The Child's "Position": The Concept of Childhood in Interwar Psychoanalysis

Education can be described without more ado as an incitement to the conquest of the pleasure principle, and to its replacement by the reality principle; it seeks, that is, to lend its help to the developmental process which affects the ego. Sigmund Freud was arguably the first to provide psychoanalytic treatment to a child, by giving the father of 'little Hans' instructions on how to analyse him. The general attempt to define the then newly introduced notion of the super-ego stands at the centre of the interwar debate between mainstream European psychoanalysis and Melanie Klein. In 1960, Philippe Ariès published his highly influential book, Centuries of Childhood, in which he argues that childhood is a historical category that belongs to the modern era. Hierarchies of age and generation, which play such a major role in our own Western societies, were not relevant in Medieval Europe, he argues.