Understanding Childhood

Without a proper understanding of childhood, it won't matter how many fortunes we have made, how stellar our reputation, or outwardly cheerful our families, we will be doomed to founder on the rocks of our own psychological complexities; we will probably be sunk by anxiety, a lack of trust, some kind of dread, paranoia, rage and self-loathing, those widespread legacies of misunderstood childhoods. Well-meaning people sometimes wonder, with considerable hope, if Sigmund Freud has not after all by now been proved 'wrong'. The tricky and humiliating answer is that no, he never actually will be in the substance of his insight. Freud's eternal contribution has been to alert us to the many ways in which adult emotional lives sit on top of childhood experiences and how we are made sick by not knowing our own histories. In a saner world, we would be left in no doubt and even partially alerted while we were living through them that our childhoods hold the secrets to our identities. We would know that the one subject we need to excel at above all is one not yet flagged up by the school system the subject called 'My Childhood', and the sign that we have graduated in the topic with honours is when at last we can know and think non-defensively about how we are (in small ways and large) a little bit mad, and what exactly in the distant past might have made us so.