‘Psychoanalysis and developmental psychology: Splitting the difference’.

This chapter examines the relation between developmental psychology, as a body of knowledge, assumptions and forms of practice, and psychoanalysis, situating it historically starting with the Child Study Movement initiated by Charles Darwin. The differing populations of concern are often split into ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’, but are also based on different assumptions about methodology and scientific truth (interpretive methods and the search for objectivity), different notions of cause and effect and relations between past and present (in psychoanalysis, this is never one of simple determination). Urwin argues that subjective consequences of life events are a complex product of meanings produced through previous life history, present circumstances and constructions engendered through the individual’s own phantasies. She stresses that there is always a relation between cognitive and emotional processes, the latter being something that developmental psychology has avoided. She describes how this pervasive split between cognition and emotion has come about, through a careful critique of the over-rationalized view of various developmental psychologists, and especially through the re-examination of the work of Piaget. She concludes that developmental psychology needs a reworking of the relation between rationality, phantasy and social practices, something that could be empirically understood through a renewed interest in children’s ‘mistakes’.