Child Psychology and Pedagogy Quotes

“There is already a kind of presence of the other in me.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“The child still thinks that the specular image is his double. We can also ask: does the adult really consider the specular image to be a simple reflection?...The image is something mysterious and inhabited. The image is some sort of incarnation...The image is never a simple reflection, but a quasi-presence...Before the specular image, personality is the id. The image will make possible another version of personality, the first element in a superego...the acquisition of a new function, a self-contemplation, a narcissistic attitude taking on a cardinal importance. At the same time, this image of my own body makes possible a kind of alienation, a harnessing of the ego by my spatial image. The image prepares me for another alienation, the other's alienation of me...It produces an alienation of the immediate ego for the mirror ego.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“The depressive attitude would be the cause given for the expectation of an imaginary phenomenon. It follows a disappointment that Deutsch paraphrases as 'it is not that' (an expression Stendhal put in the mouths of some of his characters). This is the result of a confrontation between the imaginary and the perceived. The imaginary domain is vague whereas the 'perceived' is always strictly limited. The shock in the presence of the perceived is thus inevitable, and the depression that follows is more intense than the intense imaginary life with numerous fantasies that preceded it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“We must accept at the same time a historical and social explanation of psychoanalysis and a psychoanalysis of the history and social facts.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Psychoanalysis does not only heal by making an individual's life intelligible. It is not only about making the subject understand his life, but also about making him live again and liquidating, within his relationship with the analyst, his ancient conflicts. With transference, the subject takes up the totality of his attitudes toward people and objects that make him what he is. All of his past object relationships reappear in his current relationship with the psychoanalyst. This relationship has nothing to do with his life's relations. The analyst does not intervene, he does not speak, he observes with an absolute impartiality. In not deciding for the subject, the analyst makes the subject decide for himself. The analytic situation substitutes the transference neurosis for a neurosis. It is therefore about an entirely different thing than a simple operation of knowledge. The relations revealed by psychoanalytic psychology could be true without psychoanalytic practice succeeding to heal, as inversely psychoanalytic art could be beneficial without Freud's theoretical explanations being founded. Psychoanalytic ideology could constitute a symbolic system that grasps neurosis without necessarily requiring that we hold it for a true philosophy. The diffusion of psychoanalytic psychology is inevitable because it is interested in everything and it is necessary for its progress to know.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“It is a paradox to not want to infringe upon the will of the loved being. To love is to accept undergoing the other's influence and also to exercise influence on the other.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“The first exterior contact, the first exteroceptive stimulus, is the human voice.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Until three months, the infant does not have the concept of his own body but only an impression of incompleteness.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“The perception of one's own body precedes that of the other. It is a system that develops in time...

First, there is an interoceptive body. The exteroceptivity can only exert itself in collaboration with interoceptivity. It is a buccal body and a respiratory body. In the following stage, the child perceives regions tied to excretion functions. Interoceptive organs come to serve exteroceptive organs until there is a soldering between the two domains. It is only between three and six months that the soldering between external and internal (myelination) occurs. While this soldering is not realized, perception is not possible, because the body must equilibrize itself for perception to work. No total body schema yet exists...Consciousness of one's own body is first of all fragmentary.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Psychological rigidity, the idea has a psychoanalytic origin, is the attitude of subjects who on all questions give simple responses, summaries that are entrenched without any nuance, and they are little disposed to recognize discordant facts. This rigidity is not at all a psychological force, but a mask under which an extremely divided personality is hidden: it is a reaction formation...The subjects have a profound division within themselves and a repressed aggressivity toward their parents. The subjects avoid all ambiguity and proceed with dichotomies (obedient-authority, cleanliness-dirtiness, virtue-vice, masculinity-femininity dilemmas). Psychological rigidity is effectively born from relationships with parents and extends to moral ideas. The families of these children are, in general, authoritative and frustrating. The child creates a double image of his parents: one is beneficent and appears first, the other is aggressive and is deeply hidden ('good mother and bad mother')...The social aspect of the phenomenon is that these families are socially marginal (for example, the nouveaux riches, Italian or Irish minorities in American towns) and because of this they are authoritarian...The 'rigid' child often has racial prejudices that arise from what he projects onto 'exterior' minorities. What he cannot accept in his own personality. (For instance, the myths of black sexuality in the U.S.A. and myths of the battle of the sexes; everyone puts the faults on others that he does not want to recognize in himself)...

Apparently liberal subjects can have an absolute, abstract manner: for example, they declare that all men are identical, from every point of view, and refuse to see differences in historical situations. What predicts psychological rigidity is less the adoption of this or that theory (except racist theories which, founded on a myth, are only justifiable as an explanation of psychological mechanisms); it is more the manner of adopting, justifying, and holding these opinions...The entire world is ambiguous, but what is important is the manner in which one deals with this ambiguity. Psychological maturity is shown in accepting to see ambiguity and to 'interiorize' conflict.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Melanie Klein had distinguished the concept of ambivalence from that of ambiguity. Ambivalence is where the subject makes two alternative images for the same being; alternatives that are not seen as representing the same object. Ambiguity is an adult concept. The subject perceives two images, but he knows that they apply to the same object.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Psychoanalysis does not reveal an ego that operates behind my back; it links the unconscious to the conscious. We do not want to take responsibility for the unconscious...The unconscious is not a second consciousness, but a nonthematized lived experience...If it is not thematically known, is not inevitably unknown to us who live it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Mauss recommends collaborative connections throughout purposefully uncertain frontiers between psychology and sociology. This proposition has been confirmed by history. We argue for a reciprocal envelopment and not a rivalry...One understands thus the necessity of convergent effort toward a sole reality which blends body, soul, and society because it is concerned with 'phenomena of totality.' But the ambiguity remains, since individuality and society are two totalities: there is therefore a totality in a totality and a double perspective.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“The life of thought transforms its own notions. Would not a thought in equilibrium actually be an absence of thought? Thought should be known in states of equilibrium, but in relative and nonfinal states of equilibrium. We know that our most profound convictions will be completed and modified by our future experiences. All equilibrium of thought contains in itself an evolutionary seef.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Development is a central notion in psychology, because it is not simply 'development.' It is a paradoxical notion because it supposes neither absolute continuity nor absolute discontinuity...Development is characterized by the emergence of new forms which are motivated by previous phases...auto-transformation, bonds prepared by previous acquisitions, and movement modifying its own movement. Reciprocal action between inside and outside exists,,,Quantitative accumulation phenomena produce qualitative changes...quick acquisitions followed by plateaus...(level phenomena).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“The child's consciousness is different from the adult's both in content and organization. Children are not, as previously thought, 'miniature adults.' Thus, contrary to the negative account, the child's consciousness is not identical to the adult's in everything except for its incompleteness and imperfection. The child possess another kind of equilibrium than the adult kind; therefore, we must treat the child's consciousness as a positive phenomenon.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Culture constantly impregnates the newborn from the first day,”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Freudians argue that the psychological structure is the cause of civilization. Malinowski replaces a psychological causality with a sociological causality and takes the Oedipus complex as a product of civilization. But it is evident that the one thesis and the other are both inseparable and contradictory. We must construct a psychoanalysis and a sociology...which overtakes and synthesizes classical givens.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“One finds societies which do not have an Oedipus complex (cf. Malinowski). The Oedipus complex might be an 'institutiton' tied to the structure of our society.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“In all identification, elements of sadomasochism are present.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Lacan proposes a new conception of complexes. We must understand the notion of 'complex' not in the sense of an unhealthy formation, but, rather, as the key to all normal formation (there is no 'man without complexes'). A complex is a stereotypical attitude regarding certain situations. In some way, the complex is the most stable element of behavior, being a collection of behavioral traits which are always reproduced in analogous situations...In this sense, we can say that the base of the family is not the instinct, but the complex.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Relations with the other are always complicated...Even if we make an effort to respect the autonomy of the other, even if we grant the other freedom, the other will never feel completely free since he receives his freedom in a partnership.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Economic phenomena have human significance. But it would be false to think that the economic infrastructure constitutes the only causality. The family is therefore not only an economic product of a society; it also expresses human relations. Historical materialism has within it, therefore, a psychoanalysis. In every human phenomenon, it is impossible to abstract from its economic signification, but it is equally impossible to subordinate all other significations to it.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“An attachment to the beloved always signifies much more than a simple attachment to the person; it encompasses all the spheres of interest of the beloved: his family, his friends, all which he 'invests himself in.' In this sense, we can speak of a kind of sexual polymorphism of the woman in love. Tied to a man, she is fatally, through him, tied to everything to which he is attached...She is intertwined in all relations whether she desires to be or not. This interpretation largely surpasses the 'sexual' sphere and turns its attention to a general phenomenon: all human relations radiate; they 'overflow' into their surroundings. There is no relationship of just two people; even the relations between a husband and wife encompass a collection of givens that influence their reciprocal sentiments.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Infantile prehistory does not remain inert in the adult. Rather, infantile prehistory is perpetually re-created by the adult's current attitudes.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Freud tends to see all historical or social drama as the manifestation of a family drama...Freud connects the child's attitude toward society to the parents (the parents being the first image of society the child has). But there are other factors that determine the social attitude, since all integration in society implies an extension, a modification of individual life. Freud shows the existence of properly social components in the individual's attitude. In his work on monotheism...Freud assimilates the historical and social development of a neurosis (trauma, latency period, return of the repressed) and seems to admit the existence of collective traumas on the individuals acting for many generations...Insofar as he admits the influence of collective factors, he acknowledges that the individual drama is not the only determining factor. Collective history superimposes its rhythm upon the individual histories...(cf. the collective unconscious of Jung).”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“All theory is at the same time a practice...The link between theory and practice is not one of linear dependency. It is a circular relationship where envelopment is reciprocal.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“No morality can be established a priori. Insofar as there are only abstract ends, there is no real morality. A moral imperative only emerges in contact with a situation.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“All observation is already an intervention. One cannot experiment or observe without changing something in the subject of inquiry.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952

“Pathological behavior also has meaning. Illness is auto-regulation, an establishment of an equilibrium to a level other than the normal one. It is not a totally incomprehensible one...The normal and the pathological can be considerably enriched by contact with one another.”
― Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952