International Journal of Childrens Spirituality Vol. 8, No.

2, August 2003

The Idea of the Child in Freud and Jung: psychological sources for divergent spiritualities of childhood
JOYCE ANN MERCER
San Francisco Theological Seminary, 2 Kensington Rd., San Anselmo, CA 94960, USA. E-mail: jmercer@sfts.edu

ABSTRACT This essay explores the constructions of the child developed in the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. These child-constructs constitute important psychological source-theories for spiritualities of childhood as each embodies a particular understanding of what childhood means, within the authors understandings of human personhood. After addressing an initial period of agreement between the two thinkers in which both understood the child as preeminently sexual, the essay details Jungs departure from Freud over the latters theory of infantile sexuality, toward a construction of the child as having a special closeness to the spiritual realms of the numinous and the collective unconscious. This construct of Jung, while upholding a basically hopeful and positive view of the child, risks distortions in over-idealized spiritualities of childhood. Freuds construction, on the other hand, maintained an essentially negative parallel between the child and illusory religion, and the child and so-called primitive societies, that risks reducing childrens spirituality to moralisms. At the same time, however, the essay concludes that elements of both of their constructions of the child may be retrieved toward childrens spiritualities that promote the thriving of children.

Introduction Neither Sigmund Freud nor Carl G. Jung set out to write psychologies of childhood, yet in the process of forming their psychologies, each of them constructed a particular concept of the child upon which their theories depend [1]. Those concepts continue to impact contemporary perspectives in the interface between psychology and childrens spirituality. This essay explores the distinctive constructions of the child in the works of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and how these perspectives lead to divergent understandings of childrens spirituality. It should be noted from the outset that neither Freud nor Jung offered a denition of spirituality, and among them only Jung used the term in his writings. However,
ISSN 1364-436X print/ISSN 1469-8455 online/03/020115-18 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1364436032000100502

116 J. A. Mercer both thinkers describe a phenomenon in human existence in which persons strive for or experience a connection to a horizon beyond that of their immediately apparent reality, which can be termed spirituality. For Freud, the experience he described as oceanic feeling (Freud, 1930/1961, p. 6465)and other manifestations of religiosity treated by Freud such as myth and magical thinking t into this categoryI name as spirituality, even though he did not use the term himself. For Jung, certain key concepts such as archetype, the psyche, the numinous, and the collective unconscious t into the category of the spiritual, along with his engagement of certain religious ideas such as reincarnation or Christian beliefs in life after death. Although Freud and Jung place a decidedly different value on spiritual matters, both thinkers explore the spiritual in relation to their particular constructions of the child, to which we will now turn. Freud: the child as preeminently sexual Although Freuds clinical work primarily involved adult patients, as he developed his understanding of neurosis in adults he was led to explore the early childhood experiences of his patients. Childhood thus became highly signicant to Freud, who theorized that adult neuroses had their origins in childhood conicts: [T]he inuence of childhood makes itself felt already in the situation at the beginning of the formation of a neurosis, since it plays a decisive part in determining whether and at what point the individual shall fail to master the real problems of life. (Freud, 1918/1955, p. 54) Freud did not stop with this assertion that childhood experience is determinative of adult neurosis, however. He went on to argue that the problematic childhood experiences at the root of adult neurosis are sexual in nature. One of Freuds better-known remarks is his description of children as polymorphously perverse. Freud understood himself to be writing in contrast to the prevailing notions in turn-of-the-century Viennese culture, which looked upon the child as asexual (see Robertson, 1974, pp. 407431). He believed that such a view of the child confused sexuality with reproduction (Freud, 1917/1963). Such a view, Freud contended, primarily served the interests of adults who wanted to see children as pure and innocent. But even though educators of the time may have worked hard to forbid sexual activities or make them disagreeable to the child so that the childs life would be asexual, Freud maintained, the children themselves refused to participate in this supposed innocence. They assert their animal rights with complete navete and give constant evidence that they have still to travel the road to purity (Freud, 1917/1963, p. 312). Against the idea that children basically are asexual until puberty, Freud lectured that on the contrary, from the very rst children have a copious sexual life, which differs at many points from what is later regarded as normal (1916/1963, p. 208). Is it possible to read Freuds insistence upon the natural sexual natures of children, in the face of adult attempts at repression, as an early form of child advocacy? Freuds writings contain various asides indicating his concern for chil-

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dren, or at least for non-repressive child rearing practices. In his introductory remarks to the Little Hans case, for example, Freud (1909/1955, p. 6) wrote: His parents were both among my closest adherents, and they had agreed that in bringing up their rst child they would use no more coercion than might be absolutely necessary for maintaining good behaviour. And, as the child developed into a cheerful, good-natured and lively little boy, the experiment of letting him grow up and express himself without being intimidated went on satisfactorily. Freud advocated for providing children with information about sexuality, and showed little patience for adults who adopt [the] attitude of mystery making in front of children due to customary prudishness and their own bad conscience over sexual matters (1907/1959, p. 133). Philip Rieffs appraisal that Freud formulates a plea for tolerance of the child, for an end of maiming threats, for a new sympathy and indulgence (1959, p. 149), suggests that a case can be made for viewing Freud as an early advocate of children. And in the face of aforementioned cultural attitudes and practices, Freuds views do indeed appear reform-minded. Unfortunately, however, the case for Freud as a child advocate turns out to be a rather ambivalent one, in light of the bulk of his writings about children. Freud elsewhere appeared less concerned about advocacy for children per se than to establish his claim that reality consists in conict-ridden, libidinal drive based behavior from the very beginning of human life. As evidence of that claim, Freud saw sexuality in the ordinary experiences of childhood. For example, in an early publication, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905/1953), Freud wrote on The Manifestations of Infantile Sexuality. These included thumb sucking, the sexual nature of which Freud saw as exposed by the fact that the behavior is not related to ingestion of food, but is purely pleasure seeking: In the nursery, sucking is often classed along with the other kinds of sexual naughtiness of children It must be insisted that the most striking feature of this sexual activity is that the instinct is not directed toward other people, but obtains satisfaction from the subjects own body. It is autoerotic (Freud, 1905/1953, pp. 180181) Freud compared the satisfaction of a sucking infant to sexual orgasm, adding that sucking is not infrequently combined with rubbing some sensitive part of the body such as the breast or the external genitalia. Many children proceed by this path from sucking to masturbation (1905/1953, p. 180). Freud thus concluded that since sucking behaviors continue in childhood even after the end of their association with food, such pleasure-oriented behaviors must necessarily be sexual (1917/1963). In Freuds construction of childhood, children were not simply sexual: they displayed a sexuality that Freud dubbed polymorphously perverse (Freud, 1905/ 1953, p. 191). Freuds choice of terminology is signicant. He wrote that he intended, without including any moral judgment, to give an empirical description of the sexuality of childhood as (1) involving the component instincts apart from

118 J. A. Mercer reproductive aims (his denition of perversion); and (2) autoerotic rather than focused on an external object. Thus he could justify himself as non-judgmental in his autobiographical essay: The sexual activities of children have hitherto been entirely neglected and though these of perverts have been recognized it has been with moral indignation and without understanding. Looked at from the psychoanalytic standpoint, even the most eccentric and repellent perversions are explicable as manifestations of component instincts of sexuality which have freed themselves from the primacy of the genitals and are now in pursuit of pleasure on their own account If I have described children as polymorphously perverse, I was only using a terminology that was generally current; no moral judgment was implied by the phrase. Psychoanalysis has no concern whatever with such judgments of value. (Gay, 1989, pp. 2324) Freuds efforts to convey such perversion as normal to childhood lie at the heart of his psychology and his view of the child. His claims to be a scientic empiricist, descriptive without attribution of moral value, however, fall apart in the comparisons he made between children and such so-called undesirables as an average uncultivated woman in whom the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists, and [p]rostitutes [who] exploit the same polymorphous, that is, infantile, disposition for the purposes of their profession (Freud, 1905/1953, p. 191). Freud connected childhoods perverse sexuality with all possible kinds of sexual irregularities, and noted that children are untroubled by their behaviors because the mental dams against sexual excessesshame, disgust, and moralityhave either not yet been constructed at all or are only in course of construction (1905/1953, p. 191). Freuds posture of objectivity about sex becomes unconvincing in light of such language. Furthermore, Freuds discordant sense of sexuality gets mixed up with his views of children as the human beings most completely identied with the pleasure-seeking impulses Freud judged as inferior. Freud continued an essentially discordant view of the child as he asserted that infantile sexuality culminated in the Oedipal experience, that is, in the childs fantasies of incest. Successful resolution of the Oedipal problem results in role identication with the same sex parent and the promise of eventual sexual gratication with someone like the desired opposite sex parent, for whom desires must be renounced. The child emerges with desires repressed and a new superego in place to direct morality. Freuds writings about the Oedipal child reveal some important features of his concept of childhood. First, when he was not talking about their sexuality, Freuds chief conceptual framework for considering the child was in relation to the parents. Such thinking is hardly unusual even among contemporary writers, as most childrens lives are inextricably linked with their parents. And yet, in Freud it is this very inability to see the child in her/his own terms rather than only in terms of a sexually cathected relationship with the parents, that lays the groundwork for much projection of adult feelings, meaning, and responsibility onto the child [2]. Second, by focusing on incest as a fantasy, Freud effectively denied the actual sexual abuse of

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children, a phenomenon known even in his time to be rampant. Eventually this would become the point of departure between Freud and Jungbut only after a time of agreement on the nature of the child as sexual in nature above all else.

Jungs Initial Agreement with Freud: the child as the repository of sexuality During the height of his collaboration with Freud, Jungs writings on childhood took the form of support for Freuds theory of infantile sexuality. Although Freuds views about the sexual origins of neurotic conict stood as a source of tension between the two men from the beginning of their correspondence, Freud frequently articulated the hope that Jung would be converted to his way of thinking. He saw Jungs failure to accept his libido theory in toto as a sign of Jungs prudishness, an attempt to water down the harsh reality of truth. In a letter to Freud on January 19, 1909, Jung told his teacher, Now I can stomach it. I dont water down the sexuality anymore (McGuire, 1974, p. 198). As if to offer proof of his conversion, Jung followed the statement with a series of observations about the sexual qualities of infants while feeding: It [i.e., mild convulsions seen in infants after eating] gives the impression of a sucking orgasm (rhythmic actionorgasm), perhaps also a satiation orgasm (?) [parenthetical question mark in original] (McGuire, 1974, p. 198). The bulk of the letter is taken up, however, by Jungs detailing of his four year old daughter Agathes efforts to discover the origins of babies. Jung parsed his daughters coded language down to its underlying sexual meaning: A. naturally means the genitals, taking delight in her efforts: What an enchantment such a child is! (McGuire, 1974, p. 200). This series of observations became the material for one of Jungs lectures at Clark University in September of that year when he and Freud traveled together to the U.S. Jungs lecture, Psychic Conicts in a Child, (1946/1954) offered observations about how a healthy four year-old child, Anna, explained and dealt with the birth of a baby brother in her family. The lecture was an undisguised apologetic for Freuds recently published case of Little Hans, an instance of analysis in which Freud uncovered the sexual nature of a conict causing neurosis in a ve-year-old boy [3]. Jung offered anecdotes about Annas search for understanding, and her conation of a story about angels with the stork theory on the origins of children, which resulted in her view that one person makes room for a new one to be born by dying. But Jungs real point in relating Annas story concerned how her question about the role of the father in sex and reproduction demonstrate the inherent sexual interest of the (normal, healthy) child. Such an interest precisely conrmed what Freuds case of Little Hans had shown about childhood neurosis. Jung concluded that, in light of the sexual nature of the child, children should be given sexual information when the time is right rather than having such information hidden from them: I am no apostle of sex education for schoolchildren, or indeed of any standardized mechanical explanations I can only draw one conclusion for the material here recorded, which is, that we should try to see children

120 J. A. Mercer as they really are, and not as we would wish them; that in educating them, we should follow the natural path of development, and eschew dead prescriptions. (Jung, 1946/1954, p. 32) Here Jungs plea to see children as they really are means to see them as sexualto interpret their behaviors, fantasies, and conicts as motivated by sexual interests. In his agreement with Freuds theory of infantile sexuality, Jungs address put forth a view of the child which at that time, like Freuds, stood in marked contrast to the prevailing Victorian notion of the child as innocent of sexual interest (i.e., essentially asexual until puberty). And yet, even in this essay, Jungs anecdotes conveyed other constitutive aspects of childhood besides libido to which he later returned to develop more fully. For instance, in the original lecture Jung connected Annas fantasy conation of the angel and the stork theories with a much larger issue than childhood fantasy alone: In this simple conception there lie the seeds of the reincarnation theory, which as we know is still alive today in millions of human beings (1946/1954, p. 10). This statement is scarcely more than a hint at the change of direction lying ahead for Jung, a shift away from nding sexual meaning in every aspect of childhood behavior to see instead a transpersonal and spiritual dimension in the words and actions of children. Yet such a statements presence in the early essay suggests that already for Jung there was more to psychology and to the child than could be explained by sexual theory alone.

Jungs Argument with Freud: the child as bearer of the numinous Jungs later supplements (1915, 1938) to his lecture, Psychic Conicts in a Child, provide a chronology of changes in his thinking and a helpful source for understanding the later Jungs concept of the child. In the 1915 forward to the published lecture, Jung stated that he had moved away from Freuds psycho-biological views in which the pleasure principle dominates. While his basic hypothesis still asserted the importance of sexual interest in the nascent process of infantile mentation, now the real emphasis for Jung was on aspects other than the sexual: infantile sexuality is the beginning of future (adult) sexual functions, but also of higher spiritual functions (1946/1954, p. 5). Jung now believed psychic conicts to be resolved through an intellectual process. But Jung extended further the distance between his emerging views about children and those of Freud with the claim that he, Jung, now meant something different by the term infantile sexuality: Even in adult life the vestiges of infantile sexuality are the seeds of vital spiritual functions. The fact that adult sexuality grows out of this polyvalent germinal disposition does not prove that infantile sexuality is sexuality pure and simple. I therefore dispute the rightness of Freuds idea of the polymorphous-perverse disposition of the child. It is simply a polyvalent disposition. (1946/1954, p. 5)

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The 1938 forward to the essays Third Edition took an even stronger tone, calling Freuds sexualized concept of the child a myth still sedulously believed (Jung, 1946/1954, p. 6). By this time, Jung stressed his essays demonstration of the importance of fantasy and symbol for the child, the characteristic striving of the childs fantasy to outgrow its realism and to put a symbolic interpretation in the place of scientic rationalism. This striving is evidently a natural and spontaneous expression of the psyche (Jung, 1946/1954, p. 6). Jung concluded his comments with a cogent statement of exactly how his new views departed from Freuds: To document the polyvalent germinal disposition of the child with a sexual terminology borrowed from the stage of fully-edged sexuality is a dubious undertaking. It means drawing everything else in the childs make-up into the orbit of sexual interpretation, so that on the one hand the concept of sexuality is blown up to fantastic proportions and becomes nebulous, while on the other hand spiritual factors are seen as warped and stunted instincts Even though a child may be preoccupied with matters which, for adults, have an undoubtedly sexual complexion, this does not prove that the nature of the childs preoccupation is to be regarded as equally sexual. (Jung, 1946/1954, p. 7) Jung argued for a different interpretive framework to be applied to children than the one used with adults. As early as 1912, Jung contended, obtaining pleasure is by no means identical with sexuality (1912/1961, p. 107, Jungs italics). One cannot apply adult meanings of sexuality onto childhood behaviors, Jung maintained, without over inating the sexual and undervaluing the spiritual. In his correspondence with Freud, Jung mentioned an experience from his own life that undoubtedly played a decisive role both in Jungs construction of childhood within his psychology and his theoretical departure from Freud over the issue of Freuds theory of childhood sexuality. It seems that, as a child, Jung was a victim of sexual assault: Though [my veneration for you] does not really bother me, I still feel it is disgusting and ridiculous because of its undeniable erotic undertone. This abominable feeling comes from the fact that as a boy I was the victim of a sexual assault by a man I once worshiped. (McGuire, 1974, p. 95) How might this experience have shaped Jungs conceptualization of childhood and his departure from Freud? We cannot know of such a connection denitively, as Jung did not articulate one. Yet one probable example of the impact of Jungs experience comes in his different understanding of the incest taboo, which Jung described in language suggestive of connections to his own experience of childhood sexual assault. A further connection between Jungs childhood experience of assault and his departure from Freud shows up in the way Jungs writings in his post-psychoanalytic period rarely dealt with actual children in any detail. The child became quite abstract for Jung. While he wrote extensively about the child as an archetype Jung

122 J. A. Mercer moved away from narrating historically concrete childhoods, and thereby in effect minimized within his psychology the importance of childhood experience in shaping adult personhood. With other feminist critics of Jung, I see this move as problematic in that it led Jung to develop a psychology largely dependent on disembodied thought that prefers the metaphysical to the physical in a cultural context where physicality is (negatively) associated with women (Goldenberg, 1993). Freud, meanwhile, persisted in tracing the prohibition of incest back to actual incest in a cultural-evolutionary scheme, yet abandoned his original theory that incest was occurring in the present-day lives of his patients. That is, Freud replaced his earlier idea that the psychological problems of his patients could be traced back to historically authentic experiences of abuse (known as the seduction theory), in favor of ascribing their experiences to Oedipal fantasy [4]. Freud thereby discounted most actual occurrences of child molestation among his patients. By 1924, Jung became completely unwilling to subscribe to the notion that all adult patients memories of childhood seduction could be explained by Freuds newer theory of Oedipal fantasy. Jung wrote that use of the word incest as a metaphor for the [male] childs affections toward the mother is only a gurative expression, and a misleading word applied to a child: The word incest has a denite meaning, and designates a denite thing, and as a general rule can only be applied to an adult who is psychologically capable of linking [his/her] sexuality to its proper object (1924/1954, p. 75). Jung contended that although childhood sexual precocity existed, it constituted the exception rather than the norm. He further suggested that behind the child displaying sexual symptoms stood parents with unconscious sexual desires toward their children. In other words, Jung was no longer willing to ascribe responsibility for adult sexual actions or even desires to children. Following his break with Freud, Jung again returned to his essay, Psychic Conicts in a Child, this time reading Annas return to the fantasy of the angel-stork story as a natural and positive expression of the psyche rather than as an example of repressed sexuality. This later Jung saw the fantasys approximation to beliefs about reincarnation as an expression of how children participate in the mysterious, numinous quality of human experience. Children therefore naturally seek symbolic explanations over rationalism. In a 1946 supplement, Jung went even further to highlight the positive importance of fantasy: I have been left wondering whether the fantastic or mythological explanation preferred by the child might not be more suitable than a scientic one, which although factually correct threatens to clamp down the latch on fantasy for good. (1946/1954, p. 33) Jungs transition in his construct of the child thus moved his entire psychology toward a new emphasis on childhood mystery, the ineffable, and on fantasy as a positively valued activity particularly prominent during childhood. Jung concluded that while it is not advisable to give untrue explanations to children that foster mistrust, neither is it good to insist on their acceptance of rational explanations, for that would suppress freedom of mind and preclude spiritual development. What

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became important to Jung was the childs use of fantasy as a positive aspect of development, specically, of spiritual development. Jungs positive view of fantasy as an imaginative realm with links to spirituality thus stand in sharp contrast to the Freudian notion equating fantasy with illusion, the expression of a wishful desire contrary to reality. These differences can be further illumined by looking at another aspect of Freuds construction of the childthe child as immature, unformed personhoodin comparison to Jungs further construction of the child in relation to the collective unconscious.

Freud: the child as immature/unformed personhood One of the difculties Freud poses for contemporary readers is his dual use of the term infantile. On the one hand, Freud used this term in a temporal sense, to refer directly to the child or infant, and to events occurring during the time of childhood. On the other hand, Freud also employed the term infantile as an adjective, referring to whatever is immature or less developed. Although such dual usage falls within the bounds of acceptable practice, it presents an interpretive problem in understanding Freuds view of the child: Was he writing in a descriptive sense only, referring to time, or in an evaluative sense, giving a particular value to the time and status of childhood? Freud called the unconscious the infantile mental life, with its reliance upon primary process and non-verbal images. The unconscious was the equivalent of the mental life of the child for Freud, or that which we can nd in actual operation in children (1916 /1963, p. 211). Elsewhere Freud wrote that the distinction between the conscious and unconscious is not as clear with children because the conscious is still in development and not yet fully able to transpose itself into verbal images (1918/1955, pp. 104105). At rst glance, such perspectives appear almost valueneutral. However, a different perspective comes to the foreground with Freuds use of language about religion, which he consistently calls infantile. First, religion is infantile for Freud in the sense of being inimical to reality: The whole thing [religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. (1930/1961, p. 74) Freud (1927/1961) saw religion as an illusion arising from the human need to make helplessness tolerable, built up from the material of memories of experiences of childhood helplessness. Religion arises from the same needs that shape the mental life of the child. Although the mother is the childs rst object of love and protection, the child soon transfers object status to the father, who retains that position for the rest of childhood. But the childs attitude is one of ambivalence toward the father, especially when the child nds (in the Oedipal experience) that the child must remain a child forever and can do nothing without protection from superior powers.

124 J. A. Mercer The child therefore transfers love and protection-seeking features from the father to God (1927/1961, p. 17). After infancy [the person] cannot conceive of a world without parents and makes for himself a just God and a kindly nature, the two worst anthropomorphic falsications he could have imagined. (McGuire, 1974, p. 284) Religion thus derives from experiences of helplessness, something upon which Freud places a clearly disapproving stamp. The frequent comparisons between religion and childhood express a critical view of childhood. In fact Freud even compares religion to obsessional neurosis in children, linking childhood, religion and pathology. Growth means turning away from religion (1927/1961), away from the dependency for which Freud expressed such distaste (Wallace, 1984). In the end, Freud saw religion as a kind of necessary pathology that a few stalwart individuals would be able to put aside. Childhood also constitutes a necessary pathology through which everyone must pass. The point becomes further illustrated by noting the frequent comparisons Freud made between so-called primitive peoples and children. In both, Freud found a view of essential humanity prior to the distortions brought on by the repressive veil of culture. Incest horror among primitive people was to Freud (1913/1955, p. 17) an infantile feature bearing striking resemblance to the mental life of neurotic patients in that it continued to live out the conditions of (pre-Oedipal) childhood when the earliest object choices were the mother and sister. In the case of primitive cultures and individual persons, Freud put forward the earliest form of culture (primitives) and the earliest form of the person (the child) as evidence of what is most essential and undistorted in each, but also as the neurotic and inferior starting point from which development proceeds, thus offering at best an ambivalent assessment of both. Jung: the child and the collective unconscious In spite of some similar features, Jungs perspective on the meaning and value of the childs existence as untarnished by adult life experience differed signicantly from that of Freud. Instead of seeing the child as an immature, yet unformed person, Jung held that children possess a unique relationship to the collective unconscious. He depended upon an assumed understanding of childhood as a kind of uncontaminated time, in order to communicate his denition of collective unconscious. In brief, Jung wrote of two systems of the unconscious. One is a personal unconscious, shaped by experience and therefore individual in nature (like the notion of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis). But the primary sense of the unconscious for Jung involved a parallel world to the rational, conscious realm. This unconscious speaks the language of dreams and symbols, elements constituting a spiritual language not available to the rational mind of consciousness. Like the child her/himself, the unconscious for Jung existed as a realm uncontaminated by individual experience and personal history. When Jung referred to the collective unconscious, he emphasized its transpersonal, universal and inherited nature. Jung posited

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a psychology of the development of the self, for which the collective unconscious is an important reference point as the matrix out of which consciousness grows (1923/1954; 1932/1954). Jungs concept of the child gures prominently in this framework. First, in Jungs theory of personal development, persons are born in a state of close connection with the collective unconscious. The ego, which for Jung was the center of conscious personality but not constitutive of the self, emerges out of the collective unconscious during childhood, as the child becomes aware of being an I (Jung, 1923/1954, p. 52). Although it arises from the collective unconscious, the ego remains at the same time untouched by it because consciousness functions to obscure unconscious content, as it is a process of differentiation from unconsciousness. Gradually as the child grows toward adulthood, the ego is shaped by what Jung called the collective consciousness, or the process of social adaptation by which persons learn to conform to the norms and roles of society. The work of the collective conscious on the ego results in a conforming persona, necessary for adaptation to life but potentially problematic if too strong. The persona is a mask or role, a persons use of rational consciousness in daily life. Individuation occurs as a weakening in the persona that permits the reappearance of archetypal (unconscious) material. In maturity, the archetypal images become assimilated into the ego, as a result of which the self comes into being. Thus for Jung the self is not to be identied with ego or consciousness, but is the balance of ego and collective unconscious that results from individuation. Successful assimilation of collective material contains the seeds of deeper individuality for the person. Thus the entire process involves movement from initial unity with the collective unconscious in childhood, to differentiation, toward eventually seeking unity again with the development of the self. Jung viewed children as existing in a state of recent emergence from deep unconsciousness, giving them a special access to the collective unconsciousness by virtue of their lack of differentiation from it. For Jung, until the child develops a conscious ego, sometime between the ages of three and ve years, there exists no individual psyche in the child (1923/1954). Instead, the child participates in or is fused with the psyche of the parents, and even more with earlier generations of ancestors, grandparents and great-grandparents who are the true progenitors (Jung, 1931/1954, p. 44). The childs own individual psyche is only potentially present until the development of ego out of the collective unconscious. Thus early childhood for Jung comprised a period in which the child lacked personal, experientially acquired psychic content and so existed in a state of participation mystique with the parents (Jung, 1931/1954, p. 41). So complete is Jungs identication of early childhood with unconsciousness that he even stated that if children were left to themselves without education and culture to reinforce the process of development, they would remain largely unconscious a primitive state which Jung also called an animal state (1923/1954, pp. 5253). Jungs construction of the child thus holds some similarities to Freuds view of the child as immature and unformed personhood who demonstrates essential humanity, untouched by the overlay of experience or culture, and is heavily overlaid

126 J. A. Mercer with parental elements; untarnished by life experience; and questionably valued by virtue of parallels between children and so-called primitives. Also like Freud before him, Jung displayed an ambivalent valuing of the condition of primitives, and therefore by comparison, of children. On the one hand, primitives live unencumbered by the rational business of civilization that obstructs access to the spiritual realm that Jung so obviously valued. On the other hand, Jung pictured primitives as people living in a less developed, less differentiated state (Jung, 1923/1954; 1931/ 1954), negatively assessed as inferior. Insofar as Jung placed a high value on the collective unconscious in its universal and numinous qualities to which the mature person returns to integrate it into the ego, the childs close relationship to the unconscious appears positively valued by Jung. But insofar as the full actualization of the person depends upon a process that requires a move away from unity with the collective unconscious, childhood is a less than complete state. Such development away from oneness with the collective unconscious is necessary for life in the world, said Jung (1935/1977, p. 95): Very young children still have an awareness of mythological contents, and if these contents remain conscious too long, the individual is threatened by an incapacity for adaptation; haunted by a constant yearning to remain with or to return to the original vision. There are very beautiful descriptions of these experiences by mystics and poets. Because of their closeness to the unconscious, Jung asserted that many children show an awareness of its collective contents, manifested in archetypal dreams (big dreams) (1935/1977; 1961/1977). Jung initially explained such dreams, with their very unchildlike content, as evidence for the extent of childhood dependence upon the parental psyche, but later came to see them as containing archetypes which are the cause of their apparently adult character (1923/1954, p. 54). Such dreams, like early memories of childhood, are phylogenic rather than individual (McGuire, 1974, p. 450). Jung considered the archetype of the child one of the most frequently occurring archetypes. Archetypes are hypothetical, symbolic of potential rather than being identiable with the concrete experience they represent. Hence Jung urged readers not to confuse the child-motif or archetype with the actual child. Jung contended that the child archetype appears in many forms: as elf or dwarf in folklore; the savior or God-Child or hero in religion and ritual; the hidden treasure; or as a monster or giant. Jung applied his notion of the tension of opposites to archetypes: they contain both negative and positive elements. Thus the child motif frequently holds in tension two poles: on the one hand helplessness in the face of danger, abandonment, or exposure (e.g., religious birth narratives such as that of Jesus, whose parents had no shelter); on the other hand, the possession of extraordinary powers. The child archetype contains paradox, which Jung frequently expressed in the playful descriptions of fairy tale characters such as Tom Thumb as smaller than small yet bigger than big (Jung, 194950/1959, p. 116). The child is insignicant yet divine, holding these opposites in tension with each other. Jung placed special emphasis upon the role of religion in his two essays about the

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child archetype, saying that religious ritual functions to keep the image of the child before the conscious mind, by representing it again and again. The archetype thus functions to compensate for the one-sidedness of the conscious mind, by keeping this unconscious image alive. Jung saw the child archetype as a link to the collective past, reenacted and recalled by ritual (194950/1959, p. 161). At the same time, Jung considered futurity one of the child archetypes essential features. The child is potential future. This motif acts as a unifying symbol, uniting consciousness and unconsciousness into a whole. There exists an eternal child in humans, an imponderable that determines the ultimate worth or worthlessness of a personality (194950/1959, p. 179). Because the child is related to the unconscious, this archetype was associated with darkness for Jung: The phenomenology of the childs birth always points back to an original psychological state of nonrecognition, i.e., of darkness or twilight, of nondifferentiation between subject and object, of unconscious identity of [humanity] and the universe. (Jung, 194950/1959, p. 172) The negative features of the child archetypeabandonment, helplessnesswere for Jung necessary features. He called for negativity to be lived with and transformed rather than repressed. Jung saw this movement of human experience lived out in the symbol of the Child-Hero, whose main feat is to overcome the monster of darkness: it is the long-hoped-for and expected triumph of consciousness over the unconscious Hence the child distinguishes itself by deeds which point to the conquest of the dark (194950/1959, p. 167). In spite of Jungs pronounced efforts to hold together the opposites of positive and negative features in every archetype, his chief emphasis in explicating the child archetype was upon potentiality, overcoming obstacles, and invincibility. This child motif certainly included problems and negativity, but ultimately for Jung hopefulness prevailed. Jungs construction of the child is not without problems, however. It remains unclear how he assessed the association between the child and the collective unconscious. Jungians would most likely argue that he remained neutral, holding to the tension of opposites necessary for balance. Jung closely identied childhood with the unconscious, and, as Wehr points out (1987, pp. 8788), he also frequently associated the unconscious with evil. Some manifestations of the child-archetype appear tinged with evilthe giant, for instance, or sometimes dwarfs and elves. Functionally, Jung used his child construct as a conceptual paradigm to explicate certain key concepts in his psychology such as the unconscious, or his notion of phylogenic, collective archetypal images. But when it comes to concrete, lived childhood, Jung remained for the most part silent. Conclusion: some implications for childrens spirituality By now it is obvious, I hope, that the particular constructions of the child developed by Freud and Jung are theoretical constructs that take shape within the specic frameworks of their larger psychologies. In both instances, however, these psycholo-

128 J. A. Mercer gies usher in certain perspectives on childrens spirituality, as each thinker articulates therein an understanding of the larger meaning of the state of childhood. These notions of what childhood means within the overarching meanings given to human personhood form the connections between psychologies of childhood and childrens spirituality in the writings of Freud and Jung. Their enduring signicance is less about any direct application of either construct into contemporary spiritualities of childhood than it concerns the implicit ways Freudian and Jungian perspectives continue to function as underlying source-material for psychologies of childhood that give texture to the meanings attributed to the childhood state. In conclusion, then, I will briey suggest some implications for childrens spirituality in the child-constructs of Freud and Jung explicated in this essay. The construction of the child as preeminently sexual, proffered by Freud and afrmed by Jung in his early works, has several connections to contemporary perspectives on childrens spirituality that can be afrmed. First among these is the understanding that childrens spirituality is embodied, lived and experienced through the movements, senses, comforts and discomforts of childrens bodies, rather than separated and detached from bodily experience. Second, a constructive engagement of this sexual view of the child as received from both Freud and Jung reads their emphasis on the sexual nature of childhood experience as an integration of sexuality into everyday, embodied existence of children. Against repressive perspectives, this view of the child holds within it a claim that sexuality is part of how human persons, including children, have their being. Unfortunately, it is difcult to read Freud, in particular, but also Jung, on the child as preeminently sexual without bumping up against a strongly negative and moralistic view of sexuality and therefore also of the child, in their writings. The problem such negativity poses for childrens spirituality may be seen in that trajectory within the history of religious education and spiritual formation that is overinvested in moralistic understandings of the spiritual life, and that subsequently renders childrens spiritual life and growth in atly moralistic terms. Such a perspective lends itself to placing too much emphasis on controlling a childs behavior as somehow correlating directly with the childs spirituality. Furthermore, in Freuds and Jungs era as in the current one, child sexual abuse was and remains extremely common (Demause, 1991). We therefore must question the ethical implications of such a construction of the child in which adult sexual agencies and meanings are attributed to children. The later Jungs critique of Freud on this point is a needed corrective. Feminist critiques (see Goldenberg, 1993; Westerlund, 1986; Van Herik, 1982) of both Jung and Freud allege their knowledge of, if not complicity in, the abuse of patients, which raises real issues around how such constructions of children that oversexualize them on the one hand (Freud) or deny their embodiment on the other hand (Jung) may well continue to play into dynamics of child abuse. Feeding into this issue as well is the fact, rightly addressed by feminist critics of both Jung and Freud, that their theories assume a male child, and shape perspectives on female development in relation to an assumed male norm. When a theory so clearly favors men, it becomes easier to discount the situations of women and girls, who in every era are the most frequent victims of sexual abuse.

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Second, the tendency to equate childhood with basic, unformed humanity within the theories of both Freud and Jung has the effect of elevating the importance of the child within these psychologies, giving childhood a much larger signicance than had been previously attributed to it. To a great extent the theories of both thinkers hinge on their constructions of the child. Such a move sets the stage for future psychologies to treat childhood as a fully signicant life-situation and the constructions of childhood within them as determinative of their views of the human person. Critically, however, the manner in which Freuds and Jungs child-constructs equate with notions of so-called primitive humanity is both falsely essentializing of the child and those groups, and also condescending. Their undifferentiated notions of the child which parallel undifferentiated constructions of woman (Goldenberg, 1993; Choderow, 1991) undermine the validity of the anthropologies within their systems in ways that have direct bearing on spirituality. For example, the degree of abstraction in Jungs construction of the child limits the relationship of his theory to the lives of actual children, which in turn places limits on the usability of his understandings to support a positive spirituality in children. A spirituality so far removed from the actual lives and bodies of children can easily become a spirituality oblivious to the suffering of children. Similarly, Freuds undifferentiated view of the child coupled with his singularly dismissive attitude toward things spiritual and mythical leads him to globalize all childrens participation in all religious ritual or religious education as universally harmful, rather than ushering in a critical constructive appraisal of particular childrens engagement in specic forms of religious-spiritual practices. As noted, Freud saw the child and religion alike as completely mired in dependency. Freuds inability to impute any positive value to the state of dependency he associated with both the child and religion does not bode well for a contemporary world-context in which spiritualities of mutual interdependency are desperately needed to counter the abuses of detached individualism. Finally, the signicant extent to which both Freud and Jung identify the child with religious or spiritual realms afrms contemporary efforts to theorize the connections between psychologies and theologies/spiritualities of childhood. At the same time, however, Freuds dismissive view of religion lends itself to a similarly dismissive and negative view of the child and of childrens spiritual lives, while Jungs over idealized notion of numinous mystery lends itself to an idealized mystical-spiritual child who has little resemblance to actual children and their lived spiritualities. In short, despite some efforts (noted earlier) by each theorist to provide a modulated, balanced view of the child, the excesses of both thinkers tend toward bifurcation, splitting the child-construct into either demonized or idealized features. Such tendencies may not constitute the most helpful inheritance for contemporary theologians, educators, or psychologists concerned with fostering the growth and development of childrens spiritualities within particular communities. It remains for such persons to continue developing critical uses of the positive contributions extant within the source-theories of Freud and Jung for contemporary psychologies and spiritualities of childhood that can contribute to the thriving of children.

130 J. A. Mercer Notes

[1] Both Freud and Jung constructed their psychological theories as universally applicable, as they wrote in a time period within the history of ideas prior to contemporary postmodern refutations of the existence of a universal or generalized human person. Consequently, both writers refer unhesitatingly to the child, without regard to particularity, in ways that would no longer be acceptable among most scholars. It should be noted that these constructions of the child are also based upon an assumed male norm. In order to read them within their own historicity, however, in this essay I will maintain Freuds and Jungs usages of a universal notion of the child, who is also generalized as a male child, recognizing that although this situation calls for a signicant cultural critique, offering such critique lies beyond the scope of this essays goals of explicating Freuds and Jungs child-constructs. In addition, I will use the conventional system of citation for English language speakers in which the dates of authorship are followed by a slash mark, after which the date of the English language publication is given so that the reader who wishes to attend to historical changes in thought may do so. [2] Examples of Freuds projection of adult meanings onto childhood experiences are most evident in Freuds clinical case studies. In his Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-year old Boy Freud interpreted Little Hans embrace of a ve-year-old cousin as the rst trace of homosexuality, and an interaction with his mother at bath time as the childs attempt to seduce her (1909/1955, p. 15, 19). This use of the terms homosexual and seduction to carry the same meanings for a child which they hold when attributed to adult sexual behaviors raises the central question: is the child seductive in the adult sense of the word, with all its implications of intention and agency? In Freuds famous case study of the Wolf Man, Freud speaks of the patients childhood seduction by his sister in a way that imputes clear intentionality to the sister (1918 /1955, pp. 1923). He argues elsewhere that the sexual life of children has much in common with that of adults (1917/1963, p. 325), differentiated mainly by its diffusion of aims and lower intensity of libidinal impulse. It seems entirely credible to impute a sexual basis to many behaviors of childhood without concomitantly assuming that they carry the same meaning for the child that similar behaviors would hold for an adult. But for Freud, they appear to bear the adult meaning. The matter is further complicated by the way in which Freud describes the imputed sexuality of boy-children in more afrmative, normalizing language (cf. the case of Little Hans, while pathologizing and demonizing the imputed sexuality of girl-children, where he makes a gender distinction [cf. above, the sister of the Wolf Man].) Thus implicit in Freuds view of childhood is the idea that the child is a willful and responsible agent, oriented toward the pursuit of sexual pleasure. [3] Freud initially suggested the similarity between Jungs case and his own in their correspondence. See McGuire, 1974, p. 203. [4] For a helpful history of the various phases of the Oedipal theory in Freuds work, see Simon and Blass, 1991. These authors note that Freuds theoretical focus on girl-children through his formulation of a female Oedipal complex and an elaboration of the pre-oedipal relationship with the mother came fairly late in Freuds work. It did, however, result in downplaying the importance of the boys Oedipal complex in his work.

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