ABSTRACT
In this book, childhood is re-imagined from the perspective of analytical psychology. The book is concerned with what childhood means symbolically rather than with literal childhood. It takes a different approach from the two most widely recognised approaches to childhood today: the view of childhood as consisting of purely objective facts discoverable by scientific methods, and the view of childhood as consisting entirely of social constructions created and recreated by human subjectivity conditioned by specific times, places, societies, cultures, and so forth.1 Unlike these approaches, the present study does not aim to determine causal relationships or correlations between the physical and psychological functioning and development of a child (brain and behaviour, for instance) or to identify the roots of particular images about childhood in society or culture (as the image of the innocent child might be traced to Romanticism, for instance). Instead, it explores the view of childhood as a symbol or a metaphor – a metaphor for a path towards selfrealisation – inspired by the view of ‘the child’, that is, the child archetype as a symbol of the self, which was proposed by the Swiss psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). The book looks at Jung’s psychological approach to childhood, which claims to be scientific but not in the same way as mainstream psychology is considered to be scientific, and also explores what is beneath various images of childhood, but not in the same way as social constructionism explores what underpins particular images of childhood. The book also considers Jung’s concept of ‘the child’ in relation to the longstanding psychoanalytic view of a child as dependent; Michael Fordham’s (1905-95) views of the child as independent of its parents; and the dominant view of childhood as adults’ past affecting their present, as found in both depth psychology in general and Fordham’s view in particular.
