Child development theory from Freud to Winnicott

Sigmund Freud’s developmental stage theory The approach began with the work of Sigmund Freud in Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. Freud was trained as a medical doctor and applied terms from scientific study to his ideas, endeavouring, particularly early in his career, to give them a biological basis. He coined the term ‘psycho-dynamic’ to describe the constant tension and conflict between opposing forces within the ‘psyche’ or internal world. He outlined a ‘structural’, tripartite model of the internal (intra-psychic) world, defining three distinct elements: id, ego and superego, or ‘it’, ‘me’ and ‘above me’

For Freud, life was principally concerned with the management of these conflicts, with individuals attempting to maximize instinctual gratification while minimizing guilt and punishment. Freud’s approach has, therefore, been described as a conflict management model of the inner world. Freud initially conceptualized drives (in German, Triebe) as related to the preservation of life (hunger and thirst) and to the preservation of the species (termed sexual drives). In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) he grouped these drives together, calling them Eros or life drives. At this point he posited an additional set of drives that were antagonistic to Eros. He named these the aggressive or death drives (Thanatos), as their aim was to move towards extinction – the equivalent in personal terms perhaps of the ‘heat-death of the universe’. For Freud, drives had the goal of conserving an earlier state of affairs, and so the death drive embodies the tendency for living organisms to return to the inanimate state. ‘The aim of all life is death . . . inanimate things existed before living ones . . .’ (Freud 1920). The death drive has remained a controversial concept within the psychoanalytic world after Freud.

Freud emphasized the importance of childhood for adult functioning, particularly the first five years of life. He came to believe that the major influence on development was the psychosocial conflict surrounding the sexual drive during these early years of life. The pervasive importance of this drive in shaping development and adult functioning was seen to arise from a number of its properties. Sexuality begins early in life and its development is long and complicated, making it very prone to distortion. Further, ‘the sexual instincts are remarkable for their plasticity, for the facility with which they can change their aim . . . for the ease with which they can substitute one form of gratification for another’ (Freud 1938: 127). This means that many aspects of life can be sexualised. Therefore, in addition to biological development, environment and social context exert important influences on both the form and the expression of the sexual drive.

The characteristics of infantile sexual life were considered ‘essentially auto-erotic (i.e. that it finds its object in the infant’s own body) and that its individual component instincts are upon the whole disconnected and independent of one another in their search for pleasure’ (Freud 1905: 63). Each stage has become known by the area of the body seen as the predominant erogenous, or ‘erotogenic’, zone during that particular version of the psycho-sexual conflict between instinctual drive and society: oral, anal and phallic. Each erotogenic zone is associated with a vital somatic function: the oral zone with feeding, the anal zone with defecation and so on. It is through the pleasurable sensation that accompanies fulfilment of any of these somatic functions that an erotogenic zone becomes established. A need to repeat this pleasurable sensation arises, which then becomes separate from the somatic function. Sexual development is ‘diphasic’, that is, it occurs in two waves. The pre-genital stages are brought to a halt, or ‘retreat’, by a period called ‘latency’. A ‘second wave sets in with puberty and determines the final outcome of sexual life’ (Freud 1905: 66). These phases of ‘sexual organization’ are normally passed through smoothly, with little more than a hint of their existence. ‘It is only in pathological cases that they become active and recognisable to super ficial observation’ (Freud 1905: 64). Too little or too much gratification at any stage results in the individual becoming ‘fixated’. Freud described how, at times of stress throughout life, such ‘fixation points’ could be pre-dispositional. The precise impact would vary according to what stage frustration or indulgence happened and what form it took.

Each stage therefore has an adult character type associated with it and particular defences which predominate. These defences become particularly strong if fixation occurs. The character traits related to fixation at any stage are described in terms of bipolar opposites, either of which may be shown, although there is of course here something of a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ argument, in as much as anal fixation, for example, can be interpreted in terms of extreme tidiness or extreme messiness. Freud came to believe that the three pre-genital stages did not succeed each other in a clear-cut fashion: ‘one may appear in addition to another; they may overlap one another, may be present alongside of one another’ (Freud 1940: 155). He also outlined how much from each earlier stage, ‘obtains permanent representation in the Psychoanalytic/psycho-dynamic developmental theories

The oral stage (the first year of life) Freud describes how the first organ to emerge as an erotogenic zone is the mouth, through the action of sucking. To begin with, all psychical activity is concentrated on providing satisfaction for the needs of that zone. Primarily, of course, this satisfaction serves the purpose of self-preservation by means of nourishment;( Freud 1938 p135)

The baby’s obstinate persistence in sucking gives evidence . . . of a need for satisfaction which, though it originates from and is instigated by the taking of nourishment, nevertheless strives to obtain pleasure independently of nourishment and for that reason may and should be termed sexual. (Freud 1940: 154) Sensual sucking is described as rhythmic and as ‘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’ (Freud 1905: 46). He points out how during the oral, or ‘cannibalistic’, stage, ‘sexual activity has not yet been separated from the ingestion of food . . . The sexual aim is incorporation of the object – the prototype of a process which, in the form of identification, is later to play such an important psychological part’ (Freud 1905: 64). So the infant seeks to take in or incorporate whatever he comes across or experiences. At this stage his well being is largely dependent on others. If his needs are satisfied, he comes to conceive of existence in a positive way and to see the world about him as warm and benevolent.

The anal stage is also the beginning of ‘ambivalence’, as the active and passive currents are almost equally developed. Sadistic impulses begin to act to a greater extent. These are seen as a ‘fusion of purely libidinal and purely destructive urges’ (Freud 1940: 154). However, one of the things that characterizes these early pre-genital stages remains that ‘the combination of the component instincts and their subordination under the primacy of the genitals have been effected only very incompletely or not at all’ (Freud 1905: 65). In the Three Essays on Sexuality (1905) Freud makes it clear that although the focus at this stage is on the musculature involved in defecation there is also sexual pleasure in muscular activity generally: ‘children feel the need for a large amount of muscular exercise and derive extraordinary pleasure from satisfying it’ (Freud 1905: 68). In response to the demands made upon him, he can submit, rebel or learn to cope with authority while maintaining his own autonomy . . . if the pleasure a child takes in playing with his faeces is severely constrained by his parents, for example, he may develop defences against such forbidden pleasures which may express themselves later as obsessive orderliness and cleanliness.

The predominant defences related to this stage are ‘isolation’, ‘intellectualisation’, ‘reaction formation’ and ‘undoing’. The phallic stage (3 to 6 years old) At around the age of 3 years the predominant erogenous zone is thought to shift to the genitalia as children begin to explore their own and others’ bodies. The area of the genitals is stimulated in the course of everyday washing and drying, and the child learns to stimulate this area for themselves. Freud’s theorizing about this stage shifted several times as his ideas developed. Early on he posited that the anal organization was followed by the genital. Later he reformulated this position, clarifying that it was not the genitals but the phallus that predominated. ‘It is to be noted that it is not the genitals of both sexes that play a part at this stage but only the male ones (the phallus). The female genitals long remain unknown’ (Freud 1940: 154). At this point in his thinking Freud viewed the development of both genders to be related to the norm of male sexuality. ‘Maleness exists, but not femaleness. The antithesis here is between having a male genital and being castrated. It is not until development has reached its completion at puberty that the sexual polarity coincides with male and female’ (Freud 1923: 312, highlights how this position seemed to shift again in Freud’s last papers. Although he appears in places to hold to identical development in boys and girls in the pre-genital stages (1933a: 151), he made a significant recognition of the way girls and boys differ in their earliest relationships, for example pre-Oedipal exclusive attachment to mothers is greater in women than men (1931b: 377). The phallic stage is seen as a ‘forerunner of the final form taken by sexual life’ (Freud 1940: 154).

The child’s curiosity about sexual differences becomes heightened, ‘the sexuality of early childhood reaches its height and approaches its dissolution’ (Freud 1940: 154). Freud (1940) suggests that both boys and girls, ‘have begun to put their intellectual activity at the service of sexual researches’, and that both ‘start off from the premise of the universal presence of the penis’. From this point the paths of the sexes begin to diverge. The boy initially views the girl’s clitoris as an even smaller penis than his own and then moves on to believe that the little girl has been castrated. Psychoanalytic/psycho-dynamic developmental theories 7 This gives rise to the boy’s own fear of castration. The girl, ‘comes to recognise her lack of a penis or rather the inferiority of her clitoris, with permanent effects on the development of her character; as a result of this first disappointment in rivalry, she often begins by turning away altogether from sexual life’ (Freud 1940: 155). Freud acknowledged that he was more confident about describing male development. This concern with sexual differences is played out in the phallic stage through ‘the central phenomenon of the sexual period of early childhood’ (Freud 1924: 315) – a conflict that Freud eventually named the Oedipus complex. Put at its most simple, the child is believed to develop incestuous desires for the parent of the opposite sex along with the desire to displace the same-sex parent.

Freud sees resolution of this Oedipal conflict as the key to successful psycho-sexual development. Freud’s description of female psycho-sexual development at this stage is both less clear and more controversial. Freud initially assumed that girls followed a parallel development to that of boys through the Oedipal conflict. Later he came to view as a key experience the little girl’s realization that neither she, her mother, nor any woman has a penis. Freud describes how this gives rise to penis envy and the little girl’s devaluing of all women. ‘She has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it . . . After a woman has become aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops, like a scar, a sense of inferiority’ (Freud 1925b: 336, 337). For this she blames her mother ‘who sent her into 8 Personality development the world insufficiently equipped’ (Freud 1925b: 338). The girl gives up her wish for a penis, substituting a wish for a child and thus shifting her interest to her father as love-object. So for girls the Oedipus complex is not really resolved, and according to Freud this means that the superego is less well developed.

Melanie Klein in a different p;ace and developing in a different direction both in theory and technique, pioneered the use of therapy with children through play. Through observations of children she came to believe that they were more occupied with the need to manage feelings directed towards the central figures around them than with the erotic impulses on which Freud had focused. She saw the mother–child relationship as central in personality development, forming a sort of prototype for all other relationships; and she believed that intra-psychic development in a child’s first year of life dictated much of later personality. This emphasis on the first year (as, for example, the time of the Oedipus complex, first feelings of guilt, and so on) distinguishes her model from that of Freud, in which the first five years are significant. Klein’s developmental theory remained compatible with Freud’s in acknowledging the motivating role played by instinctual drives. In fact Klein reformulates Freud’s death instinct (Thanatos), putting the emphasis on aggressive impulses rather than on impulses towards self-extinction. The conflict between the instinctual forces of life and death, for Klein, is projected out on to objects in the external world. Klein suggests that a newborn infant has an ego already able to feel anxiety, make use of defences and begin to form object relations in 14 Personality development phantasy and reality. For Klein, it is through this ongoing process of introjection and projection of objects rather than through the Freudian psycho-sexual stages that the ego develops. From birth the infant exists in relation to another person, or part of a person (a part-object), beginning with the mother, and more particularly with the mother’s breast, as the primary object. The breast is experienced at times as satisfying and ideal, and at other times as frustrating or persecutory. It is the infant’s own aggressive impulses that give rise to these persecutory feelings about the breast.

Klein’s developmental theory emphasizes the role of innate ambivalence and phantasy in early development. Ambivalence arises from the innate conflict between the instinctual drives of life and death that are manifested as love and hate, destructiveness and envy. From birth the infant tries to manage this tension by ‘bringing them together in order to modify the death drive with the life drive or by expelling the death drive into the outside world’ (Mitchell 1986: 19). Klein sees resolution of this innate tension towards mother and breast as central within the development of personality, through holding together conflicting feelings and conflicting perceptions of the other – this holding together being known as ambivalence. The infant’s actual experience of mothering is given less emphasis, while the relation to parental objects in phantasy is seen to play a central part in what is taken in (by the process of introjection) to become a part of the ‘self’. It is in this aspect in particular that Klein’s developmental theory markedly diverges from the object relations theories of Winnicott It must be pointed out that out that Freud variously used two different definitions of instincts: one that implies that an instinct is its mental representation, and one that differentiates between the two.

Klein uses the term ‘phantasy’ to refer to this mental expression of instincts. The archaic ‘ph’ spelling for fantasy is intended to indicate that the process is an unconscious one. As instincts are on the frontier between the somatic and the mental, the phantasies derived from them are also experienced as being both somatic and mental phenomena.

. Through its ability to phantasize the baby tests out, primitively ‘thinks’ about, its experiences of inside and outside. External reality can gradually affect Psychoanalytic/psycho-dynamic developmental theories 15 and modify the crude hypotheses phantasy sets up. Phantasy is both the activity and its products. So for Klein, normal development principally involves managing the opposing inner forces of love and hate, of preservation and destruction. She replaces Freud’s concept of stages of development with descriptions of positions. Her use of the term positions emphasizes that these are to be seen as ‘a specific configuration of object relations, anxieties and defences which persist throughout life’ (Segal, 1973, p. ix; our emphasis). She describes two positions: the ‘paranoid schizoid position’, spanning the first 3 to 4 months of life; and the ‘depressive position’, which begins at about 3 to 4 months. Both positions continue to play a forceful role, to different degrees according to different circumstances, throughout childhood, adolescence and adult life. In the paranoid schizoid position, anxiety is experienced by the early infant’s ego both through the internal, innate conflict between the opposing instincts for life and death (manifested as destructive envy) and by interactions in external reality. Hannah Segal describes how ‘when faced with the anxiety produced by the death instinct, the ego deflects it’ (Segal 1973: 25). She goes on to describe how, for Klein this deflection consists partly of a projection, partly of the conversion of the death instinct into aggression.

The ego splits itself and projects that part of itself, which contains the death instinct outwards into the original external object – the breast. Thus, the breast, which is felt to contain a great part of the infant’s death instinct, is felt to be bad and threatening to the ego, giving rise to a feeling of persecution. In that way, the original fear of the death instinct is changed into fear of a persecutor. The remainder of the death instinct within the self is transformed to aggression aimed at this persecutor. A similar process of projection onto the breast occurs with the life instinct, creating a ‘good’ (or gratifying) object. So from early on the ego comes to relate to the primary object of the mother’s breast as ‘split’ into two parts: a ‘good’, pleasurable and ‘ideal’ part; and a ‘bad’, frustrating and ‘persecutory’ part.

This paranoid schizoid position is characterized by persecutory anxiety, with the infant fearing annihilation by the bad object, thus the term ‘paranoid’; and by maintenance of a relationship with the 16 Personality development ‘good’ object, through phantasized splitting of the infant ego, emphasized by the term ‘schizoid’. The infant ego does not yet have the ability to tolerate or integrate these different aspects, and thus makes use of magical omnipotent denial in order to remove the power and reality from the persecutory object, and manage these inner impulses. The depressive position, a curious term that has little to do with depression, describes integration. It represents a significant step in development occurring with the infant’s discovery that the hated breast and the loved breast are one and the same. Mother begins to be recognized as a whole object who can be good and bad, rather than two part-objects, one good and one bad. Love and hate, along with external reality and intra-psychic reality (phantasy), can also begin to co-exist. With the acceptance of ambivalence, mother begins to be seen as fallible and capable of good and bad, and the infant begins to acknowledge its own helplessness, dependency and jealousy towards the mother. The child becomes anxious that their aggressive impulses have harmed or even destroyed the mother, whom they now recognize as needed and loved. This results in ‘depressive anxiety’ replacing destructive urges with guilt.

Winnicott was influenced early on by Melanie Klein, although he differs from her in a number of significant ways, including, , the emphasis on the actual, experienced, relational environment for development rather than on phantasy and the innate. He conceives of a ‘natural’ growth towards maturity that depends upon the provision of a ‘good-enough facilitating environment’ (1971: 139) and describes development as three progressive phases: absolute dependence, relative dependence and towards independence. The infant’s absolute dependence in the first few weeks after birth is met by what Winnicott describes as ‘primary maternal preoccupation’ (Winnicott 1956). This is a heightened sense of awareness in the mother about herself and her baby that enables her to respond to the child with perfect attunement.

Ego development thus depends upon the mother providing ‘good-enough ego-coverage’ to help contain the baby’s ‘unthinkable anxieties’:

1. going to pieces;
2. falling for ever;
3. . having no relationship to the body;
4. having no orientation; and 5. complete isolation because of there being no means of communication. (1965: 58)
   During this time, mother and child are seen as merged, existing in a Psychoanalytic/psycho-dynamic developmental theories 19 state of ‘seamless oneness’ (Winnicott 1960a). The infant is hungry, and when the breast appears, the infant experiences itself as omnipotent, as having itself created the breast.

He believes that such healthy development of the ‘true self’ (the inherited disposition of the child) occurs in an atmosphere of acceptance and care, with a caregiver who is attuned and responsive to the child’s ‘spontaneous gestures’. Such a ‘good-enough mother’ (Winnicott 1954) offers at the ‘right time’, rather than imposing her own timing and needs; and, in this way, provides a ‘good-enough’ ‘holding environment’ with an optimum amount of constancy and comfort. With sufficient experiences of responsive maternal attunement, the infant builds the security needed to begin to tolerate inevitable failures of empathy. The maternal ‘holding’ environment provides stability and constancy, literally a sort of holding together of the infant, a sense of ‘going on being’.

The shift to the next phase, relative dependence, is distinguished from the first phase as a state ‘that the infant can know about’ (1965: 87); that is, the child begins to gain an awareness of their dependence, and through experiencing mother’s absence, also learns about loss. This process occurs as the mother’s adaptation to her child gradually begins to lessen and small environmental ‘failures’ begin to occur. These maternal failures, described by Winnicott (1960a) as ‘impingements’, if occurring in well-timed ‘small doses’, help the child to learn that they are not omnipotent and encourage a sense of separateness. So during relative dependence the mother functions as a sort of buffer between the child and the outside world. Her ‘failure’ to adapt helps the child to adapt to external reality, and the child’s developing intellect enables toleration of maternal failures in adaptation. ‘In this way the mind is allied to the mother and takes over part of her function’ (1965: 7). This task of ‘disillusionment’ is again an important part of normal development. As the infant gradually begins to be able to differentiate itself from its mother, the capacity to form symbols develops. Winnicott describes how this time between merger and separation is bridged through the action of a ‘transitional object’. This is the 20 Personality development infant’s first ‘not-me’ possession, often a blanket or toy with a characteristic feel and smell. It acts to provide the comfort of mother when she is not available and thus promotes separation and autonomy. The third phase of development, towards independence, ‘is never absolute. The healthy individual does not become isolated, but becomes related to the environment in such a way that the individual and the environment can be said to be interdependent’ (1965: 84).

Winnicott considers the parent/child conflicts of adolescence to be important developmentally. Jacobs (1995: 45), quoting Winnicott, describes how, for healthy development the adolescent needs ‘to avoid the false solution . . . to feel real or to tolerate not feeling at all . . . to defy in a setting in which dependence is met and can be relied on to be met . . . to prod society repeatedly so that society’s antagonism is made manifest, and can be met with antagonism’. (1965: 85) They ‘can help only a little: the best they can do is to survive, to survive intact, and without changing colour, without relinquishment of any important ‘principle’ (1971: 145,

A major, if not the major, difference between Freud and Jung lay in their views about the inner world. Freud's main emphasis was on the way contents of the mind are derived from personal experience, whereas Jung's studies viewed the mind as innately endowed with a priori configurations that encompass far more than personal contents. Klein too departed from Freud on this point, Both Jung and Klein thought that the primary contents of the mind are inextricably bound up with the instincts, that, in fact, they are the mental representations of instincts.

According to Jung, the primary content of the psyche is the archetype. In contrast to instincts, the archetypes are ‘inborn forms of "intuition" ‘(Jung 1919, p. 133), analogous to instinct, with the difference that whereas instinct is a purposive impulse to carry out some highly complicated action, intuition is the unconscious, purposive apprehension of a highly complicated situation. (ibid. p. 132)

Jung also notes the similarities between archetypes and instincts. The archetypes make up the collective unconscious, which is universal and impersonal; that is, it is the same for all individuals. Instincts, according to Jung, are also impersonal and universal, and are, also like the archetypes, hereditary factors of a dynamic or motivating character. Thus, instincts ‘form very close analogues to the archetypes, so close, in fact, that there is good reason for supposing that the archetypes are the unconscious images of the instincts themselves’ (Jung 1936, pp. 43-4). Elsewhere he writes that the archetype ‘might suitably be described as the instinct's perception of itself, or as the self-portrait of the instinct’ (Jung 1919, p. 136).

Archetypes described in this way are virtually the same as Klein's unconscious phantasies. She writes, ‘I believe that phantasies operate from the outset, as do the instincts, and are the mental expression of the activity of both the life and death instincts’ (Klein 1952, p. 58).

Although for the most part Klein describes phantasies in terms of ‘stories’, for example, ‘I want to eat her all up’, these stories are based upon images: 'What, then, does the infant hallucinate? We may assume, since it is the oral impulse which is at work, first, the nipple, then the breast, and later his mother as a whole person; and he hallucinates the nipple or the breast in order to enjoy it. As we can see from his behaviour (sucking movements, sucking his own lip or a little later his fingers, and so on), hallucination does not stop at the mere picture, but carries him on to what he is, in detail, going to do with the desired object which he imagines (phantasies) he has obtained.'(ibid., p. 86)

The ‘picture’ of the breast that is an image of the instinct makes Isaacs's description of unconscious phantasies virtually identical to Jung's description of the archetype as the ‘self-portrait of the instinct’. When she writes ‘such knowledge [of the breast] is inherent … in the aim of instinct’ (ibid., p. 94), she can be understood to be talking about the same thing that Jung is describing when he states that the yucca moth has an image of the yucca flower and its structure, so that, when present externally, the flower sets off instinctual behaviour (Jung 1919). Both Jung are states that there is an image of the aim of the instinct—the object that fulfils the instinctual urge—that exists within the psyche, enabling the instinct ‘to know what it is looking for’.

Important differences do, however, exist between Jung and Klein. Klein was a psychoanalyst who extended Freud's concepts of libidinal and destructive instincts to pre-Oedipal development, focusing on how infancy lies at the core of the personality. On the other hand, although Jung drew attention to the inherent richness of the mind before Klein began writing, his interest in childhood and infancy is limited. Although he refers to the individuality of the infant (Jung 1911, 1921), for the most part he thinks that the infant is in primary identity with the mother (Jung 1927).

The variety of models that have been developed within the psychoanalytic tradition demonstrates how far psychoanalytic thinking has come from the original three stages of sexuality in 1905. Drive or instinct theory has largely been replaced by object relations theory, but the models that come from infant observation still have a long way to go before they can provide any semblance of clear understanding about what this apparently crucial period of life is like in inner experience, and what effect it has on the years of childhood and adult life that follow. Jung was concerned where we were going to, Winnicott and Klein were interested in the winding route we develop over and through. Freud looked where we came from. The fracturing, meandering and direction of the development river was severely hidden by the sectarianism of the factions of Psych dynamic theory. This was the true tragedy of developmental theory.I have inckuded after the bibliograpy an interview with James Hillman who puts the spiritual back into developmental theort and that echoes my own approach

Bibliography

Introduction to Jungian Psychotherapy - The Therapeutic Relationship, D. Sedgwick. Pub. Brunner Routledge (2001).

Boundaries of the Soul, J. Singer, pub. Doubleday (1972).

C.G. Jung: The Fundamentals of Theory & Practice, E. Humbert, pub. 1993 (1984).

Jungian Psychotherapy: A Study in Analytical Psychology, M. Fordham, pub. Karnac 1990.

Owning your own Shadow by Robert A. Johnson, pub. Harper San Francisco, 1993.

The Analytic Experience, N. Symington, pub. Free Association Books, 1986.

The Art of Psychotherapy, A. Storr, Secker & Warburg and William Heinemann Medical Books, 1987 (1979).

Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis (in Two Short Accounts of Psycho-Analysis), S. Freud, Paperback.

The Case of Anna O, in Studies on Hysteria, Freud and Breuer, pub. Penguin

An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of TraditionalSymbols, J.C. Cooper, pub. paperback.

Inner Work, Robert A. Johnson, pub. Harper San Francisco, 1991.

The Essential Jung – Selected Writings, Introduced by Anthony Storr, pub Fontana Press (1983)

The Analytic Encounter, M. Jacoby, pub. Inner City Books (1984).

Envy and Gratitude, M. Klein .

Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein, H. Segal.

The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, D. Winnicott.

Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis, D. Winnicott.

Addendum

The Soul's Code

An Interview with James Hillman
By Mary NurrieStearns

James Hillman is a psychologist, scholar, international lecturer, and the author of over 20 books including "Re-Visioning Psychology," "Healing Fiction", "The Dream and the Underworld," "Inter Views," and "Suicide and the Soul." A Jungian analyst and originator of post-Jungian "archetypal psychology," he has held teaching positions at Yale University, Syracuse University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Dallas (where he co-founded the Dallas Institute for the Humanities and Culture). After thirty years of residence in Europe, he now lives in Connecticut.

Personal Transformation: Your best-selling book, "The Soul's Code," not only introduces, but documents, through fascinating anecdotal stories, the idea that a unique, formed soul is within us from birth, shaping us as much as it is shaped. While this is not a new myth, the possibility that we are fated, or called into life with a uniqueness that asks to be lived, is rejected by our culture. This myth is described as the acorn theory.

Let's begin with a discussion of the acorn theory.

James Hillman: It is a worldwide myth in which each person comes into the world with something to do and to be. The myth says we enter the world with a calling. Plato, in his Myth of Er, called this our paradeigma, meaning a basic form that encompasses our entire destinies. This accompanying image shadowing our lives is our bearer of fate and fortune.

The acorn theory expresses that unique something that we carry into the world, that is particular to us, which is connected to our "daimon," a word rarely used in our culture.

Hillman: That's true. Daimon is an earlier word than demon. It became Christianized as demon because Christian theology doesn't approve of those figures who speak to us as inner voices and so forth. The Greek word was daimon, the Roman word was genius, and the Christian word is guardian angel. They are all a little bit different, yet each expresses something that you are, that you have, that is not the same as the personality you think you are.

And this has our best interest at its heart.

Hillman: You are its carrier so of course it's interested in you.

Yet in our culture many of us find that difficult to imagine.

Hillman: Our culture has no theory of this at all. Our culture has the genetics and the nature theory. You come into the world loaded with genes and are influenced by nature, or you come into the world, are influenced by the environment, and are the result of parents, family, social class and education. These theories don't speak to the individuality or uniqueness that you feel is you. Other cultures have this myth, but American psychology doesn't. I think the book has been an enormous success because it introduces a very old and worldwide idea that has been omitted by our psychological explanations.

Why, in our society, are we afraid to admit this into our lives?

Hillman: I don't think individual people are afraid to admit it. Vested interest in the nature/nurture view, whereby we come into the world empty and are formed by the genetic inheritance we bring as it reacts to the environment, doesn't consider the acorn myth a possibility.

In the acorn myth, the model of growth is one of growing down rather than growing up. Discuss that idea.

Hillman: The myth says that the roots of the soul are in the heavens, and the human grows downward into life. A little child enters the world as a stranger, and brings a special gift into the world. The task of life is to grow down into this world. Little children are often slow to come down. Many children, between the ages of approximately six to fifteen, say, "I don't know what I'm doing in this family; I don't know how I ever landed here." Parents say about children, "Boy, I don't know where this child come from. He's nothing like anybody else in the family," and so on. The perspective is that we came to earth as a stranger and slowly, as we mature, grow into the world, take part in its duties and pleasures, and become more involved and attached. In other cultures, the task of older persons is to not be selfishly concerned, but to grow down into the world to help the younger ones find their places. In other words, as you get older, you become more social, political and responsible.

The acorn theory says that the "daimon" selects the egg and the sperm, that their union results from our necessity, not the other way around. This has huge implications.

Hillman: That's the belief of the myth, and we have to make it clear that this is a myth, not a truth. It doesn't have to be believed, and it's not a theory that has to be proven. It's a worldwide myth, and it's a way of thinking or reflecting about life. It's something you entertain to see what the story does for you. Plato said that those who think this way may find that their lives will prosper, meaning it's not a bad way to think.

I was very influenced by reading the book and reflecting on my life. Looking back, I extrapolated different meanings out of past events.

Hillman: Yes, you can extrapolate different meanings out of events that had been locked up in former theories.

I found it to be like a breath of fresh air.

Hillman: I have heard that from many people. It's the only way I can understand the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have purchased this book.

For me, it was a way to step outside of my culture and look at my life.

Hillman: Did you find that it bore on your own childhood?

Very much so. I looked at my childhood through a different lens. I have done a lot of psychological work and was surprised by memories that were accessed again, in a new and different way. I discovered a new sense of purpose about childhood and a sense of freedom from it.

Hillman: That's really it. There are many stories in the book of people whose disturbed childhoods fit into their actual basic character.

Looking at life this way proposes that our primary instrument of fate is not our parents.

Hillman: Of course, parents have a strong role. The myth itself says that the soul chose your particular parents, and so they are part of your destiny, whether you experienced a lack of parenting, peculiar parenting, single parenting, or adoptive parenting. But that's not the be-all and end-all of existence. We overload parents today, as if they owned and were totally responsible for their children's entire fates. Mothers feel that if they do one thing wrong when the child is three, their poor child will have to go to therapy for four years later on in life. This is a heavy burden. The story of the acorn is that you have your own destiny, and that your parents' tasks are to provide a place in the world where you can grow down into life and to help make it easier for you to carry the destiny you have, which as a child is hard to carry. In addition to your parents, you need fantasy figures. You need strange people who excite your imagination, who may release an image of your calling. You also need mentors or teachers. Van Cliburn, the famous Texan pianist, was taught by his mother, who was a piano teacher and a musician herself. She said to him that while she taught him, she was not his mother. She made it clear that there were two functions, the mentor/teacher and the parent. The mentor/teacher is the person who sees who you are, sees your beauty, falls in love with it, helps and inspires it, giving it a chance to bloom in the world. The mentor is not concerned with your well-being, making sure that you have food, shoes and a roof over your head. That's what parents do. Parents keep food on the table and make sure that you have protection, but they may never see who you are. Many people complain that their parents never saw them. They may have looked in the wrong place for recognition. It's not necessarily parents who can see you. They have other destinies and eyes for other things. They may see other children and not you.

And that's not odd or wrong.

Hillman: In extended families, adults often see things in another's children. Just because your parents don't truly see you doesn't mean they don't love you. Their form of loving is taking care of you, making sure that you sleep and have clothes.

This myth unburdens parents.

Hillman: I think it does. It doesn't relieve them of responsibility, but it unburdens them of carrying the child's destiny.

And unburdens them to tend to the child and also focus on their own destiny.

Hillman: Their responsibility is to make the world a receiving place so children can grow up and follow their destinies. That's missing today. Something is wrong when one out of seven children lives below the poverty line. Most of the welfare arguments about saving money on welfare affect children, not the very old. There is something askew in parents focusing more on their own security for old age than on children.

You said that we are here to make the world receptive to the "daimon." How do we find our "daimon?"

Hillman: First of all, a person has to have this idea. As you noticed when you read the book, it was by getting the idea first that you began to see things differently. The word, idea comes originally from Greek. Idein was a way of seeing. So, if this idea is held in mind and thought about and then used for looking at your past, you may begin to see things that you didn't see before. This is the basic way to answer the question of how. It's not a technique; first of all it's an idea. It helps us look back at all our disturbances and dysfunctions, at how they have been necessary, how they fit in. It helps us look at what we have been doing and what we do well, what the world wants from us. The world may want from us what we do best, which could well be an indication about our calling. It may be a service; it may be friendship. We don't all have to be a celebrity.

Does the acorn theory help us look forward?

Hillman: I don't have anything to say about looking forward.

How can we grow the acorn?

Hillman: There is a chapter in the book about right nourishment. You need a lot of food for the imagination. The advertisers of the mercantile world recognize our need to stir our imaginations. Cars and shoes two very practical items when advertised are sold through imaginative fantasies.

Although they are serving other purposes than nurturing the acorn.

Hillman: Yes, but advertisers recognize that human beings respond to imaginative images and fantasies. That's the first food. The acorn needs around it people who have fantasies and who respond to imagination. That's why teachers who have imagination are the ones younger children are attracted to.

Another advantage of fostering imagination, particularly with the intention to grow the child or the human being, is that it gives some relief from the pressure of this culture, which runs counter to these ideas.

Hillman: We have to realize how counter the culture does go. It wants to produce units that fit into the economic system. Children are told they have to start school early, and they have to learn to read. Why do they have to learn to read? So they can be competitive. They have to be competitive, because the nation needs to have its gross national product stronger than other nations'. In other words, children are not told that education is healthy and good for the soul, or that it brings out the beauty and depth of the human being. In the Greek civilization, education was important because it made for a civilized nation and a cultured citizenship. We are told education is for competition. That's pretty sad, if you think about it.

In this myth, the soul chooses the "daimon" and then chooses its life. Where is our freedom?

Hillman: I have a chapter called "Fate" which discusses the question of freedom and pre-destination, as the Calvinists used to call it. I think both are fantasy ideas. We don't have absolute freedom. There are a lot of things we can't do. You might think you would like to be a cook, and yet are the clumsiest, dumbest person in the kitchen. There is no way you will ever be a good cook. On the other hand, even if you are enormously talented in some particular way, it does not determine every single thing you do. Your life is not predestined, as in Calvinist thought, where everything is written down in the book of life long before your birth and is inescapable. There are choices, accidents, hints and wrong paths, and the ego you, or whatever you call yourself, is a factor in all this. But there is still this other factor that keeps calling. At some moment, people turn, in despair or when they are unable to go any longer on a certain route, and this voice says, "Where have you been? I've been waiting for you to turn to me for a long time."

You mentioned accidents. According to this myth, how do we relate to accidents?

Hillman: Let's first look at how we relate to accidents in our society. We turn to the insurance company and try to get something out of it. We turn the accident into a possibility for money. In other societies we might think that the accident has a "hint" in it. I'm thinking about Churchill, for example, who cracked his head open and had a concussion when he was a young boy. He had to stay inside and not do anything for a while, and that's when he began to do his great reading. The accident of his concussion had great meaning. The idea is to look at the accident, injury or disturbance, as a potential with some sort of meaning in it.

So we relate to accidents by asking how this fits in my life and what this means?

Hillman: Realizing that something else is going on here that I don't quite know about, and remaining open to the possibility that the accident has its own imbedded purpose.

I want to have some discussion on your chapter, "The Bad Seed." I'll bet you had a lot of response to that.

Hillman: I wish there had been more because I think it is so important.

I do too; that's why I want to cover it.

Hillman: Tell me how you took it, and then I'll respond.

We as a culture don't recognize "demon" energy, thus forcing it to emerge in destructive ways. We don't want to deal with evil, and it grows more powerful because we don't attend to it.

Hillman: We don't attend to it, and we don't have an idea about it. We think that people go wrong and then ask what happened. We answer that it must have been drugs or else his father beat him. I give eight different theories about evil, including the old Catholic idea that you could actually be possessed by a devil. Orthodox Christianity, whatever the denomination, always had a place for the devil. I don't want to say that's the reason for evil, but that is one of the theories. I do think you're right when you say our usual thinking doesn't have a place for the demon the serial killer, the person devoted to torture and cruelty, the great murderer, or Adolph Heliochrome I analyzed in the chapter. This is a great mystery in human life. What about these people; can one be called to evil? We have a lot of evidence of people who are. For example, that little girl, Mary Belle, who at age nine strangled two little boys, ages three and four. She showed no signs of remorse or even awareness that she had murdered. How could a little girl of nine do such a thing? Yet we read in the papers again and again of young children killing smaller ones. Where does that come from? Some say it is caused by watching TV. I find that a preposterously easy answer. There's something very unusual about that.

The myth says there is a "demonic" call.

Hillman: There is a call. It is a call to transgress, to go beyond human boundaries, literally a call to transcendence. The curious thing is that religions, including Hinduism, Judaism and satanist cults, have the same idea that you can go beyond the normal by going into the abnormal. We don't have to interpret that people should do this, but it does emphasize that the bad seed is looking for a mode of transcendence, a mode of going beyond the ordinary human so that it becomes inhuman. We need to find modes of ritual, through the arts and ceremonies, which allow that excessive, extravagant, demonic force to find a way of expression without doing it concretely and literally. Art programs in schools are very important because they open the door to that excessive imagination.

And it's non-harmful expression.

Hillman: That's right. Instead we are shutting down art programs which represses and drives into the street those strange desires which the arts have always been a vehicle for.

You also said that we have to mourn the demonic which implies, first of all, that we acknowledge our own capacity for evil. Only by acknowledging its existence can it be dealt with intentionally.

Hillman: And not be identified with. If you recognize it, it's easier to hold it at a distance and know that, while this too is me, I don't have to be it. Hitler was completely subservient to the demonic. He shouted to his people, "Don't you see, I can't be different," and murderer Jeffery Dahmer couldn't understand what came over him.

They weren't aware enough of this evil force. The arts are very important in this regard. The arts help us release and hold this calling at bay.

You also mentioned community service as a way of addressing the demonic, in which people who have been caught for crimes go into the schools, explain how the bad seed works, what it wants, what it costs, and how it can eat up one's humanity.

Hillman: Yes. That's very different than mere punishment which doesn't seem to affect this piece of nature.

Can the bad seed be redeemed?

As far as conversion or something like that, I'm very suspicious, but the religions say it can be redeemed. Within my realm, I don't take that question up. A lot of people, for example, who were attached to the Nixon/Watergate cover-up became evangelical. I'm suspicious of a sudden conversion from black to white because I always wonder about what happened to the old person, where's the demon now.

Let's shift direction. What determines eminence?

Hillman: A sense of calling, devotion to it and long, long practice, whether it's practicing the piano, basketball, or spiritual practice. Eminent people are devoted to repetitious, tedious practice. It's not enough to have a good voice; you have to train the voice and devote yourself to it. A mentor is probably needed, and there are costs.

What does eminence cost?

Hillman: Let's remember first that eminence doesn't mean fame. There are eminent friends and eminent public servants. Sometimes, however the "daimon" asks a great deal from you. You feel as if you've never done enough. You've never written enough, played enough, or fought enough, whatever it is. There is always more because it is like an unquenchable urge. It costs what you might call your normalcy. The cost is being less of a consumer or less involved with your personal security. The focus is on serving the good of the whole, so the cost may not be as great as it seems.

I can relate, in the sense giving my energy over to doing what is asked next in the publishing of the magazine or in my private practice and not doing something that I personally desire.

Hillman: It's the cost of certain personal satisfactions.

For instance, we are doing this interview on a Sunday morning.

Hillman: That's right.

As you look back, what do you identify as your calling?

Hillman: I have been working with, thinking about, and writing psychological ideas for thirty-five years. My calling is just what I'm doing in that book.

You are also a forceful voice in challenging contemporary definitions of psychology.

Hillman: I mean the mode of my challenge is through ideas.

You are also modest.

Hillman: I think that really is the way it is. Fortunately, there is a receptivity to these thoughts now, and other people are thinking them. For me that means these ideas may help psychology and help people who are suffering from ideas they identified with and haven't paid enough attention to.

I conclrdr with an addendum by James Hillman that puts the spiritual back into developmental theory.