The crucial point in all this development is that the concepts are only minimally verbal (due to the limitations of the child's vocabulary and due to the primitive nature of the child's cognitive process) and as such in being minimally verbal and overly global, they are unrecognized and yet form fundamental or basic statements about the self, the world and the relationship between the two.

a. About himself

While the child enters the world with a pre-formed personality, he enters the world with little else. Plato (Secretes) and their progeny in the past-lives community not withstanding, the child must learn everything. He is biologically programed to learn language (Pinker, 1994) as he is biologically programmed to learn many other concepts (Gazzaniga, 1992; Gruber & Voneche, 1986).

Footnote 61. One of the characteristic of the toddler's undeveloped cognitive abilities is the characteristic over-generalizations that children make. Thus all-four legged animals are doggies. Another characteristic of the child's cognitive world which causes no end of character related problems is that ALL children consider themselves to be both the source and the object of everything that happens to them. While one can not, in logic, be both source and object at the same time; still this is the way children inherently think and thus innocently form a host of wrong concepts which, over time, go to form their character.

Footnote 62. 60% to 80% of who a person is, is genetic. The word "genetic" includes both inheritance as such and effects of a host of factors during gestation. Thus if the male child does not develop testosterone producing gonads and produce appropriate levels of testosterone and certain enzymes at the appropriate time during gestation, or the mother over-produces estrogen, 'his' brain will evolve a female brain pattern and we will get a genetic homosexual or trans-sexual (Panksepp, 1998, pp 231-236)

One of these learning tasks is to learn who he is. This learning task involves much experimentation and trial-and-error learning. But he also learns by mimesis, by observing parents and siblings, and attempting to copy their behavior. These learning tasks involve an interaction between genetics, parental behavior, opportunity, and happenstance.

Take as an example the issue of competence. The question that the young child must answer is: am I competent to deal effective and properly with the world or am I incompetent either in doing most things wrong or in not being able to do things without being told how to do them.

An eloquent testimony to this issue is presented by Holt (1964/1983). Holt points out, with criticism, the tendency of parents to interfere with the child's play with a toy to tell him how to play "the right way." The child, playing with the toy in the manner which to him seems appropriate (and thereby competently), is now told that his method is wrong, he is incompetent or he has to be told how to do things properly. This, in general, is not one time learning; it is a repeated lesson until he knows ahead of time that unless he is instructed in the proper way to do things, he will do them wrongly (incompetently).

Through repeated experience in various areas (including, later, school) he forms a concept of himself that becomes one of the fundamental building blocks of character.

But I don't want to leave the impression that it is only what the child is taught. It also includes ideas that the child forms on his own as a result of maturation and happenstance.

In this connection, I would relate a story about myself. The data for this story was obtained by my use of the first of the self-exploration techniques I will present later in this chapter.

I was in my fourth year. It happens that two things occur during this period. One is the development of the pride system. This system develops as a function of brain maturation and is influenced by the biological IQ. The other thing that happens is that at this age the child is 50% of its adult height.

I was playing in the tub and, being proud of how big I had become, in my mind I projected myself up to the height of my father. That just required a mental doubling of my size. What I did not know is that the penis develops disproportionately to the rest of the body. So in doubling my height, I innocently (child's lack of knowledge) doubled the size of my penis. I was mortified (it was a strong feeling, strongly experienced). When I got to be as big as my father, I would have a tiny little penis.

Footnote 63. Data indicate that IQ is 60% to 80% genetic.

I won't go into all the ramifications of this erroneous concept of myself, but it influenced my behavior all through adulthood until, using the recovered memory technique presented later, I recovered the memory of that four-year-old experience and was able then to explore its effects on me over the years and thus correct them.

b. About the world

For the child, the world is made up of two parts. There is the physical world which is predictable and there is the world of people which may or may not be predictable (depending on the consistency of the parents).

The child has to learn how the physical world operates. That learning process goes all the way from the early pleasure of the "peek-a-boo" game to the more advanced learning of the conservation of volume to the yet more advanced concept of cause and effect.

The child learns how to ride a bike, now to use tableware, how to tie his shoes, how to use a chair to reach something in the kitchen beyond his reach, how to manipulate objects in his mind and all the other things we all know about the physical world.

The child must also learn about the world of people. This is a far more complex task than learning about the physical world. The problem is that people are unpredictable. Parents have psychological problems that impact their parenting and they have moods that prohibit a task today that was allowed yesterday. Far more important, however, is that parents are adults and that is a serious problem.

Footnote 64. The concept of cause and effect can not be taught. It is acquired automatically as a function of brain maturation, usually somewhere in the child's ninth year (Gruber & Voneche, 1986).

Footnote 65. Mental manipulation of solid objects is one of the sub-tests in the WISC IQ test.

Before you throw away this book at this point, let me explain. I will start with the issue I raised in footnote 64. Prior to somewhere in a child's ninth year, he does not have the concept of cause and effect. That requires a bit of amplification before I continue. The proper concept of cause and effect is: because of the properties of an object, when subject to a particular operation (cause) it will respond in a given way (effect). Note that (1) the concept of cause and effect is not statistical, it is statement about the properties of an object such that when subject to a particular operation the result is a priori predictable, (2) it is temporal only in the sense that at some time in the future the effect will occur given that the cause has already occurred, and (3) it is a statement about things, not about people's actions.

Now prior to the child's biological-maturational acquisition of this concept, the only concept that the child has is one of temporal contiguity. That is to say that event (effect) B follows after event (cause) A. The child may or may not observe regularity of the sequence, but his only context of understanding is that of first one and then the other (temporal sequence).

Footnote 66. Windelband, W. (1901/1958). A history of philosophy, Vol II. New York: Harper. pp 399-425. Here Windelband discusses the modification of the concept of cause and effect from entity and action to action and action. At page 410, he writes: "This succeeded in the corporal world in a relatively simple manner. In this domain, the idea of cause had acquired a completely new significance through Galileo. According to the scholastic conceptions... causes were substances or things, while effects, on the other hand, were either their activities or were other substances and things which were held to come about only by such activities: this was the Platonic-Aristotelian conception of the airia. Calileo, on the contrary, went back to the idea of older Greek thinkers who applied the causal relations only to the states — that means now to the motions of substances — not to the Being of the substances themselves" [italics in the original].

One of the few authors on child raising books who explicitly took account of this phenomenon (even if his advice, as we will see, was wrong) was Hiam Ginott (1969). Ginott, in giving examples of his recommended style of parenting, presents the scene where a child is sitting in his high-chair. He has had a glass of milk but is still in the high-chair. As will any child, he soon starts playing with the glass. Shortly it falls and shatters on the floor. Ginott's recommendation to the parent is to say: "Now, darling, glasses are not for breaking."

Kindly, sweet, understanding; but wrong. It is wrong because it assumes the child has the concept of cause and effect. A bright five-year-old, when hearing this, will say: "I didn't break the glass, I pushed the glass off and it broke itself." To say that if you push the glass off then it will break assumes the concept of cause and effect (glass is such that given the imposition of rapid large force (hitting the floor), it will break). The child has the concept of temporality: I did act one (push glass off) and it did act two (broke).

As adults, we use the concept of cause and effect so routinely in our thinking, that we are not even aware that we are using it and even less aware that our child does not have that concept.

Now another example to illustrate another cognitive defect of children relative to their adult-thinking parents.

The child is playing in the living room. The mother sees that he is playing with the lamp on an end table. Sternly, she says: "Don't play with the lamp, you'll break it." She leaves the room and a few minutes later: crash! She runs back in to see the lamp smashed on the floor. She scolds, or hits, or demeans or otherwise punishes. Her child has directly disobeyed what she just told him.

Except that he didn't disobey. She said not to play with the lamp; and he didn't. He was playing with the space ship. For children, reality is not fixed; it is flexible.

Footnote 67. This is not hypothetical. A patient of mine many years ago after reading Ginott did start talking in this way to her child. What I report of what the child would say is exactly, word for word, what her child did say.

Footnote 68. That is why a child can color the sky purple and does not color only within the lines in his coloring book.

For an adult a lamp is a lamp and it is always a lamp, even if it is sitting on the floor unused in the garage. But to a child, a lamp is whatever you fantasize it to be. Reality is not fixed.

Adult parents are continually using adult concepts with children who either don't know the concept at all or have a grossly different context of the concept. Just to emphasize the degree of this disjunction, here is a true story about a teenager and her mother.

It happened once when I was sitting in a coffee shop and over-heard two mothers talking in the next booth. The one mother was relating to the other the big fight she had with her high school daughter the previous night.