EXORCISING FREUD :

Why psychiatry has failed : We can fly to the moon and tap genetic secrets, but human beings are as badly behaved and as miserable as ever. Is it because shrinks rely too much on words? (Peter Watson, 1st July 2002, New Statesman)

According to Kagan, the brain (he prefers to call it the mind) contains psychological structures, to which he gives the ungainly word "schemata". We hold these schemata in our heads, Kagan says, just as those babies held the concept of "animal" long before they had a word for it. We hold visual experiences, olfactory experiences, taste, touch, auditory and emotional experiences somewhere inside us, which enrich the words we use but are separate from them and individual to each of us. And they cannot be related directly to brain activity.

[K]agan becomes even more controversial when he applies his theory to everyday life. Take the moral development of children. Kagan says that, for them, concepts such as "good", "bad" or "truth" are not just verbal ideas; they embody schemata. Children and adults respond more quickly to concepts that are, as he puts it, "rich in schemata". That is why adults are faster to answer "false" to the statement "Carrots are blue" than to the statement "The function of vitamins is social justice": they have a clearer and more vivid experience of carrots than they have of social justice.

So a child will learn the concept of "bad" more fully if it is not just a semantic notion. The parent should not just tell the child what is bad but burn the idea into its experience: through frowning, scolding, withdrawing privileges (Kagan avoids the question of whether one should add smacking). The more schemata are involved, the richer the child's concept of "bad" will be. [...]

This is all grist to the traditionalist's mill. But that is not Kagan's main aim, which is to rethink psychology and psychiatry from the bottom up.

Only in a completely deracinated age would the idea of teaching morality to children be controversial and groundbreaking. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 29, 2002 11:33 AM