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Curious about the world, a child of 8 months pulls a string on a bell and something delightful happens: the bell rings!
According to a traditional model of intellectual development, the child has learned a first lesson in logic and causality--I can make things happen in the world--and has initiated a pattern of learning that will continue throughout her life and determine the growth of her mind.
Suppose, though, that the child is employing an intelligence formed much earlier, in the first months of life, an intelligence forged not through cognitive tasks but in the crucible of the most intimate emotional interaction: gazing up at her mother's face, the child smiles and--again, something delightful--Mother smiles back.
Is it there, in the felt emotional experience of an intimate encounter, that the child's education in logic and causality really begins?
So asserts psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan, M.D., in a sweeping and ambitious new book titled The Growth of the Mind and the Endangered Origins of Intelligence (Addison-Wesley Publishing Inc.).
Drawing on clinical and research experience with children and infants, Greenspan maintains that subtle emotional interactions form the building blocks of all intelligence and the origins of the highest orders of human capacity: morality, creativity, even consciousness itself.
His theory is at once radical and synthetic, contradicting a centuries-old dichotomy in Western thought between reason and emotion, while weaving genetic and physiologic understandings of the brain with a psychoanalytic and developmental perspective.
The Growth of the Mind offers an informed perspective on contemporary controversies surrounding the nature and origin of intelligence. At the same time, the book provides psychiatrists with a "road map" for understanding the development of their patients' minds over time.
Greenspan's work is also a cautionary treatise, sounding an alarm about the gradual erosion of our individual and collective intelligence. For if the author is right, the intimacies that lend us a sense of shared fate and connect us to each other are also the material from which we derive the ability to think, solve problems, and master complexity. As these shared emotional experiences give way to a pervasive impersonality in the home, school, workplace, and community, Greenspan says, we grow not just more lonely, but more dull.
He is especially critical of contemporary educational trends toward large-group, technology-based teaching and of most institutional child care arrangements (see related story).
Without a "reinvestment in shared intimacies and ongoing emotional interactions," Greenspan told Psychiatric News, "we as a society are in danger of moving toward more and more impulsivity, helplessness, fragmentation, and self-centeredness.
"These processes will be very slow and insidious," he continued. "The irony is that by the time we recognize these changes are occurring, we may not have the mental ability to understand them or correct them."
That feelings and emotional experiences are crucial to a kind of intelligence has gained a certain cache recently, with the popularity of Daniel Goleman's 1995 book Emotional Intelligence. Goleman proposes that there is more than one way of "being smart," that an intuitive, interpersonally adept form of intelligence exists alongside the more commonly recognized rational or academic intelligence.
Yet it is Greenspan's contention that affective experience is not merely a type of intelligence, but the very source of all of the mind's capacities: the lawyer's logic, the architect's spatial acuity, and the statistician's yen for precision, as well as the therapist's intuitive knack for empathy.
"The prevailing model in existence since the beginning of modern philosophy has separated the intellect from the emotions," Greenspan said. "Even Freud saw the ego as related to intelligence, riding the horse of the passions, or the emotions.
"More recently in [Goleman's] portrayal of different kinds of intelligence, there has still been this basic dichotomy," Greenspan added, "with social intelligence in opposition to or different from cognitive and academic intelligence, as if the two were controlled by different parts of the brain."
Consider, he said in response to Goleman, the mathematical concept of quantity; there could hardly be a form of knowledge more purely academic--or so it would seem. Yet to a child the concept of "a lot" is learned first when he gets more than he expects. Similarly, the concept of "a little" is experienced as getting less than what he wants.
"So the first sense of quantity is learned emotionally, based on expectations," Greenspan said. "Later, the child systematizes these experiences with numbers, so that 10 becomes 'a lot' and two becomes 'a little.' "
"But the feel for numbers, without which you cannot do mathematics, is learned emotionally," he explained.
Many of the insights in The Growth of the Mind are derived from Greenspan's work with autistic and developmentally disabled children. Because of neurological deficits, these children experience information and auditory "processing" problems--deficits in sensory perception and sequencing of external stimuli--that rob them of normal, emotional interactions with their environment.
Yet when these same children, through painstaking therapeutic work, are provided with experiences that address their unique processing challenges and that allow them to engage in a sequence of critical emotional interactions with important caregivers, the transformations are sometimes remarkable.
Greenspan cites the case of a 2-year-old girl, utterly uncommunicative, who spent hours persistently rubbing a patch of carpet with her finger. Using strategies described in his books Infancy and Early Childhood and Developmentally Based Psychotherapy (both published by International Universities Press), Greenspan and colleagues took a novel approach: to view the behavior as not only a symptom of autism, but also a sign of interest and motivation, and to engage her emotionally in that interest.
"We had the girl's mother place her hand next to hers, right on the favorite stretch of floor," the author writes. "The child pushed it away, but her mother gently put it back. Again she pushed, again the hand returned. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. . . . From this tiny beginning grew emotional connection, a relationship, and then thoughts and words. From pushing away an obstructing hand to seeking out that hand and then offering flirtatious grins and giggles, the child progressed to using gestures in a reciprocal nonverbal dialogue. . . . Over a period of time, she had started making her own sounds and then her own words."
The fledgling interaction between the girl and her mother is a small-scale version, he added, of what all individuals require for the development of higher-order mental processes: lived emotional experience. It is this active engagement with the environment, rather than rote academic or cognitive exercise, that appears to account for the development of abstract thinking, Greenspan believes.
He and his colleagues found, for instance, that among children who were asked to describe a concept--say, "people who are bosses"--children with developmental challenges, deprived of lived emotional experiences, tended to give very concrete, one-dimensional responses: parents are bosses, teachers are bosses, babysitters are bosses.
However, children with rich emotional experiences gave more nuanced responses based on their life encounters: "Sometimes I don't like [bosses], especially when there are things I want to do and they don't let me. But sometimes it's O.K. because adults know best."
According to Greenspan, the principle extends to ever more abstract concepts as an individual's brain develops over time in interaction with a challenging environment: A judge charged with the weighty task of "justice" will have gone to school to learn the laws and legal precedents by which society codifies the concept, but his underlying "knowledge" of justice will have been derived from a vast life experience of being treated fairly and unfairly.
In an interview with Psychiatric News, Greenspan said he believes that brain imaging techniques will, in time, prove that the kind of interventions used to engage autistic children emotionally produce changes not only in behavior but in the very structure of the brain.
Indeed, an exciting aspect of Greenspan's work is its synthesis of developmental psychology with new insights derived from genetics and brain physiology.
What emerges, finally, from The Growth of the Mind is not just a new way to think about learning and intellect, but a blueprint for what the author calls an "architecture of the mind."
At its most ambitious, the book points the way to answering questions long vexing to both philosophers and scientists: How does an individual become self-aware? What is the nature of human consciousness?
Materialist scientists on the one hand have maintained that such questions can be answered in terms of brain physiology, while spiritualists and others argue that self-awareness and consciousness are aspects of the "soul," unexplainable in neuroanatomical terms alone.
It is Greenspan's inspiration to seize on affect and emotion as the bridge between a purely physiologic explanation that would seem to negate our humanity and a metaphysical one that would seem to defy science.
The seed of the mind's growth--planted in the very first hours of life, Greenspan said--is an elementary physiologic response of arousal to the simplest stimuli: a shade of light, the touch of a hand, the sound of a voice.
In a short time, this arousal response becomes entwined in interactions with others: the infant's arousal catches the eye of Mother, who smiles, encouraging the infant to smile back--"a dance of affect," as Greenspan described it, "excitement to excitement."
In keeping with the child's growing nervous system, these physiologic responses grow more sophisticated, evolving from mere arousal to states of delight, surprise, and excitement.
Expressions of affect gradually become so subtle that there seem to be infinite textures of emotion. Moreover, this evolution from physiologic response toward affective expression is as individual as the proverbial snowflake: no two people can have the exact same emotional response to the same experience.
Self-awareness or consciousness arises finally when the mind learns to reflect on its own affects, using them to interpret the past, anticipate the future, and organize experience in the present.
Questions persist--how, precisely, do the body and brain produce affects?--but Greenspan's formulation offers a sound physiologic pathway for the development of consciousness while preserving the uniquely human character of our self-awareness.
"Consciousness is born as an organic or physiological phenomenon," he observed, "but then becomes a psychological phenomenon through the abstraction of your own affect patterns."
Human intelligence has come a long way, but Greenspan believes that its foundations in emotional interaction are imperiled by a growing and pervasive impersonality.
He concludes The Growth of the Mind with an urgent appeal to protect the shared intimacies that have made consciousness the distinctive human contribution to evolution.
"If early emotional experience is the basis of our intellectual capacities as well as of our moral sense and creativity, we must give it higher priority in our personal, community, and national planning," he writes. "The challenges that face us. . .require collective action. Such challenges require the development of our individual minds and the opportunity for each and all of us to attain full humanity. Attention to subjective experience is then not purely a humanitarian or aesthetic activity, but one that is crucial to human survival."
(Psychiatric News, June 6, 1997)