At 01:12 PM 9/23/98 +0200, Henk wrote:
>Edryce Reynolds wrote:
>> What I do not understand is how/why you dismiss childhood (Clinton's or
>> anyone's) as having an influence on the adult's behavior. What do you
>> do in "history of childhood" anyway?
>
>You seem to assume that "history of childhood" is about how adult's
>behavior is influenced by childhood experiences. But history of childhood,
>in most people's definition, is not primarily about this. It is primarily
>about studying the actual conditions of childhood in the past, and how
>such conditions in the past came to change.
>
>Of course it may also be interesting to discuss how the present behavior
>of Bill Clinton (or anyone else) may be caused by his/her personal
>childhood experiences. But I maintain that such a discussion does NOT
>belong in this list. Such matters belong to the realm of psychiatry or
>(as suggested by Lloyd deMause) psychohistory. These specialisms do
>provide their own email lists for discussing such matters.
>
>In this context people do not, as you wrote, "threaten to act like a
>parent". They just plead for respecting this list's specific history of
>childhood orientation.
When any other academic field, from Philosophy to Physics, now
recognizes that this is a psychological universe, I would be
disappointed to see history lose relevance to the academic
world because it fails to recognize this. Our stories, "history",
is the result of our psychology, just as many doctors would now
agree that our illnesses are, in tandem with our genetics and
our neuroscientific wiring. Studying children, especially, in an
antiseptic environment where we refuse to allow their true
stories to emerge, would seem to me intellectually dishonest
and ultimately fruitless and incomplete at best. As a philosophical
Phenomenologist, I would see such a study as highly inadequate.
Julienne
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