To what extent are today's „children‟ different from those of old-time? A psychoanalytic contribution to the debate on the plurality of childhoods

Abstract

We intuit that children would no longer have a childhood. Childhood, commonly regarded as a natural stage of life, would be in the process of disappearing. To examine this intuition, we resort to the studies of Philippe Ariès (1960) about the emergence of the modern childhood feeling and those ones of Neil Postman‟s (1982) about its current and gradual disappearance. We wonder if there would be a more appropriate feeling of childhood to the development of „children‟ than any other. In other words, we question if there would be an „adapted‟ childhood. For this, we make use of the conceptual tools of psychoanalysis. We subvert the classic imaginary pairs adult-child and adult minor, typical of the field of developmental psychologies, and propose to think about the educational process considering the pair of terms old-infants. In so doing, we are leaving aside the idea of a childlike essence, and
presenting the thesis of a three-phase childhood operating in the field of word and language. This symbolic operator is responsible for the institution within the educational process of the always-plural childhoods, according to times and geographies, as well as for the childish, no longer understood as a qualifying adjective, but rather as a noun as conceived by Sigmund Freud.