Mapping the Mind - Rita Carter 2010

The children in the child
The Landscape of Mind
PART I

Children may also fail to recognise their personalities as themselves, seeing them instead as external, autonomous entities, commonly referred to as imaginary companions (ICs). Skippy — the creation of my friend Pat’s daughter, Amy — is a fairly typical IC. He arrived suddenly, when Amy was four, complete with a firm set of dietary foibles. Every mealtime for more than a year Pat was coerced into laying a place at the table for Skippy and woe betide her if she served up something he didn’t like. Once, when I was there, Pat slithered a token portion of strawberry ice cream on to Skippy’s plate. ’Don’t give Skippy pink ice cream!’ screamed Amy. ’He’ll sick it up all over the table!’

Children who create imaginary companions were once assumed to be lonely or socially incompetent. Their invisible playmates were regarded by adults (if they knew about them) as sad substitutes for ’proper’ social interaction which were dumped as soon as the child got real friends. This theory no longer stands up, not least because nowadays it is more common for children to report having imaginary companions than not. In the 1930s, about one in nine children admitted to an IC, but by the 1990s it was one in three. Now it is more than two-thirds, and the ICs do not necessarily disappear with age or increasing social engagement. Research by Dr Marjorie Taylor, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, and her colleagues found that having an imaginary companion is at least as common among school-age children as it is among preschoolers.

Imaginary companions described by the children came in a fantastic variety of guises, including invisible boys and girls, a squirrel, a panther, a dog, a seven-inch-tall elephant and a ’hundred-year-old’ GI Joe doll. Some children reported having multiple and serial imaginary companions. The number of imaginary companions described by children ranged from one to thirteen different entities.³

Not all imaginary companions are friendly — they can be quite uncontrollable and even aggressive. One of their functions may be to act as a vehicle for experimental personalities — minors which the child wants to try out at a safe distance before adopting internally. Having placed them in the IC the child can observe how this or that response goes down in the outside world. Does Skippy get into trouble for not accepting pink ice cream? Is a naughty IC able to get away with it? The child can try out all sorts of social behaviours vicariously, safe in the knowledge that, should the IC do anything disastrous, the child itself is safe from the consequences.

Traditionally ICs are thought of as a thing of childhood — if an adult admitted to one they would probably be viewed with some suspicion. Writers and actors, however, have a special licence to create external minors for others’ amusement, and the degree to which the characters appear to break free from their creators is often regarded — probably correctly — as a measure of the artist’s talent. Marjorie Taylor’s team interviewed fifty fiction writers, ranging from an award-winning novelist to scribblers who had never been published, and found that forty-six had invented characters who had subsequently taken over the job of composing their life stories. Some of them also resisted their creators’ attempts to control the narrative. Some fictional folk wandered around in the writers’ houses or otherwise inhabited their everyday world. The writers who had published their work had more frequent and detailed reports of these personalities seeming to break free of their creator’s control, suggesting that the faculty of projecting personalities into the external world really is a measure of creative expertise.⁴

One common way that children reveal a sense of being multiple is by speaking of ’we’ instead of ’I’ or referring to themselves in the third person. Adults are usually very quick to ’correct’ these errors (as they see them) and the effect of this is to encourage children towards the adult illusion of singularity.

’J’ is one of a very small number of adults who does not have a sense of being alone in his body. It may be that he has hung on to a sense of multiplicity which most of us have discarded.

’When I was a kid I thought everyone experienced lots of different people,’ he says. ’Then I started to have rows with my mother because she thought I was playing around with her when I told her things like “I can’t do that because Jay wouldn’t like it” or “Chrissy is crying again”. Eventually my parents packed me off to a therapist and I cottoned on pretty quickly that if I didn’t want to get some freaky psychiatric label I should start talking as though I was a single.’

As J discovered, forcing children to use the word ’I’ makes it much more difficult for them to sustain their multiple selves: ’When you talk like a singlet you tend to think of yourself as one. I can see how, if you are pressed into acting like an “integrated” person, you could start to think you really are alone in your skin. But the guys in my family [household] never went away, even when I tried to shut them out, and as soon as I was away from home I let them talk freely again.’

Ariel, us, and several other children were working at the art table, making a collage out of buttons glued to construction paper. I was absent-mindedly gluing buttons to the paper, while Ariel seemed to have a pattern to her work. On her paper were red and green buttons, red on the right, green on the left. Each hand seemed to be working independently. Suddenly she let out a howl, tore up her paper and ran to her ’hide out’. I followed her, so I could find out what went wrong.

’I get so mad at him!’ (When she said ’him’, I assumed it was her ’imaginary’ friend Sam.)

’I can see that. Sam made you very angry.’

’I didn’t want any green buttons on my side. I just like red,’ she said, stamping her foot. And then: ’But I want green! Only green! And she never lets me do it.’

I looked at Anise and Jennifer, who are with me when we work with children. I could not believe what I was hearing. ’Well, maybe you can make two pictures, one with red and the other with green,’ I suggested, ’and you could help each other out.’

She/they sniffled, and nodded. ’OK.’

incident in a classroom, reported by a teacher’s assistant

Most of us succumb much more easily to the insistence that we are singular. Up to the age of about twelve children’s personalities seem to rub along fairly happily together, but as they grow up people come under increasing pressure to settle for being one personality or another. ’What are you going to be when you grow up?’ they are asked. ’Which subjects do you want to study?’, ’Are you mathematical or artistic?’ These questions do not necessarily come from adults. The child’s own developing personalities want answers to these things, too, so the pressure comes from inside as much as out.

During adolescence, after several years of relatively smooth operating, the brain undergoes a major rewiring exercise. Many of the changes take place in the frontal lobes, which are responsible for maintaining our conscious sense of self, as well as for rational thought, emotional control and the behavioural constraints we think of as our conscience. They also play an important part in the formation of our notion of what we are like.⁵ One effect of this seems to be that personalities that had until then been operating more or less independently start to compete for dominance, and what had been a murmur of different but co-existing viewpoints erupts into a shouting match. This, for example, is how one fairly typical teenager describes herself:

I’m responsible, even studious every now and then, but on the other hand I’m a goof-off too, because if you’re too studious, you won’t be popular. I don’t usually do that well at school. I’m a pretty cheerful person, especially with my friends, where I can even get rowdy. At home I’m more likely to be anxious around my parents. They expect me to get all As… I worry about how I probably should get better grades. But I’d be mortified in the eyes of my friends. So I’m usually pretty stressed-out at home, or sarcastic, since my parents are always on my case. But I really don’t understand how I can switch so fast. I mean, how can I be cheerful one minute, anxious the next, and then be sarcastic? Which one is the real me?⁶

Construction work continues in the frontal lobes of the brain right up the age of thirty or so. Well before this work is complete, though, most people, if asked, will offer a fairly coherent description of themselves. Instead of the confusion and contradictions admitted by the teenager, the young adult gives a clear and tidy account of their strengths and weaknesses, attitudes and beliefs. The message is clear: this person knows who they are and where they are going.

Close observation of adult behaviour, however, shows that we are not nearly as consistent or well-defined as we like to think. Rather we change, constantly, to suit whatever situation we happen to be in. When a situation calls for us to please or impress, for example, most people obligingly slip into an appropriate personality. The changes are not just outward — mere behavioural concessions to necessity. We change inwardly too.

In an experiment carried out by psychologist Kenneth Gergen students were given what they were told were self-descriptions of people they would be partnering in a project. Half of them were given biographies which spoke of failure, low self-esteem and self-loathing. The other half were given self-assessments that described the author as brilliant, confident and attractive. The students were then asked to give a description of themselves in return.

By far the majority of the students responded with tales of themselves which mirrored the self-assessment of their putative partners. Those who thought they were being partnered by insecure, incompetent people said that they, too, were far from perfect. Those that thought they were being put with someone brilliant, however, found all sorts of positive qualities to report about themselves and very few bad ones.⁷

This in itself is hardly surprising. What is, though, is that the students were not simply presenting, like a gift, the personalities they thought would go down best. They actually seemed to hop into them, abandoning whatever personality was there before and becoming this personality that matched the situation so obligingly. They sincerely believed that they were giving a neutral and honest description of their ’real’ personality.