2. The psychic development in the child

 

"The hearts of small children are delicate organs. A cruel beginning in this world can leave them deformed into thousand strange ways. The injured heart of a child shrinks in such way that it remains forever hard and rough as a peach core. Or, on the contrary, it is a heart that ulcerates and swells until it becomes a painful load within the body and any friction presses and wounds it.

“The ballad of the sad café ". Carson Mc Culler.

Sigmund Freud said that adults do not understand children because we have forgotten our own childhood. This phrase that at first sight can to be very simple allows us to make a set of reflections around what is a child and what it means to understand him. Many times we have heard the expression, “this is a children's thing” to lessen importance of situations that worry, disturb or agitate them, as if the feeling that accompanies their display as if it did not have the intensity and the emotional meaning that it has for us, adults.

Freud was right; we have forgotten the avatars and difficulties that we meet on the road towards maturity. We can not even recognize ourselves in that child that we were once and in the emotional disorders that accompanied our slow and painful transition towards adulthood. Of all that, only the anecdotal things remain, what is commented in our near surroundings and perhaps some experiences that persist in our conscious memory. Nevertheless, we are heirs of our infancy, and everything that we are has been kneaded in our first years of relations with the more significant others, from the very moment of our birth.

However, is not easy to bear in mind the unfolding of our own history, to be able to coin a sense of past, present and future in a continuous line. On the contrary, we usually talk about childhood as a completely differentiated phase, separated from what we are today. This generates a separation that causes us to be unaware of the children we work with although many times they are the ones who make us take contact with our feelings and emotions, in spite of not being aware of it.

It would be good to ask ourselves, why we forget it. Perhaps the answer is, as Borges used to say, because memory is permeable to forgetfulness, particularly when it is about events that have caused us pain and suffering.

Human development in these ages has special characteristics mainly because of the number of changes that follow as an indispensable condition to achieve adaptation to reality. It is certain that these changes, in favorable conditions generate progress and achievements, but it is also true that they are produced through a slow, troubled, and painful process , that tints with anxiety the child's life. This is precisely the dominant emotional phenomenon in these years, because as H. Wallon states, the development of a human being is not given in a linear way, as if it was a matter of adding up conquests that operate according to an evolutionary law of permanent progress, but, on the contrary, it is the imbalance and the conflict, the characteristic that identifies the nature of this process.

We see it presented in the scope of genetic epistemology. Piaget explains that the development of intelligence occurs based on a shifting between balance and imbalance, allowing for the adaptation to the environment and progressive adaptation to the object of knowledge. And from the psychoanalytical theory, Freud speaks of the essentially troubled nature of development in the construction of the young psyche.

These three theoretical systems, -although there are substantial differences among them that will not be dealt with in this text- conceive conflict as the motor and driving force of development, which allows for a practical and theoretical approach to the subject from a constructive perspective, since as long as there are favorable conditions for suitably overcoming them, conflicts promote development through a dialectical game of assimilations, accommodations, balance and imbalances, ruptures and configurations, that generate and impel permanent changes and restructurings that allow one to reach more harmonic evolutionary stages between one's own desires and the demands of reality.

If we want to help them, we should know them

To know one another is a difficult task, moreover we can never totally know the soul of the human being, not even our own one. Fernando Pessoa, the great Portuguese poet said it this way:

“How is another person inside? / Who is the one that will know how to dream it? / The soul of the others is a universe/ with which there is no possible communication / with no true understanding. We know nothing about the soul / but of ours. / For the others are just glances and gestures, / there are words, with the supposition of some resemblance deep down”.

The souls of children are glances, gestures and scarce words, which is their language, their way of saying and making us feel their existence. However, for the adults it is often hard to get the enormous dimension they have. When we are children we live in our own universe, populated by images, fantasies, feelings and emotions that surround us, that dwell among us in silence, a universe full of words, looks and gestures given to us by others and that turn us into people, humanize us and cause us to stop being just creatures and become persons. But during the first years we feel the impotence of not being able to say what is happening to us, not even to ourselves, therefore we turn to fantasy that allows us, without us noticing, to fight our fears, anxieties, ambivalences, frustrations, and infantile guilt. It is not easy to be aware of this underground world that populates the soul of the children because, as Freud used to day, we have forgotten most of these experiences although they laid the foundation on which we have been built.

It is frequent to fall in the deceit to believe that the apparently indifferent conduct that a child shows in a painful situation, like the death of a beloved, or the arrival a new sibling, or any situation of separation or loss, is a childish way of living the events. A strong initial impact is diluted later in his play activities and is mixed with enjoyment and fun, turning into an innocent forgetfulness and lack of affectivity.

When we are small we have a very singular way of living and processing pain, to hide it inside, deep inside, and to offer an unworried and indifferent face to the world that watches us and does not stir up because “children are like that”; even the strongest sufferings are soon dispelled in their “unworried and childish spirit”. This is the perception that most adults have of childhood, as an idyllic phase, where the child lives happily, as long as he has available the suitable conditions for his development. But as educators, we know that that it is not true, although some times we cannot escape from the influence exerted on us by that idea.

The daily coexistence with children reveals their private universe, so full, so unique, so private, so unique and so full of sensations, affections, emotions and diverse answers, it tells us of another reality, much more complex in its inside, that is only revealed after a thorough observation and a reflexive and committed attitude compromised with the task of educating, in the amplest sense of the word.

To educate we need in the first place, to know how the child is to be able to know what are his needs, both physical and psychological, and this implies the will and decision to get training in the practice, that is the one that presents the questions and in the theory that actually allows us to open new doors towards new knowledge.

We began this chapter specifying the difficulty of know the others and of knowing ourselves. Now we will try to explain how the newborn becomes a person, a human being, to gradually conquer his own identity and a relatively autonomous life.

What is the I and how is it shaped?

When we talked about the “person” we were talking about an identity, a name that designates it, a set of features, beliefs, and values that identify it, we were talking about a personality, an I that implies an affirmation of self in front of the others, a history, a memory, a project of life.

But this identity, as we know, is shaped by means of a slow process of construction that operates in the scope of affective relations from the very moment of birth, and even before, because when we are born, we are already overwhelmed with the desires of our parents, their yearnings, and the idea of the child they want us to be, which is going to influence in our way of thinking, being and feeling.

Following the ideas of H. Wallon, we can say that personal development is a construction that operates at the expense of another, "the other is the one that constitutes us", says this author, talking about the process in which the infant begins a journey towards individualization, towards one's own recognition detached from the other, towards a feeling of "being in himself ", to be an I as far as he can recognize the existence of a Not I represented in the beginning by the mother figure or a maternal substitute.

The baby is born with a set of impulses and basic needs that must be satisfied. The initial crying is a reflection, a crying of need. The baby cries because he wants to calm the anxiety that hunger produces on him, but the next crying will become a demand: the baby cries to get food, which already implies his entry into the psychological or symbolic field, because the crying has become a symbol, with which he calls his mother. How does this happen? Let's see it in a simple way. When the mother goes to feed the baby, it is she who gives the meaning of demand to that first cry. From then on, when the baby cries he is demanding food, next to other needs that transcend the biological. The baby is nourished by his mother's words that accompany the act of feeding and the emotional and corporal contact. She soothes him by saying “I am coming , soon I will be with you, wait a little bit etc."; in short, she calms him with words that are the symbols with which she is going to communicate from now on and that she can not do without anymore. Thus, the child enters into the field of words and this entry differentiates him from the rest of the living species, and it is this what is going to foster the passage from the biological to the human, the social, and to culture.

Thus, we enter language. From now on, between the child and food there is going to be a field of symbols of extraordinary importance, since a child can be momentarily satisfied with symbols, with words, whereas if we only give him food, and no symbols, he can suffer from analytical depression, that is what Spitz mentions when he makes a reference to children that despite being well taken care of in hospitals in their biological needs, they died from the lack of care and affective contact.

On the other hand this is important for the child's development, because it is going to allow the experience of a certain initial differentiation between what is a “need”, (hunger) and a “demand” in the symbolic level, since the request that the child makes goes beyond sheer food: his requests for love, tenderness and a complete set of actions that he has for the mother and that the mother is going to have for him. We could say the mother has translated the need into a field of symbols that represent that need and that from now they will be linked to each other by those symbols. It will be her words, what she tells him, right from the start, what will allow the child to acquire an identity and to develop.

In this sense we can say that the I is the son of ignorance, because the way in which we understand and think, comes from outside, from the words of others, from language, that is exterior and that precedes the human being. All the structure with which we think and that Piaget and Wallon describe as cognitive structure, with which we know and recognize ourselves in our own identity, comes, in fact, from the outside, because it is given by the language, the mother, the father, the others, the culture and everything outside the child. Therefore, we say that the I is the psychic instance more referred to the other because it is in that I where language, ideas, habits, norms, values and the elements we use to adapt to the world are found, being also the place linked to learning. This is a paradox, because this I that serves us to know is, at the same time, as a structure, a place of ignorance. It is an I that knows, but that “does not know” itself.

From another angle this I of identity, is a corporal I that is also built from the affective relation with the mother or maternal replacement. As we know the baby at birth lives an undifferentiated experience between the mother's body and of his own body. Rather, we would say that the mother's body, her breast, is lived by the baby as an extension of his own body that is felt in a fragmented way, without a conscience of totality, of unity.

The conscience of a corporal I separated from the other implies a process that gradually occurs within that relation where the mother is going to give him meaning as an other, as a unit separated from her. The child is going to recognize his body as something that belongs to him as the mother reveals this through interaction and affective interchange from which a potential sensory wealth is going to arise with its possibilities for socialization. As far as the mother sees him as a complete body, says Spitz, the baby can feel as a complete body, in an affective, existential level, at first to then give way to a corporal I at a rational level. When the mother loves the child and loves his body, the child will also love himself and will be able to see himself reflected in the mirror and recognize himself as a complete body because he is seeing that body that his mother loves. This way the mother's body operates as the baby's experience organizer helping him to leave that state of initial indifferentiation and to build his own body image separated from her body and of the others.

Piaget and Wallon state that a poor corporal experience in these early days of a child's life would give way to an impoverishment of the subsequent representative thought because the thought is enriched, is fed by the development of images and symbols built from the interrelation with the other and with the physical surroundings. When the child has the opportunity to express himself freely through the spontaneous play of his body in a loving interrelation his experience is lived on a pleasure core that becomes the source of new and enriching experiences.

Retaking our initial approach where we pointed out the nature of I as an instance that is in contact with reality with knowledge, with learning, with action, at the same time it lacks knowledge on himself, it is important to point out that the psychic structure has other components represented by unconscious levels that the I does not control. Elements of assessment, norms, prohibitions, archetypes, etc., that Freud called the Super I and that operate in a determining way in the construction of the identity and autonomy of the child in these early stages as well as in his future development. This we will deal with further on.

The process of recognition and replacement: foundation of psychic development.

Identifications imply a very complex process since they have a dynamic and conflicting character. To identify oneself with somebody means to take on characteristics from the other, internalize and turn them into something of one's own. It does not mean to make a copy but it is part of a process in which the subject loses an important emotional and significant object and takes on the attributes of the loved one avoiding in this way their partial loss. It is clear that when we talk about the loss we are not talking of the real loss of the one we love but of a symbolic loss which means that the other stops fulfilling the emotional function that he initially had. An example that clarifies this concept is the nature of the relation that the baby originally has with his mother.

As we know, in the beginning of life the child has a total relation with the mother that is going to represent for both an absolute value. The baby is going to overwhelm the mother's life and the child is going to feel that he is everything for her. Seeing it from the mother's side, the relation with her baby is a mirror relation that gives her a very pleasant sensation of total unity, since biologically the baby is a part of her and in her fantasy, because she was a daughter and had that same sensation with her own mother.

Nevertheless, there comes a time when the son is going to notice, and it is desirable that this happens, that he does not hold a total affective place in his mother's life, but that it is relative one, because there is the father, who cuts off that entire relation so to say, because part of the mother's affection is deposited on other objects of love, that makes relative the absolute role that the son dreamed of having in her mother's life. Regarding the father it is not only the concrete person, but what represents as an element that is out of the dual relation between mother and son: the mother's affective world to where she belongs, her work, her likings, her friends, other children, etc., that aim at the outside of that relation.

The experience of this loss represents a painful moment but very important in the child's life, because it will give rise to a complex process of replacement that is going to represent the search in a future of what he lost in the past. This would be a sign of psychic development because, somehow, the history of the human beings from this perspective is the history of all the objects lost throughout our life. The loss in a psychological sense is a sum because it allows the subject to take some features from the lost object that are in a certain way, the contents of the learning. For example the child does not only learn the knowledge of the educator but the features of that carrier of education which represents part of the identification process. The other meaningful ones represent identifying roles with which the I gets comfortable taking on certain features and thus causing the biggest processes of learning and development.

This way of conceptualizing the process of creating the identity, we can articulate it with the Psychology concepts of Walloon and Piaget that are more familiar to us, educators. From these theoretical systems we understand that the child takes hold of the object of knowledge by assimilation that is to say, by incorporating the features of the object producing a movement that generates a conflict and an internal alteration of the cognitive structures, (accommodation) and an adjustment or balance between what comes from outside and what he has been able to incorporate and adapt to his own structures. Thus it builds the psyche, that I linked to knowledge that acts in contact with reality and gives account of learning, language, and culture.

The different ways of relating with others shape in the child different interpretations of the reality that represent a set of beliefs and values that are going to be assumed by the I and from which he will obtain identification. But as we already mentioned before, this identification is not a copy but in the creation of I there is a level of autonomy. For example, the mother who is a fundamental affective object is going to generate the child's identity through words, what the mother tells him about "what is" and "how it is". But a time is going to come in which the son is going to detach himself from that maternal speech, because what the mother tells him, for example: "you are the most beautiful thing in the world", "you are my life", "I adore you more than anybody else", is going to hold a difference between what she says and the way in which she acts with her child. At the same time, the child is going to perceive a difference between what he thinks and feels what he lives and what it is said of him. It is indeed that difference that is going to generate autonomy. Between the mother and the child there is going to be a discordance and is in that space where the development of the unconscious begins.

From another angle, the child always comes to fulfill the fantasies of the parents. But this is not always the case because there is always going to be discordance between what the child is and what the parents wish him to be. If this was not so, if the child fulfilled all the mother's expectations, there would be serious problems of development because he would not have a space to grow.

The mother, through words, through everything she tells him generates the child's identity, determining the way in which he sees himself, his I, that is to say, who he is for himself. But there is a field that is not integrated that is not expressed in that I nor in what the mother has said that it is going to generate the child's unconscious structures. In that place of the psyche is going to rule an opposition to the I, to this I who is ruled by the principle of reality, according to Freud, and that it is going to be in permanent conflict with that other part that it is ruled by the principle of pleasure, that is going to be expressed through fantasy and the field of human's being desire. This instance is related to what Freud designates as the It that represents the pulse aspect of the psychic structure and that is present from the birth.

The It is under the control of the principle of pleasure that seeks the immediate fulfillment of desires, of sex and aggression drives, without attending to the laws of logic or of causality; it does not know the contradictions and it has no notion of time or space. Just the opposite occurs with the principle of reality that rules the I that is handled with a conscious logic, with language, and takes into account reality and its logical laws of functioning.

As we can notice these instances of the psyche are troubled. A part struggles for the fulfillment of the child's desires to annul the distance with the mother that was established at the moment the child noticed that he is not everything for her and that he occupies a relative place in the maternal relation. But on the other hand there is a part of that I called Super I that rules over the I because he has a series of values, norms and prohibitions that generate in the I a determined orientation. Therefore the decisions that generate the identity of that I, do not conform a complete I, making its nature essentially troubled, because a part of him feels and thinks in one way and the other part does it in a different way. The Super I would represent the action. This way when a person thinks and does something, the other regulatory part assesses its meaning. The Super I represents the parent's norms, their normative aspects with which the I has identified himself, but that generate conflict between the two instances of the psyche.

Taking into account all of the above, we see that the I is not a monolithic instance as is considered by other theoretical systems, but in its genesis and development there are going to arise and integrate other zones that have different functions and are going to enter in conflict with this part of the conscious I. On the other hand, the structure of the conscience leaves behind a series of decisions that become unconscious. For example the development of that I as we have seen, derives from another one, even from those elements that are not incorporated to that identity, but that remain in the unconscious one, either by ignorance or repression. For that reason we have said that the I is, somehow, the son of ignorance.

It is not necessary to resort to theory to verify, in our own daily experience, that our psychic life is not transparent for us nor for others, and that we have internal conflicts that are not easy to solve because we do not know the causes that motivate them. Nobody can ignore that in our behavior there are unconscious motivations. As teachers we often feel the need to be able to go beyond the obvious, to try to understand the causes of the behavior of our children, to be able to respond to the innumerable questions that generate on us their way of acting, their fears, afflictions, aggressiveness, timidity, specially in the cases in which all this discomfort prevents an adequate development.

Though it is true, our function as teachers it is not to reveal the unconscious of the child. It is important to be able to handle certain knowledge related to the shaping psyche so as not to fall in simplifications that reduce the possibility of orientating our actions in the correct direction. Above all one must try to avoid actions that far from helping complicate the resolution of conflicts.

What gives structure to the I and that other instance of the I that in psychoanalysis is called Super- I, is given by an set of unconscious contents and by the relation with the parents that is basically problematic. We have already seen that at birth the infant and the mother have a relation where each one represents everything for the other. It is a moment that the baby lives with the satisfaction of being important for his mother, as an ideal situation in which he feels loved and attached to her in an unconditional way. This basic feeling is the one that remains registered in the unconscious for life, what every human being would like to perpetuate. But very soon he is going to realize that it cannot be because he is going to discover that the absolute value that he felt he was for his mother and the unconditional love that he thought he'd have for ever is not going to be so: he is going to be loved but also questioned, that is to say, the mother's affection is going to start being conditional, depending on what he does, or he does not do. Further on, he is going to discover that there are other people who the mother also loves, the father, other siblings, friends, etc., for which this initial absolute value it is going to be remodeled, allowing future psyche movements to determine his personal development.

In this process the more important parental figure is the father that the child sees as an element of interposition between him and the love for his mother, the figure that causes this split, that makes relative his role in that initial symbiotic relation and imposes prohibitions. This paternal function is precisely what allows the creation of the Super-I through a slow, painful, and complex process because it represents the separation and the ending of the mother's symbiotic relation. The child incorporates and internalizes the ideals, the norms and the prohibitions, through an idealization and identification process with the father figure, that is going to allow him to think that he can not “be” the father but he can become “like” his father and to have everything that he possesses when will becomes an adult. He is going to pass from an ideal I that occupied an absolute place in the maternal relation to an I with ideals, an idealized I, because when the father emerges all the value that the child had, feeling that he was everything for his mother is going to be placed on the father with whom he is going to identify and appropriate, internalizing his idealizations to try to occupy in the future the place he lost. The norms, values and paternal ideals are what will make up that other regulatory instance that is called Super –I .

The father's function in this sense is essential, because if a child was limited by the father - in the case of an absent or repressive father, - he would always be linked to the mother, and he would grow only on the loss of that emotional object. However to not to comply with the paternal function does not mean to be a bad father, in the traditional sense of the term but in the sense of not fulfilling the function of cutting, of separating the symbiotic relation with the mother. For example, when he does not play a role, there is no meaning in the relation to pass it on to the son so that he will perceive it that he is not everything for his mother.

It is important to point out that when we say “father”, we are not only referring to the real figure, but to the “paternal function”. For example, a widowed mother can transmit the paternal function to her son, as long as she recognizes in herself the importance of the man for the woman. Just like when we speak of the mother, we are referring to the person that fulfills the “maternal function”, that is to say, that supplies to the son the field of culture, of society, of the outside.

This differentiation between the person and the function that it exerts is important in child development, because for the son to be able to be a father, he has to understand that his father was not born as a father, but some time before he was a son and some time later he will be a grandfather. That is to say, he is complying with a function. Otherwise, he cannot grow because to develop, he has to know that his dad received the father function from his own father, and he is going to pass it on to him as he will have to do later on. This has a fundamental importance in the child's development since it will lead him to a dynamics that allows him to wish what his father has: an object of love, to develop his own sexuality, to engender children, going from an absolute place to a social and family structure, to relations that will crack that total fullness. This is what determines the child's development, because it allows a separation between the present I and the future I with its own ideals that generate the tension of the desire to be, to live, to be transformed to be able to accomplish those ideals, as Maud Mannoni says “to grow in his own name”.

Conflict as the motor of development

To comply with these statutes of the development of the psyche is not an easy task. Quite the contrary, it requires a lot of time and a sustained effort for many years perhaps all life, because all this that is built in the first years of our existence, later has a singular evolution in each subject, depending on the multiple elaborations that each one can carry out based on his future life experiences. However, in our case we will give special attention to these first years of life, when the nuclear elements of identity are built.

In the first place, the brief review that we have carried out of some concepts that sustain the development of the child's psyche, without pretending to settle a theme as complex as this, prevents us in principle, from assuming a simplified attitude towards the conflicts that the children display in these early years. In the second place we can realize that the development is not linear, but on the contrary, it is conformed by contradictory dialectic and ambivalent movements that generate conflicts in the inner psyche and constitute the sign of growth in the human being, as we have the adequate conditions to solve them. This is so that if there were no conflicts development would not be possible. Genetic Psychology tells us so, from the theory of intelligence of Piaget and the theory of personality stated by Wallon, both demonstrated that conflict is an inherent part of the development of the structures of knowledge.

In the field of affectivity, as we have seen, psychology accounts for the creation of the psyche from a theoretical system that points out its troubled and enormously complex nature, that explains the genesis of a psychic structure as a slow process, full of contradictions between the different instances that make it up, whose integration occurs in a slow process until it achieves the conquest of a strong I that allows the child to achieve an adaptive balance between his impulses and the demands that his social life imposes upon him.

The child's life in these years is populated by an internal world full of contradictory, complex and ambivalent feelings that produce a great load of anxiety caused by the difficult process of acquisitions and conquests that allow him to go from a state of absolute dependence of the adults to a relative independence. In this passage there is a confused world of contradictions in which, on one hand, he tends towards immediate satisfaction and on the other he feels limited by external prohibitions, at first and then by his own caution and the reproof that the other part of his I exerts upon him when the norms and moral values have been internalized.

Psychoanalysis, as we have already seen, symbolizes these aspects of internal experience with the terms of It, I and Super I, conscious and unconscious as a form of ordering and understanding the mental processes. Which does not mean a real division of our mind but different aspects of it that have different functions whose development and integration are signs of the construction and development of the psychic structure.

Two dimensions of the conflict

From this theoretical system there are two dimensions in the concept of conflict:

A) Internal, intra-psychic or intra-subjective dimension.

B) External, interpersonal dimension.

The Internal dimension is linked to the subjective process of development that, as we have already pointed out is a contradictory, ambivalent and controversial process. Therefore, when we speak of child conflicts it should be clear to us this differentiation, among other things, to be able to determine which conflicts are a natural part of the process of development, and their difference with symptoms that is to say, pathologies that deserve another operating and theoretical treatment. Differentiating these categories is of great use for educators, to be able to determine what types of conflicts we can handle through an educational intervention, and which deserve professional psychological or psychiatric attention, and that exceed our role and possibilities.

When we speak of external or interpersonal conflicts, we refer to all the conflictive reactions caused by situation of collision of interests or motivations between two or more children, between a child and the group or between the child and the adult. As we know, at these ages there are frequent troubled reactions and they deserve a pedagogical intervention.

The nature of the human being defies simple analyses and skilful divisions. Therefore, we cannot draw a dividing line between external and internal conflicts, since the characteristics of child development, their own contradictions and ambivalent feelings, their incapacity to discern and conceptualize, predispose the children to behavioral demonstrations that require the guidance from the educator. But let's go step by step.

Intra- subjective conflict

For the child to develop his intelligence and thinking from the construction of sensory motor schemes to operational thinking, the educator should stimulate the creation and the passage from a cognitive conflict to another of greater complexity because, otherwise, the child would not be able to develop his thinking. Knowledge and learning are not acquired based on a process of progressive and gradual accumulation as many would consider it but by increasingly complex experiences caused by the conflict that takes place between the child's own structures of knowledge and the new knowledge that he must incorporate from the outside. The development of intelligence and learning depends on the overcoming of those conflicts. Therefore, we cannot consider conflict as a harmful element that must be eliminated, but quite the contrary.

Something similar happens in the field of psychic development. The creation of the psychic structure shares the same order, the same regulation. Ever since the human being is born he must confront conflicting, intra subjective situations implicit in the process of creating his internal reality and linked to the demands imposed by reality, the others, specially parents and the adult world, embodied in culture, the moral norms of behavior with which he will have to deal with in the future

This learning is not given by simple imitation because if we explained it that way we would not be able to understand the reason why the child is going to adhere to norms and prohibitions that by no means are gratifying to him, but on the contrary, limit his natural need to obtain immediate satisfaction to his desires and needs. As we have previously seen, those norms, that moral regulation is incorporated by a process of loss and replacement of the emotional object through idealizations and identifications with the parental beings that have a great meaning for the child (parents, teachers, brothers...). In order not to partially lose the object, he takes the features and the norms of the other as a way of retaining it, of making it his own. This is what we saw in synthetic terms regarding the creation of identity and the child's process of autonomy.

All this dynamics has as purpose the individualization, since at first we constitute a peculiar unit with the other that causes an enormous pleasure manifested in the fantasy of unity, of totality, of absolute value, that remains relegated in the unconscious. There is where we find contradictions and ambivalence to which we are subject in this process of building identity and autonomy. This cannot be given without attending to the confrontation between our desire of unit, of the whole and the demand of autonomy claimed by our own development. In this process we face conflicts that are always painful to overcome but if we don't adequate do so, they would generate an stagnation of growth.

In sum, we can indicate the most significant problems than distress a child at these ages: frustration from weaning, dependence and impotence in front of the adult, aggressive impulses caused by dentition, destructive impulses derived from the new possibilities allowed to him by the ability to walk, the control of his sphincters, the ambivalent feelings of love and hatred, the feeling of guilt, the feeling of exclusion from the paternal relation, the acceptance of his place in the family structure, the anguish of losing loved objects, the rivalry and fraternal jealousy, the acceptance of norms and statutes of moral behavior, the adaptation to school reality and the feeling of abandonment, etc., to name the most important. All these problems are expressed in the conflictive behaviors that educators know so well and that represent the more important and heaviest burden of our educational action, as the child's good performance in the field of cognitive learning completely depends on his relative emotional stability. The way to handle these conflicts is decisive in a double sense: the preventive one and the formative although both aspects constitute an interdependent unit.

When we speak of prevention we do not do it in the traditional sense that would suppose the elimination of the conflict. It is about an action that would allow the child to resolve it adequately to be able to gain access to another, more advanced, level of confrontation, of an action that allows him to solve the existing contradiction between his desires and the need to satisfy them and the demands and limits created by reality represented by that instance of the I that symbolizes the norms and values, (Super I) that in a first moment would came from outside and have been assumed during his development. In this slow process a group of meanings that the child does not know because he does not know exactly how they have been formed as they have been given to him by the others begin to remain in the unconscious. Also because the mechanisms of defense of the own I have eliminated from the conscience contents that were rejected by the Super I that represents the ideals, aspirations, moral prohibitions, etc., and exercises self-censorship. In basic terms it could be said that it is a confrontation between the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality. This means from the conception that we have been using that the adequate evolution of the child is characterized by the diminishing of the principle of pleasure (that seeks in a direct way the discharge of impulses and the fulfillment of desires) and the increasing adaptation to reality that will allow him to build a strong I capable of controlling his own behavior according to the demands imposed by social and cultural life.

What should be our contribution to obtain this purpose from the field of education? The first thing to determine is the difference existing between normal conflicts of development and the symptoms, as both phenomena have their own characteristics and they require specific intervention. In the later cases the teachers should not act as therapists, and it is important to know how to perceive them to be able to take the decision to derive the cases to specialized professionals.

Development conflicts and their symptoms

Many approaches used by teachers when looking for guidance to handle these aspects of development in a conscious and responsible way. However, before we look at them we need to clearly differentiate what is a development conflict and what is a symptom. From our perspective a symptom is a symbol but as opposed to a drawing or a word that are also symbols, this is problematic, because it expresses a content repressed by the child – or the adult – that cannot be dealt with in a direct way. Conscience rejects that content of desire and expresses it through a symbol that the person is unaware of. For example, the child that wets his bed, has a phobia to animals, resists eating solid food, masturbates compulsively, etc., does not know why this is happening to him. In addition, the teacher or the psychologist does not know it because it is only the visible part of a structure that it is not seen and is what is producing it. A graphic example that clarifies this concept is the resemblance with an iceberg in which we can only see the upper part, the one that is above the sea level but the other part that is hidden is invisible to the eyes of the observer. The tip of the iceberg would represent the conduct, the obvious thing while the invisible part represents that other part of the structure of which behavior is part but that is not seen. The theoretical systems that work with the modification of behavior respond to the visible part trying to get rid of the symptom but without doing alterations in the submerged area that is connected to the behavior.

An example can help clarify this. A boy who wants to sleep with his mom and does it only when dad is away (a situation that it is very common) begins to shape a fear to the father that he cannot overcome, therefore he represses it and he transfers it toward other objects for example, animals or darkness, etc., or passes from one object to another, becoming more complex until the awareness of the origin of the symptom is lost. He makes different combinations to develop a web of representations until a symbol is formed that expresses contents that he does not know but that lead to the original conflict that arose between what is repressed and what represses it: that is the symptom.

Let us take the same symptom (the desire to sleep with the mother or with the parents and the prohibition to do so) and let us see the difference between the symptom and the conflict of development. In the case of the symptom, there was a displacement of the fear to the father towards other objects (because the fear to the father is rejected) and that fear remained stagnant, paralyzed in the fear to the animal or to another concrete object. But there is a possibility that the child can turn that desire into a permanent yearning that he is not going to be able to satisfy with his mother but he is going to be able to do it with a doll, or a teddy bear, or any other emotional object in such a way that the desire circulates towards other objects and the fundamental object is substituted by other objects up to the moment in the future when he will be able to satisfy his desire with his couple. As we can see it is not a matter of eliminating the desire but to try to satisfy in another way, not through a symptom.

Educators should give the child the conditions to articulate his desires and yearnings between the different instances of the psyche, between the conscious and unconscious elements in such a way that those conflicts and their solution will encourage the development of a mature personality. This implies, in the first term, to observe the child with the instruments that we have (the knowledge on child development) so that this observation can guide our actions and we should always be aware that all the troubled behaviors of the children have a meaning and they comply a function. A meaning, because they are manifestations of something that is happening inside them and that the children do not know and their function is to promote development.

Perhaps the most powerful feeling of pain for human beings is the experience of abandonment; this fantasy strongly presses the hearts of children in these ages, and the one that causes a set of demonstrations that configure their anguishes. We previously said that development is directly related to the experience of loss not in real terms but referred to the function played by objects of affection. This will last all life because it can happen that an adult encloses himself in a symbiotic relation to relive or to update his desire to be everything for the other person. In this case, there is no personal development because the couple is self sufficient and personal growth is lived as a danger, as personal development becomes a threat of loss of the other. As there are not lacks, something missing, the psychic movements that tend to cover those lacks are cancelled, or what is the same, to substitute that lack with new contents that they develop the person. In this sense, we can say that the human, or what is the same, to substitute that lack with new context to develop the person. In this sense, we can say that the human being is the sum of all the objects symbolically lost during his life. The loss is not bad, above all when it allows the child boy to take some characteristics of the beloved object as a way of to heal that loss. Thus the contents of the learning are acquired, which is part of the process of identification. It is clear that this process is complex and painful, and the task of the educators, in general terms, is to facilitate the conditions so that the boy can carry it out in an environment of stability, security, affection and confidence.

Creating the conditions so that the child can solve his intra psyche conflicts adequately means in the first place to be aware that each one possesses a private way of processing his experiences, a singular way to form to metabolize the contents of his internal world, that does not allow in any case to apply homogeneous procedures that would be adequate and efficient for at all instances. It is important to emphasize this that seems obvious because we all know that there are theoretical approaches that present more or less standard solutions for similar behavior demonstrations, because their objective is to eliminate the symptoms through mechanisms based on positive or negative reinforcements or even applying punishment. Subjectivity is conceived as a problem, something that we must make disappear to avoid that demonstration.

From a psychodynamic point of view, subjectivity is the base from which we set out to make another thing grow. The need for the child to clarify his affectivity rises in such a way that he can work out and elaborate his conflict. This supposes to be able to perform internal movements that allow carrying out replacements, identifications and displacements that are a sign of psychic development. In these ages as we know, the verbal expression of the child is scarce, insufficient to carry out an elaboration based on conceptualization and language but he has a privileged means of expression: play.

Play as the natural setting for conflict elaboration

Independently of the theoretical perspective that each one may have, it can be confirmed that play is what sustains child development. For example from Genetic psychology the outline and structures detailed by Piaget and Wallon in theoretical abstract terms, we are able “to see” them personified through play activities, that is to say, play would be the concrete version of what has been theoretically expressed. From the psychodynamic point of view, this is also the same: all the structures that allude to unconscious fantasies, to identification, to identity, are organized through play or more exactly taking Winnicott´s expression of “play”. This use of the infinitive represents the idea of an open activity, of a child opening to the world where there is a constant exchange between structures that are developing and the possibilities that reality gives him. We could say that play is the way that the child has to think, to judge and to feel.

Due to the importance of this topic, we are going to study it more in depth further on, but at this time, we consider that it would be useful to state some aspects related to the playful activity of children as a creative element of new structures that encourage elaborating conflicts and overcoming them.

The first thing we should point out is that play is not something that the child does but, rather, the way he lives, his “habitat”, as from the way he plays we can know aspects linked to his emotional health. Everything that happens inside the child's mind is determining his way of playing: it is his secret language, the path that connects him with his conscious and unconscious world that is hard for him to express with words and that in most cases he has motivations that he does not know. Children have feelings that can only be recognize through playful fantasies that they represent in reality, by means of which they solve problems that have remained pending in the past and current worries. Therefore, it is important that educators learn how to go on that road and share that language to be able to go along with them and to facilitate the task of solving the development conflicts through play, establishing a bridge between his fantastic universe and reality.

The play in childhood

To attain a satisfactory quality of life it is necessary that we integrate our inner and outer world in a suitable way: that is the challenge of human development in this early stage. When we are very young those worlds remain for a time separated and reality often is presented as rough and unsatisfactory. For that reason we make use of fantasy to try to increase our capacity to confront reality.

Play has an initial nature, that is to say, it constitutes the base of development from the point of view of experience because the child is organizing himself through it. What conceptually is known as a system of presence and absence has its origin in apparently very simple games but that constitute the base of functions of symbolic organization and they promote the process of discovery of other beings and of his own I. For example, when the baby or a small child plays manipulating food and becomes dirty with it, he organizes himself as a body being mixing with it and at the same time differentiating from what comes from the outside. In a game of peek a boo that the child often plays with the mother and adults he discovers himself by being perceived by the others and discovers the others at the same time; this allows him to organize himself in relation to the other and the other in relation with him, something that encourages the formation of his individuality. On the other hand, it provides him with the necessary security because, although his mother and he don't see each other for a moment, the emotional contact is not lost as there is always a reunion. This prepares him to be able to assume the mother's absence for longer periods of time and prevents the child from feeling excessive anxiety before temporary separations from her, being able to experience through play that is not necessary for her to be present all the time to have the certainty that the contact is not lost.

Another fundamental function of play further on is “to clarify affectivity”. In fantasy in the unconscious, there are no rules and neither contradiction nor rational logic, or limitations of any kind; but when the child represents his fantasies by means of a playful activity he tests the limits that reality imposes upon him. For example, aggressive impulses and the desires to satisfy them allow the child when he plays to realize the consequences of his conduct. If a child has desires to attack his brother and he fantasizes with striking and destroying him, when this fantasy is done in the symbolic game destroying his doll, he will soon be able “to see” what happens when he is left to answer his need to satisfy his aggressive impulses and to know what his desire is all about. This would not be possible if the desire had been kept in the background of pure fantasy that would cause an accumulation of emotional tension that probably would have its expression in aggressive behaviors toward his brother, another child or towards himself, by the guilt that his own desire inflicts upon him.

Another example will clarify the role of play in learning control. If, as often happens, a child builds constructions and knocks them down not only does he have the opportunity to express his aggressive impulses. We have to keep in mind that while the child builds a structure he has to consider, despite his imaginative desires, the limitations that reality imposes upon him because if he does not respect the laws of gravity, etc. he would not be able to obtain his purpose. When he has built his construction and he decides to destroy it what he tries to reaffirm is his control in an environment that has puts up resistance to him. But when he knocks down the construction he realizes that he can only exercise that absolute control in a chaotic situation and he will learn through this type of activities to harmonize the demands of his internal reality with those present in the outside reality.

The hide and seek game fulfils a function of reassurance. The success of the activity depends on his capability to reach a “safe” place by his own means a “base” that symbolizes the house, the home. This unconsciously means for the child the possibility to go into the world (avoiding the dangers posed by his “chasers”), and to be able to return later to a safe place.

Due to his age and limitations in the way of thinking the child does not consciously ask himself about the problems that affect him nor does he choose the games in a premeditated way to try to solve some conflict but clinical and theoretical studies of children offer us information and evidence on the meaning of the play activity of children as the creator of new structures and as a setting to solve conflicts. This is why, from the psychodynamic point of view, childhood therapy is carried out through play.

There are certain characteristics that we should keep in mind regarding children's games especially on the way they operate. There are complex emotional situations that deeply impress the child and that he is not able to understand at one time this is why many times he divides his activity in more manageable fragments representing only some aspect of the situation as if it was the only significant episode. At least, this is what adults often think. For example, if a child has suffered a commotion because he saw a car accident, possibly he will play representing some aspect of what he has experienced but that does not mean that there would be other elements from the same situation that he would need to develop in due time. Another characteristic that is always present is the repetition of the same game, especially when it is a matter of solitary play. Leaving aside cases where children play in a compulsive way with a single object in which case it is not a game but an obsessive repetition of some well known thing, all children show a tendency to repeat repeatedly an activity with the same concentration and initial enthusiasm. We frequently see how children that are in the age to control sphincters delight themselves insistently filling and emptying some container with sand, rice, blocks or small toys.

The theme of sphincter control that so many times is presented to us, parents and educators, as a difficult problem to undertake constitutes an important worry for the child because it is the first object that comes out of his body. He feels a lot of curiosity and at the same time it produces anguish in him to know if what he is losing is valuable. On the other hand, the anxiety of parents and adults regarding everything that surrounds this fact (when he does it, where, etc.) and the power they exert in relation to the child as to the moment when he should begin to control it, or the strict prohibition to explores his excrements produce in him an important conflict between the desire to feel as an owner and to rule his own body and the paternal authority that imposes norms and prohibitions. The child feels placed in a role of passiveness, forced to do what his parents tell him. This internal reality is the one that the child devises with games as the one mentioned, trying to compensate on one hand the situation of feeling pushed to do what their parents tell him, and on the other, trying to control the anxiety he feels and the fantasy of losing his excrements. This game of filling and emptying a container shows him that nothing is lost for ever, and to play with water and sand allows him to substitute satisfactorily the exploration and manipulation of his excrements.

The repetition of a determined game has the value of allowing the child to dominate difficult experiences and to calm his anguish. So that if a child insists on the same activity for some time, it is probable that it is not easy for him to solve some conflict that causes him anguish. In this sense, educators should be alert of the family and personal situation of each child to monitor his emotional process through their play activity, and to determine the convenience of our intervention in a specific moment.

Teacher's interventions in children's play 

The moment and the way of intervening in the child play activity is a theme that resists the application of fixed rules and generalizations. Each child establishes his singular way to solve his internal conflicts even without knowing that he is doing it. They choose to play in reality their fantasies without being aware that they are trying to solve their anguish or the frustrations caused by a reality that is hostile to them. The most important thing that educators should keep in mind is that activity that may seem disturbing, has a sense and some internal laws that should be respected because as long as the child has freely chosen what he wants to play, that activity possesses a bond with a set of desires and impulses that represent him and it is exactly this link that turns the activity in a generator of new learning.

Many times our pedagogical vocation prompts us to intervene with questions, explanations or suggestions that in our understanding help the child in the achievement of specific acquisitions, promote the development or the passage into another type of game, to limit the repetition, when in reality the best thing would be to leave the child to solve in “his own way” the development of the activity and to decide the time he is going to remain in it. This does not mean that the teacher should never intervene. What one must try to avoid is to interfere in the process that the child is carrying out “to improve it”, asking questions, stating our approval or showing an excessive interest to discover the content of his fantasies because in this way we are eliminating the possibility for the child to clarify them by himself.

There are cases in which the intervention of the teacher is of fundamental importance to make the child's process evolve. For example, when we perceive that he is stagnating in an activity that far from allowing him a development and an opening towards new things, keeps him in a dynamics of compulsive repetition with a single object, or he plays in a much-reduced area. In those cases knowing the cause of his difficulty to link to something new that can be related to a type of symbiotic relation with the mother, the teacher can intervene first trying to share the game with the child and also to stimulate little by little, by incorporating other elements, an opening towards a more open field. Similarly, the child that takes refuge in pure fantasy without keeping in mind the reality that we see, needs the teacher as the bridge between his fantasy world and reality, stimulating the desire to manipulate objects with which he can link in a creative way, without pressures that could reinforce his shyness. In these cases, the use of mediating elements such as balls or ropes is of great help because they increase the relation with the teacher and they prepare the road for closeness and an exchange that increases with time.

There are innumerable situations that are presented daily in the school environment and that deserve the intervention of the educator. It is understood for intervention not only the active incorporation to the activity of the child, but also as an attitude of presence through looks, gestures or some adequate observations. It is a matter of avoiding radical actions: either being fully incorporated in the game and transforming it, or remaining out of it totally. Finally, we can indicate that the construction process of the psyche has its concrete expression in play because it is what the internal movement of the child psychological processes represents, and represents him as a person. Everything that allows play to flow and generate learning (and we are not only referring to the cognitive learning, but fundamentally to the emotional contents) is constructive for the child in itself and implies promoting and increasing his development.