Yet these are not all the manifestations. Childish anger has its
wretched aspect. There is keen suffering in these early experiences of
thwarted will and purpose. A little boy, rather more than a year old,
used when crossed to throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his
head; and his brother, when fourteen months old, would similarly throw
himself on the floor, bang the back of his head, biting the carpet as
before mentioned. This act of throwing oneself on the floor, which is
common about this age and is apparently quite instinctive, is the
expression of the utter _dejection_ of misery. C.’s attitude when
crossed, gathered into a heap on the floor, was eloquent of this
infantile despair. Such suffering is the immediate outcome of thwarted
purpose, and must be distinguished from the moral feeling of shame which
often accompanies it.
Such stormy outbursts vary no doubt from child to child. Thus C.’s
sister in her angry moments did not bite or roll on the floor, but would
dance about and stamp. Some children show little if anything of this
savage furiousness. Among those that do show it, it is often a temporary
phenomenon only.
This anger, it is to be noted, is due to check, and would show itself to
some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a
child will become angry, resentful, and despairingly miserable if
another child gets effective hold of something which he wants to have.
Yet it is undoubtedly true, as we shall see, that these little storms
are most frequently called up by the imposition of authority, and are a
manifestation of what we call a defiant attitude.
This slight examination may suffice to show that with the child self,
its appetites, its satisfactions, are the centre of its existence, the
pivot on which its action turns. I do not forget the real and striking
differences here, the specially brutal form of boys’ anger as compared
with that of girls, the partial atrophy of some of these impulses,
_e.g._, jealousy, in the more gentle and affectionate type of child. Yet
there seems to be little doubt that these are among the commonest and
most pronounced characteristics of the first years.
Evolution will, no doubt, help us to understand much of this. If the
order of development of the individual follows and summarises that of
the race, we should expect the child to show a germ at least of the
passionateness, the quarrelsomeness of the brute and of the savage
before he shows the moral qualities distinctive of civilised man. That
he often shows so close a resemblance to the savage and to the brute
suggests how little ages of civilised life with its suppression of these
furious impulses have done to tone down the ancient and carefully
transmitted instincts. The child at birth, and for a long while after,
may then be said to be the representative of wild untamed nature, which
it is for education to subdue and fashion into something higher and
better.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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