic program of forceful transformation of the child
through, if not education, at least discipline and punishment. Perhaps
this was a first general recognition, if in (for us) a distorted and perverse
form, of the malleability of human nature through child rearing and
education. Erasmus, although he tended to represent later modes,
strikes the tone when, in his best-selling child-rearing manual of 1530,
he characterized the child as a “natural void,” and asked “So what are
we to expect of man? He will most certainly turn out to be an unpro-
ductive brute unless at once and without delay he is subjected to a
process of intensive instruction.”56 In this stage the adult still sees only
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the shadow projection in the needy child, but it doesn’t trigger extreme
violence or abandonment; in fact Christian and in particular Calvinist
anthropology could even be seen as a first stage in owning the shadow.
Being able to recognize it in himself, and even attribute it to human
nature in general, is a step beyond projecting it onto the other in the
form of child, slave, woman, “native” or “barbarian.” It is separated
and well-enough contained within the adult that he begins to attribute
it, not just to infantile, but to human nature in general.
With the Intrusive Mode, which was more or less coterminous with
Renaissance, Reformation, and the gradual emergence of capitalism and
the middle classes—that is, the rise of the modern reality principle—we
rejoin the narrative of the invention of adulthood. Here the adult has
separated himself from the child to the extent that he sees the possibility
of a methodical process of eradication of the child “nature” (thereby
securing again and vindicating the eradication of his own “fallen
nature”) through technologies of child rearing and education. The
shadow contents are still split off within the adult and projected onto
the paradigmatic other—the child, that “stranger who while being
Other is me”—but the instinctual danger that the child represents is rec-
ognized as within all of us. The responsible parent must “reach inside
the child and rearrange her very insides.”57 Now mental punishment is
preferred over physical punishment, although the latter is sometimes
necessary. Thus at the height of Reformational notions of innate sinful-
ness, Protestant religious and psychological individualism opens the
door to the possibility of overcoming this sinfulness through technolo-
gies of the self; and the primary technology of the self, applied to the
other, is education, training, and methodical, systematic planned action
upon the infant body—in short, “discipline.” As a German child-rearing
manual of 1748 assures us, “If willfulness and wickedness are not
driven out, it is impossible to give a child a good education. The
moment these flaws appear in a child, it is high time to resist this evil so
that it does not become ingrained through habit and the children do not
become thoroughly depraved.” And the author adds a rationale that
evokes in a few sentences the level of splitting, fragmentation, and
denial of the unconscious required by the new instinctual economy:
One of the advantages of these early years is that then force and
compulsion can be used. Over the years, children forget every-
thing that ever happened to them in early childhood. If their
wills can be broken at this time, they will never remember after-
wards that they had a will, and for this very reason the severity
that is required will not have any serious consequences.58
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As ominous as this statement may seem to twenty-first century

ears, this planned assault upon the soul and body of the child repre-
sented the moment in the evolution of the child-rearing modes when the
adult reached the furthest degree of separation and started turning to
the child as an interlocutor. In fact it was the historical moment of the
invention of childhood: for the child, however negatively characterized,
was now understood by adults as a crucial site for the reproduction of
the new, appropriately repressed adult. Some connection with childhood
as a separate form of life had been made, even if it manifested as a rela-
tion of domination over and implicit violence toward the child’s form of
life. The less the child resembled the adult, the more she became the
object of adult attention. Said otherwise, the more the adult differenti-
ated from the child, the more visible the child became to her. The child
now had a soul (the “natives” of the colonies, not yet). In hermeneutical
terms, this is the furthest moment of distanciation, the last attempt to
take complete control of the other with one’s projections, the moment
just before the moment of negativity and the opening of the
“between”—the recognition of the other as unassimilable to our own
projections—which is the necessary preliminary for dialogue.
It certainly is not dialogue. As Elias said of the Intrusive adults of
the early modern period, it is “incomprehensible” to them that children
are not like them “by ‘nature’”—the surest sign of a projective relation.
Children “touch again and again on the adult threshold of delicacy, . . .
they infringe the taboos of society, cross the adult shame frontier, and
penetrate emotional danger zones which the adult himself can only con-
trol with difficulty.” So all demands on children have an undertone of
moral insistence, of “aggressive and threatening severity.” The child
becomes a site for unremitting work, for hypervigilance; “one must not
cease toiling,” our German child-rearing manual tells us, “until all will-
fulness is gone.” The child may be an alienated, estranged being, but
she has the adult’s full attention.
That attention varied in emphasis. For both Renaissance humanists
and Protestant reformers, not only was the ancient ideal of the puer
senex—long applied to the legendary childhoods of saints and heroic
figures—a strong guiding image in relating to children, but it was
actively pursued through a passionate concern with literacy, as well as
an intense preoccupation with personal religious experience. Among
these classes, children of seven years of age were assumed to enter
school already reading and writing and ready for classical languages,
which they sometimes studied from six in the morning until five-thirty,
with only short breaks, for ten or eleven months a year.59 The sixteenth
and seventeenth were the centuries of the child prodigy, and under such
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intensive discipline, many children reached levels of accomplishment in

letters and mathematics that contemporary genetic epistemologists
would not think possible, much less “developmentally appropriate.”
They were also the centuries of the active evangelization of children by
their Calvinist parents. Children were assumed to be capable of recog-
nizing their sinfulness—not just of act, but of intention—and of repent-
ing and turning toward a new identity in Christ. Thus, religious
education of the young became a matter of great urgency.
This early-modern attention to children of the Intrusive Mode may
seem to us closer to abuse than to nurture or education, but it was just
this assiduous, careful attention given to children by early moderns that
provides us the first example of the active, purposeful interest in chil-
dren as individuals that is much more common today. The Puritans, for
example, were quite clear that their children were persons in the full
Christian sense of that term—that they had “souls” that were of equal
value to the souls of adults. Janeway’s claim of children that “they are
not too little to die, they are not too little to go to Hell, they are not too
little to serve their great Master, too little to go to Heaven,”60 can be
read in two ways. From one point of view, it is an example of the extent
to which the early moderns, in their obsession with transforming chil-
dren into adults through rigorous spiritual and educational exercise,
made of them “miniature adults”—thus completely misinterpreting
them, and providing the most extreme example of adult egocentrism in
regard to children. From another, it is the beginning of an unprece-
dented emphasis placed by adults on children and childhood as a crucial
life stage, as well as a new sense of responsibility toward children on the
part of adults, and an interest in them as persons in their own right. As
Marcus points out, “Puritan belief in the corruption of the unregenerate
child’s nature led them to investigate that nature with a shrewdness of
psychological insight unprecedented in earlier educational writings.”61
To make both readings at once maintains the ambiguity and ambiva-
lence that pervades the adult’s understanding of the child.
This ambiguity is a major theme of the adult-child relation in itself,
and must not be avoided. It is present, not just in the pietistic tradition,
but in the secular as well, and is at the origins—both chronologically
and methodologically—of the modern approach to children. It is pres-
ent, for example, in the originators of the two major thematic emphases
of modern education, John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau. Locke,
whose associationist theory legitimated what could be termed the “etic”
or training school of education, a behavioristic tradition that is the
foundation of public, universal education, was also, as the author of a
widely read child-rearing manual published in 1693, an early critic of
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corporeal punishment and respecter of the individuality of children.

Rousseau, although correctly associated with progressive, child-centered
education, in fact holds epistemological views that, apart from the
prophetic undercurrent that informs Emile, verge on a deficit model of
childhood. As for Locke the child is a cognitive tabula rasa, for
Rousseau the child is “devoid of all morality in his actions,” having a
soul that is “yet blind,” at an age “when the heart feels nothing yet”—
“childhood is reason’s sleep.”62 Even the statements which make his
reputation as the emeritus of the progressive tradition in modern educa-
tion, examined in context, signal not so much an appreciation of the
child qua child as a legitimating rhetoric for an educational technique,
based on the highly mechanistic French sensationalist psychology of the
eighteenth century, which has distinct behavioristic characteristics, and
is as intrusive and as it is manipulative.
Thus, both Locke and Rousseau, in that they were major philo-
sophical voices of their day, offered a new legitimation for taking an
interest in children. Both also reinforced for modernity an image of the
child as a rudimentary condition, raw material for the new man of
reason, to be produced through a systematic, theoretically driven
(whether “hands on” or “hands off”), program of socialization. For
both, as paradigmatic moderns, the child represents nature, an untamed
wilderness to be shaped and transformed by method. That Rousseau’s
method is a negative rather than a positive one—”letting nature alone
in everything”63—is, in his hands, no less a way of shaping nature. Iron-
ically enough, Emile resonates more with twentieth-century behaviorist
technology than Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education,
although it was Locke’s genetic epistemology that came to ground twen-
tieth-century behaviorist theory. And the increasing number of child-
rearing manuals of the late eighteenth century—among which was
Emile—are testimony to the new, technological approach toward child-
hood characteristic of the Intrusive Mode. But the ambiguity can never
be forgotten, for in fact this new approach represented an ever increas-
ing attention to, and even absorption in, childhood. It would take the
movement of which Rousseau was the first, self-contradictory and
inconsistent representative—the Romantic critique of Enlightenment
reason—to spawn a more widespread interest in children apart from
what adults could make them into through education.
The Intrusive Mode found its most complete and lasting expression
in the rise of universal, compulsory schooling—both in its institutional
goals and in its forms and methods. The Intrusive Mode made
alliance—as did the rise of “discipline” in general in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries—with the interests of the hegemonic state, so
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perfectly exemplified in its first post-revolutionary manifestation in the

modern totalitarian nation in France—the Napoleonic—where in 1808
a unified educational system was established, and instruction at all
levels was devoted to the systematic training of “citizens” devoted to
religion, prince, “fatherland,” and family.64 The school as an early
expression of disciplinary technology carried the same assumptions and
used the same techniques as did the army, the prison, and the asylum.
Discipline simultaneously found its way into the emergent nuclear
family in the increasingly influential theoretically driven pronounce-
ments of the medical profession. Aries argued persuasively that as the
state increased in power and influence through its ability to keep the
peace and to order the social environment, the family, deprived of its
role in maintaining social order, shrank to nuclear size65 and became
another state-sanctioned site for the reproduction of the worker-citizen.
The patriarch-father was the administrator of this new mini-colony.
But even as the Intrusive Mode was reified in political and social
institutions, it was reaching its term from within. For as the spirit of
individualism increased, and the new psychological inwardness associ-
ated with modern subjectivity emerged and proliferated, and as these
tendencies both reinforced and were reinforced by the rise of political
liberalism, the child came increasingly to be recognized as a subject in
her own right. In the case of England, Lawrence Stone associates the
rise of a new “affective individualism” in adult-child relations with the
conflict between Calvinistic anthropology and a growing secularism
that began near the end of the socially and politically turbulent seven-
teenth century.66 That century’s struggles over the emergence of ideals
of political and religious autonomy were isomorphic with a similar
process within individual self-understanding, and with the understand-
ing of the self’s place in the universe. The conclusions and implications
of the physical sciences of the age—empiricism’s new direct link
between science and technology in the service of “mastering nature,”
Newton’s impersonal, clockwork universe—all served to subvert the
Great Chain of Being, or the understanding of the universe as a hierar-
chically ordered structure to which humans were subordinated. As the
normative idea of cosmic individualism in the form of Reformed Chris-
tianity, discrete, boundaried subjectivity, and political tolerance grew, it
must eventually be applied, not just to the white male adult, but to
every other, including the child.
As childhood is otherness, the excluded underside of adult subjec-
tivity, it remains the wilderness of the unconscious to be subdued and
cultivated, and the “white paper” upon which the modern adult, under-
stood as the not-child, is authored. The repression of the characteristics
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of child subjectivity in adult self-understanding and the construction of

childhood as a space for the colonization of “nature” was paralleled in
early modernism by the psychosocial adventure of the discovery and
colonization of the “new world” of the Americas. The “wild man,” a
figure that haunted the Jews and the Greeks from ancient times as a
symbol of human nature “outside the city” reappeared in modern dis-
course as a thoroughly ambivalent figure.
The new world “savage” was, like all those who live beyond the
rule of law, either an animal or a god, a prime object for projections of
either good or evil by those who live within the rule. The “native” or
“aboriginal” was another paradigmatic other for modern European
man. He or she symbolized, with the characteristic ambivalence of the
projection, either the spontaneous plenitude of a form of subjectivity
still in touch with nature and the unconscious, (i.e., nature both without
and within) or the original state of depravity assumed by both Hobbes
and Calvin. The “savage” was offered either as a critique of our own
over-socialized nature or as an ominous example of what happens to
human nature when, as Erasmus insisted, it is not “at once and without
delay . . . subjected to a process of intensive instruction.” The ambiva-
lence of the wild man in Western self-understanding found representa-
tive expression in Daniel Defoe, whose Robinson Crusoe—a narrative
of the modern European adult refinding his wild man and an instant
classic from its appearance in 1719—was matched by his later reflec-
tions on a real wild man: Peter the wild boy, about 15 years old, was
discovered in Germany in 1724 and brought to London in 1726, where
he became a sensation. Having met with Peter in person, Defoe argued
at length that “Education seems to me to be the only specifick Remedy
for all the Imperfections of Nature.”67
The child is both the wild man within modernist civilization and
within the civilized individual. He is a unique sort of wild man, in that
for modern, repressed subjectivity, one needn’t travel—even to the other
side of the tracks—to encounter him. He is the enemy within the gates
of civilization itself—or in the positive projection, the noble savage in
one’s own home, a constant reminder to the adult, either as primordial
good or primordial depravity, of his own prehistory—of a subjectivity
outside the gates of the city of the super-developed ego-function of the
modern self. Historian Hayden White has said of the Western psy-
chohistorical process,
From biblical times to the present, the notion of the Wild

Man was associated with the idea of the wilderness—the
desert, forest, jungle, and mountains—those parts of the
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physical world that had not yet been domesticated or marked

out for domestication in any significant way. As one after
another of these wildernesses was brought under control, the
idea of the Wild Man was progressively despatialized. This
despatialization was attended by a compensatory process of
psychic interiorization.”68
In the Intrusive Mode, childhood, which represents the last wilder-

ness for adult subjectivity, is “marked out for domestication.” For those
nineteenth-century crusaders of civilization, both Christian and secular,
the domestication of childhood offered the promise of the domestica-
tion of history. But the emergence of this hope in fact heralded the ter-
minus of the Intrusive Mode, for it was the dialectical moment in which
the psychohistorical structure manifested the internal contradictions
that would lead to its transformation. At the very moment in which the
othering of the child assumed hegemonic proportions in the ideal of
universal, compulsory education-as-discipline and in the search for a
“science” (meaning a proto-technology) of child rearing, its antithesis
emerged in Romanticism, for which the Wild Man—and the child—is
identified with that part of the self that modern subjectivity has
repressed and split off. Romanticism affirms and identifies with the
enemy. The adult has now come to the end of his rope; he turns and
faces both the child and the “primitive.” He recognizes the other as
himself—he acknowledges and owns his shadow projection—and so
begins a process of dialogue.
The process is both internal and external. In recognizing the other
as himself, he recognizes himself as an other. He recognizes himself as a
composite structure, and he understands that the executive center of
this composite structure, the “ego,” or Plato’s “reason” is not in control
of—perhaps not even aware of—all the elements of the structure. In a
structure that has turned from vertical (hierarchical) to horizontal (dia-
logical), the exclusions and hierarchies that the ego has persuaded itself
are necessary to unity become dangerous schisms and hiatuses. In addi-
tion, he understands, as Norman Brown put it, that
Projection and introjection, the process whereby the self as dis-

tinct from the other is constituted, is not past history, an event
in childhood, but a present process of continuous creation.
The dualism of self and external world is built up by a con-
stant process of reciprocal exchange between the two. The self
as a stable substance enduring through time, an identity, is
maintained by constantly absorbing good parts (or people)
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from the outside world and expelling bad parts from the inner
world. There is a continual unconscious wandering of other
personalities into ourselves. . . . Every person, then, is many
persons . . . We are members of one another.69
So begins one aspect of the transformation from modern to post-

modern subjectivity, in which the subject has become a field of multiple
relationships, a subject-in-process. There is no subject as fixed essence,
there is only the process of subjectivity, which in philosopher and psy-
chologist Julia Kristeva’s words, is a “field of relationships,” continually
“constructed and deconstructed in an interplay between his discourse
and the other.”70 Two generations after the “high” Romantics, Freud
began the exploration of this new self-understanding, and identified
childhood—and the adult’s relationship to her own childhood—as its
major problematic. After Freud, childhood is understood as present and
active throughout the life cycle. In keeping with the ambivalence that
runs like a fault line through the history of the adult-child relation,
childhood for Freud was the site both of trauma and fixation, and—in
his concept of primary narcissism—a form of subject-world relationship
that is the matrix of adult creativity, and therefore of the possibility for
the continual transformation of subjectivity. Childhood is the place of
structural transformation, both as memory and as possibility.
The child is the subject-in-process, the “field of relationships,”
exemplified. The dimensionality of childhood is the dimensionality of
creativity, both individual and cultural, and child rearing represents for
the adult the possibility of the deconstruction of the ego’s monotheistic,
“thematizing gaze”—the beginning of what Levinas calls “the liberation
of the ego with regard to the self.” It is the end of the reign of reason, if
reason is understood as that form of knowledge, which, as he character-
izes it, “never encounters anything truly other in the world”71 because it
assimilates, through projection, the other to its own structures of judg-
ment. This dialectical shift in the normative meaning and significance of
the adult-child relationship was isomorphic with the crisis of rational-
ism of the post-Enlightenment West that Romanticism inaugurated. As
Merleau-Ponty put it, “The task of the 20th century is the attempt to
explore the irrational and integrate it into an expanded reason.”72
It is in institutionalized education that the reorientation of adult
subjectivity that begins in parenthood is carried from the family into
society. The imperative for dialogue that was announced with the
appearance of the child-as-subject in Romanticism was institutionalized
first in the family and then in the school. In a school understood as a
site for adult-child dialogue, the teacher is a paradigmatic hermeneut of
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childhood, for he undergoes dialogue, not just with his own interior
childhood, but with the persons of many actual children, and the cul-
ture of childhood in its current historical form. In this new formulation,
school remains what it has always been—a place where the child is
introduced to the discourses and the forms of knowledge of adult cul-
ture, and to the culture of childhood of her own time. But when the
adult enters this experience as a subject-in-process, as a “decentered”
ego for whom the child is an interlocutor rather than an object of
manipulation, the school is understood as the communicative space in
which children and adults are in a process of mutual transformation.
School is the cultural “between” of the dialogical relation, the space of
difference, which is the space neither of the subject nor the object, the
adult or the child, but where their forms of life meet and converse. It is
analogous to the theater, or the artist’s studio. It is a space of play and
creativity, where new cultural forms, new forms of subject-object rela-
tion, and new forms of negotiation between primary and secondary
process are tried out. It is the space where life and art meet in the inter-
ests of individual, cultural, and social transformation.
The adult involved in the life-cycle moment that Erik Erikson
called the “generative”—the moment of turning and caring for the
next generation73—is also the moment that Jung identifies as the onset
of individuation—the process of the decentering of the ego in the inter-
ests of further self-integration. This, in turn, is identified with Levinas’
“rupture of the egoist-I and its reconditioning in the face of the other,”
or the moment of the emergence of a new form of alterity, or being-in-
relation-to-the-other. As the monotheistic, hierarchical self is decon-
structed, the self understood as in a continual process of reconstruction
becomes possible. The subject-in-process is a form of selfhood whose
boundaries—both internal and external—have become problematized.
It is the end of what Elias called the “discrete self,” or homo clausus
(closed man), the epistemological subject of classical philosophy, the
self who might as well have come into the world as an adult, whose
“core, his being, his true self appears . . . as something divided within
him by an invisible wall from everything outside, including every other
human being.”74 Homo Clausus is the adult self of the Intrusive adult-
child relation, in whom childhood is dramatically split off, invested
with ambivalent projections and identifications, and projected onto the
real child.
The Intrusive form of adult subjectivity showed the first signs of its
eventual transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century under
the influence what deMause has called the Socializing Mode. Here the
parent still understands the child as an instinctually ambivalent crea-
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ture, but the element of danger has been reduced to the extent that the
adult now identifies with that instinctual ambivalence, and is no longer
blindsided by it in her own psychic economy. For the authors of the
early-nineteenth-century form of autobiography called the Childhood,
the child was denizen of a lost paradise of self-world unity, or the myth
of the wild man projected backwards and placed in his original Eden.
For the theologically liberal middle classes, this wildness was reappro-
priated and redeemed as a form of energy that did not need to be
forcibly excised or repressed or suppressed in children. Certain cultur-
ally influential adults no longer felt the need to “reach into the very
insides” of the child through discipline, but rather to create forms and
styles of parenting and education that provided structures that shaped
the “wildness” into socially acceptable forms. This is first fruits of
Romanticism’s affirmation of the unconscious and the irrational, con-
temporary with the new culture wars then raging in Christian circles
over the doctrine of original sin.
At this moment in the adult-child relation, a new metaphor of
childhood began to emerge in adult discourse—the child as plant, and
education as gardening. The organic metaphor replaced earlier Ambiva-
lent and Intrusive metaphors of malleable wax and tabula rasa. The
gardener need only provide enough light, enough water, perhaps
(depending on the child) some weeding, and a nutrient-rich soil for the
emergence of a psychologically healthy adult. The child still represented
nature, and nature still needed to be tamed—but not forcibly subdued.
The plant is nature understood as endowed with an internal develop-
mental plan, which, given the right conditions, will unfold of itself. A
continuity had been established between the child and the adult.
Wordsworth’s phrase “the child is father to the man,” which seems so
obvious today as to appear tautological, was in the nineteenth century,
a dawning realization. The Intrusive Mode, which constructed adult-
hood as completely separate from adulthood—and consciousness, rep-
resented by ego, as completely separate from the unconscious— had
reached its term, and the moment of the possibility of dialogue had
arrived. At this furthest moment of hermeneutical distantiation, the
adult turned and began to face the child.
Dialogue becomes possible at the dialectical moment of separation
because it is only at this moment that there is the possibility of a critical
stance toward our own projections. The projective reaction is now even
further controlled, for the adult recognizes his own nature in the
instinctual expression of the child—a nature that, in the Socializing
Mode, still needs to be shaped, but not forcibly reconstructed. The
advent of the Socializing Mode was in fact the historical moment in
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which the benign projection—the “divine child”—began to emerge in

Romantic philosophical and literary thought. Now the stage was set for
Freud and the rise of deMause’s last, contemporary mode, the
Empathic, beginning in the mid twentieth century; but it would be
another hundred years—after nineteenth-century evolutionary theory,
which annexed the child as did the doctrine of original sin a century
earlier, played itself out—before adult-child dialogue as a cultural ideal
on a wide scale became possible.
From a dialectical point of view, evolutionary theory’s appropriation
of childhood in the late nineteenth century represents a scientific (replac-
ing the theological) reification of the separation between adult and child,
and a move into even further objectification. From this, the nondialogi-
cal side of the separation, the child is connected with adults, but the con-
nection is between a lower and a higher form of life. In evolutionary
theory, the Socializing Mode’s metaphor of the child as plant is trans-
formed into an even more radically organismic doctrine, based on the
new biology, which takes more primitive forms of life as its explanatory
model for the human. It is no accident that Piaget, the foremost child
psychology theorist of the twentieth century, did his first research (at the
age of 13) on the effects of the changing environment of Lake Geneva on
the form and development of the molluscs inhabiting it.
The rise of developmental psychology in the late nineteenth cen-
tury,75 based on this organismic, objectifying model, provided the legiti-
mating theory for the deployment of massive modern educational
systems during that same period. The “science of childhood” staked out
and developed by the new disciplines of psychology and sociology rei-
fied the actual marginalization of children in institutions through fram-
ing childhood in a series of regularized explanatory narratives, all of
which were based on theories whose general principles were founded on
the nonhuman—the first and most primary of which was (as was
already implicit in Aristotle), evolutionary biology. These narratives are
based on the observation of children within the world organized for
them by adults, and act to legitimate that organization, thus operating
in a recursive cycle. Two basic tenets of Darwin’s theory, for example,
lent themselves to an image of the child that neatly paralleled the latter’s
increasing social, cultural, and psychological colonization by institu-
tional forces: the theory of progression, by which simple forms of life
were said to precede more complex forms; and the theory of transfor-
mation, by which the more complex were said to be descended from
simpler forms.76 Both theories placed the child, with the mollusc, the
ape, and the “primitive” (about whom information was, through the
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new science of anthropology, flooding into the West) on a lower level of

a phylogenetic continuum. The conviction that the child in its ontogene-
sis was recapitulating the phylogenetic evolution of the race became the
founding and guiding theory in child study in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. As a way of seeing childhood, the law of reca-
pitulation represents a height of adultism, in that it regards all of child-
hood’s forms of life—whether cognitive, affective, sexual, or moral, as
merely preformative states. And in defining the child as a more primi-
tive life form, it sanctions the organization and the coercion of children,
and their separation into different environments, where they are han-
dled by “specialists.” It represents the discourse of Foucaultian “disci-
pline” reified in scientific theory.
Evolutionary doctrine annexed childhood as its proof-text for the
human condition just as the doctrine of original sin had done before it.
The child as deficit, wilderness, or chaos is no longer postulated as one
side of an ontological split, but is assimilated into colonialist discourse
as an aspect of a developmental pattern. In recapitulation theory, the
child and the “native” are assimilated to each other. The latter is a man-
ifestation of the “childhood” of the species, and hence must be treated
as a child. The colonial outpost and the school become analogous.
White Western bourgeois subjectivity, and its exemplar in the white
adult bourgeois male, is reified as a normative ideal.77
Evolution’s grand narrative is implicit in the thought of Piaget,
who, along with Freud, was the most influential interpreter of child-
hood of the twentieth century. In his early book The Child’s Conception
of the World, he aligns children’s implicit ontological and epistemologi-
cal theories both with “primitive” mentality and with the thinking of
ancient philosophers.78 The endpoint of cognitive development for
Piaget is the subject-world relation that he calls “formal operations,”
based on a logic of separation and objectification, and implicitly exclud-
ing the body, the unconscious, the emotions, and intersubjectivity
except as the experience of entertaining multiple perspectives. Piaget rei-
fies the modern middle-class European subject of surplus-repression as
scientific theory, and reproduces the notion of the white Western male
adult as an endpoint of development on the plane of cognitive psychol-
ogy. Half a century later, Piaget’s normative ideal for intelligence was
imported into ethics in Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral develop-
ment, in which is implicit the notion of the decentered, deracinated,
male adult as a terminus of subjective and intersubjective development.
Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s formulations exemplify the Socializing
Mode. Both cognitive and ethical/intersubjective development are
Kennedy03 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 100
constructed as unidirectional, and assume an endpoint from which the

fully formed adult looks back, and toward which he brings children
through childrearing and education. Freud’s work shared these implicit
assumptions of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century evolution-
ism; he too postulated a series of stages—in this case psychosexual—
which moved genetically in the direction of a normative adulthood.
Childhood represents the unresolved elements of the adult personality.
The neurotic, or the unsuccessful adult, is neurotic because he is fixated
on elements of his childhood experience, and successful maturity
depends on overcoming them through the distancing and resolution of
the psychoanalytic process. But Freud’s model, whatever its adultist
clinical goals, is inherently subversive of adultism, for it introduces, not
just the notion of the unconscious, which is another “Copernican Revo-
lution” in Western self-understanding, but the child-within as interlocu-
tor in the adult’s process of achieving emotional health, and thus
implicitly breaks with the notion of adulthood as a fixed state. Begin-
ning with Freud, the adult is now understood as a process-being,
whether that process is formulated as a clean-up operation of the
residues of childhood or not. And the adult preoccupied with the child-
within eventually turns to the child before her, for that child now
evokes her own internal dialogue—which is the necessary context for
the Empathic Mode.
Both ruling metaphors of the Socializing Mode—the plant in the
garden and the organism recapitulating the developmental stages of the
species—presume, as the Intrusive Mode did not, that the child will
become an adult in the “normal” course of development. The child is
still a pre-adult, but its forms of life, although still appropriated by a
theory that sees them as no more than stages in a process of “growing
up,” are no longer considered a necessary threat to its potential future
as an adult. The child is accepted as a subject, but does not yet have a
voice: whatever she says is pre-understood by the adult, and can be pre-
dicted. But at least the child is no longer another species, or a projected
representation of dangerous, split-off elements of the adult psyche.
Although the life cycle is still understood as linear and unidirectional, a
continuity between the life-phases of child and adult has been recog-
nized. Childhood is still understood as overcome in adulthood—unless
one is “neurotic,” in which case one is working on overcoming it—and
one does not enter into dialogue with what one has overcome. It is the
entry into the final child-rearing mode of this grand psychohistorical
narrative—the Empathic —which signals the onset of dialogue, for it is
here that the child—both the child within and the child before me—
becomes a catalyst for the adult’s developmental process. The Empathic
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adult, in recognizing “neurosis” as a normative human condition, turns

by necessity to childhood for purposes of self-reconstruction. Thus the
normative ideal emerges, decades after Freud but as a central aspect of
his legacy, of the mature or “realized” adult as the one who has
resolved his or her childhood through integrating it into her subjective
process rather than repressing it.
In the Empathic Mode, childhood is recognized as never overcome.
As deMause describes it, the Empathic adult, confronted with the child’s
instinctual expression—or as he states it, “the child who needs some-
thing”—is able “to regress to the level of the child’s need and identify
with it without an admixture of the adult’s own projections. The adult
must be able to maintain enough distance from the need to be able to
satisfy it.”79 The Empathic stance exemplifies the hermeneutical rela-
tion, in that the possibility for dialogue depends on a distanciation, fol-
lowed by a disappropriation of self or “moment of negativity” followed
by a “fusion of horizons,” resulting in reappropriation, or reconstruc-
tion of self. It is a dialogical relation in that it is undergone in mutual-
ity: in “regressing to the level of the child’s need,” the empathic adult is
undergoing the crossing of the boundaries of subjectivity of the discrete
self, and entering the transitional space of the “between” with the other,
or the space of what I will call the “intersubject.”
It is characteristic of the intersubject—as opposed to the discrete
subject in interpersonal fusion—that the boundaries are crossed but not
merged, melted, eradicated, or violated. The subject that recognizes
itself as plural—which understands its identity as part of an integrated,
field relationship with the other—enters a space in which what is mine
and what is yours, what is me and what is you, what I am responsible
for and what you are, do not so much collapse into each other as
become the subject for discourse and negotiation.
It is just because the adult can identify with the child and maintain
distance that she is able both to recognize and satisfy her needs. It is the
absence of this capacity for psychic distance that distinguishes Aries’,
Huizinga’s, Elias’ and deMause’s characterization of medieval, premod-
ern subjectivity. It is the hypertrophy of this psychic distance that char-
acterizes, not just Elias’ description of the separated, discrete self of
modernity, but the whole literature of alienation from the mid-nine-
teenth century on—from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Dostoievsky to
the sociological analysis of subjectivity initiated in Durkheim, and its
dramatic philosophical expression in the existentialist tradition of the
mid-twentieth century. In terms of the dialectical reconstruction of
Western subjectivity through historical time, homo clausus is a neces-
sary moment in the emergence of the postmodern intersubject. The
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latter retains the elements of advance gained in the modern Cartesian/

Kantian/Piagetian subject, while recuperating on another level what was
lost in the shift away from the premodern, collective, or “fused” sub-
ject. And the message of the evolutionary narrative of the child-rearing
modes is that it is the relationship with that unique other among
others—the child—upon which this dialectical reconstruction of subjec-
tivity on a broad historical-cultural level hinges. On this account, to
“regress to the level of the child’s need”—which is to reexperience child-
hood in some form—increases rather than erodes the emotional auton-
omy and the capacity to make distinctions between oneself and the
other that are the normative virtues of the modern adult. But it does so,
not at the expense of the other—not through objectifying her—but
through experiencing one’s own otherness. This is the form of alterity of
the postmodern subject.
The grand narrative of the six modes may seem a little less pre-
sumptive and historically naive to us—less of a myth and more of a
heuristic—if we don’t insist on a linear, unilateral reading. In fact it has
been suggested80 that all six modes—Infanticidal, Abandoning,
Ambivalent, Intrusive, Socializing, and Empathic—have always been
present in human culture, and that they undergo epochal decline and
resurgence. Each epoch defines one of the modes as normal, if not nec-
essarily normative. Nor does this more ahistorical interpretation neces-
sarily destroy the evolutionary implications of the theory, for it still
represents a directional movement away from a fused, projective rela-
tionship with childhood and toward a dialogical one. But the possibili-
ties for familial expression of the modes, not just across epoch, but
across variations in culture—and within culture, across variations in
context and situation—are numerous. Two parents could operate in
different modes, for example; or a person’s self-description as a
parent—her philosophy of childhood—could identify her as Intrusive,
but in critical situations she might operate empathically; or vice versa.
Or a parent might experience—and practice—all the modes throughout
his child-rearing years, depending on changing ideological persuasion,
the age of the child, the particular child in question, or all three of
these. Or a parent may experience a moment of conversion from one
mode to the other, especially as a reversal reaction to her own parents’
child-rearing mode. In addition, in our epoch, at least in the U.S., the
Intrusive, Socializing, and Empathic modes have evolved into ideologi-
cal positions in those culture wars that began in the late twentieth cen-
tury, and have become symbols for opposing beliefs about human
nature and of the role of change, conflict, freedom, order, desire,
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autonomy, and responsibility in various competing constructions of

optimum individual development and social thriving.
I have traced the history of the child’s marginalization in the mod-
ernist revolution of subjectivity, and the delegitimation of the child’s
way of knowing by the modernist worldview. This is not to deny that
the child has always been marginal, or that the tension between “adult”
and “child” has always been present in some degree in every culture, or
that in every age many adults have approached children dialogically, as
subjects.81 But the commonsense view, or “natural attitude” of adults,
which is based on real experience interpreted by culture, still instinc-
tively understands, and will probably always understand, childhood as
a rudimentary, imperfect, immature, relatively undeveloped form of
knowledge. Almost by definition, the child is seen in the context of the
not-child—of what it will grow into. Moreover the story of the child’s
marginalization is only one part of the larger story of the Western
“coming of age” in the person of the modern subject. For this coming
of age also meant a crisis in the meaning of adulthood, or otherwise
put, a crisis in subjectivity. Modernism, as a movement involving rapid,
transformative change, has been one continual identity crisis for its offi-
cial protagonist, the Euro-American adult. Beginning even in the mid-
seventeenth century, the teleology of adulthood expressed in Baconian
science, in the grave seriousness of reformed pietism, and the new idea
of adult civilité, had come to be seen as a prison of consciousness. The
Emile itself may be interpreted as inspired by Rousseau’s radical disaf-
fection with the adult society of his day, and a voice from a culture
aware of having reached a turning point in its development.82 For
Rousseau, the crisis is expressed in the conviction that one can no
longer be both “man” and “citizen.” The “citizen” must exclude nature
and the unconscious, both of which come increasingly to be associated
with childhood. Reappropriating nature and the unconscious is analo-
gous to reappropriating childhood, which thus becomes a powerful
symbol for that return to a fundamental form of psychological integra-
tion that constantly eludes the Western adult who, through accelerating
change and the modern reality principle, is increasingly cut off from his
internal sources. The child has come to symbolize, in Nandy’s words, “a
persistent, living, irrepressible criticism of our ‘rational’, ‘normal’,
‘adult’ visions of desirable societies.”83
In the deconstruction of modernism and the emergence of a new
form of subjectivity, the role of childhood—and, by implication, educa-
tion—in the human life-course has come to carry a new valance in cul-
tural process. This is signaled on the objective level, not just by the
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religious attachment of modern, state-controlled societies to the idea of

universal, compulsory, publicly funded schooling, but by the involvement
of children in the new global market economies that are fed and driven
by media imagery; by the emergence of the child soldier—and child casu-
alties—in ethnic, religious, and regional wars; by the increasingly early
introduction of children to sexual discourses, also a result of globalized
media imagery and narrative; and by the ever-emerging, ever-retarded
children’s rights movement in Western societies. In none of these cases
does the child have a voice—but neither does the young adult, or the
retiree, or the businessman, or the parents of young children, all of
whom are also the statistical targets of calculated marketing strategies
and identity traps. In the “transparent society” of media-constructed
globalism, the child is just another player. This is the “disappearance of
childhood” predicted in the late twentieth century. Pessimistically speak-
ing, it is just one aspect of the end of the human as we have known it—
or the increasing assimilation of the human by the technologies it has
created. Optimistically speaking, it is a dialectical moment of deconstruc-
tion of the human as we have known it, in the interests of a recon-
structed subjectivity. Still optimistically speaking, the role of the child in
this reconstruction promises the reconstruction of child rearing and edu-
cation, which, in turn, promises social and cultural reconstruction.
Chapter 4 will further explore the move past the modern subject for pur-
poses of finding and delineating in Chapter 5, a practical form of educa-
tion—a school—which would allow for this double promise.
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 105
Childhood and the Intersubject
The most highly developed earthly man . . . is the highest

synthetic degree of the child.
—Novalis1
Boundary Work
Homo clausus fell slowly apart over the course of the twentieth century.
The urges and tendencies that led to his deconstruction came from
many quarters. The rise and ascendancy of evolutionary theory refor-
mulated Western notions of personal/cultural development and change.
The Freudian revolution coincided with the rise of multiple visions of
selfhood through the findings of cultural anthropology, which in turn
emerged from the ever-increasing intervisibility of cultures that followed
the explosion of travel and communications technologies. That explo-
sion has now resulted in a transformed information environment. The
silent, logical cosmos of print—the cosmos of the discrete self—is rap-
idly giving way to the new electronic, digitized cosmos of binary code.
The new information world is as dramatically new as was the
world of the book for the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is different
because it is a more plural world—where digital and analogical (of both
voice and picture and printed word) modes meet and mix, but above all
where space and time are overcome in the simulacrum, the representa-
tion, or the “virtual.” Now the cultural experience of subjectivity and
intersubjectivity is both immediate and removed: self is here and there,
other is there and here. One is everywhere and nowhere.
105
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 106
The new information environment allows us to understand in a

new way the extent to which subjectivity itself is a virtual reality—
dependent on fantasy, projection and introjection of “unreal” contents,
and hypothesis-testing—constructed as an ongoing project that travels
across intersubjective boundaries, whose systemic properties include
both self and other: an intersubject. As the modern, technologically
mediated subject travels across boundaries of physical time and space
with telephone and video and satellite and airplane and automobile,
both cultural time and space and the internal, psychological time and
space of the individual are in analogous situations of transgressive rela-
tions. The new time-space constructed by technology creates correspon-
ding discourses of intersubjectivity and subjectivity. Although these
discourses are generated by a certain class and economic group, their
proliferation is a planetary phenomenon, for wherever this information
environment touches, it creates a new situation of intervisibility.
The effects of this latest technologically induced revolution in con-
sciousness can be mapped in widening or narrowing concentric circles,
depending on whether one starts with the macro or the micro level. If
we start with the macro, the changes first appear on the geopolitical
and macroeconomic levels, then on the national level and within its
institutions, then in the subcultures within nations, then in the life of
the community, in relationships within subgroups in the community, in
the family, in relations between individuals in public and in private
spheres, and in the individual’s understanding of herself and her relation
to her immediate and far world, both in terms of possibilities for and
constraints on individual thriving. The concern here is not so much to
analyze these multiple levels, or the ways in which the new transcendent
time-space created by the information revolution affects each, as to con-
sider how the last two levels—the subjective and the intersubjective—
are affected, and what is the role of childhood in culture and society in
mediating whatever changes result.
The factors contributing to the ongoing historical reconstruction of
subjectivity are causally overdetermined. The self in any given historical
period or culture is a product, not just of the information environment,
but of a multiplicity of other discourses—including cultural, economic,
sexual, familial, political, scientific, demographic, and educational.
While the bases of subjectivity are given in lived experience—in the
experience of the body, the phenomena of perception, the expression
and the vicissitudes of genetic predispositions, and the coherent sedi-
mentation of intersubjective experience—historically mediated processes
determine which elements of lived subjectivity are emphasized and
which are deemphasized by any given culture during any given period.
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Childhood and the Intersubject 107
One major dimension of the cultural construction of subjectivity—

and one that is particularly sensitive to changes in the information envi-
ronment—has to do with the extent to which the structure and
experience of self is implicitly understood as part of a field structure
that includes other selves, or whether the subject is considered as an
atom, or discrete unit. Once we loosen the modern Western middle-class
notion of a discreet, clearly boundaried self and understand subjectivity
as a field phenomenon, we can interpret the relation between the ele-
ments of the field in different ways. As described in the psychosocial
metaphor of cognitive field theory, elements of the field can be field-
dependent or field-independent. Whatever the collective construct, field-
dependence or field-independence varies along individual lines: persons
are more or less constitutionally liable to the influence of others and to
the psychological whole of a given moment or situation. But cultures
also emphasize field-dependence or independence as normative styles of
self-understanding and interaction.
Field-dependent styles are associated with traditional, collectivist
cultures, and field-independence with modern or “atomized” cultures.2
Traditional cultures are associated with an oral information environ-
ment, and modern ones with literacy. The new information environment
may be thought of as a dialectical reconstruction of the two in a third
form that integrates orality and literacy—the medieval and the
modern—in new ways. The new information environment is con-
structed on digital code, like the literate, but is instantaneous, personal-
ized, spontaneous, and interactive like the oral. Like the literate, it is
representational and removed from immediate interpersonal contact,
but like the oral, its speed and impression of simultaneity make of it an
experience of psychological immediacy. Like the oral, it is global—it
represents the world as one interactive present whole—but like the liter-
ate, that whole is entirely mediated by the individual—I have only to
disconnect the telephone or videophone, turn off the television, or log
off the Internet to be returned to my atomized state. It does not so
much erode the personal boundaries of the modern middle-class subject
as virtualize them, so that they can interpenetrate in new ways. A new
sort of play with boundaries presents itself as a possibility.
Like the dweller in a large contemporary city, the postmodern sub-
ject is completely dependent on huge coordinated systems for the most
basic elements of survival: food, water, energy, waste disposal, trans-
portation, and communication. Yet he or she is isolated in the midst of
this space, which is designed for separate, atomized, independent
units—ensconced in crate-like buildings islanded between geometrically
laid-out streets, inhabitable only by automobiles, which don’t dwell in
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the space, but are only continually passing through it. In a society that
is moving over the boundaries of the classical “modern,” the elements
of the collective are so inextricably interdependent that one saboteur
could bring down the whole system, yet each individual unit of the
system lives as if it were a completely independent individual.
Whether this is a real or only apparent paradox, the contradiction
between the individual and the collective of modernism is now reaching
a dialectical moment of crisis, which is both triggered and expressed
through the technological development of the new kind of time-space of
media, and the new information environment that results from this
development. Now, wherever there is a camera or a modem connected
to the vast planetary network of fiber-optic cable, a rapidly increasing
number of subjects can be “there” through the simulacrum of sound
and image. This new collective dimension is constructed on the basis of
the subject’s lived space and time, but is in fact a transcendent space-
time continuum. As a space, it represents omni-presence, the possibility
of being everywhere at once, which also means being nowhere in partic-
ular; temporally, it abolishes the past, and makes every representation a
now, which also implies never. As such, it produces, as Gianni Vattimo
has suggested, “a generalized cultural contamination in a world which
no longer offers a sharp split between subject and object, sameness and
otherness, or fiction and truth.”3 The relationship between individual
and collective constructed by the new information environment con-
founds subjectivity itself. One can only appear in an Internet chat room,
for example, through connecting with the collective virtual field; but
one’s appearance, unlike an appearance in the space of preliterate oral-
ity, is not an appearance at all. The I that appears is by definition a rep-
resentation, and as such a “play self”—a self of infinite possibilities,
none of them realizable except virtually, in the realm of “as if.” Tech-
nology has developed a new way for persons to be present to each other
in space and time.
From one point of view, the virtual social space of the chat room is
one in which I can undertake the chief project of the subject-in-process,
which is to resolve, through the play of my relations with the world and
the other, the internal contradictions of my own subjectivity, as part of a
process of continual reconstruction. Like the subjective play space of
the young child, it is transitional, in the sense that it offers a reconfigu-
ration of the subjective and objective poles of experience—a bridge
between primary and secondary process, desire and reality. And it is
itself an organon, a subject. It replaces the previous subjective organons
of the family, the tribe, and the nation. As the former organons bound
subjects together in a larger subjectivity, the larger subject in this case is
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 109
the whole species. Virtual space is planetary hyperspace, where anybody

can play.
On the other hand, this is a space in which the subject virtually dis-
appears. The self, assimilated to its own representations, becomes a
proxy of its own self-representation in anonymous cyberspace. In this
case, the subject is, as Jean Baudrillard claims, “absolutely alienated in
its sovereignty,” in “the malefic curvature which puts an end to the
horizon of meaning.” He calls this “the irruption of the obscene.”4 The
self can play, but the stakes have become meaningless and without issue,
and quickly devolve into obsessive, narcissistic play, reinforced by the
narcissistic goals of other players. In the world of the obscene there is
only surface, and all relationships are commodified. The distinction
between the commodified intersubjectivity of the marketplace and that
of the private world of relations is blurred or confused, especially in a
“service” economy. Intimacy haunts the world of hyper-reality like a
possibility just recently lost, or a disappearing dimension. Or is it a new
kind of intimacy emerging?
The contradiction presented here is not created by the information
environment, but triggered by it. Technology changes consciousness, but
it does not change consciousness into any form that is not already a
possibility of consciousness, for it is consciousness that produces—
expresses and develops—itself through technology. The possibilities it
presents are and always have been risks as well, for any technological
reification is capable of reversing the process of development and reify-
ing the reifier in its own image—hence Jean-Francois Lyotard’s intima-
tion that the developmental trajectory of humanity is one of
complexification toward the “inhuman,” or the machine.5 But it could
also be argued that the mutual influence between technology and
human subjectivity is part of an ontological process as old as the species
itself; and that with each technological development, we are confronted
more directly with the question of the relation between genetics or
“instinct” and culture in the construction of subjectivity, and that this
confrontation is a fruitful one.
There are certain fundamental issues of human social existence—
the most obvious of which are the related ones of sexuality and child
rearing—for which the possibility that culture might change or over-
come biologically determined tendencies suggests the most profound
implications for human thriving—even, in an age of weapons of mass
destruction, for species survival. The question of human subjectivity
itself is also such an issue: is it a historical phenomenon, and if so, to
what degree? What can and cannot change about human “nature”?
This evokes the question asked earlier: if empathic parenting requires a
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 110
new sort of adult subjectivity, and if a new sort of adult subjectivity can
only be produced by empathic parenting, then where does or can
change enter the system?
Another major dimension of the cultural construction of subjectiv-
ity, also related to field theory, has to do with the unicity or plurality of
the components of human selfhood, and by implication the extent to
which the self is or is not understood as constituted by otherness. In a
field theory of selfhood, the subject includes its alters, or the other
selves—both internal and external—with which it is in relation, whether
at the moment or as a result of past relations, as well as the collective
subject, whether that be defined in terms of family, clan, tribe, nation,
species, genus, or cosmos. Historically, even discrete theories of the self
include internal plurality, whereas a field theory assumes plurality both
within and across subjective boundaries. Plato’s basic Indoeuropean for-
mulation included, as we have seen, three components—reason
(logikos), the passionate or the “spirited element” (thumos), and
instinctual desire (epithumia)—and the successful self-structure was
understood as a necessarily imposed hierarchical unity among the three.
Aristotle’s permutation of Plato’s theory of self is an organic, biologistic
one, but retains its hierarchical structure. Both are subjective structures
that are held in place by reason, or, as Aristotle defined it, the “execu-
tive” function. Neither are dialectical models—that is, neither assume a
transformative or reconstructive interplay between the plural elements
of the self, but rather are based on an integrative model of a coming
into a unitary or harmonic situation of internal “right relation.”
Plato’s theory of self does take intersubjectivity into account in an
interesting way. As given to us in the Republic, the internal elements of
the self are, as we have seen, writ large in the “natural” elements of
social and political configuration. The appetitive or instinct-determined
element is represented by the lower classes of agriculturalists and crafts-
men and tradesmen—the producers (the “iron”). The level of passion or
spirited will is represented by a warrior class (“silver”), and reason by
an intellectual ruling class (“gold”). Here internal relations reflect and
are reflected by external ones, and vice versa, but the task of subjectiv-
ity is not so much to develop or transform or to create itself as it is to
find its place in the larger cosmic order of intrinsic human character
and function. This, for Plato, represents dikaiosune—“justice,” “moral-
ity,” or “well-being,” life lived in right relation with one’s own nature.
It assumes, as already pointed out, relations of hierarchical domination,
not just within the polis, but within the individual. The states and activ-
ities that tend to push or displace subjectivity toward change, transfor-
mation, and development—childhood, myth, and experimental art—are
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 111
dangerous for this form of subjectivity, for they trigger inquiry and
dialectical change, which almost by definition represents error, danger,
and social disintegration.
Plato’s is a field-self to the extent that each internal dimension is
represented externally, and vice versa. Although I may be a genetically
determined member of the class of “iron,” there is a “gold” dimension
within me, and I leave that dimension to be expressed externally
through those who are genetically “gold.” If I am gold, then the iron
part of myself is an alter, and so on. Whichever class I am a member of,
I live in a social world in which members of the two other classes
express genetically two elements of myself which I don’t. In this part-
whole relation, I see the disciplinary structure that is the normative
ideal of my own subjectivity displayed and worked out in the larger
social, political, and economic fabric. This suggests—albeit in a mythic
formulation—a complicated situation of alterity, but a clearly demar-
cated and ritualized one.
Aristotle’s implicit theory of subjectivity is based, not on a set of
correspondences between the micro and the macro, the individual and
society, but on an organismic, biological metaphor. Lower and higher
forms are here represented as a developmental chain of being reaching
from the vegetative soul to the animal soul to the human, all drawn
toward an omega point by the unmoved mover, the teleological both
origin and endpoint of an ultimately concentric cosmos. As Plato’s
philosopher king has the lower functions of spirited will and appetite
within, so Aristotle’s man has the vegetative and the animal souls within
him, and in a similar hierarchical relation. But Aristotle’s formulation
implies change and development, if only implicitly: the movement from
vegetative to animal to human implies both an evolutionary and a
developmental path. And the three categories are in a nesting hierar-
chy—each controls the one below it, not through demanding obedience,
but through sublating it.6
Plato’s and Aristotle’s are founding theoretical models of self in the
Western tradition—first and enduring formulations. They were carried
forward in a practical, applied way by the Stoic/Epicurean tradition,
associated with the rise of pan-Hellenism through the vehicle of
empire—both Alexandrian and Roman—where they were cashed in in
the form of techniques and attitudes designated as “care of the self.”
Care of the self implies what Foucault called “technologies of the self.”
This second term is a semantic intensification of the first that captures
this crucial moment in the evolution of the Western subject in which the
Platonic/Aristotelian self turned on itself with tools—the private diary,
the daily meditation during which one accounts for one’s thoughts and
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actions, the daily walk, the ritual of self-admonition.7 The Stoic/Epi-

curean self became its own therapist or pastor. The relation between
reason and desire was constructed as a structural transcendence within
the subject: a space, a split, a distance had opened in the self.
In Plato’s utopia, the tripartite subject was ruled both intra- and
intersubjectively by the philosopher king. In the real world of Hellenis-
tic cosmopolitanism—a world of cultural boundary crossings and emer-
gent social change—the philosopher king lost his fantasied city state
and was left with only himself to rule. He became everyman (with, of
course, emphasis on “man”). Even the slave had the potential for exer-
cising the psychotechnology of the care of the self, for Stoic subjectivity
had begun to escape its class determinism and to standardize on the
new “world citizen” class of empire (in Stoic terms, the “empire” of
cosmos itself). Understood in this sense, the Stoic subject was a precur-
sor of the rising middle-class subject of modernism identified in Chapter
3. He was also, as characterized by Hegel, the moment in the history of
Western subjectivity of the rise of “unhapy consciousness,” a frag-
mented self polarized between finitude and infinitude. Hegel said of the
Stoic/Skeptic formulation, “one is driven back in himself, should find
satisfaction in himself. In this independence, this rigidity of being-with-
self, this accord with himself, one is to find happiness; one should rest
in this abstract, present, self-conscious inwardness.”8
The operationalization of the Platonic subject in Stoicism repre-
sents self as a structure characterized by potentially dangerous and alien
distances, by internal relations of potential obsession and polarization,
by the recognition of alterity—of otherness within—and above all as a
problem. In this humanistic formulation, self is not a problem to be
eradicated through flight to an absolute, to a collective, or through col-
onization in a class structure like the iron or the silver or the gold that
determines its expectations and possibilities, but through an ongoing
inquiry. The technologies of the self are not just therapeutic but psycho-
analytic: one understands oneself as an experiment, a project, and as
capable of reconstruction. An open dialogue between reason and desire
had not yet been initiated, but the structure necessary for that dialogue
had: the Greco-Roman self had unfused and differentiated both from
the collective and within itself. Internally, it had become an interlocutive
community. Externally, it had moved toward field-independence—a
movement that would only be completed with the reprise of this form
of subjectivity in European modernism in homo clausus.
Historically, the Stoic self was both a trigger for and a reaction to
the emergent historical change in the individual-collective relation from
field dependence to field independence. The emergence of an “individu-
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alistic upsurge and the social and political process that would have
detached individuals from their traditional affiliations” during the
period of late Roman Empire9 is a historical pattern that we also find
associated with the rise of middle-class individualism in the European
early-modern period, and which in late-modern Western culture reaches
crisis proportions, in paradoxical, inverse relationship with economic,
technological, and infrastructural field-dependence.
In Stoicism and then Christianity, the modern Western discrete
individual was, if not born, at least announced. From our perspective, it
was a male patriarchal/adultist and colonialist individual. It colonized
within as it colonized without. Those rejected and manipulated ele-
ments of selfhood that were projected onto the slave, the woman, and
the child were—as is evidenced by the very fact of their projection—ele-
ments that represented danger to the ruling element of reason, and
therefore led to the attempt to dominate those elements, both within the
self and outside it. The Stoic subject, like the modern, was in a relation-
ship of what twentieth-century psychoanalysts, following Freud’s refor-
mulation of subjectivity, would later call “splitting” with desire, or the
“passions”—“the irrational power within us which refuses to obey
reason.”10
It would take a further deconstruction of subjectivity, arrived at
dialectically through a developmental process of distanceiation and sub-
sequent dialogue, before the projections were in a position to be with-
drawn—or, more accurately, to enter awareness as internal elements of
the psyche rather than as unambiguous and socially enforced “facts”
about the alien or different other. In fact in the traditional Western his-
torical narrative, the emergent discrete individual of late antiquity dis-
appeared along with the Roman Empire, and, as part of empire’s
dissolution, retreated into Christian monasticism, where it percolated in
ritualized isolation as the “dark ages” swept Europe. In the psychologi-
cal hothouse of the monastery, care of the self became an obsessive self-
scrutiny, in which Platonic reason was associated with the gaze of God,
or the absolute. The monastery was the moment of the new, private
self’s retreat from the world altogether, polarizing the promiscuous
sociability and characteristic field-dependent subjectivity of emerging
“barbarian” medieval Europe.
In Freudian terms, both Stoic and modern middle-class subjectivity
put ego in a new relationship with the other elements of the psyche. The
Stoic subject discovered the superego, the watcher within, who became
both the analyst and the judge of the new, problematized self. Subjectiv-
ity becomes a puzzle, an unfamiliar and sometimes treacherous territory
characterized by blind spots and obscurities, and subject to paradoxical
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and half-explained relations. Implicit even in ancient Stoicism is a

recognition of the “unconscious,” a dimension of subjectivity that
would become the major element in Freud’s reconstruction two millen-
nia later. The unconscious is associated with the body, not just because
consciousness is in a relationship of transcendence with the body, but
because body is the zone in which conscious and unconscious meet. As
Foucault describes Stoic practices, “. . . the focus of attention in these
practices of the self is the point where the ills of the body and those of
the soul can communicate with one another and exchange their dis-
tresses: where the bad habits of the soul can entail physical miseries,
while the excesses of the body manifest and maintain the failings of the
soul.”11 This description in fact prefigures the Freudian discourse of
defense mechanisms and neuroses.
The progressive development of the socially separated, discrete self,
internally divided and characterized by relations of splitting, domina-
tion/subordination and projection, had another, post-Platonic formula-
tion—in fact a radicalization—in Descartes (1596–1650), who provided
a founding metaphor for modern subjectivity. The Cartesian subject,
which interplays with the two other major modernist formulations of
Locke and Hume, corresponded with the crystallization of the repressed
modern adult subject discussed as a psychohistorical phenomenon in
Chapter 3. Here Plato’s reason—“the intellect,” the “thinking thing”—
separated itself completely from the other two functions, which were in
turn polarized by being completely associated with the body, which was
understood as the seat of the “passions.” Reason, the res cogito, was
rendered a metaphysical substance inhabiting the body—or res extensa,
the “extended thing”—as a “ghost in the machine,” a dimension of per-
manent, ontological transcendence.
Descartes’ construct is arrived at through the founding modernist
project of complete and radical cognitive doubt, a clearing of the decks
of anything but the evidence of the senses, combined with a developing
experimental method and a strict logic of the excluded middle. But at
this moment of what appears to be radical reevaluation, Platonic subjec-
tivity was in fact recapitulated with a vengeance. Descartes reappropri-
ated the ancient technologies of the self—in fact his Meditations could be
read as a post-Stoic prologomena to the modern application of those
technologies. The struggle between reason and desire—the “flesh,” the
“passions”—now became a struggle between the rational soul, the res
cogitans, which he understands as a unity, and the body. Plato’s formula-
tion was reduced from a tripartite to a dual, binary relationship.
Seen in terms of the history of Western subjectivity, Cartesian
mind-body dualism is a novel synthesis of Christian and Platonic/Stoic
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formulations. Descartes’ polarization between body and “soul”/reason

appropriated St. Paul’s deadly struggle between the “flesh” and the
“spirit”/logos (the element of transcendence) and assimilated it to the
theory and practice of Stoic “care of the self.” The result was an inter-
nal polarization more decisive than either the Christian or the Stoic, a
radicalization of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, and an intensification
of dialectical tension. At this moment, modern homo clausus had
already entered his crisis: subjectivity in a condition of internal polariza-
tion so extreme that it was poised for transformation. But if we follow
Hegel’s Romantic narrative of the dialectic, it represented a necessary
next step in the historical journey of human subjectivity, and as such an
advance.
Read as a precursor to its own deconstruction, Descartes’ bifurca-
tion between mind/soul and body/desire was a last statement of the Pla-
tonic/Stoic/Christian self. As is characteristic of dialectical processes,
deconstruction is initiated even as the formulation to be deconstructed
emerges. Hume (1711–1776) went immediately to work: he bracketed
any metaphysics of self whatsoever and undertook a consideration of
subjectivity as pure immanence, in which he purposed simply to
describe and explain the experience of self. The latter is dispersed into
experience: a “theater” of impressions and ideas—“that succession of
perceptions which we call self”—linked in associative contingency by
relations of “resemblance, continguity and causation.”12 Hume rejects
any normatively derived conflict between higher or lower elements of
the self, and thereby de-hierarchizes the experience of subjectivity. His is
perhaps the first purely psychological approach to the subject. And
although he speaks from a radically individualist framework, he could
be said to introduce the first loosening of the chief characteristic of the
modernist self—the clear boundaries of homo clausus. Hume enters the
immanence of experience to the point where in his phenomenology of
consciousness, the distinction between the experiencer and the experi-
enced becomes, not so much ambiguous as not completely relevant. It is
this loosening or bracketing of the boundaries that will lead out of the
impasse of unhappy consciousness. It is preliminary to the reconstruc-
tion of the field to include both subject and world, self and other that
would emerge almost two centuries later.
The social and cultural influences leading to the deconstruction of
homo clausus are multiple and in a relationship of mutual causation,
and can be traced speculatively through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries in any number of discourses—whether scientific, political, eco-
nomic, technological, artistic, philosophical, cultural, demographic,
familial, or sexual. In particular, the rapid ascent of the evolutionary
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metaphor in the latter half of the nineteenth century made of it a show-

case for new images of subjectivity. It was (and is) a metaphor based on
biology, and thus a materialistic one. Its most compelling and over-
reaching construct—the “organism”—provided the ground for field and
systems theory. This main protagonist of the evolutionary narrative
stands for anything from an amoeba to Einstein. But the idea of an
organism apart from an environment that supports, shapes, and is
shaped by it, is by definition unthinkable: the boundaries between
organism and environment cannot be thought of apart from the whole
they represent. During the first half of the twentieth century, self-theory
in various philosophical and scientific discourses adopted and opera-
tionalized this model as the metaphysical foundation of the new disci-
plines of psychology and sociology. Wertheimer’s “gestalt,” Piaget’s
equilibrative structures, Dewey’s “transactionalism,” Lewin’s field
theory and Merleau-Ponty’s “chiasm” are all emblematic of the new
impossibility of thinking the self apart from a ground and an interlocu-
tor that it both is and is not. The dialectical prelude to the late-twenti-
eth-century shift to a poststructuralist formulation of the subject was
the subject’s temporary disappearance in any classical sense of the term
“self.” In behaviorism, for example, the self as agent vanishes alto-
gether, or as more than one particularly reactive element of a field in
continual disturbance, shift, and reorganization.
The Ego Dethroned
The disappearance of the self into the larger structures of which it is a

part that characterizes behaviorism and even gestalt theory is a correc-
tive excess. Freud deconstructed the subject differently, by dethroning
the Platonic executive function—the ego—and introducing a new form
of transcendence or “logos” in the form of the Unconscious. Freud’s
overall formulation resembles Plato’s—the notion of a multipartite self,
with relations of tension, conflict, and negotiation between the parts.
The difference is that, first, he de-hierarchizes the elements—ego, id,
and superego—and sets them in relations of mutual intersection and, at
least potentially, dialogue. Ego is the closest thing to Plato’s reason, but
ego has elements of the unconscious, from which it in fact emerges
under the inexorable influence of the reality principle. It is shadowed by
the superego, which, although it presents itself as the rational “con-
science,” is characterized by obsessive and automatistic—that is, irra-
tional—tendencies. Furthermore, as the “voice within,” superego is
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 117
someone else’s voice, an introject of parents or culturally sanctioned

“oughts.” Superego is “reason,” but someone else’s.
In Freud, ego is not, like Plato’s reason, the “smallest part” that, in
a realized self, must rule the larger, more unruly parts. Rather, ego is an
embattled, often compromised negotiator, a classic harried middleman
between the urgent and fundamental demands of id and the cold statis-
tical world of the reality principle. Where ego can, it allows desire its
search for gratification. But where and when it can pursue that search is
carefully monitored by the superego, whose criteria for judgment are
introjects—“tapes” that play automatically when anxiety is triggered.
The Freudian is a form of reason that seeks not the purity of the eidoi
or “forms” as templates for noble imposition on will and desire, but
rather a livable balance between the invisible but ever-present forces of
desire and the prevailing reality principle. Freud’s subject is, in other
words, an evolutionary one, modeled on an organism-in-environment in
a process of continual equilibrative adaptation, ultimately identified nei-
ther with primary nor secondary processes, but with their shifting rela-
tion. Perhaps because of his clinical emphasis, Freud leaves to others the
question of the cultural and historical variation possible in the relations
between the pleasure principle and the reality principle—that is, the
extent to which the organism changes its environment even in the
process of adapting to it. The possibility that “reality” is finally, in the
social realm anyway, a collective construct and therefore something that
can change, is even more implicit in the interactionisms of Piaget and
Dewey, and becomes explicit in Freud’s left-leaning followers, whether
post-Marxists like Marcuse, sex-radicals like Wilhelm Reich, or Roman-
tics like N.O. Brown. But in fact it is just this possibility of a cultural-
historical alteration in the relations between the pleasure principle and
the reality principle—of a new instinctual economy—which makes of
the experience of childhood and the attitudes and practices of child
rearing a key element in social change.
Compared to Plato’s formulation, Freuds’ superego is both reason—
but some mixture of logikos and an irrational, introjected form of
“reason” as moral demand—and thumos, or spirited will. It is the ele-
ment of self that attempts to regulate the ego’s negotiations between the
pleasure principle and the reality principle—a “watcher,” but a frozen
watcher, whose categories of judgment are ideals and prohibitions the
source of which is an incalculable mixture of self and introjected others,
or, in psychoanalytic parlance, “self objects.” And as the superego is
reason inflated by irrational and rationalized feeling, so the unconscious,
associated with Plato’s epithumia or pure desire for gratification, is not
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just subrational as Plato held it to be, but—in Freud—also super-

rational. Dreams are the language of the unconscious, and the logical
structure of this language does not base its operations on the classical
Aristotelian elements of identity, negation, and the law of contradiction;
yet the dream could be said to be the most complex, sophisticated, and
creative narrative of which humans are capable, and that without even
trying. In this sense, the unconscious represents a “higher” reason, some-
thing it would take Jung’s further development of Freudian theory to
make clear. For Jung, the unconscious is that element of subjectivity that
connects to the transpersonal, archetypal dimension usually associated
with the realms of mythology and spirituality, and thus represents the
very highest form of Platonic reason—noesis, or intuitive reason, knowl-
edge immediately apprehended rather than arrived at through instrumen-
tal reason, or logistikos.13
Freud took the three fundamental dimensions of Plato’s subject and
bent, stretched, and mixed them. Each dimension embodies mixed
modalities of reason and desire, the rational and the irrational. He ren-
dered ambiguous and ambivalent the cleanly separated, ranked, and
hierarchized elements of Plato’s tripartite soul. Above all he altered the
relations of power among them—and it should be remembered that for
Plato, relations of power within individuals are isomorphic with rela-
tions of power between classes, and, by extension, between persons. For
Plato, there is only one, strictly hierarchical structure of right relation
among the three dimensions—any other leads to personal and social
disorder. Reason must rule the “lower” functions. This commonsense
assumption of the necessity for an executive function in the composite
self is present in Freud as well: the ego must rule. Yet in Freud’s system,
and in his actual accounts of the subjective experience of his interlocu-
tors, ego cannot rule. Freud comes to homo clausus with the disturbing
message—a message that seems to throw the whole project of “Western
Civilization” into doubt—that “the ego is not master in its own house.”
Its presumption to rule desire is reduced to just that—a presumption. In
order to control desire, it must revert to what he calls the “mechanisms
of defense”—projection, reaction formation, sublimation, rationaliza-
tion, displacement, regression, and so on.
Yet even though ego is no longer master, and can control only
through compromise and even self-deception, and although the uncon-
scious from which it developed as an organizing principle is as multiple
and ubiquitous and ineluctable as nature itself, yet for Freud it must
rule, even if it cannot rule well. The psychoanalytic method Freud
founded is the late modern counterpart of the Stoic technologies of the
self. In describing it, he still employs the militant Platonic vocabulary:
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“Psychoanalysis is the instrument to enable the ego to achieve a pro-

gressive conquest of the id.”14 But it is the language of an erstwhile con-
queror on the verge of truce and negotiation, for he knows very well
that any final “conquest of the id” represents the personal and social
equivalent of an Orwellian dystopia. Freud, as Nietzsche had done
before him and as Max Weber was doing in the same generation,
deconstructed Western rationalism by demonstrating its ambiguous
underside—its alters, polarizations, shadow images, splits, compartmen-
talizations, and projections. The dystopia of reason had in fact already
arrived by Freud’s—and Weber’s and Kafka’s—time in the modern hege-
monic, bureaucratized state and its various institutions. By the end of
the twentieth century, the most naive of college students, in encounter-
ing Plato’s Republic, reads it instinctively as a futurist nightmare. Freud,
like Nietzsche and Weber, is engaged in an analysis of the fall of West-
ern reason and its shifting role in the construction of subjectivity. He
shows the inseparability of the rational and the irrational. But he also
maintains a classical view of the subject as homo clausus, although he
opens the door, through his description of what he calls “object rela-
tions”—patterns of projective and introjective relations between self
and other—to a dismantling or a revision of the boundaries of self-other
and self-world. This opening of the boundaries between subjects will
lead to the subject-in-process, or the intersubject.
Freud wrote the first act of the historical drama of subjectivity of
the twentieth century. It is the story of the deconstruction of Hegel’s
unhappy consciousness, and the major players are the ego, its taskmas-
ter the superego, and the id, which is an expression of nature and the
unconscious. The ego/superego is in a relationship of estrangement from
and attempted domination of—through a series of progressively rear-
guard actions—the id/unconscious, which continually takes its revenge
for its exclusion, and comes increasingly to represent the marginalized
transcendent. This drama introduces what Jung in his later writings
would call the “dethronement” of the ego, which he associated with the
beginning of the process of reconstruction of self that leads to individu-
ation in the emergence of the Self. The Self in his formulation is that
subjective superstructure in which conscious and unconscious elements
are no longer polarized, and are reconstellated as interconnecting, inter-
communicative dimensions of a whole with no hegemonic executive
command center, but rather a set of shifting relations governed by a
transpersonal, teleological whole.15 Jung carried forward the mediation
between conscious and unconscious, reason and desire, finite and infi-
nite, personal and transpersonal, identity and otherness, which Freud
had—however reluctantly—initiated. In so doing he rejoined the great
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spiritual traditions of both east and west, which understand self-realiza-

tion as the reconstruction of subjectivity that follows on the deconstruc-
tion of an ego-dominated subjective and intersubjective economy.
The Emergence of the Intersubject
The ontological basis for the move from discrete subject to intersubject
had already been initiated in the paradigm change introduced by Dar-
winian evolutionary thought, which implicitly redefined organism and
environment—or self and world—as a unity, and their relationship as
interactive, mutually determinative, and in constant equilibrative trans-
formation. With the emergence of gestalt psychology, field and systems
theory—already more fully developed in physics—entered the realm of
the human subject, and initiated a new subject-world, self-other bound-
ary condition, which in turn has gradually redefined our notions of sub-
jectivity and intersubjectivity. Gestalt theory implicitly understands the
self as a form better defined as an organism than, as was implicit in the
ancient Platonic tripartite model, a discrete unit, or in Descartes, a spir-
itual entity. Self-as-organism has different kinds of boundaries than self-
as-unit. First, it is permeable, in interactive exchange with what it
shares boundaries with. It moves and reshapes as the boundaries of the
other do. It takes its definition from the other as well as giving the other
its definition. Its boundaries are irregular and continually shifting, and
those shifts are determined by the need for survival and mastery, or
equilibration of structures, or “integrity”—if by that term is understood
a state in which internal/subjective and external/intersubjective subsys-
tems are in a state of integration—which in turn means that they have a
dynamic functional balance, and are not in so much disjunction that
they threaten both the organism and the environment, or self and other.
From a field- and systems-theory perspective, the self is in contin-
ual negotiation with the other and the situation in which it finds itself
with the other, working to define itself as a diverse unity. It is both an
individual and part of a whole structure that is more than the sum of its
parts—a borderline phenomenon, which takes its identity from the
selves with which it shares boundaries as much as from some individual
teleological principle within itself. The subject-in-process is defined as
much by this border or boundary-work—the history and process of its
relations with its margins and interfaces—as by an idea of an internal
structure, or core. In its developmental vicissitudes, the subject’s bound-
aries are explored, probed, pushed against, raised, taken down,
adjusted, and so on, in a continual process of transformation.
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In contrast to the images of positive transformation or balance or

thriving of the self that we find in classical formulations—images based
on metaphors of distancing, exclusion, compartmentalization, hierar-
chy, and control—the images associated with the development of the
intersubject are metaphors of interlocution, conversation, transgression,
and dialogue. The psychoanalytic process itself was constructed by
Freud in the form of a conversation between the elements or dimensions
of the self, mediated by and interweaving with a conversation between
patient and analyst. The therapist is not just an expert, but, through
what psychoanalysis calls the “transference,” a paradigmatic other—
both an interlocutor and a partner chosen for purposes of playing out
the field-relations both within the self and between self and other. The
therapeutic setting is a transitional space, like the play space of the
child, or the space of religious ritual or theater or art or revel or eroti-
cism—or, as I will argue in Chapter 5, of education.
In the transitional space, the default boundaries between inner and
outer are deconstructed in such a way that internal and external reality
interplay, are negotiated, mediated, and reconstructed. Here the other is
experienced both as an independent object in relation to my ego and as
a selfobject, or a part of my own self-system. The selfobject is experi-
enced as an “introject,” or as part of my subjective structure. The origi-
nal selfobject is the primary significant other of the infant—typically the
mother—and is introjected, not as a discrete individual, but as “a class
of psychological functions pertaining to the maintenance, restoration
and transformation of self-experience.”16 In later relationships, the self-
object is projected onto the other. So the selfobject is neither self nor
other, but “the subjective aspect of a self-sustaining function performed
by a relationship of self to objects [i.e., others] who by their presence or
activity evoke and maintain the self and the experience of selfhood.”17
The presence of the selfobject is, according to “self psychology”—which
emerged from object relations theory in the second half of the twentieth
century—essential to the infant’s construction of a viable transitional
space. It is the existence of this transitional space and the play within it
whereby “integrity” in the sense used above—that is, a satisfactory rela-
tionship between the internal and external elements of the subjective-
intersubjective system—is negotiated.
From the point of view of the intersubject, children and adults are
both beings in continual process of development. The second half of the
twentieth century was the period of the emergence of life-course devel-
opmental theory—that is, the historical moment in which adults were
widely recognized as subjects-in-process. Optimal adult development
also involves transitional space and the work within it with persons
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who are also selfobjects: this is what the play of art, ritual, eroticism,
and philosophical inquiry are about. Psychoanalysis—at least following
Erikson’s and Jung’s widening of Freud’s horizon—assumes develop-
ment across the life course, and thus is often referred to as a new
religion for good reasons: it sets up the temenos—the “sacred enclo-
sure”—of the consultation room as a transitional space where subjectiv-
ity communes and interacts with its transcendent elements—meaning
those elements both within the subject herself and in the person of the
other—which are “alters” or self-parts within the whole system of the
intersubject. This is especially true of group therapy—and, by exten-
sion, the intensive group experience called “school”—where the sys-
temic aspects of intersubjective experience are triggered and magnified
through encounter in the transitional space with multiple others. The
psychotherapeutic movement may be understood as another dialectical
moment in the history of the care of the self, but it is a moment con-
structed on a different model of the self. It follows the moment of the
radical privatization of subjectivity in homo clausus, and accompanies
the emergence of a dialectical third term, which sublates both homo
clausus and the form of subjectivity that preceded it, the medieval col-
lective or fused self.
This third term, the intersubject, can also be identified with a mil-
lennial ideal that has shaped Western cultural aspirations at least since
the appearance of the Christ figure. In his late work Aion: Researches
into the Phenomenology of the Self, Jung finished his lifelong inquiry
into the symbological history of Western subjectivity with the sugges-
tion that Christ represents the implicit psychological goal of the individ-
uation process, a subjective state he called the Self. As we have seen, the
Self is for Jung a structure in which conscious and unconscious contents
have undergone a reconfiguration such that they are no longer in rela-
tions of antagonism or ambivalence, or mediated by repression, defense,
censorship, and consequent neurosis, but are integrated in a psychologi-
cal structure that allows their optimal interplay and intervisibility. This
ideal integration is an emergent system-balance achieved apart from
relations of hierarchy or domination of one part of the psyche by
another, which by analogical implication suggests the end of relations of
hierarchy and domination between subjects. This theme is found in
multiple images offered by Western post-Christian visionaries—whether
in Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which announces (following
the eighteenth-century Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg) a new
psychological age, or the notion among Romantic poets and philoso-
phers of the unification of mind and nature; or Whitman’s new Ameri-
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can democratic personality of Leaves of Grass; or Tielhard de Chardin’s

notion of a collective spiritual ontogenesis leading to the development
of the “noosphere”; or even the conditions of “species being” accompa-
nying Marx’s prediction of the withering of the state. Abrams, in his
analysis of the Romantic vision, identifies it as “a conceptualized ver-
sion of the design of Christian history”:
In this process the redemptive goal of the history of mankind

was shifted from the reconciliation and reunion of man with a
transcendent God to an overcoming of the opposition between
ego and non-ego, or a reconciliation of subject with object, or
a reunion of the spirit with its own other, and this culmination
was represented as occurring in the fully developed conscious-
ness of men living their lives in this world: the justification for
the ordeal of human experience is located in experience
itself.18
As we have seen, this mythic stratum of the Western imagination,

which Blake called “the return of Adam into Paradise,” is time and
again associated with children and with childhood. For seekers of a
golden age, childhood is both an initial and a terminal state; it repre-
sents both the beginning from which we come and the end toward
which we journey.19 One more recent appearance of the trope, appro-
priate for our epoch, can be recognized in the identification, as a result
of the clinical inquiry of the infant psychoanalyst W.D. Winnicott,20 of
the phenomenon of transitional space. As we have seen, transitional
space is the space of boundary work—both within the subject and
between subjects. It is the psychological space of infancy and early
childhood and also of art and deep personal and interpersonal experi-
ence—the space of dream, sexuality, animality, and the divine. It is the
workshop of the individuation process, which is the pursuit of the “rec-
onciliation of subject with object” through the ongoing dialogue
between conscious and unconscious elements of the personality. Suc-
cessful dialogue results in the reconstellation of these elements such that
the executive power of the ego is “ruptured” or decentered—which
does not imply that ego surrenders its synthesizing and integrating role
within the whole structure of subjectivity, but rather that it gives up its
compulsive attempts to control the whole structure. It recognizes that it
is not “master in its own house” and lives on.
Thus the intersubject is both an emergent historical and a peren-
nial, even millennial normative ideal. Relative to homo clausus, the
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intersubject is subjectivity decentered, a boundary-crosser, inherently

transgressive in the sense of being instinctively oriented toward dialecti-
cal transformation. For the intersubject, psychological health is indi-
cated by the capacity to maintain an optimal moving balance in the
field. The field is both the multiple and the whole, the one and the
many. The whole field is my world with all its relations, near and far,
present and absent. In this field, there are as many relations as are per-
ceived by an intelligence within it—the Beijing butterfly of chaos theory
is one limit-example, and the universe of omni-influence of the ancient
speculative symbolic system of astrology is another. The intrasubjective
field of the individual intersubject is a system of relations between parts
of the self. The immediate intersubjective field of the intersubject
includes others with whom she is in any kind of relation—including
strangers passed on the street—and her introjections of them in her own
personal field—their identity as parts of herself. The intrasubjective and
the intersubjective fields make up one field, sometimes more and some-
times less distinct.
Each field is a system, and to recognize one’s membership in these
multiple and overlapping systems—especially when at their bound-
aries—is necessarily to undergo to some degree the decentering of the
executive ego function. The internal balance of which Plato spoke is not
attained through the imposition of principles or categories by one
dimension of the self onto other dimensions, or onto an other outside
oneself (who is also, through the phenomena of introjection and projec-
tion, a part of one’s self-system). Rather, the balance is approached—if
never arrived at except temporarily—by “remembering,” or anamnesis,
a hermeneutical process in which I in my plurality become my own text,
approached interpretively. The self-work of psychoanalysis and of edu-
cation is an internal and intersubjective dialogue leading to continual
self-reconstruction. So in fact Freud’s new technology of the self initi-
ated the hermeneutical process that not just Merleau-Ponty but Jung as
well identified as “the task” of the twentieth century: the search for the
integration of the “dark” with the “light” elements of the self, and the
subsequent reconstruction of the ego, and by extension, reason. Implicit
in the intersubject is what Charles Taylor has called “a new synthesis of
reason and desire,” an “overcoming the barrier between reason and the
instinctual depths,” through a “decentering of subjectivity” and an
“escape from the restrictions of the unitary self.” For as Blake wrote,
“Reason, or the ratio of all we have already known, is not the same that
it shall be when we know more.”21
The “attempt to explore the irrational and integrate it into an
expanded reason,” which in fact Merleau-Ponty saw as originating in
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Hegel, was a project announced in early-nineteenth-century Romanti-

cism, but that emerged in everyday discourses and popular culture in
the twentieth century. Nor was it limited to the new discipline of psy-
chology. The deconstruction of homo clausus was accompanied by the
corresponding deconstruction of modernist epistemology, which had its
final crystallization late in the nineteenth century in the logical posi-
tivism of the Vienna School. In philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead ini-
tiated a shift in metaphysics and cosmology from a theory based on
substance to one based on relation and process. This was paralleled by
the emergence of quantum physics and relativity theory, both of which,
like Whitehead’s, suggest radical new ways, as yet mostly unavailable to
common perception and understanding, of constructing space, time,
and their relations. The new discipline of anthropology, made possible
by rapidly expanding cultural intervisibility, exposed the Western sub-
ject to alternative worldviews, which provided graphic models of
diverse constructions of the relations between the rational and the irra-
tional. Modern artists came under the influence, not just of “primi-
tivism,” but of child art as well, and Surrealism explored the semiology
of the unconscious.22 The early twentieth century was the moment of
the emergence of the “stranger at the gates” of postcolonial Western
civilization—the deconstruction of a hegemonic epistemology and the
onset of an age of alterity. And it was at this moment in the history of
the Western self—the late phase of colonialism, the proliferation of new
images of subjectivity, the “discovery” of the unconscious, new theories
of space-time relationships and the rise of field and systems theory, dra-
matically increasing intervisibility through an ever-expanding electronic,
digitalized information environment—it was at this accelerated moment
that the intersubject may be said to have emerged as, if not yet a viable
cultural ideal, at least a thinkable one. For the lived experience of the
intersubject is analogous to actually seeing/perceiving/living time and
space the way relativity theory describes them. In the same way, the
intersubject lives the relationship between ego and unconscious and self
and other in a way that is imaginable to us, but with difficulty.
If Freud did not find his way out of the Eleatic unity of the ideal
self-present and transparent ego of homo clausus, he prepared the way
through founding the dialogical and deconstructive practice of psycho-
analysis. But he certainly did not do it alone. Perhaps his most impor-
tant contemporary in this regard, although relatively little known, was
Max Wertheimer, who introduced field and systems theory—which was
simultaneously emerging in physics—in the form of gestalt psychology.
Wertheimer’s basic axiom—that “there are wholes, the behavior of
which is not determined by that of their individual elements, but where
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the part-processes are themselves determined by the intrinsic nature of

the whole”23—is crucial to the opening of homo clausus. Although
Freud still held implicitly to the working assumption that the borders of
the self were coterminous with the borders of the organism, his intro-
duction of the notions of projection, introjection, and identification into
his description of self-processes were fundamental to the later develop-
ment of a new, field-model of intersubjectivity in British and American
object relations theory24 and in continental phenomenology, most
specifically in Merleau-Ponty, on whom Wertheimer was an important
influence.
The intersubject emerges as a fundamental aspect of the age of
alterity because it is based on the realization of what Levinas called the
“fecundity of the I,” or the existential experience of the multiplicity of
selfhood both within and across the boundaries of the subject. The
recognition of the self as a multiple structure that transcends any strict
boundaries between myself and others confounds a logic based on strict
identity and negation. Hegel—the grand philosopher of Romanticism—
had in fact initiated the logic to describe it a century before. His Science
of Logic of 1813 assaults the Aristotelian bedrock of the law of contra-
diction, not by denying it, but by embedding it in the heart of identity
itself, and then putting it into motion and transformational change
through time. A is A and not-A, being and nothingness, since it is only
through positing what it is not. As Charles Taylor says of Hegels’ logic,
“not only are the properties by which we characterize things defined
contrastively, but it is also an essential part of their meaning that they
characterize what they apply to in part in terms of its potential causal
interactions with other things.”25 In terms of a fundamental logic of the
self, I as a subject come into being by distinguishing myself from what I
am not. My identity is based on my relation with an other—both
“within” me and “outside” me—who I am not, but without whom I
would not be an identity, and whom therefore I am. This is true, origi-
nally with the other with whom I am in relation, and—as the ego forms
through a process of internal division—with the other(s) “within” me.
From a structural point of view then, I (the ego) am an other to my
selves—both in me and in the other—and the “I” itself is by no means
“master in its own house.”
Applied to issues of subjectivity and intersubjectivity, Hegel’s logic
leads to a reordering of the ontological position of the subject and her
others. The psychological implications of this logic are at least prelimi-
narily expressed in object relations theory, for which self and other are
unthinkable apart from each other. They emerge together in human
infancy in a dialectical relationship, and their systemic unity remains a
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distinctive ontological trait. The psychotherapist David Scharf says

“. . . in the inner world, we cannot conceive of our selves without
invoking and relying on our objects. We see ourselves in the reflection
of the other’s eyes, gaze, expression, mirroring body responses and
echoing sounds.”26 It is through the relationship with the other that the
I emerges, is constructed and maintained; and likewise it is through the
relationship with internal others that reflection itself emerges and is
constructed and maintained.
The experience of recognizing that one is extended across one’s
own boundaries into the other and the world is, at least for the great
majority of humans, not an ontological given but an ontological poten-
tial—and, when it begins to develop, a life-course event with profound
ethical implications. It is realized—or not—not just through personal
life-course experience, but through historical and cultural enablers
and/or disenablers as well. Paradoxically, although it is a unifying
process, it is triggered through the experience of alterity. One comes to
recognize and identify with the whole field, or system, only by recogniz-
ing that one is what one also is not, and that the other is, not only never
quite what I take him to be, but also knowable only as himself-for-me,
as I am myself-for-him. This is an important recognition, for the pri-
mary ethical claim of the theory of the intersubject is that its realization
in human culture acts to reduce the possibility of psychological either
fusion with or (what amounts to the same thing) repudiation of the
other—that it leads, on the contrary, to the increased possibility for dia-
logical relations, that is, relations regulated by the ability to recognize
and to assume as critical an attitude toward one’s own projections as
toward those of the other.
On an object-relations theory account, what draws me into relation
with you is that I am projecting a part of myself—whether desired or
rejected—onto you, and that you are introjecting this part and “con-
taining” it for me; you are re-presenting it as part of a constellation that
is “outside” myself and which I can either reintroject as “good” rather
than “bad” or threatening to my felt ego, or which I can reject as “not
me.” And you are doing the same with me. To understand that we are
continually distributing these “split-off” parts of ourselves between
each other is to realize the conditions for dialogue, for it shifts the locus
of responsibility to the interaction itself, and not to one or another of
the poles of the interaction. It leads us to the realization that in working
with the other we are always working with parts of ourselves. It is also
the condition of Levinas’ notion of alterity: “Exposed to the alterity of
the other person, the I’s egoist capacities, its powers of synthesis, which
have hitherto defined the ego . . . are ‘reconditioned’, ‘put into
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question’, overexposed, such that the I is first for-the-other before the

very firstness of its being-for-itself.”27
The alterity of the other is a paradoxical experience—the experi-
ence of our inextricable mutual identity as elements or members of the
same field or system, played out through projection and introjection—
and the experience of the unknowable character of the other, and there-
fore her ultimate transcendence. In a similar apparent paradox, the
direction of positive system growth in any relationship is toward both
intimacy and individuation. In recognizing that I am involved in an
intersubjective process of projection and introjection, or “continual
passing into each other,” I recognize that what I appear to need in the
other, or what I reject or accept in the other, is actually in me, and vice
versa. I recognize that I am not the projections I am containing (or
repudiating) for the other person, nor is she my projections, however
well she may fit them. I recognize that I am as unknowable to myself as
the other is, in that I can only see myself on the screen of the other. This
triggers the individuation process in me, in that it prompts me to with-
draw or contain my projection, having recognized it as my own. It
means I am alone with my own psychic material—it means that I am
the only one ultimately responsible for my thoughts and feelings about
myself, the other, and the world. But at the same time it means that I
am never alone. I am the other—we are elements of one system, located
together on the boundaries of intersubjectivity.
The adult who positions herself for encounter on the boundaries is
positioning herself for the potential reconstruction of those boundaries
through a “reconditioning in the face of the other.” The result of the
reconditioning, understood as an aspect of psychological health—for
boundaries can also be effaced, violated, and fatally confused—is a
form of subjectivity that is both more autonomous and more connected,
more independent and more relational, more capable both of empathy
and of moderating its own anxiety or negative arousal, that is, “self-
quieting.” By implication, it is also a form of subjectivity more capable
of care and justice in all its social, political, and economic relations, and
therefore more in keeping with the modern Western ideal of the “demo-
cratic” personality. For the intersubject every relationship is a challenge
and an opportunity for this reconditioning, and the process is never
quite in one’s control, since it has both conscious and unconscious
dimensions. All that I control in my relationship with my interlocutor is
the intention to “own” my own projections, even if that also means
never knowing exactly where projection leaves off and the “real” other
begins. In fact that will never be clear, since ontologically the projection
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will never be completely withdrawn, and the other will never be an

other apart from me.
The question remains whether the intersubject so construed is a
broad, epochal historical-evolutionary emergent or a condition realized
by only a few, most particularly—in the modern epoch anyway—by the
psychoclass of the bourgeois intelligentsia, the class with the material
conditions that allow it the leisure to engage in the discourses and tech-
nologies of the self particular to this form of subjectivity. The arguments
I have given from a cultural and historical point of view are obviously
intended to suggest the former—that we are speaking here of the emer-
gence of what psychohistorians call a “modal personality”—a form of
subjectivity characteristic of a particular historical period or culture.
The very term “modal personality” points to the extent to which any
epochal form of subjectivity is a subjection—a way of being a subject
that results in great degree from a collective construction, a set of legiti-
mated discourses, of values and intentionalities shared by those with the
social power to initiate and maintain them through public opinion, edu-
cation, media, and even, finally, force of one kind or another. Nor does
this realization necessarily conflict with an evolutionary narrative of
subjectivity such as it has been offered so far: we may assume that if
there is such a dialectical movement, it does not operate independently
of social power and cultural politics.
Although the manner of the emergence of a modal personality such
as the intersubject is unclear, it appears to have a dual movement. It
shows its early signs in the privileged psychoclass which has the leisure
to experiment with its forms and implications, and it is prefigured by
the culturally marginalized. This is only apparently contradictory, for
the two are linked by projection. And just as it has been suggested that
the great artists of a given epoch “are dealing with the leading psycho-
logical problems of tomorrow,”28 it could be hypothesized that the most
pervasive personality disorders of our epoch represent fault lines in the
current model of subjectivity, excesses in the system that prefigure its
deconstruction and the emergence of a new balance. The most dramatic
and intractable disorders of the self of the modern age as documented
by contemporary psychotherapists are narcissism, borderline syndrome,
and multiple personality disorder. Narcissism reflects the radical iso-
lation of the self—the ego caught in its own mirror and unable to
decenter, and as such the terminal state of homo clausus, and a first
deconstructive moment in the transitional process. For the narcissistic
personality, the possibility of a multiple self does not even exist—rather
the self is split, and one part becomes alternately the involuntary
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worshipper or the withering critic of the other. From a psychohistorical

point of view, it may be thought of as the egoist-I in its last resort—a
self-structure that attempts to completely assimilate its external to its
internal objects—and the modal personality of a culture of radical indi-
vidualism in a situation of no exit.
Borderline personality disorder represents a dispersion, a loss of
identifiable self-structure, manifested in a pervasive underlying sense
that there is no “real me.”29 The borderline’s internal objects—those
parts of the self that are connected with real others either past or pres-
ent, but that represent and evoke one’s own repressed impulses and ten-
dencies within the economy of the self—are in a state of chaos and/or
stagnation, emerging as attackers or seducers alternately of oneself or of
the other onto whom one projects them.
Multiple personality disorder is a final intensification of the disin-
tegration of the self—a condition in which internal objects no longer
even recognize each other, and have turned into persona in their own
right, taking turns occupying what object-relations theorists call the
“central self” or “central ego.” They have turned into im-personations
in a psychodrama for which there is no longer a director—characters
who have broken free of their author. Here the self’s internal objects—
what Scharff calls “the loving, hating, beckoning, accepting and reject-
ing objects [which] are embedded within us as cornerstones of our
psyches,”30 have become dis-integrated. In the functional self-in-
process, the aggressive and the needy, the idealized, the hated and the
valued parts of the self are in dynamic relation—are in dialogue—but
are also in emergent, epigenetic, developmental movement toward a
horizon of integration. In multiple personality disorder, each has gone
its own way, and the executive function has been, not just decentered,
but depotentiated.
In showing how development has gone wrong, and the elements of
the self moved into overly contradictory and untenable positions, we
are also shown the implicate order of subjectivity. Psychopathology
clarifies the “normal”—or perhaps we should say the “acceptable,” or
the “liveable.” For the “normal” ones, those afflicted with these funda-
mental disorders of the self are psychological pioneers conscripted by
fate, or reluctant emigrants into the wilderness of the psyche, denizons
of the psychohistorical shatter zone of the old and the new. They are
the mutants of cultural evolution, if only because they are unable to fit
into the prevailing normative subjectivity. As such they prefigure—at
least negatively—the transition into another kind of subjectivity. They
represent those weakened and damaged ones who both announce and
whose struggle will be redeemed by a future culture that has figured
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out how to live with increased conditions of multiplicity, alterity, and

difference.
The inchoate prefiguration of the intersubject by pathologies of the
self implies that it is a cultural and historical task to learn how to live
with this condition as a healthy phenomenon; and given the dialectical
nature of psychohistorical change, it would follow that the same was
the case 500 years ago for the emergent discrete modernist form of sub-
jectivity then caught in the crossfire between the polymorphous social
self of the medieval synthesis—the self living completely in the larger
collective pattern—and the new form. In either case, it could also be
hypothesized that, given the early histories of those characterized by
these transitional pathologies, they seem most often—taking organic
considerations into account—to have their etiologies in early relation-
ships with parents. So it is—again, accounting for genetic differences—
the original subjection of the self across the boundaries of subjectivity, a
structural style configured through childhood experience, which deter-
mines for most of us the conditions and capacities for our own bound-
ary work throughout our adult lives. In childhood, as Scharff says, “we
live with our objects [our parents] both as real external people and as
internalizations.”31
Parents are the original “selfobjects”—both as real persons and as
functions or virtual persons or parts of our internal structure. Our inter-
nal-external relationships with our parents are what get played out in
our relations throughout adulthood. And the transitional space pro-
vided by cultural and interpersonal practices—the psychological spaces
of art, philosophy, psychotherapy, eroticism, ritual, spiritual practice,
and personal intimacy—is the space in which the adult has a chance,
like the young child, to engage in the deep play that promises the recon-
figuration of self-boundaries and functions. But as Levinas has sug-
gested, the most profound moment of reconfiguration—and the most
available to us all as well as the most grounded in everyday practice—is
the prolonged life-cycle moment of rearing children. Becoming a prac-
ticing parent is the first existential experience of alterity, and the most
powerful and lasting influence for understanding in a lived sense one’s
identity as multiple across boundaries.
In summary, the intersubject is a cultural ideal among a certain psy-
choclass, a future emergent construct that exists as a potential in human
individuals and communities, whose origin and perennial opportunity is
located in childhood, and whose emergence is greatly dependent on the
kind and quality of the adult-child relation—specifically, on a form of
the relation that discourages internal splitting, structural compartmen-
talization, and the reification of projections. The final emergence of the
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intersubject as an epochal norm or “modal personality” is dependent on

multiple and ultimately uncontrollable prior external conditions that
allow for its flourishing. Rather than a dispersion of individuality into
mass man, or the death of the subject—which are found in separate dis-
courses but amount to the same thing—the intersubject represents a
rebalancing of the individual and collective as an ecological adaptation.
It is a self-structure in which the inherently transgressive nature of inter-
subjectivity is recognized, and understood as a shifting dialectical and
dialogical configuration that is always journeying toward an emergent
integration. For subjectivity conceived as dialectical and emergent, the
“successful” life-course is a continual reconstruction of a whole whose
parts are in varying states of unity and contradiction, but for which
contradiction is the continual incentive for further growth.
Psychogenic Theory of History and the Present Age
According to deMause’s “psychogenic theory of history,” “. . . because

psychic structure must always be passed from generation to generation
through the narrow funnel of childhood, a society’s child-rearing prac-
tices . . . are the very condition for the transmission and development of
all other cultural elements, and place definite limits on what can be
achieved in all other spheres of history.” If there is an evolution of these
practices, it lies in the “‘generational pressure’ for psychic change,”
which is “spontaneous, originating in the adult’s need to regress and in
the child’s striving for relationship.” It manifests historically in what
deMause calls
a series of closer approaches between adult and child, with

each closing of the distance producing fresh anxiety. The
reduction of this anxiety is the main source of the child-rearing
practices of each age. . . . The origin of this evolution lies in
the ability of successive generations of parents to regress to the
psychic age of their children and work through the anxieties of
that age in a better manner the second time they encounter
them than they did during their own childhood. The process is
similar to that of psychoanalysis, which also involves regres-
sion and a second chance to face childhood anxieties.32
Every historical transformation of adult subjectivity is a result of a

modal change in the experience of childhood, which in turn is a result
of a change in the way adults deal with their own childhood through
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the experience of raising children, which in turn is a result of their expe-

rience of childhood. Although deMause insists that this change occurs
“independent of social and technological change,” the problem of
causal circularity his formulation presents is less inexorable if other eco-
nomic, political, social, class, cultural, medical, and technological vari-
ables are factored in. The onset of homo clausus can be traced through
the rise of the modernist infrastructure—dislocation and urbanization,
the advent of the middle classes and the nuclear family, capitalism, con-
stitutional government, the printed word, the acceleration of technolog-
ical innovation, and the beginnings of effective epidemiology—as well
as superstructure—the Copernican cosmological revolution, Protes-
tantism, and philosophical and scientific empiricism. The new synthesis
of the intersubject is fueled, in turn, by the changes associated with
postmodernism—increasing personal and cultural intervisibility through
dramatic innovations in electronic communications and transportation,
global economies, huge-scale urbanization, massive interdependent sys-
tems (food, water, power, transportation, etc.), global media, major
advances in medicine, epidemiology and birth control, the sexual revo-
lution and the changing roles of women, psychoanalysis, radical secu-
larism and religious ecumenism, universal education, the Einsteinian
cosmological revolution, and field and systems theory in both the natu-
ral and the human sciences.
As has been pointed out, the notion of an evolution of child-rearing
modes has more empirical strength when conceived of holistically. All
the child-rearing modes are present at all times in human culture, but in
any given historical epoch, one mode is accepted and/or legitimated by
the culturally powerful. It is easier to accept deMause’s claim that
advances in child-rearing modes happen whatever the historical or tech-
nological conditions if we also accept that they are all present at all
times, and that a myriad of social, economic, and political conditions
can influence the current balance of the modes.33 Infanticide, abandon-
ment, and ambivalence will always be present, and we can expect that
they will increase or decrease, and even take different forms, depending
on historical conditions. The Intrusive Mode may reassert itself on vari-
ous levels depending on economic and social exigencies, and the Social-
izing Mode will always represent a fallback, or transitional mode
between the Intrusive and the Empathic. Also, as already pointed out,
individual differences between parents—even within the same family—
will always be present, dependent on each parent’s childhood history,
on temperamental differences, on current conditions of social, eco-
nomic, or personal stress, on culturally mediated ideological persua-
sions, and on particular life-cycle moments.
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If this is the case, then the present moment offers an apparent para-
dox. On the one hand, normative or “politically correct” parental atti-
tudes toward children are characterized by the Empathic Mode. Broad
public sentiment is shocked and outraged by cases of infanticide, and
numerous agencies, both public and private, are dedicated to saving
children from all forms of abuse. Among the Western middle classes,
spanking children is now understood as physical abuse. Liberal
“experts” also commonly promulgate parenting protocols and method-
ologies in the popular press based on the empathic assumptions that
children are to be listened to and their felt needs taken seriously. Dissat-
isfaction with the intrusive and/or socializing character and practices of
the state-controlled public schools has reached—in the United States
anyway—the status of a permanent public disposition. The pronounce-
ments on childhood with which Rousseau astonished the world in
1763—“Childhood has its place in the scheme of human life. We must
view the man as a man, and the child as a child . . . Nature wants chil-
dren to be children before they are men. . . . Childhood has ways of
seeing, thinking and feeling particular to itself: nothing can be more
foolish than to seek to substitute our ways for them”34—have become
common coin. If one surveyed only the popular advice literature and
ignored the actual experience of children in Western cultures, one
would assume that children had never been more valued by adults, or
better cared for. And in one sense this is a valid assumption.
On the other hand, children are increasingly abandoned to the
institutions of the state—if “state” is understood in the broader sense to
include the corporate, media, and civic/legal worlds—schools, day-care
centers, afterschool programs, and organized programs that act to ghet-
toize children within an architectural environment relentlessly designed
in the image of low-level corporate office buildings—stripped-down
boxes filled with ugly furniture, set in increasingly dehumanized urban
and suburban landscapes bereft of the sorts of play zones and spaces
traditionally associated with childhood. Children are also abandoned to
the “main square” of the new information environment, the virtual
space and time of the media, which both constructs and manipulates
them as market-subjects, and exposes them regularly to multiple images
of the two aspects of adult life the exclusion of which the traditional
notion of childhood depends on—sexuality and violence. The decline of
the traditional nuclear family has placed many children in a sort of
demilitarized zone of familial relationships. Teachers in early-childhood
settings testify to the increasing levels of knowledge of sexual informa-
tion and corresponding vocabulary among young children, and homi-
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cide—including mass killings—carried out by children as young as ten

years old has become a not-unexpected phenomenon.
That children are universally subjected to the disciplinary power of
normalizing judgment, state coding, and surveillance in the form of tra-
ditional schooling is hardly distinctive, since adults are subjected to the
same measures. And the increasing pressures on middle-class children to
participate in organized “cultural activities”—whether sports, self-
defense, artistic activities, or special academic tutoring—can be under-
stood as one more aspect of the technologies of self associated with the
disciplinary regime of power characteristic of the modern state and
what it expects of it “citizens,” whether present or future, adult or
child. Following the logic of the contrastive pair adult/child, the “disap-
pearance of childhood” that this represents can also be understood as
the disappearance of adulthood, in the sense that disciplinary power
infantilizes adults to the same degree to which it adultizes children.
Rousseau’s “citizen” is, in the modern state, also Postman’s “adult-
child”—the radically dumbed-down consumer—Marcuse’s repressively
desublimated “one-dimensional man” targeted by television sitcoms,
news and extravaganzas, and commercial seductions.35
There is no reason that even dramatically contradictory social con-
ditions and tendencies should not coexist in any one historical period.
From a dialectical perspective, those contradictions represent the possi-
bility for transformation. That modern childhood and adulthood are
“disappearing” even as the Empathic Mode has become the expert-
sanctioned parenting discourse of the age; that mainstream schooling
still blindly and obdurately—and, in its own terms, successfully—
strives to make children “citizens” before “men”; that children are
more independent in the world of media and markets than ever before;
that children are more manipulated by the world of media and markets
than ever before; that parents hold to the value of offering their chil-
dren more choice than ever before; that children are more isolated and
lonely and controlled in the larger environment than before; that the
nuclear family—the niche of modern childhood—is unraveling: these
are indicators in which deconstructive and reconstructive elements and
tendencies are ambiguously interwoven, and hint at transformation as
much as at decline. For psychogenic theory, which of these are causes
and which are effects in the transformation of subjectivity is not so
important. What is significant is what, broadly speaking, an adult does
“when faced with a child who needs something.” For it is the adult for
whom the voice of the child becomes the voice of a fully human other,
a subject in his or her own right, who is thus triggered into a space of
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intersubjectivity that is the matrix for the emergence of the intersub-

ject. Adults are changing, children are changing, and consequently, the
adult-child relationship is changing, but it is how these changes change
adult subjectivity that will eventually make possible the reconstruction
of children’s lifeworld, because it will be part and parcel of the recon-
struction of the adult’s.
The Dialectics of Reason and Desire
The reconstruction of Western adulthood is, as I have already repeat-

edly argued, a matter of the question that was implicitly posed as early
as Plato’s formulation of subjectivity—the question of the relationship
between reason and desire. The problem has been posed in multiple
ways at least since the Romantic revolt against Enlightenment reason,
and Hegel’s introduction of a new, dialectical logic of development.
Romanticism poses the goal as the reconciliation of reason and feeling.
Already the Romantics had announced, in Coleridge’s notion of
“joy”—which might, in modern play theory, be called “flow”—a
“breaking down the boundaries of the isolated consciousness” and the
reinstatement of “the flow of a shared life between the elemental polar-
ity of mind and nature.”36 Implicit in the Romantic formulation is the
ideal of the adult who, in Taylor’s formulation, has escaped from “the
restrictions of the unitary self.” As we have seen, the grand myth of
Romanticism posited a necessary division of an original unity in the
interests of a reconstructed unity. According to Taylor, “The belief
[among Romantics] was that the human destiny was to return to
nature at a higher level. . . . The original single unity makes its way
through divided paths, in reason and nature, and then comes to
fruition in a reconciliation,” thus “overcoming the barrier between
reason and the instinctual depths,” and “breaking down the division
between art and life.”37
The Romantic narrative of the development of subjectivity, long
understood as a spiritual tradition, was taken up by secular conscious-
ness near the end of the nineteenth century in the philosophy and sci-
ence of human development, which integrates dialectical and
evolutionary theory. Heinz Werner’s notion of “orthogenetic develop-
ment,” presented in a classic paper in 1945, implicitly allows a theory
of the developmental pattern of biological organisms to cross over into
theories of psychological development. He describes development as a
dialectical advance in which organic functions become both more cen-
tralized and more differentiated, more hierarchical and more capable of
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laterality. Above all, Werner normalizes the principle of regression as

necessary to development. The principle of “regression in the service of
the ego” had already been announced in psychoanalysis, and is critical
to deMause’s explanation of the Empathic Mode, for it is “the ability to
regress to the level of the child’s need and correctly identify it without
an admixture of the adult’s own projections . . . then be able to main-
tain enough distance from the need to be able to satisfy it,” (see p. 101
above) which is the fundamental psychological disposition of the
Empathic parent.
The point for a discussion of the role both of one’s own childhood
and of real children in the reconstruction of adult subjectivity is that
Coleridge’s “joy” is emblematic of childhood, whether as experienced
by children, reconstructed in adult memory, or both. The normative
ideal of the dialectically transformed subject of the Romantic develop-
mental narrative is, as put by the psychoanalyst Ernest Schactel in his
definitive study of the Western “forgetting of childhood,” the “person
who has continued and expanded the child’s openness to the world on
the adult level.”38 The realized adult is the one who has not so much
avoided leaving the subject-object, self-world, self-other relation of
childhood, but who is continually reconstructing it in the journey into
and through the “fall” signified by adult experience. The actualization
of the intersubject is not a return to a historical childhood or even to
specific childhood memories, but to an archetype of experience, to that
“well of being,” which will never be directly remembered, but only
reconstructed. The adult so turned or converted to this archetype is ori-
ented to a re-organization of lived experience, and therefore of percep-
tion itself. Bachelard refers to the character of this reorganization as the
lived experience of a sense of “secret correspondence” between self and
world, where “the I no longer opposes itself to the world,” where
“everything I look at looks at me,” where “between [me] and the world
there is an exchange of looks,” where “everything lives with a secret
life.”39 Living on the level of reconstructed childhood experience is
equivalent to a realization of the self as located in an intersubjective
field—the lived experience of subjectivity as a transitional space in
which “the interpersonal and the intrapsychic realms create, interpene-
trate, and transform each other in a subtle and complex manner.”40
Given that children tend more than adults to inhabit or indwell the
lived space of the intersubject, they signify doubly for adult subjectivity:
they are the “before”—what the adult was before she was an adult—
and also the horizonal future of a normative developmental ideal.
Applied to the narrative of the dialectical reconstruction of subjectivity,
they are both precursors and unconscious prophets. They represent an
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early and ephemeral appearance of a form of human subjectivity that

may appear later in the life-course, but only if the conditions of that
early appearance have been satisfied—that is, only if adults allow, as
Rousseau claims that “nature wants,” “children to be children before
they are men.” Psychologically speaking, adults who have not been
allowed their own childhoods have difficulty allowing it in their own
children. If this is the case, then the major question for human culture is
the question of the possibility of intervention in this reproductive cycle,
and thus is a question of education in the broad sense. What form of
education is necessary—whether of children or adults—in order to posi-
tion them for transformation into the modal adult intersubject?
As we have already seen, Levinas associates the moment of the
shifting of the structure of subjectivity toward the intersubject with
child rearing. Jung provides a confirming clue in his identification of a
life-cycle moment with middle age, when a new subjective economy
begins to emerge.41 Finally, we have identified the experience of the
intersubject with Winnicott’s notion of “transitional space,” which in
early childhood is associated, not just with play, but with the subjective
field in general, in the sense that inside and outside, projection and
introjection, have not been operationally dissociated—although our
analysis of the intersubject would indicate that in fact they never fully
are. In adulthood, the experience of transitional space is associated with
play as well, and art, philosophy, and intense emotional and relational
experience. To the extent that we follow Schiller’s identification of the
“play impulse” as the intentional state that best expresses the human
impulse for transformation, we can identify play as the engine of dialec-
tical development of the subject-in-process in its search for a harmo-
nious integration of reason and desire, the “happy midway point
between law and exigency.”42 From a phenomenological point of view,
it is a refinding of the space between inside and outside, projection and
introjection, which is a space of creativity and transformation, both of
self and self’s relations.
Because the child is a human child, born into culture and from even
before first breath a cultural being, she is early conditioned by both
biology and culture to the same intentional states as adults, if to varying
degrees. She shares what Alfred Schutz calls the “tensions of conscious-
ness” characteristic of all humans. What he identifies as “wide-awake
consciousness”43—which could be defined as the primary adaptive
mode of the human in her environment—is the most characteristic adult
tension of consciousness. As the state adapted for biological survival, it
is characterized by the clearest subject-object or subject-world demarca-
tion, since it is the consciousness of the world of “work,” which
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requires an instrumental manipulation of the environment by an organ-

ism that is in adaptive relation to it. It is the hypertrophy of this tension
of consciousness in the West, and particularly in those cultures most
indoctrinated into the Protestant ethic, which has contributed to the
accelerating technological advances of Europe and the United States
over the last 500 years. It is also the working model for homo clausus,
for whom self-world, self-object, and self-other separation, the perform-
ance principle and surplus-repression are both functional and discursive
necessities for the maintenance of the system.
On the other end of Schutz’s spectrum is the tension of conscious-
ness of the dream or the hallucinatory state, in which self and object are
interfused and mutually transformative. This could be identified with
Freud’s “infantile narcissism” or “infant autism,” an original human
condition in which no absolutely necessary ontological or causal rela-
tions in the world are operative—where, as pure pleasure principle,
what one wishes happens and what happens is what one wishes. The
tension of consciousness characteristic of play and the lived experience
of the intersubject could be placed roughly between “wide-awake” and
“dream” on Schutz’s continuum. It is, as Schiller has already shown us,
“everything that is neither subjectively nor objectively contingent”—
and he adds, “In proportion as it [play] lessens the dynamic influence of
the sensations and emotions, it will bring them into harmony with
rational ideas; and in proportion as it deprives the laws of reason of
their moral compulsion, it will reconcile them with the interest of the
senses.” 44 From a psychodynamic point of view, Schiller is here describ-
ing transitional space. From the point of view of the relation between
reason and desire, it represents the onset of nonrepressive sublimation,
a subject-world relation that results, according to Marcuse, “from an
extension rather than from a constraining deflection of the libido,” and
which, according to both Schiller and Marcuse, “would harmonize the
feelings and affections with the ideas of reason.”45
For the child, and most dramatically the young child, the represen-
tative tension of consciousness—the default state—is one of dispersion
across the boundaries between “sensations and emotions” (i.e.,
“desire”) and “the laws of reason,” a state that triggers play because
the latter is the engine of their dialectical interaction. According to Win-
nicott, play “is always on the theoretical line between the subjective and
that which is objectively perceived . . . [it] is neither a matter of inner
psychic reality nor a matter of external reality.”46 Play is the form of
problem solving characteristic of this “transitional” tension of con-
sciousness, as instrumental reason is for wideawake consciousness, and
as the forms of symbolization that Freud described as the logic of
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dreams—condensation, displacement, and censorship—are for the

oneiric state.47 By this definition, and as has already been suggested, art
is a form of play, as are philosophy, humor, and eroticism, and we
might say, any form of “extraordinary investigations.” All lead to the
deconstruction-in-the-interests-of-reconstruction of boundaries between
self and world and self and other, and between the pleasure principle
and the reality principle, or primary and secondary process.
As a transitional being in both senses of that word, the young child
lives, albeit unconsciously, that form of subjectivity I have called the
intersubject. This is true as well in the realm of object relations, where
the division between her real significant others and her internalizations
of those others as selfobjects is still unclear and in formative process.
The child is still working to arrive at what Melanie Klein called the
“depressive position” (in which “depressive” evokes the emotional
results of the demise of infantile narcissism and the “grandiose” self).48
When she has worked through to this position, Winnicott says, “. . . the
child can say: ‘Here I am. What is inside me is me and what is outside
me is not me.”49 But what Winnicott’s inquiry—in combination with
the cultural construction of the subject-in-process and its lifelong devel-
opment that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century—
points to in the notion of transitional space, is just the blurring of this
putative boundary for purposes of creative personal and social transfor-
mation. In this sense, the developmental journey of the intersubject
means the reappropriation of childhood.
If we dare apply a recapitulationist hypothesis to the relations
between individual development and the development of (at least) West-
ern culture, we might say, following Schiller, that just as the child
must—because she is “a lively representation to us of the ideal, not
indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined”—“fall” from the lived
experience of the intersubject into the depressive position, so earlier
forms of human subjectivity were representations to us of the future
ideal of the intersubject. The medieval modal personality was more of a
transitional one than homo clausus: more emotionally immediate, less
psychologically isolated, with the boundaries of the individual not yet
so clearly drawn—less able to say, “What is inside me is me and what is
outside me is not me.” Keeping to Werner’s formulation of “ortho-
genetic” organismic development, this personality was relatively undif-
ferentiated, and therefore more characterized by a tendency to fusion
than to dialogue, both inter- and intrapersonally. On this account, the
modern modal personality that followed the medieval represents a
moment of negation, a hypertrophy of individualism leading to a radi-
cal alienation and a historical “fall” into a universal “adulthood.” This
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is reflected in the discourse of Enlightenment, whose main metaphor is

the notion of “growing up” or “coming of age,” with its call for human
autonomy under the sign of a universal Reason. It is also, at least in its
early modern beginnings, associated with the Intrusive Mode of child
rearing, according to which the child must be “subjected to a process of
intensive instruction.” At this height of Hegel’s “unhappy conscious-
ness,” of the state of being “driven back in himself,” of the experience
of subjectivity as “abstract, present, self-conscious inwardness,” and
triggered by the very material conditions that resulted from it, a synthe-
sis emerges in a form of subjectivity dedicated to reclaiming and reinte-
grating the “repressed.” This process is exactly equivalent to what Jung
and Neumann described in the reconfiguration of conscious and uncon-
scious elements of the personality in the emergence of Self, which is the
goal of the individuation process.
At the turn of the century heralded as the “century of the child,”—
the twentieth—Freud provided the final statement of homo clausus—
unhappy consciousness, Enlightenment man, the “grown-up.” In his
characterization of adulthood as a condition of disillusionment and res-
ignation to the repressive order, he endorsed the “renunciation of [the]
narcissistic entitlement” that is childhood’s legacy. “Infantilism,” he
said, “is destined to be surmounted. Men cannot remain children for-
ever.“50 The depressive position is essential to civilization—“civiliza-
tion” in Freud’s terminology being code for Comte’s third stage of the
historical development of Western culture, the “scientific,” which has
displaced the “animistic” and the “religious,” and which constitutes the
maturity of the species in a universe that no longer affords any room for
human omnipotence. “Men,” said Freud, “have acknowledged their
smallness and submitted resignedly to death and to the other necessities
of nature.”51 Without the repression that accompanies the depressive
position, none of the institutions of civilization, which are built through
the sublimation of repressed drives in the form of social, familial, and
economic structures, law, politics, culture, art, technology, and educa-
tion, would be possible.
Freud’s successors provided the historical response to his own
counsel of despair, which he—positioned as he was—could not. The
revolt against surplus-repression already begun in Romanticism repre-
sents the end of “Western civilization” in Freud’s terms, as the civiliza-
tion of homo clausus, and the emergence of a new ideal of maturity
beyond the repressive order. Historically, the revolt against the tyranny
of the depressive position has unfolded with the revelation to the West
of alternative epistemologies—alternative ways of knowing and acting
in the world—a revelation effected by the very information explosion
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that resulted from the technological advances made possible by the

“tension of consciousness” of that same repressive order.
The Privileged Stranger
The child, along with the “noble savage” of modern Western colonial-
ism, was the first to emerge to conquer—in classic theory-of-empire
fashion—from within, and to initiate the culture of postcolonialism.
Along with the “aboriginal” or “native,” the domesticated woman, the
“lower classes,” the madman, and more recently the “queer,” the child
represents the difference overlooked and projected by homo clausus.
The child and the woman are the most dangerously seductive of all, for
they are an enemy not at but within the gates—the wild man in the
bosom of the “civilized” family, repression’s “savage” displacement.
Along with the other “othered” ones, children carry what feminist
philosopher Sandra Harding has called an “epistemic privilege.” These
“others” represent alternative standpoints, or ways of seeing the world
based on a difference in material, class, physical, sexual—or, in the case
of the mad and young children—cognitive and even perceptual reality
from the dominant culture and its ways of knowing the world. Harding
refers to as them “valuable ‘strangers’ to the social order,” or “outsiders
within.”52 They are those marginalized by Eurocentric, patriarchal per-
sonal, interpersonal and social constructs. As we have seen, they are
typically screens for both the dark and the light projections of the dom-
inant class—both the shadow and the ideal of freedom from repression.
They are those “bondsmen” in Hegel’s master-slave relationship whose
identity is canceled, or put under erasure by the “desire” of the lord or
master, who, ironically, only knows himself through his mastery of
them—that is, through their negation—and therefore is dependent upon
them for his sense of self. As Hegel says of the desire of the lord, “First,
it has lost its own self, since it finds itself as an other being; secondly, it
has thereby sublated that other, for it does not regard the other as essen-
tially real, but sees its own self in the other.”53 As the conqueror proj-
ects his own split-off, unconscious contents onto the conquered and
distances her as the profane, the untouchable, the quintessential other,
so by a dialectical process, the split-off content appears in the other—in
the flesh—and becomes not just an adversary but a part of one’s own
subjective field, a “selfobject,” and as such, a potential interlocutor. The
slave shares in the master’s power because the master defines himself in
opposition to the slave, and therefore needs the slave as a dimension of
his own subjectivity.
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The relation of domination—of “dark” by “light,” unconscious by

conscious, desire by repression—which exists in the subjective economy
of the master is replicated externally in colonialist and patriarchal rela-
tionships, and in the Intrusive Mode of child rearing. This has changed
historically in postcolonialist reality with the “reversal”—the dialectical
reappropriation through dialogue—which applies both to social history
and to the history of subjectivity, and which is already implicit in any
situation of domination. As Hegel said, “But just as lordship showed its
essential nature to be the reverse of what it wants to be, so, too,
bondage will, when completed, pass into the opposite of what it imme-
diately is: being a consciousness repressed within itself, it will enter into
itself, and change round into real and true independence.”54
As we have seen, the child’s epistemic privilege was first recognized
in modernity by classical early-nineteenth-century Romanticism. Almost
100 years later, in 1891, the Romantic iconography of childhood was
reinscribed in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, where he
announced, along with the death of God, the death of homo clausus
and the rise of a new form of subjectivity: “The spirit,” he proclaimed,
“shall become a camel, and the camel a lion, and the lion at last a
child”—where child signifies “innocence and forgetfulness, a new
beginning, a player, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred
Yes.”55 Nietzsche’s philosophical sortie “beyond good and evil” was in
fact a further development of the Romantic iconography of the child as
the prophetic expression of what Judith Plotz described as a “pre-moral
freedom and spontaneity in which the psyche is fully at one with itself,”
which prefigures the wisdom of adults unhampered by moralizing and
repression.56 It is the intuition of this form of freedom that underlies the
existentialism of the first half of the twentieth century, and initiated the
postmodern inquiry into what Marcuse called “a new relation between
instincts and reason,” “a new rationality,” a “non-repressive order.”57
The new value placed on transitional experience—which is the hall-
mark of childhood experience—inaugurated twentieth-century theory.
Piaget’s notion of cognition as a constant mediation between organism
and environment—a self-regulating equilibrative process involving
assimilation and accommodation—necessarily implied a continuity
between internal and external structures. Dewey called this process
“transaction,” and his notion of “growth” as a continual reconstruction
of experience permeated twentieth-century ideas of an epistemological
structure that has the quality of the unfinished—with the fluidity, the
permeability, the flexibility, of constant transformation—and of the
inseparability of self and other. But it was twentieth-century artists who
first recognized and operationalized the child’s privilege, for it is in the
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transitional realm of art that epistemology is expressed concretely, and

where its relation to actual perception is represented—for an epistemol-
ogy is a way, not just of explaining, but of seeing the world. Twentieth-
century art, in its project of the deconstruction of representationalism,
required a related perceptual process of deconditioning of the eye, and
the art of children played—along with the so-called “primitive” art and
music that were beginning to find its way into European and American
circles—a major role in this aesthetic revolution.58
Four of the twentieth century’s most prominent artistic revolution-
aries—Klee, Kandinsky, Picasso, and Miro—and the emergent move-
ments they were sometimes associated with—Russian neo-primitivism,
futurism, cubism, surrealism—all sat before children’s art as before an
unconscious generic master. Kandinsky searched it for traces of a uni-
versal visual language. Klee, when taunted by critics that his art was
childish “scribbles and smears” responded “That’s fine! The pictures my
little Felix paints are better than mine.” Picasso studied it, it is reported,
with “greedy curiosity,” and is said to have told Herbert Read as they
toured an exhibition of child art in Paris in 1945, “When I was the age
of these children I could draw like Raphael. It took me many years to
learn to draw like these children.” And Miro, who immersed himself in
the semiotic of children’s art most profoundly—its “egocentric” per-
spective, its style of composition built on narrative, its tendency toward
highly charged single images, its bold use of color, its symbolic exagger-
ation, its arbitrary limiting or infinitizing of space, either heroizing or
dwarfing the objects placed within it—did not just adopt child motifs
and elements, he entered them. His project was not so much to appro-
priate the child’s pictorial syntax as to internalize its perceptual uni-
verse. The result was, as the historian of art Jonathon Fineberg has put
it, an “assault[ing] [on] the hierarchies of adult civilization with a sub-
versive innocence.”59
The persona of this subversive innocence is the “childman” of Rim-
baud, ten years younger than Nietzsche—Rimbaud the child genius
intent on the “disorganization of all the senses” as the chief methodol-
ogy of the deconstruction of the repressive order. The reconstruction
that is implicitly sought in this project is a dialectical advance of human
subjectivity—a reordering of the instinctual economy that corresponds
with the Romantic project of the renovation of the imagination—those
for whom, as Abrams suggested, the “new earth and heaven” of Christ-
ian eschatology is “simply the ordinary world of life’s everyday appear-
ances, renovated by the interplay of mind and nature in the act of
perception itself.”60 It is the bid to pass from outer revolution to a revo-
lutionary mode of perception—a relation between self and world in
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which “the unconscious is . . . more unmodified and accessible.” This is

what Abrams called “an apocalypse by imagination,”61 which accom-
panied a century of yearning for deep-structural social revolution, from
the French Revolution to World War I.
Always in the vanguard of this project of renovation was the inti-
mation and the expectation of a form of subjectivity that, in Marcuse’s
words, “preserves the truth of the senses and reconciles, in the reality of
freedom, the ‘lower’ and the ‘higher’ faculties of man, sensuousness and
intellect, pleasure and reason.”62 It represented a direct challenge to
Freud’s stern insistence that the repressive order is necessary to “civiliza-
tion.” Marcuse argued that the material conditions of existence, which
have until now required it, have been transformed by that very order to
a point where it is no longer necessary to species survival. Once the
abundance created by the performance principle has released us from
the necessity of that very principle, the reconstruction of the relation
between reason and desire is possible, in the development of a “‘libidi-
nal rationality’ which is not only compatible with but even promotes
progress toward higher forms of civilized freedom.” Marcuse expresses
the vision as a transformation of subjectivity in the form of a dialectical
return to the polymorphous eroticism of the young child:
No longer used as a full-time instrument of labor, the body

would be resexualized. The regression involved in this spread
of the libido would first manifest itself in a reactivation of all
erotogenic zones and, consequently, in a resurgence of pregeni-
tal polymorphous sexuality and in a decline of genital
supremacy. The body in its entirety would become an object of
cathexis, a thing to be enjoyed—an instrument of pleasure. . . .
the process just outlined involves not simply a release but a
transformation of the libido: from sexuality constrained under
genital supremacy to erotization of the entire personality. It is
a spread rather than explosion of libido—a spread over private
and societal relations which bridges the gap maintained
between them by a repressive reality principle.63
Elsewhere Marcuse, arguing from Schiller, analyzes this transfor-

mation as a return to the “aesthetic function” and the “play-impulse.”
Above all he claims that the movement does not represent mere release
of impulse or instinct. Within the repressive order, movement toward
release results in what he calls “repressive desublimation,” or the
expression of instinct in polarity with reason, where it still represents
the dark, the projected, without elements of transcendence—the body
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apart from spirit—the obscene. The new order of subjectivity entails, on

the contrary, nonrepressive sublimation, in which “the pleasure princi-
ple extends to consciousness,” and “Eros redefines reason in his own
terms.” In the new order, “Reasonableness is what sustains the order of
gratification.”64 This is an expression of the heart of the Romantic
vision for dialectical reunification of the personality, stated originally in
Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell during the French Revolution,
where he offered three propositions on the relation between reason and
desire that would preoccupy the next two centuries:
1. Man has no body distinct from his Soul; for that call’d
Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the
chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is
the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.65
Marcuse’s is perhaps the latest statement of the reappropriation of

childhood, articulated in terms that satisfy the fundamental questions
put by both Freud and Marx to the order of modernity. Maturity here
represents a reactivation of “precivilized and infantile stages,” but also,
in that it transforms the “perverted content of these stages,” and thus
does not represent regression or fixation, leads to an “attitude that
experiences man and nature as joined in a non-repressive and still func-
tioning order,” where “nature is taken, not as an object of domination
and exploitation, but as a ‘garden’ which can grow while making
human beings grow.”66 It also satisfies the criteria of the intersubject as
a dialectical reconstruction of the relation between subject and object,
self and other such that alterity, or the progressive withdrawal of pro-
jection, is possible.
The practical question, and the question most important for those
in relationship with children, is what kinds of changes in adult-child
relations follow on or produce—for the causal direction is still moot—
the reconstruction of normative adult maturity as a dialectical reappro-
priation of childhood? I have argued that the Empathic Mode of child
rearing in fact represents this reappropriative ideal, and that an under-
standing of optimal adult development as the progressive reunification
of conscious and unconscious elements of the personality and the corre-
sponding decentering of the ego, is implicit in the Empathic Mode.
Whether or not the Empathic Mode and the intersubject are becoming
normative for our culture could be determined by identifying multiple
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 147
criteria for evaluating changes in adult self-understanding, as well as

changes in social forms among adults. How to gauge change in modal
adult subjectivity is complicated by the fact that, if we stick to a dialec-
tical interpretation of change, negative or destructive phenomena in cul-
ture may be interpreted as deconstructive moments preceding
transformation. Schiller for example, writing during the French Revolu-
tion, when the impulse for social change was at a height in Europe—
and even as he predicted the “new reality principle” of the
Romantics—could characterize the spirit of the times as “fluctuating
between perverseness and brutality, between unnaturalness and mere
Nature, between superstition and moral unbelief, and it is only the equi-
librium of evil that still occasionally sets bounds to it.”67 Nor does his-
tory lead us to believe that the spirit of any given time will ever present
a different face, or public life ever find a balance other than the “equi-
librium of evil.”
The differences resulting from subjective transformation emerge
most often as protest, and historically speaking, as a seed awaiting the
cracking of the outer shell in order to emerge. Those who carry a new
principle into the world of action typically face various forms of resist-
ance and even martyrdom. And the emergence in adult culture of an
emphasis among increasing numbers of individuals on difference, alter-
ity and tolerance, lifelong development, multiracialism, androgyny,
sexual freedom and multiplicity, environmental responsibility, human
rights, social justice and world peace—amplified by the increasing inter-
visibility and transparency of the new information environment—repre-
sents a promise that is dialectically linked with the disorder—including
the fluctuation between “perverseness and brutality”—which the dis-
mantling of the “order of repression” entails.
The role of children and childhood in the emergence of a new order
of subjectivity is multidimensional. The Empathic Mode positions
parents for that moment identified by deMause that triggers the
“regression in the service of the ego” which is a necessary aspect of psy-
chological reorganization. A style of parenting that recognizes the child
as a fully human other—as a form of subjectivity which, whatever its
differences from the adult, carries the implicit demand that its interlocu-
tor forego domination and assume dialogue as its normative ideal—con-
fronts the adult with the continual necessity of deconstruction of rigid
categorical structures characterized by exclusions and hierarchies. And
altering the relations of power between adults and children necessarily
implies altering the relations of power between the elements or dimen-
sions of the self, and vice versa.
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For the adult to purpose to listen to children means attributing

reason to them, in the deepest sense of the term “reason” as a capacity
and a natural tendency toward self-regulation and self-organization.
Listening to children in no way implies, as it tends to do in the popular
imagination, capitulating to impulse, whim, or domination, any more
than it does among adults. To the extent that it recognizes the child’s
status as “valuable stranger” or “outsider within,” this form of listening
implies that each child offers the hope and possibility of the develop-
ment of a new relationship between reason and desire, a new opportu-
nity for the construction of a nonrepressive order of subjectivity, with
its corresponding opportunity for the construction of a nonrepressive
social order. It also implies that the child is that singular other whose
unconscious vocation is to contribute to the reconstruction of adult-
hood through its relation to it.
Attributing self-organizing capacities to children means, on the
most obvious level, ever more attention to the question of children’s
rights, and the transformation of child “management” methodologies
from controlling, intrusive and unilateral to dialogical, collaborative,
and democratic ones. On a practical level it implies a reorganization of
the lifeworlds of adult and child in the direction of reintegration and
deinstitutionalization in multiple domains, from the built environment
to the worlds of education and work. The slogan of the Romantic peda-
gogue Friedrich Froebel—founder of the kindergarten—“Come let us
live with our children”—perfectly expresses the urge for the reintegra-
tion of the lifeworlds that still informs those radical experiments in
architecture, urban planning, and alternative schooling which have
experienced perennial florescence in the West—most particularly in the
Progressive educational movement of the 1920s and the counterculture
movement of the 1960s. Although the reconstruction of subjectivity will
not come about through any one institution, and although the family is
obviously the primary institution of reproduction of the boundaries and
domains of the modal self, educational institutions—most particularly
the institution of the public school—play a major role, in the West
anyway, in holding any particular mode of the adult-child relation in
place, and thereby in the reproduction of a certain form of adulthood.
School is the place where adults and children meet for purposes of
cultural and social transmission, for the production of cultural and
social meanings, above all for the meanings associated with work and
with the formation of collective ethics. Marcuse suggested that the
reconstruction of the relation between reason and desire, or, as he put
it, “the transformation of the instinctual structure” that he saw as a
possible consequence of the “conquest of scarcity and alienation,”
Kennedy04 1/11/06 10:37 AM Page 149
could result in “the transformation of work into play.”68 The most logi-
cal cultural site for the institutionalization of this transformation—
which hinges on adults entering into dialogue both with their own
construction of childhood and with real children—is the school. And it
is the school to which, finally, we turn.
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Reimagining School
. . . our social life has undergone a thorough and radical change.

If our education is to have any meaning for life, it must pass
through an equally complete transformation.
—John Dewey1
The Purposes of Schooling
The eminent philosopher of education John Dewey wrote these words

in 1899. If we consider the last 100 years, that “radical change” in
social life of which he spoke will be seen to have been magnified expo-
nentially. But the school has not transformed accordingly. Most of those
who work for change in public education usually satisfy themselves
with the hope that the continual assimilation—through gradual coop-
tion of ideas and practices with which the school has been confronted at
least since the turn of the twentieth century will lead to a critical mass
of slight differences, which will eventually appear as transformation.
Whereas we in our lifetime see nothing, Rip Van Winkle might. For
others, there is no necessary expectation that slight quantitative incre-
ments will turn into qualitative change, and hence no way to imagine
the school except as “after the Revolution” whose arrival will surprise
everyone, and which will certainly not originate in the schools.
This situation presents those of us who allow ourselves to imagine
a form of schooling, universally practiced and available, which realizes
the potential of adult-child dialogue, with a danger that Dewey has
151
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 152
rightly characterized as a situation in which “the ideal is itself the prod-

uct of discontent with conditions,” which, instead of “serving to organ-
ize and direct effort, . . . operates as a compensatory dream.”2 This is
especially dangerous in confronting an institution that represents an
extreme case of the hardening of habits—in Dewey’s broadened sense of
the word—into predetermined “ruts,” which is the major problem
around which his analysis of the possibilities for social change revolves.
His succinct characterization of schooling as “largely utilized as a con-
venient tool of the existing nationalistic and economic regimes”3 applies
as well today as it did at any moment in the history of public schooling.
Dewey characterizes habits as “working adaptations of personal
capacities with environing forces,” “affections . . . predispositions . . .
demands for a certain kind of activity,” which in fact “constitute the
self.”4 Those habits that are not flexible, and open to reconstruction
through the influence of what he calls “impulse” or the “practically
equivalent” word “instinct,” are not capable of changing social condi-
tions, and are in fact the chief causes, as he sees it, of the structural
inequalities that support both personal and social conditions of either
chaos or stagnation like economic exploitation and war. In a modern,
state-mediated polity and economy, the public school is the chief point
of application of adult habit on childish impulse. It is the point of tran-
sition between childhood—the age, in his terms, of “original modifiabil-
ity” and “plasticity”—and the sort of habituated adult required for the
purposes of the state and economy. As such, it is the location in the life
cycle where the modal relation between habit and impulse, or reason
and desire, is determined through the ritual standardization of the
adult-child relation and its operationalization as the moment of transfer
or transition from childhood to adulthood.
It is this transitional moment in the life cycle, first referred to by
Freud as “latency,” where the relation between impulse and habit is
normalized on an adult model: where the child is “instructed” through
the most fundamental of hidden curricula, in the role and limits, prohi-
bitions and allowances of impulse in the reconstruction of habit. Either
we learn to use impulse, which according to Dewey is “the pivot upon
which the re-organization of activities turn,” to “give new directions to
old habits and change their quality”—that is, we teach children (and
ourselves in the process) to be oriented toward continually reconstruct-
ing habits—or we reproduce the gap between old habits and present cir-
cumstances that make for what he calls, ironically enough, the
“infantilisms,” the “mass of irrationalities that prevail among men of
otherwise rational tastes,” which manifest “just where critical thought
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Reimagining School 153
is most needed—in morals, religion and politics.” This reproduction of

“normal” social pathology is accomplished through what he calls
“training,” that is, “an impatient, premature mechanization of impul-
sive activity after the fixed pattern of adult habits of thought and affec-
tion”5—in short, the adult colonization of childhood.
The school has not changed because it is the major institution for
“subjection”—the social reproduction of a form of subjectivity—in the
interests of modern hegemonic ideologies and economies. As such, it
will never change merely through the introduction of new techniques or
technologies or methodologies within the current structure of subjec-
tion, but only through a form of subjection—which amounts to a form
of lived experience—based on a new set of discourses about the relation
between impulse and habit. As I have already argued, the question of
causality in the historical transformation or evolution of subjectivity is
moot because it is both circular and overdetermined. If, as I have also
argued, subjectivity is constructed to a great extent through the adult-
child relation, then one must ask, what enters that system or what
changes within that system in order to change the cycle of reproduction,
and how? What led the premodern, collectively modulated subject to
turn into the discrete subject of modernity, and what leads homo
clausus to transition into the intersubject? Where is the path, however
tortuous, from surplus-repression to a nonrepressive order?
Certainly the changes in social life of which Dewey spoke are also
changes in the lived experience and self-understanding of the individual
subject who participates in those changes; which, in turn, hinge on the
reconstruction of habit, which in his formulation is a lifelong process.
But this process shows its greatest promise in the socialization of the
young, and thus is dependent on the kind and quality of the adult-child
relation. Dewey’s analysis is so important because he provides us with a
way to imagine the transition from the modern to the postmodern sub-
ject as a dialectical process. The direction of evolution as he under-
stands it is from an ideal of subjectivity understood as fixed
habit—presented as a positive ideal in the Platonic model—to subjectiv-
ity understood as an ongoing process, which implies “a generosity of
outgoing action, a liberation of power as against the close, pent in pro-
tected atmosphere of a ready-made ego”6—the continual reconstruction
of habit, or what we have already encountered as the “subject-in-
process.” Dewey’s ideal of the continuous reconstruction of habit as an
engine for personal and social transformation is based on the decon-
struction of the monological and the emergence of the dialectical self—
characterized, not by exclusions and hierarchies but by plural and
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 154
sometimes contradictory dimensions and attributes whose interactions

implicitly aspire to a new, more differentiated and more fluid synthesis,
whether that synthesis is ever completely achieved or not:
Inconsistencies and shiftings in character are the commonest

things in experience. Only the hold of a traditional concep-
tion of the singleness and simplicity of soul and self blinds us
to perceiving what they mean: the relative fluidity and diver-
sity of the constituents of selfhood. There is no one ready-
made self behind activities. There are complex, unstable,
opposing attitudes, habits, impulses which gradually come to
terms with one another, and assume a certain consistency of
configuration, . . . .7
As Dewey’s analysis implies, the transition between these two ways

of imagining—and therefore performing—the self, hinges on the shifting
relation between reason and desire, the very binary relation that
Merleau-Ponty, following a tradition at least as old as Hegel and
Schiller and Romanticism in general, prophesied as the hinge of evolu-
tionary cultural transformation, or what Dewey referred to as “a most
far-reaching problem: The alterability of human nature.”8 The “nature”
here identified by Dewey is in fact Marcuse’s historically mediated
“libidinal economy.” After distinguishing between “a self taken as
something already made and a self still making through action,” Dewey
identified the hinge of this transformation: “In the former case, action
has to contribute profit or security or consolation to a self. In the latter,
impulsive action becomes an adventure in discovery of a self which is
possible but as yet unrealized, an experiment in creating a self which
shall be more inclusive than the one which exists.”9
The distinction is crucial, and made doubly so by Dewey’s lifelong
emphasis on the social role of education as either the reproduction of
existing adult habits, or the reconstruction of those habits in a form
that allows for “growth,” by which he meant a form that allowed for
further reconstruction. School for Dewey was the one institution—even
beyond the family—which could systematically, as a praxis, allow
“immature impulse to exercise its reorganizing potentialities.” For him,
“. . . the cold fact of the situation is that the chief means of continuous,
graded, economical improvement and social rectification lies in utilizing
the opportunities of educating the young to modify prevailing types of
thought and desire.”10
As a functional component of existing ideological and economic
power and interest, universal compulsory state schooling—where by
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 155
“state” is understood the regulative, hegemonic, interest-determined

structure of family, law, political system, economy, and class organiza-
tion—is essential to the reproduction of that form of subjectivity, that
is, worker/consumer/citizen, which is necessary to maintain this struc-
ture. The school, like all analogous educational institutions in whatever
age and culture, is the critical point of passage between the “wild,”
unsocialized being of the child and the being of the modal adult of the
epoch and the culture. It is in this institution that the passage between
the two states is expressed, codified, and continually enacted ritually
and symbolically. The parent sends the child to school as to a site where
the adult-child relation is regularized, formalized, and fitted for the con-
struction of relations of authority in the wider adult world—the “work-
place,” the “moneyplace,” and the “policyplace.” It is in school where a
process secondary to family socialization but equally powerful is initi-
ated. Here the desires, the aspirations, the prohibitions, the fatalisms,
the boundaries, and even the trangressive dreams of the modal adult—
the adult with certain commonly shared tastes, aspirations, and expec-
tations—are instilled and enforced in hegemonic form as discourses,
dispositions, beliefs, and practices.
From the point of view of the psychology of ego development,
school age is the moment in the life cycle when children are psycholog-
ically most available to this instillation. By “latency” Freud meant the
withdrawal of libido from the bodily organs and its investment in the
social relationships with mentoring adults and the tasks they
demand—the expansion of eros or desire into the psychosocial sphere,
with an emphasis on the world of instrumental production. Here,
instinctual energy is sublimated into work energy. Erikson follows
Freud in his characterization of the developmental ego-“crisis” of the
school-age child as the resolution of the binary psychosocial themes of
“industry” and ”inferiority.” For Erikson, the successful (or “good-
enough”) resolution of each developmental crisis contributes to the
epigenetic reconstruction of the ego to include a new dimension or
structural element, which in this case means the awarenesses and dis-
positions and skills—or what Schutz, on a more fundamental psycho-
somatic level, called the “tension of consciousness”—appropriate to
the adult world of work. In school the child learns, as Erikson put it,
“to earn recognition by producing things,” which is accomplished
through “adjust[ing] himself to the inorganic laws of the tool world.”
On this social functionalist view, the expansion of the child’s “ego
boundaries” to “include his tools and skills,” which in turn involves
learning the “work principle,” or “the pleasure of work completion by
steady attention and persevering diligence,” necessarily implies that
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 156
children, in whatever culture or historical period, “receive some sys-

tematic instruction.”11
A hermeneutics of suspicion would suggest that Freud’s and Erik-
son’s construction of latency is at least in part a theoretical reification of
what deMause called the Socializing Mode, which, as we have seen,
emerged in the nineteenth century. The notion of latency is a theoretical
legitimation of a certain form of the adult-child relation, and thereby of
a certain form of adult subjectivity. If we uncouple stage theory from
purely genetic accounts and consider, as Dominick Cavallo has sug-
gested, that “society politicizes the life cycle for its own purposes, and
that one can view psycho-social development from psycho-political as
well as psycho-sexual and psycho-social perspectives,”12 we can read
“latency” as a scientific legitimation of universal compulsory schooling,
which was just consolidating as a hegemonic institution in the mid- to
late-nineteenth century. Universal compulsory schooling is the institu-
tionalization of the idea of latency, as Barbara Finkelstein has argued,
“as a social as well as a psychological state of childhood.”13
In spite of its anti-historical bias, it is not necessary to abandon
Erikson’s epigenetic theory, or even his understanding of the develop-
mental “task” of the school-age child in order to introduce the idea of
dialogue into the construction of schooling. Schools or other educa-
tional institutions in any culture are necessarily ways of what he calls
“admitting the child to an understanding of meaningful roles in its tech-
nology and economy.”14 What Erikson, following Freud, has left out—
and the omission is in fact the chief index of his (and Freud’s)
construction of childhood—is admitting the child to an understanding
of meaningful roles in the construction of social and political power. If
we identify the school as we now know it as an artifact of the Socializ-
ing Mode, the question becomes one of imagining the same institution
fulfilling the same functions—of “admitting the child to an understand-
ing of x”—from the point of view of the Empathic Mode. We might ask
what kinds of changes that shift would bring about including, not just
what technological and economical roles might or might not be under-
stood as meaningful, but what a form of education based on dialogue—
which is the basis of the Empathic Mode—would mean for the
construction of relations of power.
Applied to the adult-child collective called “school,” which is a
community of power as much as a community of teaching and learning,
a key analytic dimension in any child-rearing mode could be defined as
that of both personal and collective self-regulation. The term evokes
both developmental and political discourses. The developmental dis-
course of self-regulation is constructed on binaries like habit versus
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 157
impulse or instinct, internal versus external locus of control, and auton-

omy versus heteronomy, which in turn evoke the social and political
binaries of anarchy (in the philosophical sense of the term) versus hier-
archy, self-governance versus external rule, and, at a deeper level, order
versus disorder. The notion of self-regulation, whether applied to indi-
viduals or social systems, is both about desire/reason and about power.
The Empathic construction of childhood understands the child first
as an interlocutor, and thus sees her, as described by the philosopher of
childhood Loris Malaguzzi, founder of the exemplary schools of Reggio
Emilia, as
tak[ing]an active role in the construction and acquisition of

learning and understanding. . . . Once children are helped to
perceive themselves as authors or inventors, once they are
helped to discover the pleasure of inquiry, their motivation and
interest explode. . . The age of childhood, more than the ages
that follow, is characterized by such expectations.15
Teachers in Reggio Emilia “begin by noting that it is impossible for

a culture to exist without an image of children. Children, as understood
in Reggio, are active and competent protagonists who seek completion
through dialogue and interaction with others, in the collective life of the
classroom, community and culture, with teachers serving as guides.”16
Dewey understood this intuitively in his announcement of what at the
turn of the twentieth century he called “a change, a revolution, not
unlike that introduced by Copernicus”17 in education, a revolution that
hinges on a reversal of the traditional relation between reproduction
and reconstruction. He saw the role of the school in a genuine social
and political democracy as an experimental or “embryonic” commu-
nity.18 Such a community is dedicated, not to the “citizen” but to the
“man”—or the “citizen” reconstructed as a bona fide social and politi-
cal agent—in short, as the democratic personality. To believe in such a
possibility requires a new understanding of and attitude toward the
meaning and potentiality of the child’s powers and impulses.
Dewey argued that the impulses—by which he means “the pivots
upon which the re-organization of activities turn, . . . agencies of devia-
tion, for giving new directions to old habits and changing their
quality”19—of the young are in a different relation with their forms of
habit than is the corresponding relation in adults. In children impulses
are, because of the “original plasticity” or “modifiability” of the young,
“highly flexible starting points for activities which are diversified
according to the ways in which they are used. Any impulse may become
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 158
organized into almost any disposition according to the way it interacts

with surroundings.” Implicit here is the notion that any habit, bad or
good, which has closed itself off to ongoing reconstruction by the medi-
ation of the “pivot” of impulse, has become “arrested and incrusted.”
Given that “human society is always starting afresh” in the young,
social transformation begins just there—in the young—and for him the
central, guiding belief of a fully humanized education necessarily
implies “some consciousness of the extent to which a future new society
of changed purposes and desires may be created by a deliberate humane
treatment of the impulses of youth.”20
The Space of Dialogue
The argument of this book has been that, although there are many vari-
ables that contribute to the evolution of subjectivity, the final determi-
native causal factor is the kind and quality of the adult-child
relationship itself—if only because it is through child rearing that any
cultural trait is reproduced. When the latter comes to be understood as
a relationship of dialogue, it is intimately associated with internal dia-
logue in the adult—the dialogue between the adult and his own “child”;
and according to the hermeneutic principal of subjectivity, internal dia-
logue is the dialectical engine of subjective transformation. That is, the
qualitative shifts in the adult-child relation over historical time have
directly to do with the shifts in the psychic economy of the adult that
result from internal dialogue. These shifts center in the organization and
reorganization of the relations between habit and impulse, conscious
and unconscious, superego (or “conscience”) and ego, and in a tempo-
ral dimension, of the relations between present, past, and future
(whether, for example, the adult considers himself capable of “starting
again,” “like a child”). To the extent to which they hinge on the ability
of the various dimensions of selfhood, some of which are in contradic-
tion, to listen to each other and to be moved by each other’s “reasons,”
they can be understood as relations of power. On its most fundamental
level, dialogue is about power, for it is based on the premise, as Martin
Buber put it, that “Each must expose himself wholly, in a real way, in
his humanly unavoidable partiality, and thereby experience himself in a
real way as limited by the other, so that the two suffer together the des-
tiny of our conditioned nature and meet one another in it.”21 This state-
ment can be applied to both external and internal dialogue.
When it moves across the shifting boundaries of the subject, inter-
nal dialogue forms the basis for dialogue with the other, who on the
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 159
model of the intersubject, is in fact already an element of the individ-

ual’s subjective field structure through introjection and projection. The
“child within”—the child the adult once was and therefore still is—is
the “other” within her own libidinal economy, the “valuable stranger”
or “outsider within,” with whom the adult as subject-in-process is in
dialogue. The child “without,” the child before us, the child as pre-
sented to the adult as son or daughter or ward or student or friend or
child passed on the street, is in a special relationship of dialogue and
power, which Buber calls a relationship of “inclusion.” In a relationship
of dialogical inclusion with the child, I assume the existence of those
powers and capacities that I as an adult find within myself either as a
universal human birthright, or as products of my individual develop-
ment. This means that I am committed to fostering and nurturing them,
and the implicit rights, privileges, and responsibilities associated with
them. In this sense I understand the child “as if” she were an ideal
adult—a self-regulating subject-in-process, knowing full well that (like
me) sometimes she is and sometimes she is not. When I need to protect
her from her own emotionalism and poor judgment I have no qualms
about doing so, but I understand these in the same way that I under-
stand my own (usually better hidden and more controlled) emotional-
ism and poor judgment.
I attribute to the child the same capacities, if not the same level or
consistency of their realization, for self-regulation and self-organization
that I find in or attribute to myself. I attribute to the child the same
needs I find in myself: for autonomous action, for personal choice, for
privacy, for respect from others, for personal exploration, for moments
or periods of psychological regression, for nurturance, for meaningful
work, for a reasonable level of power in the personal politics of the
“microsphere” or near environment, for leisure, for equal treatment in
situations of dispute, for, in every case of conflict or failure, the recogni-
tion of mediating circumstances of one kind or another. When the
powers and capacities I assume in the child are not realized or mani-
fested, I take the same attitude toward that situation as I take toward
myself—the same explanatory discourses and the same strategies. I
understand us both to be subjects-in-process, both involved in continu-
ous dialectical change, and both of us just as liable to system conflict,
stagnation, and chaos. I understand the pattern, if not all the details or
material, of our development to be the same.
This form of mutuality of attribution, which provides an interper-
sonal basis for dialogue, creates the same set of possibilities for my
actual relation with each child-person. Buber identifies three broad cate-
gories of intentionality toward the other, or “ways in which we are able
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 160
to perceive a man who is living before our eyes.”22 First, he character-

izes “observing” as seeing the other as consisting of “traits,” which can
be cataloged and categorized.23 This way of approaching the other is a
fundamental evolutionary function that is probably brain-based and an
aspect of perception itself, but as a style of personal and cultural inten-
tionality it is a reification of the latter, and underlies instrumental sub-
jectivity, or the “I-It” relationship, that is, the objectification of persons
for purposes of security and use. Buber opposes to this the “I-Thou,” or
the dialogical relation.24
As an intentional aspect of the “everyday” tension of conscious-
ness, the “I-It” relation also underlies both common sense and the sci-
entific attitude. It is the basis both for the everyday rational world of
use and exchange and for the stereotypification and subspeciation that
lead to criminal behavior by whole social groups—as in cases of institu-
tionalized inequalities, political and economic oppression, genocide, and
ecocide. Epistemologically, it is the knowledge of what Levinas calls the
egoist-I, or the situation of “totality,” which “knows nothing but
itself.” It is a form of intentionality that has not encountered true differ-
ence in the world, because it assimilates everything to its own sameness.
In Jungian terms, it is a negative ego-Self axis, in which the ego denies
its part-relationship with the totality of its nature, the Self, and arro-
gates the whole to itself.
Elsewhere, Buber refers to it as “monologue”: “He who is living
the life of monologue is never aware of the other as something that is
absolutely not himself and at the same time something with which he
nevertheless communicates.”25 The life of monologue is the epistemo-
logical basis for those attitudes we associate with adultism. It is the
epistemology of schooling, which understands the child as “future citi-
zen,” “standing reserve,” “human resource,”—as raw material for the
production of an adult—in which is implicit a “deficit model” of child-
hood, and the child understood as, not just an incomplete but an imper-
fect form of subjectivity. In fact Gadamer specifically refers to this form
of intentionality toward the other—any other—as the “educative rela-
tionship,” whereby “one claims to express the other’s claim and even to
understand the other better than the other understands himself,” and
thereby “seeks to calculate how the other person will behave.” He calls
this “the dialectic of charitable or welfare work,” which “penetrates all
relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate.
The claim to understand the other person in advance performs the func-
tion of keeping the claim of the other person at a distance.”26 This style
of intentionality informs at least one dimension of mainstream develop-
mental psychology that, as an instrument of state colonization, is used
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 161
by institutions to categorize, control, and locate individuals within a

codified system.
Buber identifies his second category, “the onlooker,” with “all great
artists”—which in the case of the adult-child relation, we can apply to
“all great teachers.” The onlooker “takes up the position which lets him
see the object freely, and undisturbed awaits what will be presented to
him. Only at the beginning may he be led by purpose, everything
beyond that is involuntary.” The onlooker is a phenomenologist—she is
interested in letting the object “appear” as much as possible apart from
her projections and instrumental purposes. She understands the event of
her own understanding of the object as the self-structuring of the object
being understood. For onlookers, the other “neither demands action
from them nor inflicts destiny on them.”27 To the extent to which the
teacher is an artist of soul-making, and the school her studio, she is an
onlooker: epistemologically she operates in the region of theory in the
original, etymological sense of the term. Aristotle used the word theor-
ein—a way of looking translated as “to behold” or “to contemplate”—
to describe what he considered the highest form of knowledge. To
“behold” is to see the object, as Buber says of the onlooker, as “what is
not ‘character’ and not ‘expression’,”28 both of which are projective
attributions. It is to see the world as play—as the self-structuring of the
world—or, in other terms, as open, self-organizing system. For the edu-
cator-as-onlooker, the adult-child collective that we call the school is the
“theater,” the place of beholding, of what Gadamer calls “total present-
ness,” in the transitional space in which the adult-child relation is
played out endlessly—in which its themes and plots undergo endless
recapitulation and development.29
Buber’s final intentional category, which he calls “becoming
aware,” is closely associated with a key concept in his understanding of
dialogue—that of “being addressed.” In the dialogical relation, the
other “says something to me, addresses something to me, speaks some-
thing that enters my own life.”
It can be something about this man, for instance that he needs

me. But it can also be something about myself. The man him-
self in his relation to me has nothing to do with what is said.
He has no relation to me; he has indeed not noticed me at all.
It is not he who says it to me, . . . but it says it.30
What “it” says is connected for Buber with the “sign.” “Signs,” he
says, “happen to us without respite, living means being addressed, we
would need only to present ourselves and to perceive.”31 Although
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 162
Buber insists that the signs that “happen to us” cannot be predicted or
categorized, we may say that the adult in dialogue with childhood and
the child is in the realm of a specific order of signification, and that the
sign of childhood is received across that “abyss of historical conscious-
ness” between the adult and her childhood mentioned in Chapter 1
which characterizes the hermeneutical situation. The “it” that speaks to
the adult is the child’s form of life in its structure as a different relation-
ship between habit and impulse, reason and desire—a different tension
of consciousness. But this is not a sign unless it arrives uncategorized,
not—as in the monological, “educative” relationship, as something
“understood in advance”—but as a sign that triggers the appropriation
of a new or rediscovered form of knowledge in the adult. Therefore it
should not and in fact cannot be named or predicted, and in the end
must be understood as the sign of the difference, or alterity that makes
for genuine dialogue. It is the recognition of difference between adults
and children that leads adults to recognize and listen to the individual
voices of children, rather than to presume “to express the other’s claim
and even to understand the other better than the other understands
himself,” and thereby “seek to calculate how the other person will
behave.” It is the possibility of this recognition that gives the phenome-
non of school its importance, and makes of it a key intercultural space
of meeting and coconstruction.
Adults and children are faced with at least four kinds of concrete
difference. Physical and physiological difference—in size and weight,
patterns of activity level, hormonal and neuronal differences—either
result in or are translated into social difference, above all differences in
power, wealth, status, and degrees of independence. The existential dif-
ference between adults and children—the kind and quality of their lived
experience—is an expression both of physical and physiological differ-
ences and of social difference. It is different, for example, to negotiate
the world from a height of three or four feet, as opposed to five and a
half or six, and neuronal differences translate into differences in percep-
tion itself. Finally, different degrees of inductive experience make for a
different practical logic—the child’s cognitive maps and categorical
structures are typically not as complex as the adult’s, simply because she
has not been around as long. This is not to deny that children of five
may have developed a more sophisticated and functional structure of
judgment in their given life-context than some full-grown adults—espe-
cially in schools, which are designed at least partially with children in
mind. In fact one of the major characteristics of adultism is the ignorant
attribution of ignorance to children.
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 163
These differences between children and adults are finally no more

telling or determinative or even more extreme than some cultural differ-
ences between adults. Like members of different adult cultures, the child
lives in a “culture of childhood” in which there are traditions, practices,
and expectations that make the culture what it is, and in which there
are pathologies and virtues specific to it. The culture of childhood lives
necessarily in a dependent relation to adult culture, but the style and
character of that dependency can vary greatly from culture to culture,
and between historical periods.
It is the reification of the four forms of difference—physical, social,
existential, and experimental—by adults that makes for the basic psy-
chosocial structure of the traditional school, which is a site for the
imposition of sameness by one culture—the culture of adulthood, which
is more powerful than the other—on the culture of childhood. Although
the perennial conflict between these two cultures guarantees that the
traditional school will always be in some sense a place of struggle, there
is no reason to believe that these two cultures would not struggle in a
school in which genuine dialogue took place, given the close relation-
ship between conflict and reconstruction. A school that understands
itself as in-process in no way overcomes, any more than any other insti-
tution, the vicissitudes of the relations of power, given that power is, in
Foucault’s classic formulation, omnipresent—“not because it has the
privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but
because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or
rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere;
not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from every-
where.”32 The school as embryonic community is in fact a laboratory
for relations of power—a site necessary to any collective interested in
social reconstruction. As a laboratory, its goal is to resist what Foucault
calls “Power,” that is, hierarchy and “lordship” in whatever form,
which he characterizes as “. . . permanent, repetitious, inert, and self-
reproducing,” yet “simply the overall effect that emerges from all these
mobilities [of power with a small “p”], the concatenation that rests on
each of them and seeks in turn to arrest their movement.”33
In order to emerge, the event of dialogue requires an initial separa-
tion, a distance to be bridged, and a “will to relation,” relation having
been made possible only by the hermeneutical act of “setting at a dis-
tance.” “Distance,” according to Buber, “provides the human situation;
relation provides man’s becoming in that situation.” Buber’s ontology of
intersubjectivity implies the intersubject, who as a dialectical synthesis
of the collective and the discrete subject, recognizes her own radical
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 164
individuality again within a dual system of self and other: the intersub-
ject “can accomplish the act of relation in the acknowledgement of the
fundamental actuality of distance.”34 Broadly speaking, the premodern,
collective self is in a situation of psychological fusion with the other,
and the modern, discrete self is in a situation of isolation and objectifi-
cation. The intersubject is in a situation of dialogue, which sublates
both terms of the binary construct in a third structure that mediates dis-
tance and relation.
Dialogue assumes the rupture of the egoist-I and the reconstellation
of the ego-Self axis, which precipitates an internal reconstruction
whereby the self recognizes its own multiplicity, the otherness within
itself, and simultaneously that the other—who is also multiple—is a
part of its intersubjective field through projection and introjection. Dia-
logue both causes and is caused by reconstruction across the boundaries
of the self, but it emerges not as an experience of fusion or collective
identification, but as the recognition of the very otherness of the
other—the recognition that the other “is absolutely not myself” and
that the other is “the very one she is.” Dialogue implies accepting
another human being in his or her particularity as “the single one,” the
“Thou.”35 It requires the withdrawal of the projection of the egoist-I,
which, paradoxically, reveals, not just the individual who is absolutely
not myself, but the intersubjective structure of subjectivity that contains
us. I and the other are both more individualized through withdrawal of
the projection, and more recognizable as field beings, in that the struc-
ture of intersubjectivity is clarified when its contents (projections and
introjections) are distinguished from its formal structure—the structure
that carries and organizes those contents.36
The “between” of dialogue is both the between within the sub-
ject—the difference that the subject finds within herself—and the
between between subjects—the space of interlocution where self-other
boundaries become mutually transgressive and thereby negotiable
between persons. These two forms of alterity are in dialectical relation.
Together, they establish transitional or “potential” space—the space
outside the individual, but is not the external world, the space of cre-
ativity and transformative process. It is, as we have seen, the dialectical
“third way of living,” which mediates the inner reality of the individual
and the shared reality of the world that is external to individuals. The
transitional is a space of the deconstruction and reconstruction of inter-
human relations of all kinds, including relations of power—which
implies the dialectical overcoming of Hegel’s paradigmatic master-slave
relationship in the direction of equality—and relations involving the
reconstruction of mutual values and accepted social and political prac-
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 165
tices. It is the space of the more fluid relation between impulse and
habit that is childhood, and is marked above all by the sign of play,
which, as Winnicott has shown, corresponds in the world of adults to
the space of what he broadly calls “culture”: art, philosophy, religion,
intense relational experience, dreaming, envisioning.37
The transitional “between” is the site where the ego understood as
the bearer of the “same,” the “thematizing gaze,” the epistemological
subject who “never encounters anything truly other in the world”
because it assimilates the other to its own structures of judgment—
which, as we have seen, Levinas associates with Western reason—under-
goes reconstruction, creating at least the possibility of “the liberation of
the ego with regard to the self.”38 Philosopher Hugh Silverman calls it
“the space of difference which is neither that of the subject nor that of
the object”—a space of inquiry, in that inquiry involves “the appropria-
tion of a space which is neither that of the interpreter nor of the inter-
preted, but one which uncovers what most needs to be said with respect
to that which is interpreted”39—in which one is, in Buber’s terms,
“addressed” by the “sign.” The interlocutors enter dialogue as a space
in which the assumptions of both are put under interrogation, and in
which therefore the outcome is uncertain and emergent. Nor is there
any necessary expectation that difference will be overcome. If it is over-
come it will be through a higher resolution, a sublation, which will in
turn carry its own difference within it.
The School as Laboratory of the Third Way of Living
Reimagining the praxis of school on this side of the “revolution not

unlike that introduced by Copernicus” means imagining an institution
that creates the conditions for dialogical relations between the forms of
intentionality of childhood and adulthood. As we have seen, Schiller
understood “the third joyous kingdom of play” as representing a dialec-
tical reconciliation between “rational ideas” and “the interest of the
senses,”40 or reason and desire, and—either synonymously or analo-
gously understood—primary and secondary process, unconscious and
conscious contents, impulse and habit, and ultimately, ego and Self.
Understanding the school as laboratory, studio, or experimental cultural
zone—the transitional space in which this reconciliation is continually
and perennially undertaken, where adults invent and maintain and
mediate an interactive and performative structure which “permit[s]
immature impulse to exercise its reorganizing potentialities”41—in no
way trumps the perennial function of the school as a site where, on
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Erikson’s account, “ego-boundaries” are expanded to include “tools

and skills,” where we first experience “the pleasure of work completion
by steady attention and persevering diligence,” or where children
“receive some systematic instruction.” If Freud’s psychosexual theory of
latency and Erikson’s “industry versus inferiority” stage of epigenetic
ego-formation reflect a genetic psychosocial situation and not merely a
historically determined psychopolitical one, they will apply to the
school as a site for cultural reconstruction as much as a site for cultural
reproduction.
As it is, the implicit goals of schooling as we mostly know it are in
direct contradiction with a major conditional requirement for dia-
logue—that it is possible only in a context of noninstrumental relations.
Buber’s presentation of the complex, emergent, and uncontrollable rela-
tionship between dialogical and instrumental relations in the two basic
word-pairs “I-Thou” and “I-It” make it clear that instrumental and dia-
logical relations are mutually dependent and even mutually entrain-
ing.42 The instrumental world of “use” is in fact what we typically
mean by the “world as experience” as opposed to the “world of rela-
tion.” Nevertheless, the school is currently implicitly constructed, not
just as an involuntary reflection of, but as an intentional reification of
that use-world—as a world of the calculated reproduction of the “citi-
zen,” “the worker,” and the “consumer,” in which latter is also implicit
the “information-consumer,” that is, someone who accepts the state
media’s account of the world—whether by “state” is understood the
government or the corporations. Traditional state-driven educational
rhetoric, with a mixture of sentimentality and instrumentalism as chill-
ingly grotesque as it is hypocritical, refers to children as “our most pre-
cious resource,” and need say no more in order to be understood. The
school as we know it simply cannot understand itself as other than a
colonizing arm of the state, taken in its broadest sense to include not
just legal and political and economic forms, but social and cultural and
relational ones—from the form of the community to the form of the
family to the form of individual sexual organization and of sexual
morality.
As a colonizing institution, it is the school’s “job” to produce,
through what Dewey describes as “converting an original docility to the
new into a docility to repeat and conform,” an adult subject who will
maintain these forms. The way the school accomplishes this is by setting
impulse and habit, reason and desire, at odds, and thereby sundering
the dialectical connection between them that is the location of the
potential for individual and social reconstruction. What is reproduced
in the very structure and intent of traditional schooling is whatever the
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 167
good intentions of its operatives, “the social divorce of routine habit

from thought, of means from ends, practice from theory.” In fact
Dewey goes on to deconstruct the interests behind those “good inten-
tions” in a few blunt sentences: “Those who wish a monopoly of social
power find desirable the separation of habit and thought, action and
soul, so characteristic of history. For the dualism enables them to do the
thinking and planning, while others remain the docile, even if awkward,
instruments of execution. Until this scheme is changed, democracy is
bound to be perverted in realization.”43
Although overcoming the instrumental relations that are inscribed
in the school as an institution of social reproduction in no way implies
doing away with the school as a preparation for the world of work, it
does imply the reconstruction of the world of work as much as the
world of leisure and the world of politics. The adult not subjected to
“premature mechanization,” like the adult of Coleridge who “retains
the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood” has learned a
way of being, a pattern of coordinating means and ends, of uniting
action and soul through “constantly utilizing unused impulse to effect
continuous reconstruction.”44 This adult subject offers the promise of
constructing, collectively and individually, new approaches to the tool
world, which imply new approaches to the ethics of work, which imply
new approaches to social justice, which imply new approaches to the
construction of power. The index of a culture oriented to reconstruction
rather than reproduction will be an educational structure that encour-
ages a form of individual and social life that marries, as in the Romantic
vision, ends and means, habits and thoughts, practice and theory.
What are the fundamental practical guidelines for such a school? Is
there just one way that such a school can be constructed, or multiple
ones? To affirm the former promises the imposition of yet another “one
best system.” The only set of criteria that can be consistently applied
without the danger of totalitarianism are the principles of dialogue,
which we have identified as: 1) a hermeneutical approach to self and
other, that is, the recognition and acceptance of distance and relation in
dialectical process; 2) the affirmation of the other as the “single one,”
which is identified with “alterity,” or the decentered psychological
organization associated with the “rupture of the egoist-I”; 3) an empha-
sis on noninstrumental relations, which in this case imply a meticulous
respect for and attention to the perceptions, interests, and goals of
childhood and of individual children; 4) a continuous attention to equi-
table relations of power, which implies political autonomy and self-gov-
ernance, both within the school—which includes the classroom
itself—and in the school’s relation to larger associations of which it may
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 168
be a part. Political autonomy and self-governance are fundamental

requirements for the formation of social democracy.
By social democracy is understood, following Dewey’s now famil-
iar phrase, a form of “associated living, . . . of conjoint communicated
experience”45 that forms the basis for genuine political democracy.
What upholds the latter is a society dedicated to two related realms of
common value: values of social justice, equality, social responsibility,
nonviolence and mutual care; and values of individual rights and free-
doms, which is to say the social intention to allow individuals to live a
relation between impulse and habit that allows for personal transforma-
tion in the interests of self-actualization. Social democracy is about the
reconstruction of relations of power on the intersubjective level, and of
the relation between impulse and habit on the intrasubjective level
(which, as Plato’s analysis of the tripartite self indicates, is also a rela-
tion of power).
Practically speaking, what Dewey noticed and encouraged in his
view of the emergence of social democracy were two tendencies. First,
as he put it,
a movement toward multiplying all kinds and varieties of asso-

ciations: Political parties, industrial corporations, scientific
and artistic organizations, trade unions, churches, schools,
clubs and societies without number, for the cultivation of every
conceivable interest that men have in common. As they
develop in number and importance, the state tends to become
more and more a regulator and adjuster among them; defining
the limits of their actions, preventing and settling conflicts.46
Second, the tendency toward what is now—at least on one interpreta-

tion—known as “globalism,” or at least a logical transformation of the
current form of it, expressed in the slow resolution of the “opposition
between the claim of independent sovereignty in behalf of the territorial
national state and the growth of international and what have well been
called trans-national interests.” This tendency connects with the first, in
that the voluntary associations that form the heart of a social democ-
racy “do not coincide with political boundaries,” and therefore
internationalism is not an aspiration but a fact, not a senti-

mental ideal but a force. Yet these interests are cut across and
thrown out of gear by the traditional doctrine of exclusive
national sovereignty. It is the vogue of this doctrine, or
dogma, that presents the strongest barrier to the effective for-
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 169
mation of an international mind which alone agrees with the

moving forces of present-day labor, commerce, science, art
and religion.47
As an expression, then, of social democracy, the school’s role is not to

be understood as an expression of or an arm or a function of state
socialization, but as a form of association protected and nurtured, but
in no way determined by the state.
A school of the “third way of living” must, then, be understood as
an autonomous and self-governing collective in its relation with larger
bodies or associations. No obligatory curricula or academic or profes-
sional standards will be handed down to it by any group that presumes
to know its goals and interests better than itself. All that the state may
provide the school is an equalized allocation of tax monies, which
belong to the people as a whole—the “people,” it is assumed, being eth-
ically committed, in their own best interests and according to the two
realms of common values mentioned above, to equal educational access
and opportunity for all of its members. Beyond financial support, the
state may certainly work as a generator and disseminator of educational
ideas and materials, but none of these shall be imposed.
Parents of students are understood as part of the “committee of the
whole” of the school community, and participate directly in school gov-
ernance and administration, as do teachers, students, other staff, and
anyone else who expresses a desire to be a part of the school commu-
nity. There are on principle no permanent administrators, although any
member of the community, including students and parents, either indi-
vidually or as parts of administrative groups, may serve in that capacity
for extended periods of time—always at the discretion of the commu-
nity as a whole. Decisions about crucial dimensions of the school such
as curricula, grouping, scheduling, personnel, and even disciplinary
issues are arrived at democratically, through inquiry and mutual deliber-
ation, and finally, the judgment of the collective, or the committee of
the whole. On a practical basis, this means that the space and time allo-
cated to these processes, in the form of appropriately designed meeting
spaces and a schedule that allows adequate, paid time for collaborative
inquiry and deliberation is assumed to be as essential to the quality of
the life of the school as the space and time allocated to instruction.
The school is as much a community of adult inquiry—as much a
laboratory for social democracy among adults—as it is of children, and
the processes of inquiry, deliberation, and judgment are shared by both.
In places those processes intersect, in others they operate separately, or
in a parallel, or in tandem. The professional vocation of the educator is
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 170
understood as a continual inquiry into the optimal relation between

theory and practice, a continual inquiry into the adult-child relation,
and—in keeping with Dewey’s suggestion that it is among the youth
that society is reconstructed—into social reconstruction in collaboration
with that very youth. In such an intentional community of adults and
children, the two are co-learners and co-inquirers, and this co-inquiry
applies both to academic and to political, or power-related, aspects of
the community.
Teachers are prepared for the school of the third way through a
reconstructed form of enculturation and skill-building: the academy
moves to the school, which now becomes the primary site for prepara-
tion in pedagogy, curriculum development, and group process. Classes,
seminars, student teaching, consultation, and mentoring take place pri-
marily on-site, and these classes, seminars, workshops, projects,
research episodes, etc. are implicitly understood as generally open to all
members of the community, including children. Pre- and apprentice
teachers participate in the life of the school on all levels, including
organization and governance. This represents a reprise of a pattern initi-
ated in the U.S. at the beginning of the twentieth century and aban-
doned in the latter half, of “laboratory schools” in universities; what is
different in this case is that the school hosts the university rather than
vice versa. Professors of education have assignments that include resi-
dency in particular schools, which include classroom teaching responsi-
bilities and mentoring of children, collaboration with teachers in
curriculum development and implementation, coordination and facilita-
tion of action and grounded research, and ongoing dialogical philo-
sophical inquiry with teachers and other staff.
The reconstruction of physical space to accommodate this recon-
struction in practice and in the theory-practice relation is a crucial
aspect of the shift itself. Institutional practices are shaped and deter-
mined as much by the design of the built environment as by the activi-
ties that take place within it; in fact the two are inseparable. The built
environment is a reification in space—in boundary, pathway, wall and
sector—of the social roles and relationships that gave rise to it—which
in turn are influenced and determined by the built environment, and so
on in a circle. The philosopher of architecture Yi-Fu Tuan refers to built
space as “a text encoding the rules of behavior and even a whole world
view,” which “demarcates and intensifies the forms of social life”
within it.48 Built space shapes, identifies and determines the range of
possibility of the activities of those it contains. For the child, the built
environment of the school is a first definitive social text in architectural
form, which forms and instructs lived experience, and creates a lifelong
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 171
psychological template for the functionality, possibility, comfort, and

beauty of the work environment.
A space dedicated both to children and adults and to their interac-
tion must take into account the differences in the lived experience of
space of children and of adults, identify the intersections and the devel-
opmental trajectories of the two, and balance the distinctive needs of
both. The child’s most fundamental project is to “master” the world—
to learn to control and manipulate and preserve and enhance it with
tools and emergent skills—through play, or “playfully.” Play is a form
of activity in which means and end are in harmony, which effectively
means that they have merged, in that the activity of play is experienced
as its own end. The child has not relinquished the conviction that work
should be play, and that any overdrawn distinction between the two is a
problematic one. In playful work, mastery is attained through participa-
tion in the world of the task, through joining it as an interlocutor in
transitional space. As a result of the interaction, something is produced,
and this object is both a transformation of the world and a representa-
tion of internal transformation, which in developmental terms may be
understood as greater differentiation, articulation, functional integra-
tion, and centralized control, that is, “mastery.” In making something in
an encounter with the world the child, like the artist, produces, not just
objects for use, but symbols of her own interior development. The
latency child is, in Erikson’s words, oriented toward “adjusting himself
to the inorganic laws of the tool world”—which is to say becoming an
adult—through a process akin to the artist’s. The result is greater dis-
tance and greater relation within the environment: as a result of the
process of playful work, the organism is better adapted to the environ-
ment through changing the environment and in the process of changing
it, being changed itself.
The modern adult’s work project—unless he or she is an artist,
which can be taken in the broadest sense of the term—is, as Heidegger
put it, “to pursue and entrap nature as a calculable coherence of
forces,” which he called “enframing.”49 This is the project of a subject
who is already separated from nature, or world, and represents a hyper-
trophy of distance, instrumentalism, and mastery and domestication of
a potentially dangerous “other.” From the point of view of the child or
the artist, it represents a shift from Buber’s ontological position of dis-
tance and relation to distance without relation, from interlocution to
colonization, from communion to alienation, differentiation to frag-
mentation, and from normative to implicitly pathological use of the
world, including the world of other people. It has resulted in an aes-
thetic degradation of the lived environment that has paralleled the
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 172
increasingly rapid development of the technology available to manipu-

late that environment. To this extent, the development of human tech-
nology, at least in the case of the West and arguably universally, can be
seen either as a tragic narrative, captured originally in the myth of
Prometheus; or as a dialectical moment that will be followed by a subla-
tion, or synthesis of contradictory elements. The latter is what the sub-
ject-world relation of childhood prophecies—recalling Schiller’s
characterization of childhood as “a lively representation to us of the
ideal, not indeed as it is fulfilled, but as it is enjoined.”50
The transitional intentionality of the child and the artist promises a
reunification of work and play. Both play in a differentiated unity with
world, in the interest of communion and integration. The environment
with its demands and exigencies provides the challenge, or the “ali-
ment” for this process, which is to say for its own transformation. For
the child as for the artist, the product that emerges from the engage-
ment and that represents the encounter with the environment is rela-
tively unexpected because it has emerged through an interactive process
that allows for creative outcomes. It is not a part of what Heidegger
calls the “standing reserve”—the outcome of strategies of domination,
to be extracted from the world and ordered and stored—but a symbol
of transformation. It stands in a different meaning-relationship to the
environment. It resists the status of the standing reserve, it is “un-
enframe-able”—a transformation rather than an colonization of the
world and the self-world relation.
The intentionality of the over-instrumentalized adult—the one, to
recall again Schiller’s analysis, who has undergone a “dismemberment
of being,” for whom “nature has disappeared from humanity,” and for
whom the environment has become an adversary—is a Faustian hyper-
trophy. But if we take a dialectical view of development, this hypertro-
phy is a temporary one and necessary to growth, to ultimately, in the
long run, being “reconciled to nature in freedom.” In its current form it
is dangerously out of balance. It takes a normal aspect of self-world dif-
ferentiation—the strategic impulse to put things aside, to choose, to use
only those parts of the world that can be regulated and secured, stored,
distributed, and placed in reserve for future use—and turns it into a
general principle of use, thus rendering it ecocidal. The factors con-
tributing to its historical reconstruction are overdetermined, but it can
be assumed that key among them is the reconstruction of those two
institutions most directly determinative of the education of the young—
the family and the school. In the family, it implies a reconstruction of
the relation between culture and instinct, thought and action, order and
disorder, heteronomy and autonomy in the context of intimate relation-
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 173
ships—that is, on the most fundamental of levels. In the school, it

implies a reconstruction of the world of work: the “inorganic tool
world,” the world of tasks.
The physical plan of a school dedicated to the realization of a space
dedicated to the reunification of work and play will include spaces that
are designed for various kinds both of adult and child work, play, and
meeting. The configuration of classrooms, offices, seminar and confer-
ence rooms, shop and studio areas, lounges and eating areas, large and
small meeting areas, must be imagined within the larger context of
design variables like the overall construction of pathway or route, the
interface between indoor and outdoor spaces and the concomitant con-
struction of a combination of natural and artificial light, the juxtaposi-
tion of “open” and “closed, “noisy” and “quiet,” “hard” and “soft,”
public, semi-public and private spaces—of spaces designed for large
groups, small groups, intimate groups and individuals. These obvious,
concrete principles of overall design have been virtually ignored by
school architects, under the sign of economy and a spurious argument
for “efficiency.”51 Such a dramatic insensitivity to the effects or the pos-
sibilities of the built environment is an index, not just of adultism, but
of the function of the school as a site for colonization. The traditional
school building is a reification of the Intrusive Mode, and emerged in
the late eighteenth century, as Foucault has argued, with the prison, the
barracks, the hospital, the asylum, and the office building in construct-
ing an environment designed for purposes of surveillance, classification
and “normalization” of the population.52 Normalization serves social
control through the production of a “docile body,” “both a productive
and a subjected body,” a subject who has, in Dewey’s same use of the
word, been converted from the “true docility” of the young—which he
describes as “to be eager to learn all the lessons of active, inquiring,
expanding experience”—to “subjection to those instructions of others
which reflect their current habits. . . . a willingness to follow where
others points the way, into conformity, constriction, surrender of skepti-
cism and experiment.”53 In his archeology of disciplinary practices,
Foucault chronicles the emergence of an architecture designed “to
permit an internal, articulated and detailed control—to render visible
those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that
would operate to transform individuals: to act on those it shelters, to
provide a hold on their conduct, to carry the effects of power right to
them, to make it possible to know them, to alter them.”55 This is the
architecture of the school as we know it.
The school of the third way assumes an emergent, systemic balance
of multiple pedagogies and curricula, from the most open to the most
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 174
closed forms of structure and organization. The overarching theoretical

perspective through which this balance is determined would be based,
not on an imposed unity or hierarchical continuum, but on the assump-
tion of radical difference, or alterity. In education, this would amount to
a learning—and therefore a teaching—theory based on constructivist
stage theories of development and domain theories of intelligence, both
of which imply a primary emphasis on the individualization of learning
and instruction within a social context. The theory justifying this
approach has been in place at least since the work on human intelli-
gence and motivation began roughly one hundred years ago with Binet,
was developed and articulated in Piaget, linked to drive and ego psy-
chology in Rogers, Maslow, and Bruner, reconstructed as multiple and
nonlinear through Gardner, understood as implicitly social and dialogi-
cal in Vygotsky, and operationalized by practitioners in a multitude of
ways, from curricula based on individualized instructional plans in spe-
cial education to curricula directly based on multiple intelligences, to
inquiry-based learning of all kinds.
A school that is constructed on the learning unit of the individual
in no way implies selfish individualism; in fact it could be argued that
the contradictory combination of radical individualism and brute collec-
tivism of the Intrusive structure does much more to instigate and
foment selfishness than a fully individualized model because it puts the
two modes in conflict, impairing both individual and community self-
realization. The grouping principle of the third way is based on the
assumption that the school is an intentional community rather than a
forced collective or state colony designed for the production of individ-
ual and group “high achievement,” or specifically for the “tooling up”
of the population for the uses of the economy or the “market.” As an
intentional community, it is conceived normatively by definition—that
is, it is both experimental and emergent and guided by normative ideals;
it is not a community that “just happens,” nor is it a community that is
determined from above, by a hierarchy of power. It is a community that
very consciously explores the possibilities of the relation between adults
and children in the interests of the emergence of individual self-actual-
ization and social reconstruction, which are inseparable. And the form
of social reconstruction that any intentional community based on dia-
logue necessarily entails will be a democratic one, which implies an
intentional community dedicated to the construction of the attitudes,
dispositions, knowledge and skills characteristic of a social democracy.
What has so far prevented the practical realization of construc-
tivist-developmental theory, which has only emerged as a general phe-
nomenon during the period of the Socializing and the Empathic Modes,
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 175
are curricula and a corresponding pedagogy based on the Intrusive

Mode. The heritage of the latter is written, not just into classroom
activity and interaction, nor just into relations of power between adults
and children and adults and adults in schools, but into the physical
design of schools themselves. Reconstructed curricula, pedagogy, and
relations of power, and therefore patterns of governance, demand the
reconstruction of the space in which they are developed, articulated,
and performed. Group activities and the spaces in which they happen
are mutually interactive and determinative. To begin to reimagine how
groups and individuals are organized for work and for meeting in the
reconstructed school is necessarily to begin to reimagine the physical,
material organization of those spaces.
There is no obvious common sense or empirically proven instruc-
tional reason to regularly group students by age or academic perform-
ance, or to regularly put students in groups of more than fifteen or
so—whether those groups be age-graded or determined by some other
criterion. Where the unit of academic measurement and analysis is the
individual and his or her interest and performance, to design activities
and the spaces for those activities based unilaterally on a model of large
group instruction is, if not counterintuitive, then simply dramatically
inefficient. The principle of transitional space calls for the construction
of physical spaces that lend themselves to the “between” of any
encounter, whether that encounter be between members of large, mid-
sized or small groups, including triads, dyads, or the intrasubjective
“between” of being alone. A curriculum, a grouping plan, a system of
scheduling, a system of mentoring, a system of individual, large and
small group instruction and inquiry and deliberation, a system of collec-
tive self-governance and of professional development—all of these
should map onto a space designed to provide to the greatest possible
degree for the specific forms of these practices.
A curriculum that is both dialogical and fully individualized is best
constructed operationally as a combination of individual and group
projects, individual and small group skill instruction, and group inquiry
of various kinds, related both to the projects underway and to the usual
subject areas that can be applied to them. In terms of content area, the
curriculum should embody all the traditional academic disciplines,
including the arts, languages, mathematics, physical education, and the
natural, physical, and human sciences. The “project method,” which
has been present as a concept since the early-twentieth-century progres-
sive school movement, offers the most obvious possibility of a dialogical
and emergent reconstruction of curriculum and pedagogy. It provides
for multiple approaches both to the numbers of students involved in
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any given project, and to the extent to which the theme or topic of the
project is the outcome of a negotiation between the teacher—whose
interest is in communicating and transmitting the content and processes
of the disciplines—and the student’s interest.55 A project may be an
individual or a collaborative inquiry, and a certain proportion of each
day is devoted to it. It often calls for “field trips,” and requires suffi-
cient shop, studio, laboratory, and library spaces for its implementation.
As recently implemented in the schools of Reggio Emilia, projects fall
naturally into three categories: those that arise directly from the interest
of a child or children, those that reflect mutual interests of teachers and
children, and those chosen by teachers with certain cognitive or social
concepts in mind.57
The effect of such an emergent curriculum is to diversify grouping
practices, and thereby pedagogical strategies as well. At any given point
during the school day, groups ranging in size from one to twenty per-
sons may be found assembled, not to speak of whole-school assemblies
devoted to various purposes. Each of these groupings will have an
appropriate space in which to meet—a space that optimally both con-
tains, encourages, and contributes to the structure of the particular
activity in which the individual or group is engaged. Teachers will be
engaged in a corresponding variety of pedagogical activities—from lec-
ture or drill to small or large group facilitation to individual, small or
large group guided skills instruction. Some students will be engaged in
project work, alone or in small groups, some assembled in groups of
varying sizes for tutoring or skill instruction in subjects such as mathe-
matics or foreign languages; some will be writing or engaged in cooper-
ative editing or writing, some will be working on a dramatic
production, or practicing or performing music; some will be crafting an
object in shop or studio, some engaged in group critique of a work of
art, some engaged in observation of cellular structures in a laboratory,
and some engaged in communal literary or historical and philosophical
investigation, which includes dialogical inquiry.
If there is a set of content-expectations that form the conceptual
spine and the scope and sequence for curriculum, they are understood
as one dimension of the structure in which students and teachers enter
into dialogue in order to produce an emergent curriculum. If adults
decide, for example, that certain literacy, numeracy, musical, artistic,
computer, kinaesthetic, or other knowledge and skills are critical to the
school’s notion of a “good education,” then the principle of dialogue
requires that they find a way to bring that knowledge and those skills
forth in the context of the interest of the students. “Interest” of the stu-
dents does not necessarily imply their pleasure interests—there is no
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 177
necessary relationship between interest and “fun”—nor does it imply

that there will not be conflicts of interests between adults and children
to be continually worked through. It is also understood that in certain
areas of the lifeworld there is differential authority between adults and
children, just as it is understood that in certain areas there is differential
responsibility. The argument for this differential is given in everyday
experience, and in the great majority of cases is as obvious to children
as it is to adults. The points at which it is not obvious are the very
points of dialogue and reconstruction, and the adult-child collective of
the school, as an “embryonic community life,”57 is the logical site for
this dialogue. The school of the third way, is in Dewey’s words, a “pro-
gressive community,” in that it “endeavors to shape the experience of
the young so that instead of reproducing current habits, better habits
shall be formed, and thus the future adult society shall be an improve-
ment of their own.”58
If, for example, after careful, context-sensitive deliberation, adults
decide that arithmetic, algebra, and geometry skills and understanding
will in the estimation of their school be considered a goal, then curricu-
lar strategies will be adopted or developed that will operationalize that
goal in multiple settings. These strategies can be broadly categorized
into three groups: 1) strategies for incorporating the study and mastery
of mathematical skills and concepts into projects. This represents the
adaptation of those skills and concepts to the spontaneous and native
and emergent interests of children; 2) strategies of individualized, small,
and large group instruction, which may very well involve direct instruc-
tion, individual study with workbooks, computer programs and so
forth; 3) strategies for collaborative critical and dialogical inquiry into
the philosophical ground—in this case epistemological, ontological, and
metaphysical—of mathematics.
Philosophical inquiry is of the greatest importance for the overall
character and structure of a school of the third way, for when it is con-
ducted communally and dialogically, it represents a methodology
through which children are able to encounter for themselves the funda-
mental questions that provide a rationale for studying mathematics—or
any other of the content-areas—on a level deeper than that of its practi-
cal application. The issue of the absence of practical application is usu-
ally offered as the source of children’s disaffection with school, but in
fact the issue is one of an absence of the presence of children’s own
questions in the construction of what is studied—that is, the issue of
meaning.59 When mathematics—or history, or art, or language or sci-
ence—is approached critically in search of the inherent assumptions
underlying its beliefs and its normative claims, then its identity as a
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 178
static, already-accomplished body of knowledge, externally imposed, is

loosened, and the extent to which each discipline is it itself is a product
of previous inquiry is revealed. As a result, children are able to connect
the artifact that the organized discipline represents to their own sponta-
neous and interest-driven inquiries. Over 100 years ago Dewey identi-
fied the gap between the two as a fundamental problem in the
construction of curriculum, and searched for some way
to get rid of the prejudicial notion that there is some gap in

kind (as distinct from degree) between the child’s experience
and the various forms of subject-matter that make up the
course of study. From the side of the child, it is a question of
seeing how his experience already contains within itself ele-
ments—facts and truths—of just the same sort as those enter-
ing into the formulated study; and what is of more
importance, of how it contains within itself the attitudes, the
motives, and the interests which have operated in developing
and organizing the subject-matter to the plane which it now
occupies. From the side of the studies, it is a question of inter-
preting them as outgrowths of forces operating in the child’s
life, and of discovering the steps that intervene between the
child’s present experience and their richer maturity.60
The “attitudes, motives and interests” contained within the child’s

experience that identify the child and the curriculum as “simply two
limits which define a single process” have, on their deepest level, not to
do with practical application, or the issue of “how can I use this in real
life?” That question is simply a child’s first challenge to the pedagogy
and curriculum of colonization, and a first act of cognitive rebellion
against a form of education that separates work from meaning. It
would not even be asked in a school that truly valued the child’s inter-
ests. Rather, the attitudes, motives and interests in question revolve
around inquiry, which—as constructivist genetic epistemology, begin-
ning with Dewey and Piaget, has increasingly indicated over the course
of the twentieth century—is the fundamental category of a kind of
learning that is undertaken by and not imposed on the learner. Simply
put, inquiry is a response to disequilibrium in the cognitive system, and
successful inquiry results in reconstruction of the system such that it is
more adequate to the environment that put the system in disequilibrium
in the first place.
Inquiry presents itself in the form of a question. A question is an
index of system-disequilibrium. Intrusive curriculum presents itself in
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 179
the form of a series of propositions. The goal of intrusive curriculum is

not to put the world in question, but to affirm a series of accepted
propositions about the world. But if the child is to encounter the cur-
riculum on the level of meaning it must be with a question; for if self-
initiated learning is undertaken in the interest of the reconstruction of
his or her cognitive system, then reconstruction implies a prior state of
disequilibrium, which is indexed by a question. We recognize that the
majority of children’s questions—although often fewer than the adultist
interlocutor assumes—are personal ones; but each personal question is
based on a question of identity—Who am I, Who are you? What is
that?—or a question of relation—between self and other, other and
other, or things in the world. And each of these personal questions is
connected generically, in a part-whole relation, with universal questions
of identity and relation (ontology and metaphysics), and also with ques-
tions of knowability (or epistemology) and of ethics. Children can move
very quickly from Who am I? to What is it to be a person? What is right
relation between persons? What is the difference between an animal and
a person? And they can move from What is that? to How can I or
anyone else know if something is true? or What is the difference
between believing and knowing? Such questions lead into similar ones:
What is a number? Is the mind just the brain? What is justice? What is a
right? What does it mean to be free? What is culture? Is there such a
thing as nature?
These fundamental questions—questions that are central to both
human understanding and conduct, which are common to us all, and
which are inherently contestable61—in short, philosophical questions—
that underlie any course of study on the most fundamental level, the
level of meaning. In an Intrusive model, questions are under erasure, or
they come already answered, which is the same thing. In a dialogical
model, questions are the hidden springs of inquiry, of “the attitudes, the
motives, and the interests” that dispose one to inquire and which drive
inquiry. And given that questions are common, central, and contestable,
they lend themselves to collaborative inquiry in a community of norma-
tive discourse—a speech community characterized by dialogue, and
oriented to a drive for deconstruction and reconstruction of the taken-
for-granted answers foisted on them by a habit-driven culture.
In a school setting, to undertake such a community of discourse
amounts to the introduction of philosophy as a content area. Unlike the
uses of philosophy in the intrusive curriculum, which is typically not
introduced until adolescence, and which consists in a course of study in
the history of philosophy, the form of philosophy with children as here
understood takes up the questions that the philosophical tradition has
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 180
always asked, but does so as if for the very first time. The experience of
communal dialogue about our most fundamental assumptions brings us
face to face with the original condition of philosophy—philosophy not
as didactics, and not just as conversation, but as an emergent, multivo-
cal, and interactive oral inquiry into questions that require an answer
before any further questions can be answered, yet which are in them-
selves unanswerable.62
So reconstructed, philosophy takes its place again, as in the
medieval synthesis, as the “queen of the sciences,” but in this case as an
oral event-structure like the Socratic, implicitly dedicated to the contin-
ual reconstruction of the answers to the same questions humans have
always asked, and always implicitly oriented to the underlying question,
“How are we to live?” In the school of the third way, this activity is
where the whole conceptual structure of the curriculum enters transi-
tional space. It is the space between the conceptual structures of the dis-
ciplines and the conceptual structures of each child and of the
community, and as such a space of interrogation and dialogue. Recall-
ing Winnicott’s characterization of transitional space as “outside the
individual, but . . . not the external world,” a space into which “the
child gathers objects or phenomena from external reality and uses these
in the service of . . . inner or personal reality,”63 philosophy as commu-
nal dialogical inquiry is the space where our assumptions, our funda-
mental beliefs enter into question for purposes of reconstruction. And
those beliefs are as much about ethical and moral questions as they are
about metaphysical or epistemological ones.
In a school of the third way, the dimension of collaborative philo-
sophical inquiry will be present throughout the emergent curriculum as
a form of problematization of belief—a first inquiry into the epistemol-
ogy, and by implication the methodology, of any discipline that is a part
of that curriculum. For example, a project that undertakes to examine
the architectural, economic, social, and cultural changes in a given
urban neighborhood in the last 100 years will naturally involve the
introduction of historical research, which in turn will call for an inquiry
into principles of historiography, which in turn will involve an inquiry
into the fundamental concepts that are at issue in the philosophy of his-
tory—what constitutes a historical “fact,” the question of historical
goal, direction, or pattern and the idea of “progress,” the question of
the narrative element in history (whether it can ever be anything but a
“story”), and, correspondingly, questions of interpretation: can history
ever in its very nature, be “objective”? Is all history revisionary? And
moving into ethical questions—can history be responsible or irresponsi-
ble, and if so, how does one do responsible history?
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The natural movement philosophy makes from the descriptive to

the normative ensures that the dimension of ethical and moral inquiry
is present in the curriculum as a permanent element, and is integrated
into all content areas. It also defines the school as a site in which
instruction serves inquiry and not vice versa. Nor will such an empha-
sis have any real reconstructive power unless the same sort of commu-
nal deliberative inquiry practiced throughout the curriculum is also
practiced within the school community as a whole. As we have already
seen, the school of the third way is the primary site for teacher training
and development. University professors have offices there, and partici-
pate in groups on multiple levels—groups of children, student and
apprentice teachers, and school faculty. The school as a whole is under-
stood as a community of inquiry—inquiry into learning, teaching, cur-
riculum construction, school governance, assessment and evaluation,
and issues of order and discipline. At any given moment during the
day, one might find groups of adults—which may include children—of
varying sizes, one discussing a recent or classic treatise on education or
some other discipline; another engaged in an innovative course of
study in mathematics or literature or art; another constructing an inter-
disciplinary project curriculum; another deliberating on a series of
observations made by teachers or apprentice teachers of a particular
child or particular group of children, for the purpose of generating cur-
riculum or some other kind of intervention in response; another dis-
cussing a recent incident of conflict or perceived violation of persons,
space or routine; another assessing a project or projects in process;
another discussing a chronic problem in scheduling or group dynamics;
another composed of parents and teachers engaged in deliberation of
some kind. These sorts of activities must be understood as of equal
importance to “instructional time,” for they are as crucial an aspect of
the life of an “embryonic community” as any other.
A school that has deconstructed and diversified grouping patterns,
decentralized and individualized learning and instruction practices, and
thereby reconstructed the distribution of individuals and groups calls
for a different approach to the overall design of space, time, activity and
interaction than the traditional model. A school might adopt a system
of supervision based on individual advisement—whereby, for example
one teacher enters into a mentoring relationship with ten to fifteen chil-
dren of the same or different ages, who in turn constitute a “home”
group. These groups could be assembled using various criteria: on the
basis of a disciplinary interest—for example the group could be inter-
ested in languages, in the arts, or science, or mathematics; on the basis
of a more immediate interest such a longterm project in which they
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 182
have all expressed interest; or on the basis of skill level in numeracy or

literacy (which does not necessarily mean that all students would be at
the same level); on the basis of a sociometric analysis; or some other.
The mentor teacher would meet with this group at the beginning and at
the end of the school day, and generate and/or monitor individual and
small group plans for each child. And there might be other periods
during the day or the week in which this group was together—for indi-
vidualized instruction, for collaborative inquiry, for project work, peer-
tutoring, small-group work of various kinds, or for some other sort of
problem solving.
The group’s “home” space would be constructed to make it possi-
ble not only to confer, but to study and eat together. Such home spaces
would be spread throughout the school, and each would provide soft
places (carpeted areas with couches and soft chairs), a seminar table,
appropriate space for preparing food and eating, storage and display
areas for materials, and individual study areas in the form of carrels.
Each place would be adjoined by the mentor teacher’s office, and would
also access an interior or exterior courtyard or terrace, in order to
maintain an indoor-outdoor relation. Over the course of the day, chil-
dren would venture out from these home bases to a variety of spaces
that provide studio, workshop, lab, resource, teaching, seminar, and
large-group meeting functions. Some of these spaces would be enclosed,
some partially enclosed, and some areas open onto the pathways that
connect them all. The younger the children, the more concentrated into
one area or section around the home spaces these work and meeting
spaces might be, but on general principle, the territory to be mastered
progressively by each child is the whole school, in all its complexity and
variety. This represents a radical difference from the traditional model
of understanding of the relationship between the local and the global
within the school. In the latter, the child’s territory is his or her class-
room, and the rest is anonymous and administered space, requiring
passes, exceptions, or rebellion to explore. But the space of the school
should be understood on the metaphor of a village, or hive, or
labyrinth, as opposed to a “disciplined” or “normalized” space, in
which one principle or style of spatial organization and use is imposed
on the whole. Both home groups and individuals within them are in the
new school both autonomous and interdependent, local and global,
within the whole system.
Finally, in a school of the third way there is simply no place for a
form of evaluation or assessment that is not directly related to helping
children to better meet the goals that have been negotiated between
them and the adults with whom they are collaborating. The standard-
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 183
ized test constructs knowledge as a commodity, and performance of

knowledge as an act of competition, both of which are completely irrel-
evant to the aims of education, and are broadly pernicious in their
results. The apparatus of standardized testing is, except for its possible
value as a research instrument, simply an oppressive atavism, a naked
instrument of colonization with no genuine educational relevance. In a
reimagined school, the unit of analysis is the individual, and the criteria
for analysis the ability to meet his or her own goals and objectives. All
acts of assessment should on principle include the participation in some
form of the one assessed, all evaluative judgments should involve multi-
ple perspectives, all assessment should be carried out in the form appro-
priate to the kind of knowledge involved, and the chief goal of any
assessment and evaluation procedures should be to enable those being
assessed to apply those same reflective and evaluative procedures them-
selves. There is no reason, for example, not to evaluate performance in
mathematics using purely quantitative criteria and methods, but the
very algorithm by which a student’s performance is evaluated should be
a part of the mathematics curriculum itself, and its implicit principles of
knowledge and judgment—in this case, statistics—be at some point in
the mathematics curriculum a subject of philosophical inquiry. And if
assessment and evaluation cannot be meaningful, let there be none,
except in the forms that emerge naturally and spontaneously from the
sorts of purposeful activity in which children are engaged.
The Dark and the Light
The institution of the school, even—and perhaps especially—given the

priority and status and universal influence it has assumed in the modern
nation state, cannot serve as the sole engine of transformation of the
instinctual structure of the modal personality of our time, the search for
which has been at the heart of this inquiry. To overemphasize the influ-
ence of the school in social reconstruction (or, for that matter, reproduc-
tion) would be to succumb to the very ignorance that has informed
those dystopic impositions of universal “solutions” by state planners
that have characterized at least the last 100 years of collective life. Nor
has the central aporia that has emerged continually in this inquiry—the
problem of the order and direction of causality—been resolved. In the
school as in the family, as in urban planning, the question remains how
one form of subjectivity can raise up its children in another.
But the fact is that images, styles, normative models, and everyday
explanations of human subjectivity have changed and are still changing,
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 184
and those changes are passed to the next generation through the narrow
funnel of child rearing and education. The notion of finding a way to
predict how the changes happen implies that one could find a way to
direct and control them, which is exactly the dialectic of welfare work,
where one is concerned to understand others better than they under-
stand themselves. This is the attitude of adultism, which attempts, espe-
cially through schooling, to reconstitute the reality of the child as an
adult, rather than providing a space for a transition between childhood
and adulthood that allows for the dialectical preservation and presence
of childhood in adulthood, which in turn is the basis for the reconstruc-
tion of subjectivity.
Not only are causal factors both reciprocal and overdetermined,
but experience would seem to indicate that in the history of cultures
and societies the “highest” and “lowest” forms of subjectivity and
forms of relation are always present, and their interaction ambiguous
and even ironic. There will always be brutalization and dehumanization
and there will always be compassion and altruism; always the highest
form of idealism in action and the most egregious cynicism, venality,
and impoverished imagination; always surprising breakthroughs of the
good and dramatic failure and misunderstanding of the most noble
intentions. There will always be filial kindness and basic human solidar-
ity in the search for peace and justice, and there will always be perver-
sity, violence, and blind selfishness, both individual and social. To
attempt to construct a system, whether of child rearing or education,
which overcame this fundamental human condition would not only be
totalitarian, but its success would create an entropic social condition
from which the conditions for growth were removed.
Empathic parents will always in some cases inadvertently, and
against their own deepest wishes, raise children who become nonem-
pathic adults, and vice versa. To recognize multiplicity and contradiction
internally—in the self—is to recognize it in the larger system of subjectiv-
ity that is the collective, and on this account, Socrates was right when he
said that virtue cannot be taught.64 But multiplicity and contradiction
are the very conditions of change, and thus, logically, the kind and qual-
ity of multiplicity and contradiction themselves will change. The intellec-
tual, moral, and aesthetic mediocrity of the post-Intrusive school is a
result of institutional resistance to that change. Institutions and individu-
als resist change because present change—the situation visible to us at
any given moment—carries contradictions and multiple possibilities that
hint at alternate futures, not all of them positive. Negative and positive
elements and their conflict within a system are necessary to system trans-
formation, and in matters related to the historical construction of subjec-
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 185
tivity, change will always hint both at the dark and light, deadly chaos
and a transformed order, thanatos and eros.
The intersubject represents both the death of the subject—not just
its dissolution in the discourses that constitute it but the erosion of the
boundaries that, for champions of Western individualism, constitute its
only ethical possibility—and the possibility of its positive transforma-
tion. On the dark side of the dialectic of change, “mass man” was
already registered from the middle of the nineteenth century on by
observers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Ortega y Gasset, and the rise
of the discourses both of sociology and of a psychology of the uncon-
scious at the end of that century initiated the deconstruction of the
finite, punctual self. It could easily be argued that the modal subjectivity
produced by the new information environment and the triumph of
global ideological and economic systems represents a profound loss of
dimensionality in the self, and the erosion of those necessary tensions
without which the modal personality of our time becomes increasingly
shallow, shortsighted, and even mildly sociopathic—a subject in whom
the relationship between reason and desire called sublimation, which
for Freud was what held civilization together, has disappeared, and
nothing has replaced it. This is Marcuse’s “one dimensional man” in
whom the possibilities of the intersubject have fallen victim to “the
social controls of technological reality, which extend liberty while inten-
sifying domination.”65 In this form of subjectivity, the liberation of
desire from reason is a complete chimera, presented for the benefit of
the market as a series of television commercials, and actually signals the
loss of autonomy, critical consciousness, social responsibility and any
sense of history. One-dimensional man represents the onset of the pro-
liferation of a new form of the totalitarian personality, the one best
adapted to the various forms of economic imperialism that represent the
dark side of global capitalism.
The light side of the dialectic is the promise of the reconstruction of
the relationship between reason and desire in a form of subjectivity
across boundaries with the other and with the “others” within oneself.
The intersubject understands her identity as a field-being, not as the
sign of ego dissolution or inflation, psychological chaos, magical think-
ing, herd politics, and ethical relativism, but as the trigger for a form of
individuality made more poignant both by its recognition of its other-
ness within, and of its systemic connection and fundamental identifica-
tion with others. In this case, the deconstruction of the boundaries of
the punctual self lead to further self-actualization and greater social
compassion, further capacity for solidarity in the human cry for justice
and life-affirmation. The promise here is in a reconstruction that leads
Kennedy05 1/11/06 10:38 AM Page 186
to the lifting of surplus-repression and the onset of a social movement

dedicated to breaking down the work-play dichotomy and finding the
human and social spaces in which the connections between childhood
and adulthood, life and art, are maintained. This of course has always
been the “social movement” of the artist, including the artist-of-one’s-
own-life. The artist’s witness testifies that the revolution begins, as in
the Romantic vision, as a revolution of perception—a marriage of the
ethical and the aesthetic.
Because the school is the space where adulthood and childhood can
meet and enter dialogue, those who craft and construct schools with the
normative principles of the intersubject in mind, however few and lack-
ing in power or influence, are of the utmost significance to the future
emergence of a new balance. All, realistically, that can and perhaps
should be expected of the school of the third way is that it remain
through the necessary paroxysms of historical change an outpost—an
experimental zone dedicated to that reconstruction of relations between
adults and children that enable the more general emergence of dialogical
relations between the two. In dark times, the school of the third way
remains, like the child in modern adult subjectivity, the “valuable
stranger” and the “outsider within” to the “natives” of the mainstream
culture of the adult-child relation. Such schools are like those medieval
monasteries that took inside their walls the seeds of the highest develop-
ment of a world then falling in ruins, and nurtured them through dark
ages in expectation of a new dawn—a future world in which those seeds
would carry a new and expanded meaning and possibility. The dark
ages, it seems, always come, for longer or shorter periods, but there are
always those who would preserve what those dark ages presume to crush
and obliterate, and would deliver it, in whatever apparent chaos of his-
torical emergence, to the future. This makes of the teacher—or rather the
adult who undertakes a form of dialogical relation with children that
purposes to nurture and develop the possibility of a reconstructed form
of adult subjectivity—a monastic of sorts. This monastic is dedicated to
assist, through her relation with children, in the construction of an insti-
tution dedicated to the third joyous kingdom of play. In this sense she is
midwife to the birth of a new form of reason. The new age she repre-
sents is always on the way, and the schools she joins with others to
create and protect—in the dark face of technological rationality, global
imperialism, terror, and the new authoritarianism—are the safe-zones,
the harbingers and the prototypes of a world to come.
Kennedy06Notes 1/11/06 10:39 AM Page 187
Notes
Preface: On How This Book Got Its Name
1. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Childhood,” in Selected Poems, trans. Robert

Bly (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
2. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language,
and the Cosmos, trans. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press,
1969), 124, 126.
Chapter One: Questioning Childhood
1. Henry Vaughan, from “Childe-hood,” The Works of Henry

Vaughan, second edition, L.C. Martin, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1957), 520.
2. See for example, Valerie Polokow, The Erosion of Childhood
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), and Gareth
Matthews, The Philosophy of Childhood (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1996).
3. Kenneth Keniston, “Psychological Development and Historical
Change,” in Rabbs, T.K. and R.I. Rotberg, eds., The Family in His-
tory: Interdisciplinary Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1976), 141–157.
4. Pierre Erny, Childhood and Cosmos: The Social Psychology of the
Black African Child (Washington, DC: Black Orpheus Press, 1973),
187
and Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).
5. William Wordsworth, Poems, H.J. Hall, ed. (New York: Scott
Foresman, 1924); Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Selected
Essays, Lectures, and Poems, R.E. Spiller, ed. (New York: Washing-
ton Square Press, 1965).
6. See The Republic of Plato, trans. F.M. Cornford (London: Oxford
University Press, 1941), 125, 138; and Laws, in Plato: The Col-
lected Dialogues, E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, eds. (Princeton, NJ:
Bollingen, 1961), 1379. For Aristotle, see Physics, 197b:7–10;
Eudemian Ethics, 1224a:27–29; Nichomachean Ethics,
1099b:25–1100a:5, 1104b, and 1239a:1–6., in J.L. Ackrill, ed., A
New Aristotle Reader (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1987); M. Ostwald, trans., Nichomachean Ethics (New York:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1962); and John Burnet, trans. and ed., Aristotle on
Education (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1904).
7. The first historian to suggest this was Phillipe Aries, in Centuries of
Childhood, trans. R. Baldick (New York: Knopf, 1962). The stage
was set for this analysis by Johann Huizinga in The Waning of the
Middle Ages (New York: Anchor Books, 1954).
8. Richard Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography and the
Experience of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1984).
9. Dominick Cavallo, “The Politics of Latency: Kindergarten Peda-
gogy, 1860–1930,” in Regulated Children/Liberated Children:
Education in Psychohistorical Perspective, Barbara Finkelstein, ed.
(New York: Psychohistory Press, 1979).
10. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
11. Marx Wartofsky, “The Child’s Construction of the World and the
World’s Construction of the Child: From Historical Epistemology
to Historical Psychology,” in The Child and Other Cultural Inven-
tions, F.S. Kessel and A.W. Siegel, eds. (New York: Praeger, 1983),
208.
12. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of
Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renais-
sance (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 27.
13. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners
(New York: Urizen Press, 1978).
Notes to Chapter One 189
14. Neil Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood (New York: Dela-

corte, 1982), 99.
15. Robert N. Bellah, “To Kill and Survive or To Die and Become: The
Active Life and the Contemplative Life as Ways of Being Adult,” in
Erik H. Erikson, ed., Adulthood (New York: Norton, 1978).
16. For popular examples of this see John Bradshaw, Homecoming:
Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child (New York:
Bantam, 1990), but the theme is announced in Freudian and Jun-
gian psychoanalysis.
17. Of Grammatology, trans. G.C. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Press, 1976).
18. Aristotle, Nichomean Ethics, 1119a35, 1144b5; Politics 1260a,
9–14.
19. Golden, 7.
20. Plato, Symposium, 217e., in Hamilton and Cairns, Plato: The Col-
lected Dialogues.
21. Golden, 44.
22. Proverbs 22:15.
23. Matthew 11:25.
24. Ibid., 18:2.
25. Ibid., 21:14–16.
26. Peter Fuller, “Uncovering Childhood,” in Martin Hoyles, ed.,
Changing Childhood (London: Writers and Publishers Cooperative,
1979), 85.
27. For a summary of sources, see David Kennedy, “The Roots of
Child Study: Philosophy, History, and Religion,” Teachers College
Record 102, 3 (June 2000): 514–538.
28. For a more detailed account, see David Kennedy, “Child and Fool
in the Western Wisdom Tradition,” Thinking 11, 1 (1993): 11–21.
29. See David Kennedy, “Images of the Young Child in History:
Enlightenment and Romance,” Early Childhood Research Quar-
terly, 3 (June 1988): 121–137.
30. Stephen Toulmin, “The Concept of ‘Stages’ in Psychological Devel-
opment,” in Theodore Mischel, ed., Cognitive Development and
Epistemology (New York: Academic Press, 1971), 58.
31. Charles Taylor, “What is Involved in a Genetic Psychology?” in
Ibid., 409–410.
32. Sigmund Freud, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-

logical Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 11, trans. and ed. James Stra-
chey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 48.
33. Ashis Nandy, “Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of the Ideol-
ogy of Adulthood,” in Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias: Essays in
the Politics of Awareness (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987),
56–76.
34. Dieter Misgeld, “Self-Reflection and Adult Maturity: Adult and
Child in Hermeneutical and Critical Reflection,” Phenomenology +
Pedagogy 3, 3 (1995): 92.
35. To put ourselves back in the young child’s world of scale is a shock.
This has been demonstrated by Paul Ritter, who “got his students
to mock-up a room two-and-a-half times actual size, just to remind
us what a child’s-eye-view is really like . . . it brought gasps of
astonishment from the visitors.” In Colin Ward, The Child in the
City (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 22.
36. “Il est à la fois vrai que les fonctions adultes sont déjà répresentés
chez l’enfant, et qu’elles n’y ont pas le même sens que chez
l’adulte.” Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Méthode en Psychologie de
L’Enfant,” Bulletin de Psychologie XVIII 3–6 (1964), 137. This is
the same problem raised by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his discussion
of the attempt to describe one language game in the terms of
another. See his On Certainty (New York: Harper and Row, 1969),
para. 108 and passim.
37. Merleau-Ponty, “Methode en Psychologie de L’Enfant,” 111.
38. This argument is made in three different ways in Johan Huizinga,
The Waning of the Middle Ages; Norbert Elias, The Civilizing
Process; and Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood.
39. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” in Collected Papers, vol. 1,
I. Schutz, ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 231.
40. See Robert Bernasconi, “Bridging the Abyss: Heidegger and
Gadamer,” Research in Phenomenology XVI (1986), 1–24.
41. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, trans. and
ed. J.B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), 185.
42. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, trans. F.G.
Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 98.
43. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York:
Scribner’s, 1970), 113.
Notes to Chapter One 191
44. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 105.

45. Ibid., 143, 113.
46. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad,
1975).
47. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 191.
48. For a discussion of anamnesis (if), see Hans-Georg Gadamer, The
Idea of the Good in Plato and Aristotle, trans. Christopher Smith
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 53–59.
49. James Risser, “Hermeneutic Experience and Memory: Rethinking
Knowledge as Recollection,” Research in Phenomenology XVI
(1986), 41.
50. Gadamer, Reason in the Age of Science, 105–108, passim.
51. Herbert Read, The Innocent Eye (New York: Henry Holt, 1947), 7.
52. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 114, 125.
53. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, trans. Robert Bly (New York:
New Directions, 1967).
54. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans.
Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1968), 137; and see his Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin
Smith (London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962).
55. Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, 142. And see his
Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort
Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976).
56. For a profound description of the phenomenon of force, see
Simone Weil, “The Iliad: The Poem of Force,” in Alasdair McIn-
tyre, ed., Revisions (Terre Haute: Notre Dame University Press,
1974).
57. For a discussion of adulthood, childhood, and habit, see John
Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct (Carbondale, IL: Southern
Illinois University Press, 1988 [1922]).
58. Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood,” in deMause, ed.,
The History of Childhood (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974).
And see David Kennedy, “Empathic Child Rearing and the Adult
Construction of Childhood: A Psychohistorical Look,” Childhood
5, 1 (February 1998): 9–22.
59. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England
1500–1800, abridged edition (New York: Harper, 1979).
60. Carmen Luke, Pedagogy, Printing, and Protestantism: The Dis-

course on Childhood (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989).
61. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
62. Plato, Republic, trans. F.M. Cornford (London: Oxford, 1941).
63. Georges Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970).
64. For a concise overview of Freud’s basic theory in his own words,
see his The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York: Norton,
1960).
65. Only implicitly acknowledged in Freud, but explored in N.O.
Brown, Life Against Death (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1959), and Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1966).
66. See Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, second edition (New
York: Norton, 1963), Chapter 7, “Eight Ages of Man.”
67. Charles Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, vol. I, in Collected Works,
Barbara Rooke, ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1969), 109–110.
Chapter Two: The Primordial Child
1. Eugene Ionesco, quoted in Coe, When the Grass Was Taller, 63.
2. G.C. Jung, and C. Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The
Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (Princeton,
NJ: Bollingen, 1963), 35.
3. “Then some children were brought to Him so that He might lay
His hands on them and pray; and the disciples rebuked them. But
Jesus said, ‘Permit the children, and do not hinder them from
coming to Me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as
these.’” Matthew 19: 13, 14. New American Standard Version.
4. 1 Corinthians 1:18–2:16.
5. For an account of this countertradition, see David Kennedy, “Child
and Fool in the Western Wisdom Tradition.” And see, for example,
Pierre Erny, Childhood and Cosmos: The Social Psychology of the
Black African Child (Washington, DC: Black Orpheus Press, 1973),
and “Taliesin,”in Barbara Leonie Picard, Hero-Tales from the
British Isles (New York: Criterion Books, 1966).
Notes to Chapter Two 193
6. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, R.S. Pine-Coffin, ed.

(Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1961), 177.
7. Jung and Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, 35, 69
8. Ibid., 130.
9. Ibid., 78–79.
10. See Victor Lasareff, “Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin,” Art
Bulletin 20 (1938), 26–65.
11. Josef Kunstmann, The Transformation of Eros (Edinburgh: Oliver
and Boyd, 1970), 13.
12. Quoted in Ibid., 10.
13. Lasareff, “Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin,” 27.
14. Kunstmann, The Transformation of Eros, 17.
15. Ilene H. Forsyth, “Children in Early Medieval Art: Ninth Through
Twelfth Centuries,” Journal of Psychohistory 4, 1 (Summer 1976),
36.
16. Ibid., 46–47.
17. Ibid., 32, 58.
18. Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers. See Chapter 5, 230.
19. Mary M. McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates: Children and
Parents from Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” in Lloyd
deMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Harper,
1974), 131–133.
20. See C.S. Lewis’ discussion of “Intellectus” and “Ratio” in The Dis-
carded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Liter-
ature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 156–161.
21. Lasareff, “Studies in the Iconography of the Virgin,” 41.
22. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution
in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971). In his discus-
sion of the Renaissance hermetic tradition, Abrams describes Christ
as having “the apocolyptic function of restoring both fallen and
divided man and the fallen and fragmented universe to the perfec-
tion of their original unity,” 30.
23. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in
Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 127.
24. The Philosophy of Plotinus, trans. and ed. Joseph Katz (New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), Book VI: 205–270, 155.
25. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ, 3, 110.
26. Ibid., 51.

27. Erich Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renais-
sance (London: Phaidon, 1972), 64.
28. Ibid., 153.
29. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, revised edition
(New York: Norton, 1968), 55–67 passim.
30. Gombrich, Symbolic Images, 159, 168, 174.
31. Jung & Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, 55, 56.
32. Kunstmann, The Transformation of Eros, 24.
33. For a taxonomy of the “enigmatic child,” see Reinhard Kuhn, Cor-
ruption in Paradise: The Child in Western Literature (Hanover,
NH: University Press of New England, 1982), Chapter 1.
34. This child is considered in Fuller, “Uncovering Childhood”
(71–108).
35. For an account of this “monumental life” see Bachelard, The Poet-
ics of Reverie, Chapter 3, “Reveries Toward Childhood.”
36. My primary source for the material in this section is Leah Sinan-
golou Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and
Variations in 17th Century Literature (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1978).
37. From Henry Vaughan, “Childehood” and “The Retreat,” quoted in
Ibid., 173.
38. Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature (Athens:
The University of Georgia Press, 1978), 33.
39. Ibid., 36.
40. Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 208.
41. Thomas Traherne, from “Innocence,” in Poetical Works. G.I.
Wade, ed. (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1965), 11.
42. From “The Preparative,” Ibid., 12.
43. Compiled from “Wonder,” 5; and “My Spirit,” 28 and 29; in Ibid.
44. From “An Infant-Ey,” in Ibid., 105.
45. Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 2, Mythical
Thought, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1955), 99.
46. For a thorough summary of the Romantic understanding of child-
hood, see Judith Plotz, “The Perpetual Messiah: Romanticism,
Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development,” in
Notes to Chapter Two 195
Barbara Finkelstein, ed., Regulated Children/Liberated Children:

Education in Psychohistorical Perspective (New York: The Psy-
chohistory Press, 1979), 63–95.
47. Thomas Traherne, Centuries (New York: Harper and Brother,
1960), 141.
48. Coe, When the Grass Was Taller, 240. And see Friedrich von
Schiller’s comments on the Pastoral, which he calls the “Idyll,” in
Naïve and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A.
Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 145 ff.
49. The secularization of this myth in Romantic literature and philoso-
phy is described in Abrams’ definitive study, Natural Supernatural-
ism, published at one moment of the myth’s perennial reactivation
in Western thought and culture—the launching of the “countercul-
ture” of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
50. Quoted in Philip Stewart, “The Child Comes of Age,” Yale French
Studies 40 (1968), 136–137.
51. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800.
52. Quoted in Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 62.
53. Traherne, Centuries, 110.
54. Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 84, 85, 87.
55. Ibid., 100, 103, 104.
56. Friedrich von Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man In a
Series of Letters, trans. Reginald Snell (New York: Frederick
Ungar, 1954 [1795]), 39; and Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 103.
57. Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 105.
58. Ibid., 111.
59. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 43.
60. Ibid., 113.
61. Ibid., 129, 153.
62. Ibid., 153. According to Hegel, “The harmoniousness of childhood
is a gift from the hand of nature: the second harmony must spring
from the labor and culture of the spirit. And so the words of
Christ, ‘Except ye become as little children’, etc., are very far from
telling us that we must always remain children.” Quoted in
Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 380–381.
63. D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge, 1989
[1971]), 51.
64. Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise, 229.

65. Quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 227, 292, 278, 292,
337–339.
66. Quoted in Ibid., 104, 291.
67. Schiller, Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, 153.
68. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 351.
69. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 102, 107, 3, 14.
71. From Wordsworth’s Prelude (II, 255–276), quoted in Abrams, Nat-
ural Supernaturalism, 368.
72. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind, an
Autobiographical Poem, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1959), 59.
73. Ibid, II: 270–271.
75. Peter Coveney, The Image of Childhood: The Individual and Soci-
ety: A Study of the Theme in English Literature (Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books, 1959), 32.
76. Eugen Fink, “The Ontology of Play,” Philosophy Today 4 (Summer
1960): 95–109. And see also Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Play as the
Clue to Ontological Explanation,” in Truth and Method (New
York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1975), 91–119.
77. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston: Beacon Press,
1966), 37.
78. Ibid., 46.
79. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. and ed. William Boyd (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1956), 13.
80. Ibid., 34, 38.
81. Friedrich Froebel, The Education of Man (Clifton, NJ: Augustus
M. Kelley, 1974), 29.
82. For a discussion of what Freud called “childhood amnesia” based
on the incommensurability of perceptual-cognitive structures
between early childhood and adulthood, see Ernest G. Schactel,
Metamorphosis: On the Development of Affect, Perception, Atten-
tion, and Memory (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
83. Nandy, “Reconstructing Childhood,” 71.
Notes to Chapter Three 197
84. Erikson presents us with a working version of this model in his epi-
genetic model of the life cycle. See his Childhood and Society.
85. Thus the poet Rilke: “. . .the child may become older and more
sensible in the everyday sense of the word, in which case he
becomes a budding citizen who will join the order of his historical
epoch and be ordained as a member. Or, again, he may ripen qui-
etly and simply from the depths of his being, nourished by his own
existence as a child, in which case he will belong to the spirit of all
epochs—he will be an artist.” Quoted in George Boas, The Cult of
Childhood (London: The Wartburg Institute, 1966), 112.
86. Quoted in Coe, When the Grass Was Taller, 41.
87. Quoted in Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 380.
88. Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Mean-
ing of History (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1959),
31–34, passim.
89. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 41.
90. Brown, Life Against Death, 30.
91. A clear example of this influence can be found in the institution of
art, which was dramatically influenced by children’s art over the
course of the twentieth century. See Jonathon Fineberg, The Inno-
cent Eye: Children’s Art and the Modern Artist (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1997).
Chapter Three: The Invention of Adulthood
1. Paul Eluard, from Oevres Complete, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade

(Paris: Gallimard, 1968), 4: 419.
2. Aries, Centuries of Childhood.
3. Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
4. For a vintage example of this approach, see the developmental
theory of the first dean of American psychology, George Stanley
Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology,
Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education
(New York: Ayer, 1970 [1904]).
5. For an interesting argument for radically child-centered education
based on recapitulationist theory, see J. Gary Bernhard, Primates in
the Classroom: An Evolutionary Perspective on Children’s Educa-

tion (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988).
6. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, in H. Rackman, ed., Aristotle, vol. 20,
book 8, chapter 1: 1224a and 1236a.
7. Ibid., 1239a:1.
8. The Republic of Plato, 125, 138; and Laws, in Hamilton and
Cairns, eds., The Collected Dialogues, 1379.
9. The equivalent of Plato’s “reason” as a terminal state for the
philosopher king is Piaget’s “formal operations,” which (along
with Kohlberg’s “post-conventional” moral reasoning), is stated as
a developmental ideal for the modern patriarchal West.
10. Plato, Republic, 102, 141.
11. L. Martin, H. Gutman, and P.H. Hutton, eds., Technologies of the
Self: A Seminar with Michael Foucault (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1988).
12. Georges Dumezil, The Destiny of the Warrior (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1970).
13. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1104b, in Akrill, A New Aristotle
Reader, 379.
14. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3: The Care of the
Self, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986), 45.
15. Julian Jaynes, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976). See also
Jan Bremmer, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1983).
16. Michel Foucault, “On the Geneology of Ethics,” in Hubert Dreyfus
and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 245.
17. James 1:17.
19. C.G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans.
R.F.C. Hall, Bollingen Series XX, vol. 9, i (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1980), 284.
20. C.G. Jung, Aion. In Collected Works, trans. R.F.C. Hull, Bollingen
Series XX, vol. 9, ii (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
And see Erich Neumann, “Reflections on the Shadow,” in Depth
Psychology and a New Ethic, trans. Eugene Rolfe (New York:

Harper, 1973[1948]), 137–147.
21. Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 124. And see Jung
and Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, 100.
22. Levinas, Emmanuel. Time and the Other, trans. Richard A. Cohen
(Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press, 1987), 18.
23. Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 81. And see Erich
Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, trans. R.F.C.
Hull (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 414 ff.
24. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis
(Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 277.
25. Levinas, Time and the Other, 17.
26. For the beginnings of an approach to the variables involved, see,
e.g., Aage B. Sorensen, Frana E. Weinert, and Lonnie R. Sherrod,
eds., Human Development and the Life Course: Multidisciplinary
Perspectives (Hillside, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986);
and Glen H. Elder Jr., John Modell, and Ross D. Parke, eds., Chil-
dren in Time and Place: Developmental and Historical Insights
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
27. Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, 202, 27, 31, 32.
28. Aries, Centuries of Childhood, 411.
29. Aries, Centuries of Childhood; Johan Huizinga, The Waning of the
Middle Ages; and Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process and State
Formation and Civilization, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1994 [1939]).
30. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 115–116.
31. Ibid., 117, 115.
32. Ibid., 475.
33. Ibid., 211.
34. Ibid., 209.
35. For an erudite account of the philosophical lineaments of premod-
ern cosmology, see C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image. For a more
psychohistorical view, see Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word:
Some Prologomena for Cultural and Religious History (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1967).
36. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 209.
37. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical

Biology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 7.
38. See Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word; and his Orality and
Literacy: Technologizing the Word (London: Methuen, 1982).
39. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 81.
40. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 6 ff.
41. Ong, Orality and Literacy, Chapter 3, passim. For an application
to young children’s intentional style, see David Kennedy, “The Life-
world of the Young Child,” in Young Children’s Thinking: An
Interpretation from Phenomenology. Doctoral Dissertation (Lex-
ington: University of Kentucky, 1986).
42. Ibid., Chapter 4, passim.
43. Ong, The Presence of the Word, 221.
44. For a discussion of theoria as a form of “ecstatic self-forgetful-
ness,” a “being totally involved in and carried away by what one
sees,” see Gadamer, Truth and Method, 111.
45. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis
and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1978).
46. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life, 10.
47. Ibid., 124, 196, 59.
48. See Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 92; and David
Kennedy, “Fools, Young Children, Animism, and the Scientific
World Picture,” Philosophy Today 33 (Winter), 1989: 374–381.
49. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 137.
50. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136.
51. For accounts from both sides of the Atlantic, see Mary Jo Maynes,
“The New Pedagogy,” in Schooling in Western Europe: A Social
History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), Chap-
ter 4; and Barbara Finkelstein, “Casting Networks of Good Influ-
ence: The Reconstruction of Childhood in the United States,
1790–1870,” in J.M. Hawes and N.R. Hiner, eds., American
Childhood: A Research Guide and Historical Handbook (West-
port, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 111–152.
52. Postman, The Disappearance of Childhood, 13.
53. Ashis Nandy, “Reconstructing Childhood,” 59.
54. Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, 413.
55. This account is found in Lloyd deMause, “The Evolution of Child-

hood,” 1–73.
56. Erasmus, from On Education for Children, in E. Rummel, ed., The
Erasmus Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 69.
57. deMause, “The Evolution of Childhood,” 52.
58. J. Sulzer, from An Essay on the Education and Instruction of Chil-
dren, 1748. Quoted in Alice Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden
Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York:
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983), 10–11, 13.
59. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 27–28.
60. Quoted in Ibid., 51. And see C. John Sommerville, “English Puri-
tans and Children: A Social Cultural Explanation,” The Journal of
Psychohistory 6, 1 (Summer 1978): 113–137. He claims that the
Puritans “were the first to write books exclusively for children, and
the first to show an awareness of the difficulties involved in com-
municating with them” (115). See also his The Discovery of Child-
hood in Puritan England (Athens: The University of Georgia Press,
1992).
61. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair, 55.
62. Jean Jacques Rousseau, Emile, Or On Education, trans. Alan
Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 92, 93, 104, 107.
63. Ibid., 131.
64. Gerald L. Gutek, A History of the Western Educational Experi-
ence, second edition (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1995),
188–191.
65. Aries, “From the Medieval Family to the Modern Family,” in Cen-
turies of Childhood, Part III, Chapter 2.
66. Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800.
67. From Daniel Defoe, Mere Nature Delineated (London, 1726)
quoted in Maxmillian E. Novak, “The Wild Man Comes to Tea,”
in Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, eds., The Wild Man
Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to
Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972),
209.
68. Hayden White, “The Forms of Wildness,” in Dudley and Novak,
eds., The Wild Man Within, 7.
69. N.O. Brown, Love’s Body (Berkeley: University of Califormia
Press, 1966), 146–147.
70. Quoted in Catherine Marchak, “The Joy of Transgression: Bataille

and Kristeva,” Philosophy Today 34, 4 (Winter 1990): 357.
71. Levinas, Time and the Other, 92, 68.
72. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Hegel’s Existentialism,” in Sense and
Non-Sense, trans. H.L. and P.A. Dreyfus (Evanston, IL: Northwest-
ern University Press, 1964), 63.
73. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 266–268.
74. Elias, The Civilizing Process, 203, 204.
75. For a brief but incisive account of this historical moment, see
Chapter 1, “Origins,” in Erica Burman, Deconstructing Develop-
mental Psychology (London: Routledge, 1994), 9–20. And for
another look at origins, see Klaus F. Riegel, “The Influence of Eco-
nomic and Political Ideologies on the Development of Developmen-
tal Psychology,” Psychological Bulletin 78, 2 (1977): 129–141.
76. See Harvey Green, “Scientific Thought and the Nature of Children
in America, 1820–1920,” in Mary Heininger et al., A Century of
Childhood, 1820–1920 (Rochester, NY: Margaret Woodbury
Strong Museum, 1984), 126.
77. See Nandy, “The Reconstruction of Childhood.”
78. Jean Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, trans. Joan and
Andrew Tomlinson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1929).
80. Peter Petschauer, “Intrusive to Socializing Modes: Transitions in
Eighteenth-Century Germany and Twentieth Century Italy,” The
Journal of Psychohistory 14, 3 (Winter 1987): 257–270; and “The
Childrearing Modes in Flux: An Historian’s Reflection,” The Jour-
nal of Psychohistory 17, 1 (Summer 1989): 1–41.
81. For a well-argued perennialist view of the history of adult-child
relations, see Linda A. Pollock, Forgotten Children: Parent-Child
Relations from 1500–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983); and her A Lasting Relationship: Parents and Children
Over Three Centuries (Hanover, NH: University Press of New Eng-
land, 1987).
82. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, vol. 2 (New York: Vin-
tage, 1951), 167. And see Joseph Featherstone, “Rousseau and
Modernity,” Daedalus 107 (Summer 1978): 167–192.
Notes to Chapter Four 203
Chapter Four: Childhood and the Intersubject
1. Novalis, Pollen and Fragments, trans. A. Versluis (Grand Rapids,

MI: Phanes Press, 1989).
2. H.A. Witkin et al., Psychological Differentiation (London: Wiley,
1962).
3. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneu-
tics in Postmodern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1988), xlvi. See also Guy Debord, The
Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1983), who refers
to the “spectacle” of the new information environment as “the
heart of the unrealism of the real society,” in which “everything
that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (2,
3).
4. Jean Baudrillard, Revenge of the Crystal: Selected Writings on the
Modern Object and its Destiny, 1968–1983, trans. and ed. Paul
Foss and Julian Pefanis (London: Pluto Press, 1990), 214, 163.
5. Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans.
Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1991).
6. Aristotle, De Anima.
7. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, The Care of the Self.
8. G.W.F Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 124–125, 156–157.
9. Foucault, The Care of the Self, 41.
10. Quoted from the Greek physician Galen, in Ibid, 56.
11. Ibid.
12. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, vol. 2, (London: J.M.
Dent and Sons, 1911), 5; and Ibid., vol. 1, 65.
13. C.G. Jung, Aion; and “The Psychology of the Unconscious,” in
Collected Works 7, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1980).
14. “The Ego’s Dependent Relations,” in The Ego and the Id, 46.
15. For a Jungian account of the relations between the ego and the Self
from infancy, see Erich Neumann, The Child: Structure and
Dynamics of the Nascent Personality, trans. Ralph Manheim (New
York: G.P. Putnam, 1973).
16. Robert Stolorow, “Critical Reflections on the Theory of Self Psy-

chology: An Inside View,” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 6 (1986): 389.
The term “selfobject” was introduced by the psychoanalyst Heinz
Kohut in his The Analysis of the Self (New York: International Uni-
versities Press, 1971).
17. E. Wolf, Treating the Self: Elements of Clinical Self Psychology
(New York: Guilford, 1988), 184.
19. For a short but inclusive summary of the perennial myth of the
golden age, see Kathleen Raines, “The Myth of the Great Year,” in
Blake and Antiquity (Princeton: Bollingen, 1977), 51–70.
20. Winnicott, Playing and Reality.
21. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern
Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 386, 471,
465, 462; William Blake, There Is No Natural Religion [Second
Series], in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake: Complete Writings (Oxford
University Press, 1966), 97.
22. Jonathan Fineberg has described and illustrated the intersection of
these three alternative universes of art in his The Innocent Eye:
Child Art and the Modern Artist. And see David Kennedy, “Sub-
versive Innocence,” Childhood 6, 2 (May 1999): 389–399.
23. Max Wertheimer, “Gestalt Theory,” trans. W.D. Ellis, in Ellis, ed.,
Source Book of Gestalt Psychology (New York, Harcourt Brace &
Co., 1938 [1924]).
24. The foremost representatives of this school are Melanie Klein, D.W.
Winnicott, Ronald Fairbairn, Wilfrid Bion, Michael Balint, Henry
Guntrip, Edith Jacobson, and Otto Kernberg. Heinz Kohut’s “self
psychology” also offers a perspective on subjectivity based on
object relations. For an historical overview of object relations
theory, see Otto F. Kernberg, Object-Relations Theory and Clinical
Psychoanalysis (New York: Jason Aronson, 1976).
25. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1975), 235.
26. David E. Scharf, Refinding the Object and Reclaiming the Self
(Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1992), 24–25.
27. Richard A. Cohen, from the Introduction to Levinas, Time and the
Other, 16.
28. Heinz Kohut, “The Self in History,” in Self Psychology and the
Humanities: Reflections on a New Psychoanalytic Approach (New
York: Norton, 1985), 168.
Notes to Chapter Four 205
29. Russell Meares, The Metaphor of Play: Disruption and Restoration

in the Borderline Experience (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson,
1993), 127.
30. Scharff, Refinding the Object and Reclaiming the Self, 25.
31. Ibid., 17.
33. Peter Petschauer, “The Childrearing Modes in Flux: An Historian’s
Reflections,” Journal of Psychohistory 17,1 (Summer 1989): 1–41.
34. Rousseau, Emile, Selections, trans. and ed. William Boyd (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1956), 34, 38.
35. Postman, “The Adult-Child,” in The Disappearance of Childhood,
98–119.
36. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 276, 277.
37. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 386, 471.
38. Schactel, Metamorphosis, 183.
39. Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, 167, 185, 188.
40. S. A. Mitchell, Radical Concepts in Psychoanalysis: An Integration
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 9.
41. C.G. Jung, “The Stages of Life,” in The Structure and Dynamics of
the Psyche, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980),
387–403.
43. Schutz, “On Multiple Realities,” 230.
44. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 78, 75.
45. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 170, 182.
46. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 50, 96.
47. Sigmund Freud, On Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York:
Norton, 1989).
48. Melanie Klein, The Psycho-Analysis of Children, third revised edi-
tion, trans. Alix Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1980), xiii,
xiv.
49. Playing and Reality, 130.
50. Quoted in Joel Whitebook, “Reflections on the Autonomous Indi-
vidual and the Decentered Subject,” American Imago 49, 1 (1992):
111.
51. Ibid., 107.
52. Sandra G. Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking

from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
53. Hegel: The Essential Writings, Frederick G. Weiss, ed. (New York:
Harper and Row, 1974), 71.
54. Ibid., 76.
55. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, trans. R.J. Holling-
dale (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), 54, 55.
56. Plotz, “The Perpetual Messiah,” 74.
57. Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 197, 198, 199.
58. Fineberg, The Innocent Eye.
59. Ibid., 120, 100, 133, 151.
61. Ibid., 182, 334. And see Kennedy, “Subversive Innocence.”
62. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization, 174.
63. Ibid., 199, 201.
64. Ibid., 224.
65. William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in Blake: Com-
plete Writings, 148.
Chapter Five: Reimagining School
1. John Dewey, The School and Society, in M.S. Dworkin, ed., Dewey
on Education: Selections (New York: Teachers College Press,
1959), 49.
2. John Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 179.
3. Ibid., 89.
4. Ibid., 16.
5. Ibid., 67, 71, 70.
6. Ibid., 97.
7. Ibid., 96.
8. Ibid., 79.
Notes to Chapter Five 207
9. Ibid., 97.
10. Ibid., 70, 89.
11. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 259.
12. Dominick Cavallo, “The Politics of Latency: Kindergarten Peda-
gogy, 1860–1930,” 159.
13. Barbara Finkelstein, “Schooling and the Discovery of Latency in
Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of Psychohistory 13,1
(Summer 1985), 3. See also her “Casting Networks of Good Influ-
ence: The Reconstruction of Childhood in the United States,
1790–1870.”
14. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 260.
15. Loris Malaguzzi, “History, Ideas, and Basic Philosophy,” in Car-
olyn Edwards, Leila Gandini, and George Forman, eds. The Hun-
dred Languages of Children (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993), 64.
16. Carolyn Edwards, “Partner, Nurturer, and Guide: The Roles of the
Reggio Teacher in Action.” In Ibid., 152.
17. Dewey, The School and Society, 52. Dewey adds, “In this case, the
child becomes the sun about which the appliances of education
revolve; he is the center about which they are organized.”
18. Ibid., 49.
19. Dewey, Human Nature and Conduct, 67.
20. Ibid., 69, 70, 75.
21. Martin Buber, Between Man and Man (New York: Macmillan,
1965), 6.
22. Martin Buber, “Dialogue,” in Between Man and Man, 8.
23. Ibid.
24. Buber, I and Thou.
25. Buber, Between Man and Man, 20.
26. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 322, 323.
28. Ibid.
29. For a discussion the original Greek idea of theoria, see Gadamer,
Truth and Method, 111.
31. Ibid., 10.
32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York: Pantheon,

1978), 93.
33. Ibid.
34. Martin Buber, “Distance and Relation,” in The Knowledge of Man:
A Philosophy of the Interhuman, trans. Maurice Friedman and
R.G. Smith (New York: Harper, 1965), 64.
35. Buber, Between Man and Man, 51; and The Knowledge of Man,
79.
36. For a further development of the philosophy of dialogue, see
Michael Theunissen, The Other: Studies in the Social Ontology of
Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Buber, trans. Christopher Macann
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), especially his “Postscript: The
Transcendental Project of Social Ontology and the Philosophy of
Dialogue,” 361–384.
37. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 51, 64.
38. Levinas, Time and the Other, 17, 92, 68.
39. Hugh Silverman, “Hermeneutics and Interrogation,” in Research in
Phenomonology, vol. XVI, 1986, 88, 89, 91.
40. Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 78, 75.
42. “. . . The sublime melancholy of our lot [is] that every You must
become an It in our world. However exclusively present it may
have been in the direct relationship—as soon as the relationship
has run its course or is permeated by means, the You becomes an
object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them,
assigned its measure and boundary. The actualization of the work
involves a loss of actuality. . . . Every You in the world is doomed
by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter thinghood again
and again. . . . The It is the chrysalis, the You the butterfly. Only it
is not always as if these states took turns so neatly; often it is an
intricately tangled series of events that is tortuously dual.” Buber, I
and Thou, 68–69.
43. Human Nature and Conduct, 50, 70, 52.
44. Ibid., 73.
45. John Dewey, Education and Democracy (New York: Macmillan,
1916), 87.
46. John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, enlarged edition
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1948), 203.
Notes to Chapter Five 209
47. Ibid., 204, 205.

48. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1977), 116, 112.
49. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, trans.
William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 21.
50. Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry, 87.
51. A few major works that address institutional design either directly
or by strong implication are the architectural classic by Christopher
Alexander, A Pattern Language (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1977); Meyer Spivak, Institutional Settings: An Environmen-
tal Design Approach (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1984);
and Carol Simon Weinstein and Thomas G. David, eds., Spaces for
Children: The Built Environment and Child Development (New
York: Plenum Press, 1987).
55. For two brief historical overviews of the project method, see See H.
Warren Button and Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., History of Education
and Culture in America (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall,
1983), 257–259, and Lawrence A. Cremin, The Transformation of
the School: Progressivism in American Education, 1876–1957
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 216–220. For its initial theo-
retical and practical emergence, see William Heard Kilpatrick,
“The Project Method,” Teachers College Record 19, 4 (September
1918), and its elaboration in his Foundations of Method (New
York: Macmillan, 1925). For a more recent formulation, see Lilian
G. Katz and Sylvia C. Chard, Engaging Children’s Minds: The Pro-
ject Approach (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991).
56. For descriptions of Reggio Emilia practice, see Carolyn Edwards,
Lella Gandini, and George Forman, eds., The Hundred Languages
of Children: The Reggio Emilia Approach to Early Childhood Edu-
cation , especially chapters 10 and 11, which are detailed accounts
of specific projects. See also Rebecca New, “Excellent Early Educa-
tion: A City in Italy Has It,” Young Children, 45, 6 (September
1990), 4–10.
57. Dewey, The School and Society, 49.
58. John Dewey, Democracy and Education (New York: Macmillan,
1916), 79.
59. For an eloquent argument for the priority of “meaning” and

“thoughtfulness” over “rationality” in educational structure and
design, see Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Frederick
S. Oscanyon, Philosophy in the Classroom, second edition
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 4–11.
60. John Dewey, The Child and the Curriculum. In M.S. Dworkin,
Dewey on Education: Selections (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1959), 96–97.
61. Lawrence J. Splitter and Ann Margaret Sharp, Teaching for Better
Thinking: The Classroom Community of Inquiry (Melbourne:
ACER, 1995), 130.
62. For a fuller treatment of the implications of doing philosophy with
children, see David Kennedy, “Philosophy for Children and the
Reconstruction of Philosophy,” in Metaphilosophy 30, 4 (October
1999), 338–359, and “Philosophy for Children and School
Reform: Dewey, Lipman, and the Community of Inquiry,” in John
Portolli and Ron Reed, eds., Children, Philosophy, and Democracy
(Detselig, 1995), Chapter 8. And for a classic formulation of a
methodology of doing philosophy as communal inquiry in the ele-
mentary classroom, see Lipman, Sharp and Oscanyon, Philosophy
in the Classroom.
63. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 51.
64. Plato, Meno, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976).
65. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology
of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 72.
Kennedy07Bib 1/11/06 10:40 AM Page 211
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The Well of Being: Childhood, Subjectivity, and Education

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THE WELL OF BEING

SUNY series, Early Childhood Education: Inquiries and Insights

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

© 2006 State University of New York

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

No part of this book may be used or reproduced

Cover photo © the Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of Califor-

For information, address State University of New York Press,

Production by Diane Ganeles

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Kennedy, David, 1943-

For my children—Irene, Sean, Anna and Joel—

2. The Primordial Child 27

3. The Invention of Adulthood 63

4. Childhood and the Intersubject 105

viii The Well of Being

The Dialectics of Reason and Desire 136

5. Reimagining School 151

On How This Book Got Its Name

This book represents an attempt at a synthesis of the multiple realities

x The Well of Being

an important role in this one—is a perennial one, to be found both in

1763 cleared the educational decks in a dramatic way for a vision of

xii The Well of Being

I cannot reach it; and my striving eye

2 The Well of Being

If one of the aims of this critique is to contribute to the deconstruc-

4 The Well of Being

unimaginative “grown-up” has been a major motif in Western children’s

psychologists under the influence of social, economic, and political pres-

The concept adult is equally liable to historical and cultural deconstruc-

During most of Western history only a minority of grown-ups

Boswell finds widely varying criteria for determining when adult-

6 The Well of Being

It could be that the twentieth century West is experiencing yet

them changing according to cultural fashion. In our time at least, some

8 The Well of Being

The Western Construction of Childhood

In the realm of alterity and interhuman projection, the child typically

. . . what desires the base and what grows wild needs to be

dent that without intelligence these are harmful. [The free

10 The Well of Being

an important part later in this book, in a discussion of the role of the

Jesus’ evocation of the ancient tradition of child as unconscious

12 The Well of Being

ambivalence, none of which seem to have very much to do with the

sketched above—projections which remain, if not unconscious, at least

As a form of interpretation of the other, modern scientific theory is

14 The Well of Being

practices of traditional schooling itself. There is no dimension in imposi-

Adult-child dialogue is distinguished from adult-adult dialogue by a few

easy for them to assume a kind of first-hand knowledge about child-

16 The Well of Being