The ‘wave-particle’ child: reconnecting the disconnect in the concept of latency

ABSTRACT

The aim of this paper is to re-examine psychodynamic understanding of middle childhood towards a conceptual reformulation of this critical developmental stage. We believe such a reformulation is necessary in the light of contemporary psychoanalytic thought and developmental findings outside of the psychoanalytic field. This is intended as a preliminary stage in the direction of a recalibration of the technique and language of child analytic treatment to fit the particular psychological challenges and needs of middle childhood. Historically, middle childhood (or latency) has been regarded as a period of psychosexual dormancy and psychic rigidity. We review contemporary developmental findings and suggest a shift in emphasis in psychodynamic thinking towards the psychic growth, developmental challenges and emotional fragility that also characterise middle childhood. We propose that the psyche of the school-aged child is at once wave and particle, constantly growing and evolving and yet simultaneously stable and structured. We also emphasise the complexity of psychosocial development in middle childhood beyond the triangular, into what we term the polygonal psychic space. The familiar structured games of middle childhood – card games, ball games, board games and today’s console games – reflect this complex and paradoxical developmental picture, but the traditional child psychotherapy paradigm remains biased towards the toys and make-believe games of early childhood. Adaptation of technique and clinical theory to middle childhood is critical, particularly given the recent steep rise in referrals of school-aged children to mental health clinics across the globe, and the relatively high treatment drop-out rate commonly seen, especially in boys. We suggest the game-play typical of middle childhood offers a safe and developmentally appropriate medium of play, through which the child can express and explore their intrapsychic and interpsychic world in a psychotherapeutic setting.

KEYWORDS:

• Child psychoanalytic psychotherapy
• child development
• middle childhood
• latency
• structured games
• board games

Introduction

In the field of psychoanalysis in particular, and child development more generally, the years of middle childhood – the so-called ‘latency’ period – have frequently been likened to an uneventful journey through calm and quiet seas (Cooper et al., 2005; Diem-Wille, 2018). In classical psychoanalysis, these years are often described as a period of psychosexual stagnation and dormancy, characterised by an overly rigid and defensive psychic structure. It was Freud himself who set the tone for this rather staid Victorian view of the post-oedipal pre-pubertal child, in stark contrast to his revolutionary view of pulsating infantile sexuality in the oedipal child:

It is hardly to be believed what goes on in a child of four or five years old. Children are very active minded at that age; their early sexual period is also a period of intellectual flowering. I have an impression that with the onset of the latency period they become mentally inhibited as well, stupider. From that time on, too, many children lose their physical charm. (Freud, 1926, p. 215)

Over the last thirty years, this developmental picture has been called into question by many researchers across a range of academic fields (Campbell, 2011b; Etchegoyen, 1993; Knight, 2014). A survey of the psychodynamic literature on middle childhood reveals that multifaceted in-depth contemporary psychodynamic reformulations of middle childhood are still lacking, and that little has been done to conceptualise the necessary adaptations of psychotherapeutic language and levels of engagement to the emotional and developmental needs and challenges of this age group.¹ Despite the steep rise seen over the last two to three decades in referrals of 6–12-year-olds to mental health clinics across the globe (Collishaw, 2015; Crenna-Jennings & Hutchinson, 2018), the period of middle childhood remains relatively neglected as a topic of developmental and clinical research (Bellinson, 2002; Cincotta, 2008; Etchegoyen, 1993; Knight, 2014).

The aim of this paper is to re-examine the existing psychoanalytic descriptions of middle childhood and to begin to construct a new psychodynamic developmental formulation of this critical but neglected period of childhood. This is intended as a preliminary stage towards a recalibration of psychotherapeutic technique to meet the older child’s developmental stage and needs. (Such a clinical discussion is beyond the scope of this paper and shall be addressed in detail in future papers). The focus of the discussion here is on developmental theory. After a very brief review of contemporary psychodynamic conceptualisations of middle childhood, we will turn first to the world of children’s literature and then to historical, anthropological, and neurophysiological findings, in order to rediscover what was deemed latent and dormant, concealed, and camouflaged, behind the veneer of the proverbial industrious ‘good citizen’ portrayed by Erikson (1950). In the second half of the paper, we will integrate these findings into a reconceptualisation of middle childhood as a paradoxical period of structure and flux, and re-examine issues of gender identity and gender integration in the context of contemporary multi-gendered reformulations of the Oedipus complex. We conclude by examining the unique language of play in middle childhood, its origins in the contradictory complexities of the psyche of the older child, and the implications for child psychoanalytic psychotherapy with this age group.

Towards a reappraisal

Today, many researchers and practitioners in the field of child development argue that middle childhood should no longer be viewed predominantly from the perspective defined by the resolution of the Oedipus complex and the establishment of ego defences (Etchegoyen, 1993; Knight, 2014; Novick & Novick, 1994; Shapiro & Perry, 1976; Wilson, 1989). These authors suggest that whilst some aspects of the psyche do indeed seem to settle and go underground in the post-oedipal years, other aspects of the mind and the psyche develop and change at an astounding rate between the ages of six and twelve.

Some authors have even suggested that the classical psychoanalytic descriptions of rigid ‘latency’ defensive structures do not in fact represent a picture of normal psychodynamic development, but rather are a sign of neurotic pathology or ‘pseudo-latency’ (Alvarez, 1989; Etchegoyen, 1993; Waddell, 1998). Alvarez (1989) posits that whilst psychic organisation in middle childhood may superficially appear defensive to the outside observer, it is better seen as a form of defensiveness that facilitates psychological (not just cognitive and physical) growth and development by keeping the allegorical wolves of unbridled passions at bay:

Such splitting has an important developmental function, which is by no means purely defensive…

… [I]f a farmer encloses a field so that his “sheep may safely graze”, the hungry wolves outside may see the fence as defensive; the sheep also, may feel - in their anxious moments - that the fence is for their defence. But in their safer moments, they may feel protected by it so that the flock may graze peacefully and flourish. (Alvarez, 1989, p. 75)

As Gilmore and Meersand (2014) have observed, psychosexual development has largely been relegated to an ‘ensemble [collaborative] role’ in contemporary psychodynamic developmental theory, alongside the ‘cognitive, semiotic, object relational, self-regulatory, and affective developments’ (p. 86). All these aspects are now seen as necessary for what could be termed a ‘good-enough’ transition into middle childhood. Clearly the developing child’s mind does indeed need some sort of structure, order, containing and scaffolding to avoid overload and potential meltdown in the face of sexual and aggressive impulses, coupled with the burgeoning capacities and myriad of novel experiences that threaten to overwhelm the child’s young and still fragile psyche in middle childhood. But it is important not to mistake this scaffolding for rigid stone walls of the rather staid and boring house that has long been the analogy for the psyche of the ‘latency-aged’ child in psychoanalytic theory.

Despite the increasing number of recently published papers reassessing the developmental characteristics of the latency period, this shift in perspective is still far from common parlance in the field. Training courses in child psychoanalytic psychotherapy and child psychoanalysis alike devote little time to teaching developmental theory of middle childhood in depth, let alone discussing adaptations of psychotherapeutic technique to suit the older child’s changing psyche. This, notwithstanding the fact that most studies today show that children in the 6–12-year age range are just as often in need of psychotherapeutic help as their more vocal and overtly disruptive older and younger siblings (Kessler et al., 2007; Polanczyk et al., 2015). As Wilson (1989) puts it:

What is implicit is that latency is an achievement that has to be maintained. It is not something ordained or inevitable, despite maturation. Rather it is a state that has to be earned and looked after, given adequate environmental facilitations. Despite its virtue of composure and orderly growth, it nevertheless sits perilously at the mercy of numerous disruptive forces. (p. 63)

Children’s literature as developmental textbook

Vitality, imagination, sexuality and aggression, all disconnected and split off from the classical psychoanalytic view of middle childhood, have remained alive and kicking in children’s literature throughout the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Although popular classics, such as Dickens’ (1872) ‘David Copperfield’, Brontë’s (1847) ‘Jane Eyre’ or Alcott’s (1869) ‘Little Women’, were frequently educational in tone and tended to emphasise the virtues of morality and ‘responsible’ behaviour over mischief and creativity, many authors of the same period painted childhood in more realistic, varied, vibrant and adventurous colours. From ‘Peter Pan’ (Barrie & Barrie, 1911), ‘Tom Sawyer’ (Twain, 1876), and ‘Pippi Longstocking’ (Lindgren, 1945) to ‘Matilda’, (Dahl, 1988), ‘Harry Potter’ (Rowling, 1997), and ‘Mulan’ (Bancroft & Cook, 1988), the heroes and heroines of children’s stories – rich and poor, educated and uneducated alike – are full of pluck, ingenuity and imagination, oblique sexuality and less oblique anger and aggression.

Typically, these childhood adventures take place far from the eagle eyes of supervising adults: children working together according to pre-agreed upon codes of conduct, in clear objective teamwork combined with creative invention, a modicum of infantile omnipotence, plenty of plain childish mischief and boundless energy. Unlike the physical and mental torpor stereotypically attributed to adolescents, school-aged children are portrayed in these stories as ‘energiser’ bunnies: their minds, as well as their bodies, constantly on the move, questioning, memorising, learning, inquiring, thinking, and working things out. Equally, these stories are full of childhood fun and humour, interspersed with the fears, tears, jealousies and fights that are typically part and parcel of these years of development. Any visit to a school playground, inner-city street, or local park tells the same story.

Interestingly, many of these books, such as the ‘Narnia Chronicles’ (Lewis, 2010 [1950–1956]), ‘His Dark Materials’ (Pullman, 2003), the ‘Harry Potter’ books (Rowling, 1997), or the ‘Chronicles of ancient darkness’ series (e.g., Paver, 2004), create worlds that are a combination of magical fantasy and the mundane reality of everyday life. They frequently feature animals endowed with supernatural powers who accompany the children on their quests to fight evil and injustice. These brave and faithful animal companions often play a crucial role in sensing and warning of hidden danger and revealing crucial aspects of the fantasy world hitherto concealed from the child heroes and heroines of the story – the ultimate Winnicottian teddy bear, morphed into age-appropriate form.

As Waddell (1998, pp. 72–77) and Rustin and Rustin (1986, 2019) have pointed out, these much-loved tales of middle childhood, written about children and for children, have much to teach the field of child psychoanalysis about the inner psyche and interpersonal world of the post-oedipal, prepubertal child. Perhaps most of all, children’s literature highlights the remarkable propensity for new mental activity and discoveries in middle childhood that goes hand in hand with an ‘innate’ craving for rules and structure, for labelling, sorting, ordering and categorising on the one hand, and escape to the world of fantasy and magic on the other (as described by Knight, 2014).

Findings from developmental, anthropological and historical research

Research across disparate fields of developmental and historical research also reveals a complex picture of middle childhood that runs counter to the emotional and psychosexual quiescence and stability traditionally attributed to the latency period:

This stage encompasses the years typically thought of and remembered as … a time of carefree activities, with simultaneous overwhelming cognitive growth. The naiveté of infants and toddlers gives way to the inquisitive nature of children, who seek beyond the repetitive ‘why’ question, to learn in detail who, what, where, when, and how. (Cincotta, 2008, p. 69, emphases added)

The marked transition that occurs around the age of six, from dependent overgrown toddler to productive and active young member of the community, appears to be universal across countries and cultures. Furthermore, recent findings suggest that these profound developmental changes are physiologically and neurologically based (Blakemore, 2018; Campbell, 2011a, 2011b; Hagelin, 1980; Shapiro & Perry, 1976).

History and anthropology – middle childhood through the ages and across cultures

In ancient Rome, the infant stage (infantia) was defined as ending around the age of five, the age at which children were perceived to have developed rational minds, and as such were expected to assume domestic responsibilities, to be inducted into various trades and to even become eligible for betrothal. The unique cognitive plasticity of children of the 6–12 year age group² was widely recognised in Europe during the Middle Ages, and is reflected in various literary texts from the time (Gaffney, 2011; Orme, 2003, 2009). Apposite here are the eloquent words of St Anselm, the 11^th century theologian and Archbishop of Canterbury, who famously likened the educational malleability of the child to the propensities of sealing wax:

… [I]f the wax … is too hard or too soft it will not, when stamped with the seal, receive a perfect image … Take a man … altogether set in]his] ways … He is the hardened wax … Now consider a boy of tender years and little knowledge, unable to distinguish between good and evil … Here indeed the wax is soft, almost liquid, and incapable of taking an image of the seal. Between these extremes is the youth and young man … If you teach him, you can shape him as you wish. (Black et al., 2014, p. 407)

In the medieval church and the guilds, this proclivity for learning and adaptation, characteristic of the ‘juvenile’, ‘puerita’, years, was well appreciated and well exploited. At age seven, boys and girls were often sent off to monasteries and nunneries, or to work away from home as apprentices or servants. Likewise, in the Roman Catholic Church today, children take their first communion at seven years of age, dubbed ‘the age of discretion’ or the ‘age of reason’, when the child is deemed to have matured and developed sufficiently to be capable of distinguishing between right and wrong.

Multiple ethnographic studies of subsistence-based societies around the world also describe the dramatic shift that can be seen at around age six in the roles children assume, both in the home and outside (Lancy, 2018; Lancy & Grove, 2011; Rogoff et al., 1975). This shift typically takes place between the fifth and seventh year, the age at which children in these societies are perceived by their elders to have achieved a sufficient level of physical and cognitive competence and capability to begin learning in earnest from their elders and to be assigned specific roles, chores, and duties. Children beyond the age of six are expected to reduce the time spent in play and to behave in an increasingly socially responsible and acceptable manner. It is no coincidence that formal education begins across the globe at this very same critical stage of development, which occurs around six years of age.

Education and cognition – from Locke through Rousseau to Piaget

In many ways centuries ahead of his time, John Locke, the English 17^th century philosopher, was one of the few educationalists of the early Modern era to emphasise the child’s need to assert their independence of thought and action and the importance of play, whether at home or at school (Locke, 1712). Jean Jacques Rousseau, writing over half a century later, was greatly influenced by Locke’s ideas of encouraging free thinking, curiosity and learning by experience in children, and proposed an even more radical view of child development and education. In ‘Emile’, or ‘On education’ (Rousseau, 1762/1817), Rousseau, like Locke, emphasised that the child is a person whose needs, knowledge and capabilities are different from those of adults, and should be understood and addressed accordingly.

Rousseau described four different stages of child development up to adulthood and outlined his ideas for educational approaches appropriate to each developmental stage. Following Classical thinkers, he posited the second stage of childhood as stretching between the ages of five and twelve and saw the ‘child–enfant’ of this stage as possessing an emergent sense of self, a distinct personality and increasing self-reliance.

Rousseau’s descriptions of developmental stages in turn served as the philosophical-educational bedrock on which Jean Piaget later based his highly influential theory of cognitive development in children.³ Piaget’s research revealed the same qualitative leap in cognitive abilities in children at around age five to six proposed by Rousseau and his predecessors. He formulated this as a shift from egocentric, ‘preoperational’ (one could say illogical, irrational) thinking, to what he called ‘concrete operational’ thinking, governed by a logical understanding of concepts such as reversibility, cause and effect, conservation of matter, and temporo-spatial relations (Piaget, 1971).

Piaget began to frame his theory already in the 1930s, but it became popularised only in the 1960s, and has constituted the central paradigm in cognitive developmental theory ever since. However, despite the far reaching implications of Piaget’s theory for a psychodynamic understanding of the so-called ‘latency’ phase, it took until the 1970s for his theory to begin to influence, and be incorporated into, psychoanalytic thinking on middle childhood (Knight, 2014).⁴

Psychosocial developmental theory

In parallel to Piaget’s pioneering work in the field of cognitive development, perceptions of psychosocial development also changed radically in the second half of the last century, thanks largely to two prominent psychoanalytic thinkers of the 1940s and 50s, Harry Stack Sullivan and Eric Erikson. Both Freudian trained psychoanalysts, they each developed independent theories of psychosocial development across the lifespan that were outside of mainstream psychoanalysis and which, pertinent to this discussion, highlighted the achievements and challenges of middle childhood, rather than just assuming quiescence and stagnation.

Harry Stack Sullivan, one of the founders of American interpersonal theory, emphasised the relational shift typically seen in middle childhood from family to peer relations, relations with schoolteachers, sports coaches, and the like. Sullivan (1933/1972) called this period of childhood the ‘juvenile era’:

… a time when children experience social norms and customs that are different from their family culture, when they have to learn to conform to a peer group and experience peer pressure, and when they have to evaluate themselves in contrast to their peers – all necessary skills for future adolescent and adult relationships. (Knight, 2014, p. 209)

Erikson’s (1950) theory was more Freudian at its heart, based on sublimation of the biological urge to procreate, but, unlike Freud, Erikson’s focus was not on repressed conflicts and sublimated drives in the post-oedipal pre-pubertal child, but rather on the psychological consequences of success, struggle and failure during these years. Erikson termed this stage of development the ‘age of industry versus inferiority’, during which the child acquires sophisticated physical, cognitive, and social skills, moving from a position of great physical and emotional dependence on their parents, to relative independence and self-sufficiency. If this process is disrupted for some reason, the child’s sense of agency and competence is damaged, and feelings of inferiority and futility set in, which detrimentally affect later psychosocial development.

We would suggest that the paradigm shift Erikson proposes from the psychosexual to the domain of self-image, self-confidence and sense of agency is critical to building a broader understanding of emotional development in middle childhood.

Neurology and endocrinology

Over the last 50 years, the view of middle childhood as a well-defined and formative stage in human development has been substantiated by evidence collected from research in the fields of developmental biology, neurobiology, and endocrinology. Campbell (2011a, 2011b) cites an abundance of evidence of biological changes observed in children between five and seven years of age that have been found to coincide with the cross cultural cognitive behavioural transition described above. Such changes include the loss of milk teeth and the eruption of the first molars; a rebound in adiposity and the development of axillary hair and odour (Campbell, 2011a); maturation in neuro-muscular development and fine and gross motor coordination (Hagelin, 1980; Jemerin, 2004; Shapiro & Perry, 1976); the consolidation of gross brain volume (the brain in the seven year old child is 90% of its final adult volume) and the onset of cortical maturation (Campbell, 2011b; Shapiro & Perry, 1976). Campbell also emphasised the onset of adrenarche (increase in the adrenal production of the neurosteroid DHEAS) and proposes the radical suggestion that this might be the possible driving force behind the physiological changes and even the psychological and behavioural changes that take place in children aged five to seven.

As early as the 1970s, Shapiro and Perry (1976) highlighted evidence from research for ‘functional changes in the child’s neurobiological, perceptual, and cognitive development that cluster about the 7th year of life’ (p. 80). It is now known that white matter in the brain increases markedly during middle childhood, as millions of new synapses are formed as the child learns and develops, investigates and discovers. These synapses are later pruned back, honed and specified during adolescence, as thinking becomes more refined, efficient and abstract and cognitive and emotional understanding of the world deepens (Blakemore, 2018; Mah & Ford-Jones, 2012). This neurological picture matches the observational developmental evidence, which shows that during the years of middle childhood the child amasses a multiplicity of new abilities and interests, behaviours and beliefs, from which the teenager and young adult later picks and chooses, consolidating their identity and future life path (Diem-Wille, 2018; Etchegoyen, 1993; Gilmore & Meersand, 2013; Knight, 2014; Shapiro & Perry, 1976; Waddell, 1998; Youell & Canham, 2006).

Reconnecting the disconnect: re-reading the term latency

It can thus be seen that many contemporary authors today across the spectrum of child development research and practice see middle childhood as a critical stage of development with its own emotional, cognitive and social tasks and challenges (Emde, 1988a, 1988b; Knight, 2014; Shapiro & Perry, 1976; Tyson & Tyson, 1993; Waddell, 1998; Wilson, 1989; Youell & Canham, 2006). Viewed through this contemporary prism, it becomes clear that the child’s psyche in middle childhood, though relatively structured and stable (compared to adolescence or infancy and early childhood), should be regarded as a system in a constant state of flux, where the potential for upset and anxiety and even turmoil on the one hand, and emotional change and restructuring on the other, are ever present. Observation in any school playground reveals these contradictory states: children’s ceaseless physical energy alongside an extraordinary ability to concentrate for hours mastering a new skill; the passionate quest for knowledge and physical prowess combined with a coquettish shyness and exaggerated disgust at the merest hint of sex and sexuality; the perplexing admixture of fierce adherence to rules and regulations on the one hand, and creativity, curiosity and ingenuity and barely sublimated aggression on the other.

This is a contemporary ‘Heisenberg-like’⁵ paradoxical view of the school-age child, whose psyche can be understood to be, as it were, both ‘wave and particle’, constantly growing and evolving and yet, at the same time, stable and structured. Quantum ‘entities’ are understood to behave simultaneously both as waves and as discrete particles. We suggest here that this ineffable otherness of the wave particle duality serves as a suitable metaphor for the enigmatic nature of the psyche of the older post-oedipal prepubertal child, that is at once continually in flux and yet also distinctly structured.

Freud’s term latency, borrowed originally from Breuer, has its etymological roots in the Latin participle, latens or latentis, meaning being hidden or concealed. Traditionally, the word latent has been used both colloquially and scientifically as a qualifying adjective to describe a phenomenon that is present, but not yet manifest or fully developed; the emphasis is on the potentiality, not on the inactivity or dormancy per se. Noun and adjective are intimately wedded one with another: latent talent, latent hostilities, latent energy, latent disease. But within the psychoanalytic discourse, the adjective has become a noun, latency as a developmental phase in and of itself, as a hiatus, an interruption in development, disconnected from the psychosexual energy that is purported to be latent. It is this fateful disconnection between noun and adjective, between latency and the ongoing partially concealed psychological processes and psychic energies, which has been perpetuated by authors in the field throughout the 20^th century.

The psyche of the latency child is indeed structured and bounded, and it is this psychic organisation that contributes to the distinct quality and character of the psyche of middle childhood. But, as any parent knows, this psychic stability and structure is fragile indeed, far more so than classical psychoanalytic theory would lead us to believe. Even the most balanced, tranquil, and cooperative school-aged child is also bursting with energy and ideas, insecurities and fears, and tantrums or tears are not a rare occurrence.

It is this concealed (latent) emotional instability that Bion (1976) aptly dubbed ‘emotional turbulence’, lurking below the surface in children of this age. This psychic turbulence is perhaps not as close to eruption as in the effervescent, turbulent toddler, or in the volatile, explosive, adolescent. However, the potential for disruption in middle childhood is ever-present. Disturb the equilibrium, add a catalyst, heat the surrounds, loosen the outside containing structure, and the internal bonds destabilise. In the heat of the moment, under internal or external stress, forceful primal anxieties and instinctual impulses temporarily break through and break apart the bonds of the child’s newly constructed inner psyche. Splitting and primary processes replace rational behaviour. At such moments of melt-down, after an overwhelming birthday party or an especially important football game, the child’s psyche loses its well-defined structure, the ‘psychic substructures’ slip and slide over one another in random disorganised fashion, and irrationality and unbridled emotion take over. And yet, unlike in the pre-oedipal child or older adolescent, the child’s psyche in middle childhood is naturally and even phylogenetically and neurologically oriented towards coherence and construction (Blakemore, 2018; Campbell, 2011b). When the system cools down and external boundaries are firmly placed, a cohesive psychic structure forms once again, rhyme and reason, calm and rationality return to the child, usually in response to a good solid meal, a few reassuring words or containing limits from parent or teacher, or packing the exhausted child off to bed for a good night’s sleep.

Expanding the psychic space: from the oedipal and the triangular to the polygonal

It is within this contemporary conceptual framework of a paradoxical, not-so-calm, not-so-stable, wave-particle, middle childhood state of mind, that we will now re-examine the traditional concepts of the Oedipus complex and triangularity.

According to classic psychoanalytic theory, the transition to latency is heralded by the solution of the oedipal complex, and contingent upon the successful mediation by the child’s developing ego between the erotic and aggressive id drives and impulses on the one hand, and the strictures and prohibitions of the nascent superego. The original Oedipus complex as conceived by Freud, and the associated phallocentric concepts of castration anxiety, the castration complex and penis-envy, have of course all undergone major revisions in the last hundred years in the light of historical, socio-political and psychoanalytic critiques (Benjamin, 1988; Buhle, 2009; Chodorow, 1994). These contemporary reformulations tend towards a more humanistic, nuanced, complex view of the Oedipus complex as a universal ‘watershed in individuation’ and emancipation in human development (Loewald, 1979, 1985). Nevertheless, the basic concept of the child moving from dyadic to triadic relations, and from the illusion of omnipotence to symbolic thinking and an objective ‘binocular’ perception of reality, has stood the test of time in the field of psychoanalysis. This is a move from the mother-infant dyad towards the mother-father-child triad, where the infantile fantasy of their ‘majesty’ the baby (Freud, 1914) has been replaced by the sobering reality of father-king sitting on his rightful throne, mother-queen loyally by his side, the child excluded from the royal parental couple. This exclusion, though painful and difficult to tolerate, and even harder to internalise, is at the same time emancipating; the child is thereby liberated to explore and discover the outside world, in the knowledge that the parental couple are safe from the child’s dangerous incestuous parricidal impulses.

Alongside these important reconceptualisations in theory, psychoanalytic thinking in the later years of the 20th century has nevertheless been plagued by a certain conceptual intransigence and rigidity and has often been dominated by the zeitgeist of the primacy of the mother-infant bond with its own preconceptions and lacunae. There has been an overarching tendency to concentrate on the infant-mother dyad and its regressive pull, in tension with the role of the father as agent of separation-individuation. The more complex aspects of triangularity, which we suggest should better be termed polygonality, have been largely neglected. We use the term polygonality to denote the complexity of the wider interpersonal and intersubjective field in which the child grows up and develops.

Middle childhood is a period of negotiation through a multiplicity of relations: siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents and cousins, peers, teachers, scout leaders and sports coaches. It is this polygonal interpsychic and intrapsychic complexity that the child needs to negotiate, with increasing confidence and independence, through middle childhood – a tall order for an immature and as yet unstable psyche. No less significant in this process are the parents’ own internalised polygonal web of relations, and their real life external social and professional worlds, from which the child is excluded, but whose presence as significant other in the parents’ world is strongly felt.

It is at this level of psychic organisation and functioning that the child, or indeed the adult at different moments throughout the lifespan, examine the more nuanced issues and questions connected to identity and to the self, including the body self and the sexual and gendered self, and also in relation to the other and the outside world. The child is on an unconscious and conscious quest to answer questions such as: ‘Who am I?’; ‘What am I made of?’; ‘Who are my parents? And my siblings?’; ‘What makes the world go round?’; ‘With whom do I identify?’; ‘To whom am I similar?’; ‘In what ways am I different?’; ‘What are my likes, my dislikes, my strengths, my weaknesses?’; ‘How do I manage my emotions, my body, my impulses and drives within the real world?’

Identity integration and gender identity in a multi-gendered system

Twenty first century psychoanalysts, many writing from a feminist standpoint, have now begun to breathe sexuality back into psychoanalytic theory of early childhood. These approaches have moved away from the binary concepts of feminine and masculine, maternal and paternal, and have begun to redraw the developmental map in multi-gendered language, without disregarding the importance of sexuality, aggression, the body, and the bodily (Balsam, 2001; Bassin, 1996; Ben-Ari Samira, 2015; Benjamin, 1995; Chodorow, 1994; Fiorini, 2019; Mitchell, 2000; Palgi-Hecker, 2005; Scarfone, 2013). From this standpoint, notions of lack and difference signified in classical psychoanalysis in terms of the phallus, the womb and breasts, penis envy and castration anxiety, have been restated in terms of the fundamental ‘incompleteness’ that is intrinsic to the human condition. Incompleteness that goes well beyond the manifest differences between the sexes and the generations to encompass the very ‘enigma of difference’ (Fiorini, 2016, 2019; Fogel, 2006; Mieli, 1993) between the self and the other, an ineffable difference that perhaps can never be fully comprehended, let alone fully accepted. (For explanations of these terms and for more detail please see Fiorini, 2016; Laplanche, 1999; Laplanche & Fairfield, 2007; Scarfone, 2019).⁶

Contemporary research has revealed that the reality of motherhood and fatherhood as experienced by children and as rated by observers, from infancy and into adolescence, is far less polarised than the stereotypes suggest. Children experience the ‘masculine’ and the ‘feminine’, the ‘maternal’ and the ‘paternal’, the subjective and the objective, in both parents of whatever sex, and in other adults inside and outside the home. Fathers have been found to be as emotionally receptive as mothers in multiple studies, and mothers as responsible for rules and regulations as fathers (Ben-Ari Samira, 2015; Cath et al., 2013; Etchegoyen & Trowell, 2005; Russell & Russell, 1987).

Attaining a relatively stable degree of identity integration and gender identity is a central developmental task of middle childhood. From this contemporary multi-systems perspective, the psychological task is for the child to align themselves freely in the polygonal space between identifications with one or other (or several) of the internalised parental objects (in whatever familial situation the child is growing up), whilst critically accepting the ‘enigma of difference’ and the fact of ‘incompleteness’ (the latter related to, but not restricted to, the biological anatomical differences between the sexes and the generations).

The implications for psychotherapy of this multi-gendered view of sexual identity, sexuated subjectivity and parental identification are far-reaching. Children should be understood to be identifying with their parents and other significant role models they meet in multi-gendered and multifaceted ways. Clinically this means enabling the child to explore aspects of activity and passivity, competition and rivalry, creativity and cognition, space and boundaries, yielding and aggression, sexuality and gender, fantasies of production and reproduction and parenthood, of home and of work, irrespective of biological sex and of gender.

The language of play in middle childhood

Christopher Robin was going away. Nobody knew why he was going; nobody knew where he was going; indeed, nobody even knew why he knew that Christopher Robin was going away. But somehow or other everybody in the Forest felt that it was happening at last. Even Smallest-of-all … told himself that Things were going to be Different. (Milne & Shepard, 1928/1961, p. 162)

As noted poignantly by A.A. Milne in the final chapter of ‘The house at Pooh corner’, reaching the age of six and going ‘away’ to school (literally or metaphorically), marks both an ending and a beginning in childhood, when children’s play changes radically in both form and content. This is a time when children begin to spend less time playing in their ‘enchanted places’ … ‘just going along and listening to things you can’t hear, and not bothering’ (Milne & Shepard, 1928/1961, p. 173) and turn their attention to their peers and the outside world.

Fantasy play continues to be dominant in the early years of middle childhood (six to eight year olds), but such play becomes more complex, symbolic and deeply layered in the older child, and day-dreaming and creative outlets such as arts and crafts, writing, dance and music, slowly replace the pretend play of the younger child (Gilmore, 2011; Meersand, 2009). As Waddell (1998) writes, children of this age have:

… an increasing need to develop a world apart, a world of one’s own, separate and yet not cut-off from that of the adults. Time for engaging with one’s own experience is needed, for experimenting with it, and developing a stronger sense of self as a consequence. (p. 73)

It is play, both individual and group play, which provides children with this very arena of experimentation and psychic growth. Unlike adolescents, whose dominant mode of communication is verbal (though parents and teachers of many a sullen teenager may seriously doubt this), for school-aged children play still serves as the principal mode of communication and intra-psychic and inter-psychic interaction (Bellinson, 2002; Diem-Wille, 2018; Meersand, 2009; Waddell, 1998). The preferred modes of play in these years naturally reflect the distinctive developmental picture of middle childhood detailed above. The momentous shifts in all spheres of development propel the school-aged child towards rule bound, competitive games and organised group activities. Card games and board games, computer console games and games on the smartphone, competitive physical games such as tag, hop-scotch, football and basketball, become the mainstay of children’s play at home and outside. Children of this age also tend to collect all sorts of weird and wonderful items, from seashells and conkers (horse chestnuts) to football stickers and Pokemon cards. These often take the form of fads and crazes that spread through schools and neighbourhoods like wildfire and act as an organising axis of shared common interest in the peer group, a space where the art of negotiation can be learnt, and where rivalries, jealousies can be explored and worked through (Canham, 2018).

The dominant language of communication of the 6–12-year-old, then, is still play, but the dialect spoken in this land of middle childhood is distinct and specialised. It is a dialect that possesses a grammar instantly recognisable by its rhythm, rhyme, rules and reason and a vocabulary, which, though superficially perhaps a little poor and simplistic in some regards, comprises a rich variety of intellectual and physical activities: sports, competitive games, arts and crafts, building, constructing, and collecting. These are games that have been designed and refined, usually unintentionally, by generations of creative children and adults to engage children’s attention and enable them to practice their burgeoning physical, cognitive and social abilities, whilst simultaneously releasing and working through emotional and physical steam and sexual and aggressive impulses, all ‘under cover’, within the framework, of the game at hand.

This analysis of the language of play in middle childhood, as belonging to both the ‘primary dyadic’ sphere and the sphere of the ‘external other’,⁷ has profound implications for psychotherapeutic technique with this age group. When viewed through the polygonal prism of psychosexual and psychosocial development, the traditional psychotherapy paradigm based on the playroom of early childhood with dolls, small animals, toy cars, paints and creative materials, is weighted towards the sphere of the primary (carer-infant) dyad. This is a psychotherapeutic paradigm geared towards the younger child, that leaves many older children bereft of the familiar competitive structured games of middle childhood, games bounded in time and place, representing the world of action, discovery and adventure, symbolic of the ‘external other’, games that are critical to psychic development and growth in middle childhood.

Conclusions and implications for psychotherapy in middle childhood

Research over the last 50 years across a range of fields has revealed that the psychological and developmental needs and challenges of middle childhood are profoundly different from those of toddlers and pre-schoolers, on the one hand, and adolescents, on the other. These are years of momentous cognitive, physical and psychosocial advances, a time of flux and change, of ongoing psychological development, challenge and transformation, a time for acquiring and stockpiling emotional, intellectual, social, and physical provisions in preparation for the turbulent storms of adolescence to come.

Middle childhood constitutes a period of dramatic shifts in the child’s locus of interest and activity, from the home to school and the outside world, from parents to siblings and peers, from make-believe and pretend play with toys and dolls to structured reality-and-fantasy-based games, involving increasingly complex physical, cognitive and social skills. The developing child must grapple with the enigmas of ‘difference’, ‘alterity’ and the ‘fact of incompleteness’ that are prerequisites for differentiation and integration of the self and of the child’s crystallising identity. This is a multifaceted quest that is often at the heart of children’s literature and of traditional children’s games.

This developmental picture of middle childhood has fundamental implications for child psychotherapy theory and technique. Children aged six to twelve tend to have little insight into their difficulties, their self-esteem is often shaky, but they nevertheless have a strong urge to assert their will and independence, which can easily be channelled as resistance to treatment. School-aged children, particularly older boys, have been voting with their feet: studies have shown that between 25% and 60% of school-aged children fail to engage, or drop out altogether, of psychotherapy before they have had a chance to benefit from its effects (Deakin et al., 2012; Kazdin & Mazurick, 1994). As far as we know, no systematic research has been conducted into the factors that are contributing to this high drop-out rate. However, it is our clinical experience that older children, particularly in more disturbed states of mind, often baulk at the suggestion of playing with the toys and play materials of early childhood traditionally offered in the analytic playroom, and they instinctively seek out other more age-appropriate modes of play and communication (as previously suggested by Bellinson (2000), Oren (2008) and others).

Just as the very term latency has come under question, so too the techniques and theory of child psychoanalytic psychotherapy with this age group need to be reassessed in line with contemporary understanding of the sometimes contradictory and elusive wave-particle nature of their psyche. The recent sharp rise cited above in the proportion of school-aged children found to be suffering from mental health problems across the globe, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, adds extra urgency to this task (Collishaw, 2015; Crenna-Jennings & Hutchinson, 2018; Mental Health of Children and Young People in England 2022, NHS Digital, 2022; Samji et al., 2022; Singh et al., 2020). In the last thirty years especially, some contemporary authors, most of whom are based in the US (Bellinson, 2002; Krimendahl, 2000; Meeks, 1970, 2000; Oren, 2008) have taken up these issues and begun to discuss the therapeutic power of game-play in psychotherapy, and to emphasise the developmental need of the older child to play games in psychotherapy that are more age appropriate and more acceptable to their own self-image.

Building on the work of these aforementioned authors, and given the revised psychodynamic conceptualisation outlined above of middle childhood as a period of tremendous flux and change and simultaneously of structure and crystallisation, we would suggest that the therapeutic power of these traditional childhood games in fact lies in their very structure and containment. The ‘story lines’ of these games of commerce, battlefields, superheroes, and sports – games such as Monopoly, War, Chess, and football – can be seen to offer safe developmentally appropriate metaphors and ‘covers’ for expressing and exploring even violent and visceral anxieties, impulses, and passions. To use the language of Alvarez (1989), these games can be conceived of as offering a familiar everyday space in which the children can explore their inner private selves from a safe psychic distance, vital in this rather precarious ‘betwixt and between’ stage of development.

Similarly, the conceptual reappraisal of middle childhood in terms of a polygonal ‘multi-gendered systems of operations’ (Balsam, 2018), sheds new light on the therapeutic role of these games in the psychotherapy room. This presence of the full gamut of toys, dolls, creative materials, bats, balls and structured games in the psychotherapy room can be understood as enabling deeper, broader and richer exploration of both the primary dyadic and the external other, of the triangular space and the ‘paternal in the maternal’, the ‘maternal in the paternal’, and the sororal and the fraternal and beyond into the polygonal psychic space.

This statement of position throws up a variety of important clinical-technical-theoretical questions that we shall be addressing in depth in future papers: how does the language of middle childhood and of play with structured games fit into, and indeed enrich, the grammar and vocabulary of child psychoanalytic theory as it stands today? Can these games be used as transitional space for free and structured ‘wave-particle’ play at one and the same time, and if so, how? When should we use which games and in what way?

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Notes on contributors

Celine Maroudas

Celine Maroudas, PhD, is a supervising child and adult clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who trained and worked for many years in the Haifa Child Adolescent and Family Mental Health Clinic. She works today mainly in private practice in the Haifa area and teaches in various post-graduate psychoanalytic psychotherapy courses around the country, including at Haifa University and in the Israel Winnicott Centre.

Hadas Wiseman

Hadas Wiseman, PhD, is a Professor in Counseling and Human Development, University of Haifa, Israel. Her research focuses on the psychotherapy process, the therapeutic relationship, attachment in psychotherapy, and intergenerational trauma in families of Holocaust survivors. She co-authored ‘Echoes of the trauma: relational themes and emotions in children of Holocaust survivors’ (with Jacques P. Barber); co-edited ‘Developing the therapeutic relationship: integrating case studies, research, and practice’ (with Orya Tishby); ‘The responsive therapist: attuning to clients in the moment’ (with Jeanne Watson); and ‘The core conflictual relationship theme method’ (with Orya Tishby), APA teletherapy video series.

She is a certified clinical psychologist in private practice. She served as international president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR).

Judith Harel

Judith Harel, PhD, is professor emerita in the Department of Psychology in the faculty of Social Sciences, University of Haifa. Professor Harel is a certified clinical and developmental psychologist and supervisor and senior consulting child and adult psychotherapist, and works as psychotherapist and supervisor in private practice in Haifa. She teaches and supervises in the Haifa University post-graduate school of psychotherapy and in the school for child-parent psychotherapy in Tel Aviv. Professor Harel co-founded the Haifa dyadic therapy system and teaches and supervises professional staff working with pre-schoolers and their parents. She is co-author with Miriam Ben-Aaron, Hayuta Kaplan, Raya Avieir-Patt of the book ‘Mother-child and father-child psychotherapy: a manual for the treatment of relational disturbances in childhood’.

Notes

1. An in-depth literature survey is beyond the scope of this paper, but is available elsewhere, for example Maroudas (2021), Bellinson (2002, 2013), Etchegoyen (1993), Knight (2014) and Meeks (2000).

2. The age range six–twelve refers to the average ages when children are commonly thought in child development theory to transition out of early childhood into middle childhood and thence into adolescence. Clearly, in reality, these transitions happen gradually, and the age of transition varies between individuals and even between different aspects of the child’s development. We use the six–twelve year definition here, and throughout this paper, as defining the lower and upper age boundaries of middle childhood as convenient shorthand for the more accurate, but unwieldy, definition of middle childhood as spanning from its onset between the ages of five and seven to its gradual close between the ages of eleven and thirteen.

3. Rousseau’s ideas similarly influenced the educational approaches of the Austrian-born philosopher and educationalist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) and the Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952). Although differing in their approaches, they all emphasised the importance of recognising the specific and distinct educational and emotional needs and abilities of the 5/7–12/14-year-old (particularly to explore and learn independently) in the revolutionary education systems they each founded.

4. See Sarnoff (1971) and Sandler (1975).

5. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle states that until a quantum ‘particle’ interacts with another (is observed) its position and/or velocity remain uncertain and can only be predicted approximately by what can be thought of as a probability cloud. Likewise, the properties of a quantum particle can never be known fully – the more precisely its position is known the less can be known about its velocity (and vice versa). The uncertainty principle, together with the concept of the wave-particle duality of quantum ‘particles’, describe the inherent uncertainty of the quantum world (and indeed today are thought by some to be equivalent statements mathematically) (Coles et al., 2014).

6. Such are the winds of change that the 2019 IPA centenary conference was devoted entirely to ‘The feminine’, with the aim of ‘updating rethinking classical psychoanalytic views on the feminine [and by corollary the masculine also] and their repercussions in psychoanalysis’, and addressing such questions as how ‘the feminine develop[s] in childhood and adolescence, and how … we deconstruct the infantile theories about the feminine at work in our psyches’ (Bürgin et al., 2019, p. 5, p. 7, respectively).

7. The terms primary dyad and external other are used here as gender neutral terms to replace the terms maternal and paternal more commonly used in the literature.