The Personality of the Preschool Child. The Child's Search for his Self

345 Pages·1947·17.359 MB·English

by  Werner Wolff (Auth.)

ILLUSTRATIONS TO FAIRY TALES
THE PERSONALITY OF
THE PRESCHOOL CHILD
The Child's Search for His Self
By WERNER WOLFF
PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY
BARD COLLEGE
London
WILLIAM HEINEMANN · MEDICAL BOOKS · LTD.
1947
This book is copyright
PRINTED IN IT. S. A.
To KATE WOLFF
FOREWORD
By Mary Fisher Langmuir, Ph.D.
Chairman, Department of Child Study, Vassar College;
President, Child Study Association of America
The Personality of the Preschool Child is an important and
creative contribution to the rapidly growing science of child devel-
opment. Dr. Werner Wolff is one of the first psychologists to con-
sider child behavior and child expression from the point of view of
the dynamics of personality during the foundation years in which
the self is becoming differentiated. His unifying concepts, first
"that all expressions of personality by the young child seem to be
varieties on one theme: the child's search for his self" and second,
"the recognition of two worlds in which the young child and adult
live isolated from each other," are suggestive and stimulating. Even
those who disagree with certain of Dr. Wolff's formulations or his
interpretations of specific items of behavior will be deeply indebted
to him for carrying his important pioneer work on "experimental
depth psychology" into the study of child personality.
One point made by Dr. Wolff on a controversial subject seems
particularly worthy of mention in view of rather widespread current
confusion, especially among educators and parents. It also has
important implications for our understanding of children's aggres-
sions and fears. In discussing the fairy tale and "the Integration
of Fairy Tales into the Orbit of Experiences" Dr. Wolff states, "We
believe that the structure of the fairy tale is of the same kind as are
the imaginings of a child who has never heard a fairy tale. Fairy
tale and the child's autonomous thinking originate in a similar
psychic level." The author presents convincing evidence from the
rich and varied data made available to him for study and analysis
that "any fantasy of the child, even if derived from stories heard,
leads us into the child's personality." In this and many other ways
the reader's attention is continually directed to the meaning for the
child of his particular symbols or forms of expression.
No one who carefully reads Dr. Wolff's reconstruction of the
inner world of childhood and the search for the self can continue to
ignore or deprecate what have traditionally been considered the
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irrational, the illogical, and the destructive (naughty) items of
childhood. Each child's spontaneous behavior and individual idioms
of expression take on new dignity, and new significance, because of
this book.
Finally, Dr. Wolff's emphasis on the need for converging ap-
proaches instead of isolated tests is not only scientifically sound
but essential if the basic unity of personality, even in childhood, is
to be described and understood. Even though much of the work is
still in a controversial, pioneer, and experimental stage, Dr. Wolff's
Personality of the Preschool Child makes an outstanding contribu-
tion toward the creation of a "depth psychology of childhood."
M. F. L.
Vassar College
August 15,1946
PREFACE
THE present study of the child's personality had its beginnings
more than fifteen years ago.(ei0614) Observational and experi-
mental studies were made in nursery schools and homes in Germany,
Spain, and the United States.
The author's interest in child study was mainly motivated by his
concern with the problem of personality. The personality of the
adult grows out of the personality of the child, but the further we
trace back the origin of personality formation, the darker becomes
the field of exploration. Our own remembrances mostly do not reach
to the years of our preschool existence. Some scattered situations
may spring up in our memory, but they remain isolated facts with-
out inner relationship. The continuity of our existence is suddenly
broken up, we do not know what lies behind this gap, but we feel
there was another world.
In spite of the detailed investigations of a child's abilities in his
years of early growth there did not emerge a picture of the person-
ality of the preschool child. A. Gesell, in his book The First Five
Years of Life, remarks :(214) *
It is hoped that the reader will not be too much disappointed if he fails to
find in the volume he now holds an exclusive ideology which would explain the
hidden forces and motivations of child behavior. We believe that too little is
known about the complex transformations of early behavior to warrant an
elaborate theoretical structure.
The present author felt that he could not add too much to the
brilliant investigations of overt child behavior by investigators such
as Gesell, but he felt the urge to attempt an approach to the hidden
forces and motivations of child behavior. Searching for some kind of
theoretical structure of the personality of the preschool child, the
task was to design new experiments and to explore the expressive
behavior of children in their spontaneous verbal, graphic, and dra-
matic expression. From the author's observations there emerged a
unifying concept of the viewpoint of the child, in that all expres-
*P. xiii.
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xiv PERSONALITY OF THE PRESCHOOL CHILD
sions of personality by the young child seemed to be variations on
one theme: the child's search for his self. The child's imagery, his
spoken language, and the language of his behavior appear as a con
tinuous questioning: Who am I? What am I for? The child does
not explore the world only in order to gain knowledge, but also to
differentiate himself from his environment.
The other unifying concept was the recognition of two worlds in
which the young child and the adult live isolated from each other.
The transformation of a child into an adult proceeds in his gradual
process of growth. The preschool child is at the beginning, the
adult at the end of this developmental process. Thus, the young
child and the adult have extreme positions; the gap between both
worlds becomes bridged when the preschool period has ended. Be
cause of this structural difference between preschool child and
adult, the child's thought processes, his emotional world, his social
life cannot be evaluated from the standards of the adult, buthave to
be understood from the child's own culture. Even if expressions
of the young child resemble in their appearance corresponding
manifestations of the adult, their basic structures are as differ
ent from each other as are, for instance, two forms of laughing
-laughing in joy and laughing in embarrassment. Thus similar
appearances may have different roots, just as dissimilar appearances
may have similar roots, as for instance two forms of joy, expressed
by laughing and by weeping. These examples are chosen to indicate
that neither similarities nor dissimilarities can be inferred from a
surfacebehavior; we needan explorationof the depth of personality.
In an attempt to explore the child's inner personality methods
were used bywhich the child was stimulated to a "projection" of his
personality, just as an image is projected upon a screen. The differ
ent rays which cause the projection of an image come together in
one point that lies in the depth of the apparatus. If we want to dis
cover this hidden point in the psychic apparatus, we have to con
struct experiments which indicate the directions of each ray; and so
as not to be lost in experimentation, our procedure should always
have in view the focal point of the rays. The author calls such an
approach to the depth of personality by means of experiments "Ex
perimental depth psychology." This term indicates experimental
investigation for exploring the depth of personality.
The children discussed in this study were from 3 to 5 years old.
The three parts of our investigation-observation, experimenta-
PREFACE xv
tion, and theory—focus upon one main problem : the development of
the self.
In this country the author's studies on the personality of pre-
school children were first carried on at the Sarah Lawrence College
Nursery School, Bronxville, N. Y. (1939-40), and he wishes to
acknowledge the courtesy of Drs. L. B. Murphy and E. Lerner in
making available their research material.
From 1940 to 1943 the author was Research Associate in the
Department of Child Study at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, N. Y.,
which was carrying on research on the personality development of
children under grants from the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and the
General Education Board. This research group developed special
facilities for the study of the preschool child in training recorders of
children's verbal responses, observers of children's behavior, and in
establishing a filming project to study the child's development of
personality. I express my most sincere gratitude to Dr. Mary Fisher
Langmuir, director of the research project, to Dr. L. Joseph Stone,
who gave me much stimulation with his unique films on children's
behavior, and to the many observers and recorders whose material I
am kindly permitted to use.*
I wish to thank my students in psychology and child study at
Bard College,! who carried out many of my experimental designs,
and Mrs. Serena Modigliani, who generously contributed records of
her son.
I am grateful for the comparative material obtained from many
sources such as the Jewish Education Committee, the Poughkeepsie
Day School, the New York Institute for the Education of the Blind,
the Lighthouse, New York City, the material on epileptic children
furnished by Miss Florentine Hackbush, psychologist with the Bu-
reau of Mental Health in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and
the drawings of a neurotic child given by Dr. Miriam Fiedler.
I am indebted to the many authors whose works are referred to.
I wish to thank the World Book Company for permission to use
Figures 91-95 from Florence Goodenough's Measurement of Intelli-
gence by Drawings, and to Harcourt, Brace and Company for Fig-
ures 108-111 from The Psychology of Children's Drawings, by
Helga Eng.
♦The initials V.C. before a record in the present book indicate that the material
was collected by the staff of the Vassar College Nursery School, printed by permission.
t The initials B.C. before a record indicate that the material was collected by stu-
dents of the Department of Psychology, Bard College. The other records of reactions
to the experimental situations were taken by the present author himself.
xvi PERSONALITY OF THE PRESCHOOL CHILD
My special thanks go to my wife, Kate Wolff, who with her criti-
cism and most valuable suggestions brought this book into its shape,
which became final through corrections proposed by Dr. Dorothy
Clifton, Mrs. Paula Mendel, and through the fine editing job of Mr.
James Holsaert. I am grateful for their help and for President Har-
old Gray's careful reading of the proofs.
My deepest thanks are offered to all the little children whose
thought and art inspired not only this approach to the preschool
child but enriched my view on the problems of human behavior.
Annandale-on-Hudson, N. Y. W. W.