The colonization of childhood

psychological and psychoanalytical explanations of human development

Klaus Holzkamp

pp. 210-230

in: Klaus Holzkamp, Psychology from the standpoint of the subject, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In psychology, "development" not only serves to designate the topic of a particular branch, namely "developmental psychology"; concepts such as "development", "childhood", etc. are used in various problem contexts where the behaviour or personality of adults is to be made explainable or comprehensible. This paper focuses on the second, more general concept, its characteristics and its functions. It is designed to gradually explicate how, when one talks of "development", this is done in a particularly fixed and "one-sided" way (without this being made apparent or reflected upon) which, on the one hand, largely characterizes present psychology's self-understanding and "identity" in distinction to other social sciences and, on the other, involves discipline-specific restrictions on knowledge by which contradictions are bracketed out and insights into broader interrelations blocked. In discussing the implications and consequences of such a foreshortened concept of development for psychological research and practice, the perspective of a more comprehensive and less ideologically fixed understanding of "development" should become clear.