“ Work in Progress ー The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood ”, by Edith Cobb,1959 ( 1/5)
2010.03.09 Tuesday
“ Work in Progress
The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood ” ,
Edith Cobb
The present essay is an abridgement of a longer work in process, which attempts the difficult task first of defining what we mean by the genius of childhood as a common human possession; and second of showing that a major clue to mental health lies in the spontaneously creative imagination of childhood both as a form of learning and as a function of the organizing powers of the nervous system. Of necessity, the Exploration includes tracing the relationship of this early psychological force in human development to those uncommon forms of genius which constitute the high point of achievement in human growth potential, with roots, as I believe, in the child’s perceptual relations with the natural world.
I propose to argue in this paper that children are born animals and mature biologically, but evolve culturally into human individuality, reaching widely different levels and norms. This use of the term “evolution” must be taken literally- that is, as a “true metaphor,” a description of an experimental continuation of nature’s own strivings toward a transcendence of biological levels through culturally elaborated relations with environment. The differences between animal and human individual as a species in himself, while nature’s drive toward speciation and variation in forms could be interpreted as continuing in individual form into human life, first in the child’s speculative play with nature’s plasticity, and ultimately in man’s individual striving to create forms not found in nature, in the arts, sciences, technology, and thought.
Historically speaking, individual genius has played the principal role in the achievement of a general cultural transcendence of previous levels, both psychological and cultural, by introducing higher forms of ability, purpose, and aim into the cultural continuum. The genius of childhood, in the sense of extreme personal originality and the creation of private worlds, is discontinuous and persists into adult life only as specialized, highly cultivated condition. But the gift of our prolonged human childhood to the family of man is plasticity of response to the environment. This plasticity of response may be extended through memory into a lifelong renewal of the early power to learn and evolve.
If we examine the statements made by adult geniuses about their own childhood and compare them with references to the child in myth and religion ( in particular in the Christian religion), it seems clear that there is and always has been a widespread intuitive understanding that certain aspects of childhood experiences remain in memory as a psychophysical force, an élan, which produces the pressure to perceive creativity and inventively. For from this position, creative and constructive mental processes do not result from an accumulation of information, but form the maintaining of a continued plasticity of response of the whole organism to new information and in general to outer world. Perhaps we have arrived at a new age in which this condition of mind and purpose can no longer be optional or left to the gifted few, but must be recognized as a common human need in adapting to life and society.
My position is based upon the fact that study of the child in nature,culture,and society ( the evolution of social attitudes toward childhood into present realization of Its importance in everyone’s life history ) reveals that there is a special period, the little- understood, prepubertal, halcyon, middle age of childhood, approximately from five or six to eleven or twelve-between the strivings f animal infancy and the storms of adolescence-when the natural world is experienced in some highly evocative way,producing in the child a sense of some profound continuity with natural processes and presenting overt evidence of a biological basis of intuition.
These concepts have evolved from four principal sources:first,biographical and autobiographical memories of gifted people; second, the Freudian concept of childhood as the core of human development, particularly as this is treated in social casework, which furthers adaptation of the unique individual to his total environment; third, a study of the plastic, dynamic nature of imagery in contrast to the more static Condensed simultaneity of the symbol; last, and as a tool for the implementation of these sources, an investigation of studies of the changing imagery in the language of natural description, which disclosed this special trend in perception, a trend in the cultural evolution of attitudes toward nature which has produced the concept of ecology, the study of mutual relations, the give-and-take between organisms and their
complete and total environment. The science of ecology provides us with a plastic image of behaving organisms in a behaving world, and a tool for synthesis as well as analysis of the system of meaning and verbal imagery which we use to describe nature.
In my collection of some three hundred volumes of autobiographical recollections of their own childhood by creative thinkers from many cultures and eras, ranging from a fragment from the sixteeth century to the present, it is principally to this middle-age range in their early life that these writers say they return in memory in order to renew the power and impulse to create at its very source, a source which They describe as the experience of emerging not only into the light of consciousness but into a living sense of a dynamic relationship with the outer world. In these memories the child appears to experience both a sense of discontinuity, an awareness of his won unique separateness and identity, and also a continuity, a renewal of relationship with nature as process. This apprehension is certainly not intellectual; I believe it is rational at least in a limited sense, a preverbal experience of an “aesthetic logic” both in nature’s formative processes nervous system, aesthetic powers that overlap meaningfully in these moments of from-creating expansion and self-consciousness.
“ Form is the magic of a world,”as Dalcq has expressed it, whether in nature, play, art, or thought. But it is the activity of creating from which has fasinated the mind of man, most particularly as the power to animate the inanimate, the ability to make things move in the shape of working models and refined machines, the power to produce animation even in the“still”image of the plastic arts.
This shaping force, this desire to master and to create motion, not only is at the basis of all human technical invention but also is the prime characteristic of effective metaphor: “Those words set a thing before the eyes that show it in an active state,” said Aristotle.
It is especially interesting to note, therefore, that in dictionary terms the words “ animate” derives from a latin word signifying “soul” or “breath”( a metabolic action pattern), and that among its meanings are “to give spirit to “ or “ to put in motion or,Synonymously,” to energize” ( Webster). The term “ genius” plays with all these threads of meaning, including mental power or energy, but in its earlier usage it referred most frequently to the spirit of place, the genius loci, which we can now interpret to refer to a living ecological relationship between an observer and an environment, a person and a place.
Instead of working backward from the adult’s position to the child’s, I found it necessary in my
exploration of the genius of the living child to set up methods of investigating creative purpose in the child’s play and art. The value of forms produced was secondary to the importance of the response to "aesthetic logic" in the child’s gestalt-forming action patterns with the instrument of the self. Using various forms of so-called projective methods and play technique ( in particular, modified versions of the Lowenfeld World-Play Technique and the Thematic Apperception Test,accompanied by a continual reference to the Rorschach categories of Form, Color, Motion, Time and Space, Animal and Human Response), I became acutely aware that what a child wanted to do most of all was to make a world in which to find a place to discover a self. This ordering reverse the general position that self-exploration produces a knowledge of the world. Furthermore, while observing the passionate world-making behavior of the child when he is given plastic materials and
working dimensions which are manageable and in proportion to his need, accompanied by a population of toys, fauna and flora, and artifacts that do duty as “ figures of speech” in the rhetoric of play, I have been made keenly aware of those processes which the genius in particular in later life seeks to recall.
The tendency to play may be said to be characteristic of animals reared in a nidicolous (i.e., a specifically nestlike ) domestic ecology. The important point about the child’s play is that it includes the spontaneous effort to be something otherthan what he actually is, to “act out”, and to dramatize speculation, which is in effect to take play out into the four-dimentional continuum by adding motion and sequence, and therefore time, to its procedures.
Note: “Act out“-An important term, which now is unfortunately also the metaphorfor delinquency and neurotic behavior.
（ to be continued)
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Daedalus , 1959 Summer, No.3, P537-548
published by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
and the Wesleyan University Press.
Eco-children's book No.12 " We all are dependent companies each other on this earth !"
2010.03.03 Wednesday
Writer：Kyoko Nishizawa Picture: Toshiyuki Kusama
Superviser： Miwako Kurosaka
Puｂlisher： Child Book Co．Ltd．
Congratulation ! Ms.Kim Yuna for the gold medal! You are so beautiful !
2010.02.28 Sunday
Her performances are so beautiful, natural and elegant!
with charming smile !
She deserves to have that !
Curious cｈｉｌｄｒｅｎ with No.8 Eco-children's book, " Reliable ones under the Fallen Leaves "
2010.02.18 Thursday
Eco-Children's book No.11," Please check before you throw it!"
2010.02.13 Saturday
”Philosophy and the Health of the Child ”(3/3), ｂｙ Edith Cobb, at the American Philosophical Association, 1961
2010.02.04 Thursday
”Philosophy and the Health of the Child " (3/3) , by Edith Cobb, at the American Philosophical Association, 1961
”Even Wordsworth whose awareness of the contribution of childhood to the plasticity and maturity of human mental process which is expressed so completely in The Prelude, could say the “the child is the father of the man.” This is just what the child can never be and, as Freud has shown us, never should attempt to be, for this very powerful wish may be the source of serious psychological illness in later life. My own position has been most beautifully summarized in a recent letter by Dr.Edward Hopkins of the Episcopalian Divinity School in Philadelphia, published in the Saturday
Review. Discussing the very mistakes of dwelling on the oathos of childhood, he remarks,” Childhood and adulthood are extremely subtle functions of one another.”
Let me make it clear that although I am speaking here in terms of abstractions, the Child I dealt with, the children I worked with, are always before me. If we can say once again with Whitehead that philosophy is the criticism of abstractions,(and by criticism we obviously mean analysis ) we must likewise remember that the child’s whole life is devoted to analysis of adult abstractions, which, however, he realizes better than adults in general, must be synthesized and integrated with his won perceptions and experience in order to become useful, that is to say,meaningful.
If the physical flesh-and blood cjild I played with, talked to, or observed came first,so in the case of adults did that child which they had once been, the lost or very often the merely buried potential, still there at the heart of a crude or burdened or corrupt exterior, but lacking the true psycho-physical purpose which the child knows with its very body, enabling it to grow, to add form metabolically to the multi-cellular body-mind.
In sum and substance the point of view presented here is a clue to the need for future reinterpretation of our relations with nature, a reinterpretation to which it seems to me we are already committed by Freudian revelation of the role of instinct on human behavior and mentation. The study of instinct, however, does not take us far enough into nature to account for our powers of mental creation, our astounding capacity to inventively transform nature’s materials into tools and artifacts. The study of the role of perception in animal and human evolution on the other hand, does take us deep into our historical relations with nature as universe, and into comparative studies of the evolution of our own nervous system, and the systems in nature from which we derive.
The points of view of neurology and cyernetics only provide some of the information we need. We haveto look upon the purposefully creative behavior of the whole organism as person in nature and society in manner in which I studied the world-making purpose of the child in nature, in culture and in society, in order to work out the problems of mental health as creative process in itself.
We have neglected sorely the remarkable work of such animal ethologists, (animal behaviorists) as Tnbergen, Lorenz, or Eliot Howard on birds, which I believe represents a totally different view of development from that which we are accustomed to thinking about. In relation to perception we seem to have overlooked entirely the still more astonishing conclusions of W. H.Thorp on Learning and Instinct in Animals, in which he argues that perception is a first order drive in evolution and that an animal is essentially something which perceives. Not only this
But he defines exploration in animals as an instinct over and above the satisfaction of other bodily appetites. In the process of perception, we find the perception of temporal and spatial relations as primary and formation of the gestalt as the result of this scanning process.
Furthermore, Thorp shows that creative evolution a learning process in itself.
Against this we can lay the fact that the perception of temporal and spatial relations is the very essence of the perceptual intuitive genus of the child and the source of his keenest inquiry, represented in familiar tones in the nursery rhyme:
Whither go all the night and days
And where can tomorrow be
Is anyone here when I‘m not here
And why am always me?
This perceptual preoccupation with time and space remains the stimulus of adult genius as it evolves into conceptual forms, according to John Oman and others. But
recollections of this poetic power in our own experience, if it remains fresh and green, may present any adult with the ability to begin again, and to enjoy beginning again and
again. This, I think, is the meaning of Christ’s lovely words, “ unless ye become as one of these” and “ of such is the Kingdom of Heaven” a point of view to be found in the philosophies of the East as well as the West.
Cosmic sense and common sense are identical and innate in the genius of the child or adult. But by cosmic sense it should be understood that I refer simply to the Fluid psycho-physical behavioral sensibilities of the developing body of the child relating itself and participating in the behavior of the environment. But even in the ordinary man these intuitive beginnings are infinitely educational.
Meanwhile, the most vital philosophical tool available to us in this new mental climate which I have been discussing is the science of ecology. The science of ecology is concerned with all mutual relations between organisms and their environment, their ecos, or habitat. Ecology must therefore work with many levels and many disciplines from cosmic through to psycho-physical and mental behavior, and on to the social relations of plant, animal and man. My own subject is the Ecology of Imagination in Childhood―the title of a work in process.
Eduard Lindeman has suggested that ecology could be the toll for the uniting of science with philosophy, but I think it may offer something even more exciting to philosophy which is embodied in the term mutual. We have here, I think, the potential for anew dialectical pattern in philosophy which can avoid the conflict of
antithesis as a hostile opposition to these in the search of new synthesis. We could have instead a dialectical exchange which would operate as thesis, analysis, synthesis, or better still, as my friend Elizabeth Sewell has it in her new work, “ The Orphic Voice”―statement, question and method. For in this way of thinking the synthesis which emerges proves to be itself the new method, a dynamic continuity instead of a static over - spatialized conclusion.
But self-increase in knowledge without purpose, without social and human purpose is not therapeutic. It becomes an over-feeling of self. Social purpose only operates when the image of other and different people are at least allegprically represented and understood as part of creative purpose.
The great challenge ahead of us is to create societies – the plural is most necessary – in which education and social purpose are clearly linked. The need is to
create societies for people and not people for societies. The problem is really a terrific one, for we have not yet tapped the true capacities of human beings except to a limited extent and yet we don’t have anything like the necessary number of openings for the present generation in spite of the known scarcities in certain fields.
I am minded of Margaret Mead’s recent remarks to me about a mutual friend, a gifted young British architect who had just landed a very fine university appointment. “Do you realize,” she said to me,” that this was open to him?”
I, myself, do not believe the invasion of space can provide answers. Nut there is a huge task of remedial work in helping correct past errors in human societies. “Heaven lies about us,” although in a special sense, not only in our infancy as in Wordsworth’s lovely lines, but ahead and beyond us, ( a cosmic world we can work with as in childhood ) if we can but believe that knowledge is itself continually evolving. From my own standpoint, humanism is not enough. We are where we are at our very best today purely because our forebears throughout history conceived of
something higher than man.
Biography
1.Lancelot Law Whyte, Aspects of Forum, Percy Lund Humphries and Co.Ltd.,London,1951
Page 43 - C.H.Waddington: The Character of Biological Form
Page 91 – Albert M.Dalcq: Form and Modern Embryology
Page 157- Konrad L. Lorenz: The Role of Gestalt Perception in Animal and Human Behavior
2. Miguel De Unamuno, Tragic Sebse of Life, Dover Publication, Inc., 1954
3. Arnold Gesell, Embryology of Behavior, Harper and Brothers, New York, 1945
4. J.H.Woodger, Biological Principles, Harcount Brace and Company, New York, 1929
5. W.H. Thrope, Learning and Instinct in Animals, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1956
6. C.Judson Herrick, George Elliot Coghill, University of Chicago Press,.Chicago, 1949
7. C.Judson Herrick, The Evolution of Human Nature, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, 1956
8. M.H.Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, W.W.Norton & Co., Inc., New York, 1958
9. W.E.Le Gros Clark and P.B. Medawar, editors, Essays on Growth and Form, Oxford University Press, London, 1945
Page 94-J.H.Woodger: On Biological Transformation
10. Elizabeth Sewell, The Orphic Voices, Yale University Press, new Heaven,1960
11. Julian Huxley, editor, Evolution as a Process, George Allen, and Unwin, London, 1958
12. Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1960
13. Margaret Mead, New Lives for Old-Cultural Transformation-Manus,1928-1953, William Morrow, new York, 1956
14. Charles Solley and Garnder Murphy, Development of the Perceptual World, Basic Books, Inc., 1960
15. Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago, 1958
16. Academy of Religion and Mental Health, Religion in the Developing Personality,New York, University Press, 1960
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This is the Late Edith Cobb's the original speech paper at the American Philosophical Association, 1961.
I was given this speech paper by her mentor, Prof. Don.C.Gifford, Williams College in 1985 for for my research and my three volume book series.
The Late Edith Cobb is the author of the book , "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood", Columbia University Press,1977, which I am now retranslating into Japanese.
This revised Japanese version will be published by this
early summer.
Miwako Kurosaka
" Philosophy and the Health of the Child "(2/3),by Edith Cobb, at the American Philosophical Association, 1961
2010.01.19 Tuesday
” Philosophy and the Health of the Child ”
by Edith Cobb , speech paper 2/3, At the American Philosophical Association, 196
”The step I am suggesting, however, recognizes a continuity not only of process in cultural evolution, but a direct continuity of this process with biological evolution so that the levels achieved both by ourselves and by nature in earlier phases, become ”part-events” in the new structures created by life and mind. According to the biologist J. H. Wooger , this is the action-pattern of biological transcendence of organisms from lower to higher levels found in all evolutionary processes, parts of earlier forms of the behavior of organism remaining as functioning events in the new forms. So-called higher levels of behavior enable the organism to create richer and more creative relations with environment, and so to transcend earlier types of animal organisms.
I believe the child’s world –play is the basis from which all later thought processes develop and that child-thought displays a continuity of action pattern with
The action patterns of nature’s formative processes. In a recent conferene on education at wood Hole, the emphasis on the need to explore the child’s intuitions was emphasized because as Jarome Bruner stated, it appears that “There is a continuity between what a scholar does on the forefront of his discipline and what a child does in approaching it for the first time. “ Intuition, I believe to be a form of
innate “ aesthetic” logic, arising naturally within us as a result of our total bodily participation in the aesthetic logic of nature’s own formative processes.
It is worth mentioning here that the only true child geniuses in the sense of competing with adults are mathematical and musical. And, as Bruner also observes, it is the mathematician and the physicist who refers with confidence to intuition. The implication here is that genius and intuition have an organic basis and are dynamically related to the rhythms of the organism.
On human levels, it is self-evident that intellectual growth of evolution alone cannot be the basis for a working philosophy of mental health which would be effective individually, although to some extent love alone, love of human nature, human otherness actually can produce this widening and heightening of ethical intelligence to higher levels in an individual. In human life, richer and more creative relations with the environment must include human nature as well as nature in its world-image. Such understanding is a matter of a controlled power of empathy, or identification which is the technique of my own profession, deriving from psychoanalytic psychology. Its earliest from may be observed as “Mimesis” in the world play of the child, the ability to be at least temporarily the person or object you want to know. Both participation in nature by the nervous-system and identification as a technique may be controlled by the intellect .
It has been said and I think very beautifully by Unamuno in The Tragic Sense of Life that“social consciousness is the child of love” and that imagination is the social sense which animates everything and anthropomorphizes everything in nature, in the search for the divine, a search which can never end. But again by turning on the axis of this supposition perceptually, I think we can reinterpret this statement to read that social consciousness is primarily the outcome of love, protection, and education of the child, and that every social institution developed to therness has evolved from the principles of nature required by our prolonged human infancy. It may be said, I think, that our attitudes toward the child in culture and society shape our humanity
and our destiny. But we have a step further to make in our thought about mental health and that is to understand more clearly the importance of the sense of immediacy in the perception of nature of child and poet, a fact which is established over and over again in my collection of some 300 volumes of autographical recollections of childhood now in possession of Columbia University.
My position on the importance of childhood may be reinforced from biological andevolutionally thinking also, so that the patter of its human form may be said to have
roots in animal history. In a recent volume of essays, evolution as a Process, edited by Julian Huxley, A.C. Hardy describes a theory put forward by his father-in-law,
Walter Garstang , which Garstang called paedomorphosis. By this he meant that adaptation to larval or young life might not only have a profound influence on the adults of the race but upon the whole evolution of the stock.
“Ontogency,” he boldly says,” does not recapitulate phylogeny, it creates it.” It was also Garstang’s
opinion that modification of the larval stage could produce changes in the species―which is much like saying that in human life, changes and improvement in education can produce changes in adult purposes and behavior in the[ whole society.
Now much has been said and written in the first half of this century about the pathos of childhood, its agonies and fears, the child’s fear of its own destructive needs and purposes. A child I know does have destructive impulse and you can enlarge this to a need to express destructive feelings. But I do not think that we should refer to this as a basic or primary process. Anger and destructiveness, or as adults, we may say the devil in us, represents the untamed instinctual part of our nature and its reaction to necessary social and cultural demands for restraint of animal impulse.
We are, it happens, both animal and human, and here indeed lie the true sources of conflict between levels of behavior in the aims of the organism. Here lies the difficulty of maintaining mental health of the individual on a consistent basis. In 19th century Western culture, it was thought necessary to kill the animal within us in order
to save the human soul. In the 20th century, we have found，largely due to the discoveries of Freud, that we must learn to domesticate and even nurture the animal within our own nature in order to create, preserve, and maintain the human soul, while yet remaining a healthy animal.
But the language of conquest in which most of our present thinking is phrased tends to obscure other and more creative ways of observing our own abilities and our relation with nature, ways in which we can love nature without requiring nature to be
moral, ethical, or benign.
We are born animals, then, and became human only through acculturation, a very significant part of which is nurture in infancy, which even at its most depleted contains some elements of human love, however unrecognizable or meagerly expressed. The human soul is born within nurture and touch, within that nursery without walls, the nurturing arms which support infantile dependency.
On the positive side, the present emphasis on the child is actually, I suggest, the climax to the centuries of cultural evolution toward a social, political, and psychological concept of the uniqueness of the individual, a process which is still far from being complete realized. But although so incomplete, its application is edging toward anti-climax in an overemphasis upon self, including self-knowledge, self-improvement, etc.,ａtruly narcissistic over-emphasis which permeates character structure even on high levels and is, I believe, the core of our serious problems of delinquency.
But further than this the over-concentration upon pathos in childhood introduces false hopes of some permanent maturity and permanent norms toward which child and adult are urged to struggle, though they represent goals which are unattainable and even I believe undesirable in human life. Our very creativity derives from an ability to retain the plasticity of response and originality in the creation of worlds is the gift of our prolonged human childhood to the human race.
Problems of mental health, I believe, hinge to a very great extent upon the hopeless of the philosophical aim and beliefs of achievable permanence, corrupting, moreover,
the goals and purposes of society. Even the religious ethos, where it exist at all, tends to emphasize past and present and to leave the future, especially in relation to death, unspeakable. I was witness to the fact that a change in this situation might produce a very great differences in our attitudes towards many things, when a recent day-long conferences on terminal illness set up by a social work friend of mine released the most remarkably creative as well as compassionate understanding of people in all the group meetings as well as the large opening and closing sessions. The participation, including clergy and lay people, doctors and psychiatrists, demonstrated an obvious and quite overwhelming relief at being able to discuss openly thoese depths which concern all of us, but are taboo, largely, I believe, because they are concerned with the limitation of our basic powers and energies, of which sexual power ( in spite of Freudian reasoning) is only one and not the most important aspectof living and dying. Our moral and psychological strengths derive from knowledge of our frailties and how we deal with infancy, age, illness, etc., not from our tough-mindedness as human beings.
To illustrate how deeply this attitude about ideal adult maturity appears to penetrate our intellectual behavior, I quote the biologist Woodger writing strictly within a non-human biological context, a study ofbiological transformations. He says that “ The persistence of our tendency to identity organism with adult…” turns our way of thinking and perceiving topsy-turvy. “ What went before the adult in time is treated as a separate subject –matter under a separate name and is taught after adult anatomy”, instead of teaching embryology first and anatomy last as a subjectdealing with a rather prolonged incident in development.
Thought is fragmented and confused in this way and continuity which we need sorely to understand is interrupted. Samuel Butler, wittily criticizing the some error, wrote that from one standpoint at least, “ A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.” I am not suggesting we make the ovum our ideal goal, but we would do well to accept the image of the child as our future, not Father Time with his scythe which is time as a purely private affair. " 2/3 (to be continued)
***
This is the Late Edith Cobb's the original speech paper at the American Philosophical Association, 1961.
I was given this speech paper by her mentor, Prof. Don.C.Gifford, Williams College in 1985 for for my research and my three volume book series.
The Late Edith Cobb is the author of the book , "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood", Columbia University Press,1977, which I am now retranslating into Japanese.
This revised Japanese version will be published by this
early summer. Miwako Kurosaka
Eco-children's book,No.10, "Shall we enjoy painting plays !?", Childbook Co.ltd.
2010.01.19 Tuesday
" Philosophy and the Health of the Child "(,1/3)by Edith Cobb, at the American Philosophical Association, 1961
2010.01.10 Sunday
" Philosophy and the Health of the Child"
by
Edith Cobb
The speech paper at the American Philosophical Association, 1961
Perhaps because philosophers like physicists deal with such a high order of abstraction they tend to appear as rather awesome characters to the ordinary run of people like myself. I can not , therefore, entirely repress a feeling that it is somewhat preposterous for me to come before you to discuss this very problem of abstractions and to think that I have much to offer you.
Yet something in the deliberately creative nature of this group as expressed in its title or titles, the emphasis here on research, upon the questions, not the answers, give me hope that my concept of vital, that is to say a psycho-physical relationship between mental healsth, learning and evolution does fit in with your purposes, does
Offer something to philosophy.
I believe that during my exploration of the creative genius common to all childhood and its rare extension into adult forms, I have come upon some vital clues to the links between naïve experiences, perception and the abstractions of language upon which we all depend in varying degree for our philosophy of life.
My subject, however, was and is the child- or better still, childhood as a biological And universal phase in human life-history, thus including within its meaning the concept of time, and, therefore, not only form but also process, ie, .movement in time.
For, to quote Judson Herrick from his wonderful work, The Evolution of Human Nature, “ the cradle of mind is motility…,”while in the Rorschach test, a test which diagnoses the manner in which the person perceives his world, a balanced tendency to perceive figures in motion in the static images of the ink blots on the cards, is evidence of creativity in thought.
Herrick says, moreover, that “ Mentation is a total pattern, and as such it may use any or all of the organs of the body. We feel and think all over just as a bird flies all over.” This is not a common view especially in psychology which still separates mind and body to a marked degree. But the child, like the poet, in his own instrument and uses his whole body as a mental tool.
The term mentation is important to the ideas presented here because it refers to an Action-pattern of the body signifying mental behavior, thus saving us from referring
to mental energy, which I believe must now be considered as a false metaphor. For, as Herrick also says, and anyone who recalls an illness may recognize, energy is simply
bodily energy, energy is physical, not mental or libidinal for that matter. Energy is the drawn from the universe which enables the animal as a body to pursue its goalsand purposes, mental, libidinous or otherwise, and
philosophically speaking, it would seem erroneous to overlook this when creating our image of the world even on common-places level.s.
Baudelaire wrote in his essay on Constantin Guys, ”Convalescence is like a descent into childhood. The convalescent, like the child, enjoys to the limit the ability to be intensely interested in things… The child sees everything as new… Genius is but childhood recovered at will.”. I have underlined the term will to indicate that this need is not to be a regression.
The premise here is that every human child in every culture and society is born an animal but evolves culturally as a human being to varying levels and in varying degrees. Culture can not be innate. Therefore, for each child, the creation of the image of the world around him proceeds initially through true acts of genesis, the formulation by child of what are for him original relationships between the instrument of his perceiving self, his acts of perception, and the world towards which
he is dynamically polarized.
The process of acculturation takes places within the framework of language and the child’s humanity thus derives from his culture and his cultural of rebears who designed the early pattern of his human relations and the terms of his speech. His body is the working tool with which he continues this process of individual cultural evolution.
Every human being reports this experiences, and we may surmise that the pattern of the imagery we produce differs as much as our thumb-prints. Language is the principal tool we use in creating relations with the world, and this world-building proceeds through a continual process of interpretation and reinterpretation of perceptions which should remain a life-long process in the interest of mental health.
Perception of necessity, therefore, are primary and ambiguous experience, but apperception or the organization of perception into increasingly differentiated and more complex pattern and form is the way we achieve a deepening of the meaning of our world-image. The precise nature of this behavioral process may be observed at work within the operations of the Rorschach Test where the emphasis is upon motion, that is, where the dynamics of perception play a major role in how we “take in the world.”
The specializations which arise during the evolution of cultures produce different Categories of thought in the form of art, science, or philosophy, whie technology introduces different ways of dealing with environment. All of these modes of experience invade speech and produce their own vocabularies of perception. It has been said recently that our modern problems are to a great extent due to “ hardening of the categories.” This is particularly true of the field of mental health with the dialectical patterns of philosophical inquiry seem a very welcome move. Semantic rigidity distorts meaning and stifles creativity but it also blocks ordinary perceptual processes.
Convinced that the child’s early tactics and perceptual delight in nature derived from some deep sources in his bodily history not presently describable in psychiatric language, I began to adopt a different vocabulary of perception drawn to a large extent from the natural sciences. Eventually it became clear to me, as I observed the child’s confinement within the self and the emphasis on inner worlds so dear to most contemporary thought, what a child wants most of all to do is to make aworld outside and around him in which to find a self and create his unique identity.
The world he makes includes the child’s play and is based upon how it and the materials around him behave in relation to each other. The child is ego-centric, yes,
but centered in a world. Philosophy, as a basic category, begins I would think in childhood as a theory of how the world works, i.e. behaves. It was in the search for some explanation of the beauty and profundity of the child mind, the genius of the child’s questions, that I came upon what I conceive to be the poetics of therapy, the creative sources and physiological roots of the remedial power of mental therapy which I conceive to be a creative process, a growth of phenomenon in contradistinction to the accepted psychiatric theory of sublimation of instincts.
The term “ poetics,” as it is used here, refers to the original Greek meaning of “poein”, “to make”, but includes the language of speech as intrinsic to all human “
making”. Altho the value we call “beauty” may not yet be present in early creativity, the term ”poetic” implies that the seeds of beauty are present in the very earthiness
of first realities. Furthermore, the term “poein”,” to make”, which is the source of our concept of poetics, not only indicates the presence of technique in th power of making but points to a rhythmical, even a lyric pattern in the controlled behavior necessary to the creation of form at any level.
Sublimation is only half of the human story and deals only with instincts. The other half, I suggest, takes the form of what we call intuition, the perception of relations which create structure and form. This appears to be the great achievement of the analysis-synthesis behavior of human nerves system, an extension of its own evolutionary behavior into tools and into language as a tool, according to the work of such thinkers and scientists as Coghill, Gesell, Daleg, L. L .Whyte, and others. The questions and the perceptual responses of the child and poet tend to come from some deep and immediate exchange with environment, ad overlapping, I suggest, of the nervous system of nature within which as organism we are embedded in an infinite series of mutual form-creating processes.
This is the central theme of The Prelude, a poem whose greatness we have barely begun to understand. Wordsworth tells us that the mind is
“ Creator and receiver both
Working but in alliance with the works
Which it beholds “
Mind and nature are thus mutually operational, inter-active systems producing form in thought and art.
“ How exquisitely the individual Mind
( And the progressive power perhaps no less of the whole species to the external World is fitted) And how exquisitely, too ..
Theme but little heard of among men
The external World is fitted to the Mind.
The italics are mine. The theme is but little understood for we have but recently begun to find the instruments with which to explore the relations between organism and environment which Wordsworthian poetic intuitively apprehended.
We are now, I think, in a position to work with this WordsWorthian conception of the Effect on cognition and mental health of man’s perceptual relations with nature on organic levels.
By this I mean and I think that WordsWorth sensed that the creative effect of mentation as a total bodily process is informed i.e.shrapedby the very forces which have produced evolutionary transcendence, speciation, and variation in form throughout the history of nature. In other words, the mind as body continues to pass forward more of the same purposes that produced its own growth and form, its own specialization. In so doing it achieves new levels and new form and new types of behavior. The creative world-making of the child, therefore, posseses the inestimable beauty of hope and futurity- the apprehension of some unforeseeable continuity of creative behavior.
It is my suggestion, and I know it is a bold one, that Nature’s striving toward speciation is expressed inhuman nature and human societies in such limiting mechanisms as we see in the incest motif or celibacy as a social ideal. Therefore, it seems to me we can consider the human individual as a species in himself, from which he springs his desire for personal evolution, his desire for a creative continuity in the variation of forms.
But although my concept derived from explorations of the oedipal complex during a personal analysis, I found that a somewhat similar cobcept of creativity as the outcome of speciation was expressed by Coleridge in 1817. During the period of the child’s latent sexuality and lively instinct, his sensibilities are focused on the vegetative pole of his developing body. The child fills in the sdistance between the self and the shadows of desire with imagine forms, imagined worlds. The materials and
the and the instrument of his body with which he works are natural. The aim of his creation is to go beyond the natural.
Perhaps the main difference between my position about the child and prevailing attitudes in the field of mental health is merely a matter of or ientation, a mere pivotal
turn upon the present axis, away from the over-emphasis on inwardness of the child or adult, toward an awareness that physically speaking outer nature and human nature are interactive, interrelated and indeed at some levels overlapping systems. In eating or breathing, for instance, it is very difficult to say where environment begins
and organism ends.
What we see in the world-play of the child implies a tremendous possibility, namely, that man’s own world is not merely internal and invisible but the result of an
interplay of outer with inner nature and that through this activity alone he has transcended nature in creating the cultural world of man. Man thus makes visible
( see Paul Klee), puts forth, a continuity of creative natural processes, a continuity which he must himself extend individually and socially in order to survive. To fail to do this means regression to animal levels, although often retaining all the ingenuity of human mental process, with results which we see in the delinquent or in the regression of a whole section of a social order as in Nazi Germany.
Ｍy position is not meant to contain a revolutionary suggestion, for that I would decry as a destructive overthrow, a casting out of previous useful cultural principlesand efforts, a method of change we need to outgrow. Nor is this concept a private invention of my own. It is part of an emergent mental climate, particularly in the physical and natural sciences, representing new levels of knowledgeto which we have presently evolved through the instruments of technology and greater differentiation in perception and thought. In this new climate, it is said that man knows nature because he is nature. For instance, Heisenberg, writing about nature and contemporary physics, I search of an explanation of contemporary art, says, when we speak of a picture of nature, but a picture of our relation to nature,” because sciencerecognizes itself as part of the interplay of nature and man.”
(to be continued. 1/3)
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This is the Late Edith Cobb's the original speech paper at the American Philosophical Association, 1961.
I was given this speech paper by her mentor, Prof. Don.C.Gifford, Williams College in 1985 for for my research and my three volume book series.
The Late Edith Cobb is the author of the book , "The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood", Columbia University Press,1977, which I am now retranslating into Japanese.
This revised Japanese version will be published by this early summer.
Miwako Kurosaka
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