Contributions of Behaviorism, Psychoanalysis, and Ethology to Child Psychology
Contributions of Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis to Child Study
In the history of child psychology, several pioneering and influential figures have emerged, including Watson and behaviorism, and Freud and psychoanalysis.
Behaviorism emphasizes the influence of the environment on child development. It opened two fields of research: learning and child development. Watson introduced the use of extensive experimentation in child study. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, highlights the importance of childhood experiences in later emotional development during adulthood.
Behaviorism’s main objective is the prediction and control of human behavior. It is based on the study of observable behavior, considering the environment as a set of “stimulus-response” interactions, where only the observable can be studied. Watson adopted the stimulus-response paradigm as the unit of analysis, defining stimulus as any external factor or change in physiological condition, and response as the reaction or behavior towards that stimulus. The method used is that of natural science, i.e., controlled observation.
Watson’s perspective is mainly based on Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning, characterized by establishing a relationship between two independent stimuli and the subject’s response. Watson built upon Pavlov’s work, studying the existence of unconditional or innate reflexes in children and differentiating them from learned or conditioned reflexes, thereby establishing a distinction between innate and learned behavior. Watson’s analysis inferred that if all behavior can be conditioned, then, like the laws of any other natural science, psychology should help predict and control behavior. Watson did not believe in the influence of heredity (genetics) and was confident that all behavior is due to the environment and the child’s conditioning. He went so far as to say that if provided with a certain number of children, he could transform any of them into specific specialists: doctors, lawyers, engineers, or even thieves, regardless of their talents, inclinations, tendencies, abilities, vocations, and race. In other words, Watson gave more value to the influence of environment than biology, considering that we are all equal.
Moreover, Thorndike confirmed that the child is the product of their experiences, not genetics. Behaviorism never considered evolution as a change of behavior with advancing age. Research on operant conditioning shows that the baby’s memory increases with age and is related to contextual data and time. That is, an event will be related to a past event if it occurs within a certain period but will be considered new if mentioned later.
Watson was highly influential in his time, opening two new fields of study: learning and child development. Another important influence of behaviorism on child psychology has been the massive introduction of experimentation.
On the other side are the contributions of Freud, who presented a revolutionary and disconcerting idea about the way of thinking about children and childhood at the time. The psychoanalytic approach focuses on the study of psychological distress in adults, emphasizing the importance of early childhood emotional development.
Freud claimed that the origins of conflict in childhood should be studied as psychological disturbances in adults due to inner conflicts of a sexuality that exists in childhood, especially in the first year. Freud hypothesized that infants are born with sexual feelings, which was a revolutionary idea. There are three key ideas in Freud’s work: that we have an irrational unconscious, that the two basic roots of mental life are sex and self-preservation, and that there are oral and genital stages in infantile development.
Freud suggested that the human unconscious is constituted by the repression of a conflict between a sex drive (which was to desire the mother) and an instinct for self-preservation (which had to fear the father). Freud also thought that the evolution of sexuality goes through certain stages. These stages are distinguishable based on certain similar features, occurring in a specific order.
In the development of infantile sexuality, there are 5 stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. However, we will focus on the first 3, which occur in the first year of life. Freud believed that before overcoming the Oedipus complex, the child has to go through two sexual stages: an oral stage and an anal stage.
The oral stage occupies the first months of life. The baby gets their most intense sexual pleasures from food. These pleasures of the mouth are interrupted by the frustrations of weaning, when solid food is introduced, and they can no longer have the breast or bottle. Here, the anus becomes the place of sexual pleasure that comes to exert its influence on mental development. Unlike food, excretion is further dominated by the child by the adults around them. The great crisis of this stage occurs at the time of bowel control, which can often take the form of a battle between the desires of the baby and the parent. Long after individuals have stopped wearing diapers, high emotion can make them become constipated or experience uncontrolled defecation, harking back to early childhood.
Finally, young children enter the phallic stage, marked by increasing genital masturbation and by the passions of the Oedipus complex. According to Freud, sexual feelings will not reappear until puberty, where the other two stages come into play.
Freud indicated that personality was then marked by the conflicts of the early/late or too much/little gratification in any of the stages or unconscious conflicts of impulses and the demands of society, which could become a trauma that resurfaces later in adulthood. Neo-psychoanalysis emerged, which was less complex and disregarded the superego, as well as the determinism of sexual identity during childhood.
However, Freud’s theory was rather heuristic, meaning it continued to produce more research and inspire other researchers in their theories.
Contributions of Ethology to the Study of Children
The concept of childhood that we have today is relatively new, constructed by society. Throughout history, children have not been recognized for the capacities and needs we now see as essential.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the development of child psychology as we know it today. This was a time of great change thanks to works such as those of Charles Darwin, Stanley Hall, and Sigmund Freud. Several studies from different disciplines contributed to the development of child psychology, including ethology.
Ethology contributed concepts such as “critical period” or “sensitive period” to developmental psychology. The critical period refers to the specific moment when an event or lack thereof has a significant impact on development. Lorenz, who studied the phenomenon of imprinting in animals, is a prominent figure in this area. He observed a group of ducks and realized that the newly hatched ducklings followed the first moving object they saw. He stated that imprinting was an automatic and irreversible process and that it signified a willingness to learn. If certain information was not acquired during a critical period, then learning would not be possible.
Ethologists and evolutionary psychologists argue that humans are not a tabula rasa at birth but are born with a number of specific behaviors and tendencies that are activated by environmental stimuli. These behaviors occur at a given time, so if they do not appear, normal development is threatened.
Bowlby’s ethological theories were particularly influential in relation to attachment. He demonstrated that, based on certain behaviors and innate response tendencies, babies develop strong emotional bonds with the adults who care for them. The interaction with strong emotional bonds of children with adults has its origin in the behavior and innate response tendencies of infants, such as the imprinting of Lorenz’s ducks, which made them follow him on the grounds that if he was the first living thing they saw, “he was probably their mother.” Subsequent research has shown that this child’s tendency to establish strong links need not necessarily be with the biological mother but can be with the person representing the mother role, even the father, as inheritance is mediated by the environment.
Today, we know that there is nothing decisive, but there are certain times that can have a significant impact. Fortunately, we have plasticity and the capacity for change. The concept of a sensitive period is now more commonly used, during which a subject is particularly susceptible to certain kinds of experiences but never in a decisive manner.
The View of Genetic Psychology
Genetic psychology studies the development of mental functions to understand them in their highest state, so it utilizes child psychology. It studies processes from the beginning, from simple functions to the complex functions that are part of human beings.
The first to become interested in the study of nature by studying human behavior was Baldwin, who later studied social phenomena. Due to the effectiveness of scientific methods in the study of nature, such as animals, the study of human behavior was facilitated. Perhaps for these reasons, child behavior began to be studied before adult behavior: The child was more like an animal to study compared to an adult.
It is noted that in medieval society, there was no sense of childhood, and children were regarded as something fun, like an animal. Also, when they no longer required special care, they became part of society without distinction, therefore, childhood virtually did not exist.
An early advocate for children was the philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (17th century), who produced a change in attitude towards children and facilitated and promoted work on child development.
In the eighteenth century, observations on the development of children began to appear, which were essentially made by parents or relatives. But the most interesting of these early works is the book by the German doctor Dietrich Tiedemann, popularized by psychologist Bernard Perez, who is considered the founder of child psychology.
Baldwin was the first to address developmental genetic theory in his book “Mental Development in the Child and the Race” (1894). For him, genetic psychology was defined as the “investigation of the principles governing the origin and development of mental processes.” He exercised a strong influence on Piaget, the author considered most capable of empirical psychology, and his interest was to define a genetic epistemology, i.e., how knowledge is produced and mental development occurs. For Piaget, all human brains are potentially scientific.
Piaget gave a different conception of evolutionary psychology. Until then, child psychology was considered a secondary branch of psychology devoted to those who were not, strictly speaking, psychologists, but educators, etc. Piaget’s disenchantment with philosophy was because it lacked true knowledge since it did not involve practical experimentation. Knowledge is impossible without a scientific epistemology, i.e., without a theory of knowledge. He therefore devoted himself to the study of epistemological problems, one of which was how different skills develop, from the progressive formation of intelligence, concluding that knowing is genetic.
He then began (around 1920) a series of studies whose purpose was not the study of the child in itself but the understanding of the adult. So for Piaget, child psychology is not a part of psychology but a form, a method of studying general psychology, where it is more fruitful to see how the different mechanisms of the adult are formed through their genesis in childhood. That is, genetic psychology focuses on the study of the development of mental functions to understand them in their most finished state and be able to answer the big questions of psychology.