Psychic development

“ Important biological analogies have taught us that the psychic development of the individual is a short repetition of the course of development of the race, and we shall therefore not find improbable what the psychoanalytic investigation of the child's psyche asserts concerning the infantile estimation of the genitals. ”

“ We may thus lay down in a general sort of way a conception which I like to call the theory of psychophysical progression, fixation and regression along evolutionary and developmental lines. In the case of tics the regressive or devolutionary aspect comes in for special consideration. We may react mainly physically, or mainly psychically. But as a rule we react by both physical and psychic means, the manner and degree of our conduct being determined, as above mentioned, by our stage in evolution and development. ”

“ These indications, if studied xxxviiior valued accurately, would lead to the realization that consciousness is but a single stage and but one form of expression of mind. Therefore its dictum is but one, often untrustworthy, approach to the great question as to what is man’s actual psychic accomplishment, and as to what in particular is the actual soul development of the individual. ”

“ Then, starting afresh from that conception of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer relations in the environment,—a conception of which he made such brilliant use in his "Principles of Biology,"—he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such correspondences. ”

“ Very important, too, for psychogenesis, are reports concerning the physiological condition and activity of children whose mental development has seemed to be stopped for months, or to be made considerably slower, or to be unusually hastened. ”

“ But mental physiology, or objective psychology, taking into consideration the vital conditions, can deal rationally with psychical development. The subject of mental growth is at the root of education. ”

“ On the whole, few recent formulas have done more service in psychology than the Spencerian one that the essence of mental life and bodily life are one, namely, 'the adjustment of inner to outer relations.' The adjustment is to immediately present objects in lower animals and in infants. It is to objects more and more remote in time and space, and inferred by means of more and more complex and exact processes of reasoning, when the grade of mental development grows more advanced. ”

“ The actual evolution of the individual psyche is a result of the interaction between the individual and the outer universe. Which means that just as a child in the womb grows as a result of the parental blood-stream which nourishes the vital quick of the fœtus, so does every man and woman grow and develop as a result of the polarized flux between the spontaneous self and some other self or selves. It is the circuit of vital flux between itself and another being or beings which brings about the development and evolution of every individual psyche and physique. ”

“ Selective mating is a product of the mental symbolism so developed. It is itself a product of psychogenesis. What is the law of psychogenesis? Since the present investigation is psychological, not metaphysical, we must keep strictly to the psychic plane, and leave out of account the question whether, and if so how, our experience stands related to a noumenal existence. ”

“ All “descent” and “evolution,” which, even in regard to the gradual development of physical organisation and its secrets, offer not so much an explanation as a clue, are still less sufficient in regard to the origin and growth of psychical capacity in general, and in relation to the awakening and autonomy of the mind in man, because the psychical and spiritual cannot be explained in terms of physiological processes, from either the quantity or the quality of nervous structure. ”

“ I formerly entertained similar hopes, but in my own melancholy experience all these studies end in delusion, in so far as they are applied to explain the [pg 120] genesis of the human mind. They do not reach far enough, they give us everywhere only the products of growth, the result of art, not the natural growth, or the real evolution. The observations on the development of a child's mind are very attractive, especially when they are made by thoughtful mothers. ”

“ If we assume that before this point of development it was habitual to keep in separate compartments bodies of experience such as those arising [p. 82] out of an amphibian existence, we shall not only be provided with an explanation of the potentialities of dissociation in Man, but we shall also be enabled the better to understand the great development of intelligence and of the neo-pallium which is the distinctive feature of Mankind. ”

“ It follows then, that we cannot have thoughts, without first having sensations to form images and concepts, the soil out of which all thoughts naturally grow. Therefore, if in a practical way, all possibilities in the way of sensations, which may come through the avenue of each one of the child's senses, are fully developed; a sure foundation has been laid, for the largest possible development of brain and the corresponding growth of thought. ”

“ In the cultivation and expansion of the faculties of the mind, we act altogether upon organized matter—and this, too, of the most delicate kind—which, while it serves as the mediator between body and spirit, partakes so largely of the nature, character, and essential attributes of the former, that, without its proper physical growth and development, all the manifestations of the latter sink into comparative insignificance; so that, without a perfect organization of the brain, the mental powers must be proportionally paralyzed ”

“ We may say, then, that the higher phases of mental development are characterized by the fact that the situations contain the products of reflective thought, presumably absent in the earlier stages; they are further characterized by a new purpose or end of consciousness, namely, to explain the situations hitherto merely accepted as they are given in presentation or re-presentation; they require deliberate attention to the relationships which hold good among the several elements of successive situations ”

“ Here the natural sciences — in the strict sense of the word "natural" — may be evoked to tell of the physical conditions, under which the genesis and development of mental life takes place. But we make a very meagre, an unnecessarily meagre, use of the principle of development, if we fail to apply it directly to mental life itself. ”

“ And yet it is impossible to translate any psychosis into any neurosis, or to say that this organic movement has become this phase of consciousness. Nor is it possible to say that this neurosis has produced that psychosis, as we may say that these two movements in space have combined to produce that movement in space. We evidently have here two orders of reality, one an order of consciousness-of-objects, the other an order of objects-of-consciousness. The problem of psychogenesis is, to trace the origin and development of this consciousness-of-objects. ”

“ In other words, the organs of sense and of those mental faculties which are directly occupied with the sensations, are the earliest to be developed, as we might naturally suppose would be the case; and, by consequence, the sensible properties of objects and the direct and immediate effects of any action, are those which have a controlling influence over the volitions of the mind during all the earlier periods of its development. ”

“ Every one knows that the result of a chain of reasoning, made up of a row of single acts of thought, may be a product of those single thought-acts, which throws much light on some subject and which was before unknown to us, and yet which conclusively comes from those premises, if we analyse retrogressively its development. Upon this creative character of apperceptive combinations, above all, rests the regularity of psychical development, which is shown in the single consciousness during the individual life, and in the total mental development revealed to us by culture and history. ”

“ The psychic life and the mental activity of human beings is conditioned by three factors. The first, heredity, denotes the accumulation of experiences and consequent structural modifications acquired by the race during the process of its adjustment to its environment; the manifestation of the result of this experience in behaviour is called instinct. The second is the result of the habits and acquirements of the individual from the moment of conception to the end of his existence: this, together with the first, produces what we call character. ”

“ If one thinks that such thoughts do not come to so common a type of mind—that such feelings require a higher mental development—I would urge for their consideration the fact that it is the higher mental development that does away with such thoughts. ”

“ It is now time to explore more carefully some of the more important of these byways into which the human mind may wander in the course of its development—byways which we have hitherto passed unnoticed, or at most examined with a hasty glance, as we traced the direct path of emotional development from childhood to maturity. ”

“ The relations of physical to mental structure are dwelt upon, and the intimate connections of the two orders of development. The difficulties which beset the transition from a subhuman to a human consciousness, and the activities of consciousnesses in a subhuman condition, are discussed at some length. ”

“ When such a man passed on to the greater mysteries he received not only the ordinary teaching about the conditions of the mental plane, but also private instruction as to the development of the mental body as a vehicle. ”

“ The world of the inner processes which accompany the higher forms of nervous development in human beings is capable of unlimited growth and it is capable of this by a process of becoming external: it becomes external, and, as it were, perpetuates itself in language, literature, science and art, legislation, society, and the like. ”

“ Byways in human development, both emotional and intellectual, Abnormalities of development at different levels may diverge from the main track at various points in its course—some near its origin in the infantile strata of the mind, some at a later stage of progress. ”

“ By removing to a new environment, and substituting new mental and psychical vibrations the old states of consciousness are allowed to rest while a new unworked state of mind begins.
Psychical development is not a disease; it is an attribute of individual growth; no one is to blame if he has it or has it not; all that anyone needs to know is the truth about it and just how to control it and direct it. Subjective hearing and vision come just as naturally to us as life and death--they are a part of the great plan of unfoldment. ”

“ It is the full and harmonious development of the four primary modes of consciousness, always with regard to the individual nature of the child.
The goal is not ideal. The aim is not mental consciousness. We want effectual human beings, not conscious ones. ”

“ We find another series of strong arguments in favour of our Monistic psychology in the individual development of the soul in the child and the young animal. We know that the new-born child has as yet no consciousness, no intelligence, no independent judgment and thought. We follow the gradual development of these higher faculties step by step in the first years of life, in strict proportion to the anatomical development of the cortex with which they are bound up. ”

“ Among cultural peoples, the child is surrounded by influences inseparable from the processes that arise spontaneously within its own consciousness. Folk psychology, however, in its investigation of the various stages of mental development still exhibited by mankind, leads us along the path of a true psychogenesis. ”

“ We may point out here an important aspect of the percept, an aspect which has been neglected by the older psychologists, but which is now being more and more emphasized by the younger psychologists who lay more stress on the functional and biological side of mental life. Like the life of all organized beings, the life existence of the psychic state is for some reaction, for some adjustments to the conditions of the external environment. ”

“ Those who contend that knowledge results wholly from the experiences of the individual, ignoring as they do the mental evolution which accompanies the autogenous development of the nervous system, fall into an error as great as if they were to ascribe all bodily growth and structure to exercise, forgetting the innate tendency to assume the adult form. ”

“ Nay, more, when we survey the net results of our experience up to the present time, we find indisputable evidence that in the past history of the visible universe psychical phenomena have only begun to be manifested in connection with certain complex aggregates of material phenomena. As these material aggregates have age by age become more complex in structure, more complex psychical phenomena have been exhibited. The development of Mind has from the outset been associated with the development of Matter. ”

“ This is a quite different thing from the notion of a small and feeble measure of heart and intellect in the child, to grow by degrees into the robust and noble spiritual development which, according to the psychical evolutionist, should distinguish the adult human being. ”