SHRINKING HISTORY, On Freud and the Failure of ... - Planet.ee

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problem: how to establish accurate information concerning the
specific childhood experiences and specific adult personality
patterns of a sizable body of individuals. Psychoanalytic sources of
such information- the selective and highly questionable infant and
childhood memories of patients under care- are totally unacceptable
to the researcher seeking confirmation or disconfirmation of the
theory, since even parents' memories concerning dates of weaning and
toilet training have been shown to be seriously inaccurate after as
short an interval as one year.
One rather comprehensive study which artificially inflated the
probability of accurate parental recall asked participating parents
to submit progress reports both in writing and in person throughout
their children's infancy. The study tested parental recall when the
children were only three years old and found common inaccuracies of
as much as six months (an enormous discrepancy in discussing just two
to three years of life) in remembered dates of weaning, the onset and
conclusion of bowel training, and other milestones of infancy. Only
slightly more than one-third of the fathers and one-half of the
mothers questioned remembered accurately whether the child had been
fed on a schedule or on a demand basis, and- in striking support of
the idea that suggestion is an ever-present problem- almost all of
the distortions tended to be in the direction of the schedule
recommendations contained in Benjamin Spock's Baby and Child Care.
The sample of parents studied was, as a group, highly educated, andof
great importance- they were aware that their memories would be
checked against the records they themselves had prepared. *(28)
Needless to say, evidence of this sort casts serious doubt on the
accuracy of psychoanalytic patient recall and on studies relying on
parental recollection of childhood training, experiences, and events.
Thus, the substantial body of studies that employ parental recall in
gathering infant training data must at best be treated with great
caution. Nevertheless, it is at least worth noting that since the
first such studies of any size or complexity were conducted in the
1930s, there has to date been only one of any sophistication that has
found even tentative support for any psychoanalytically hypothesized
links between specific infant care and specific adult personality
patterns. And this study flatly contradicts other parts of the
orality hypothesis. *(29) That research has so consistently resulted
in negative findings does not, of course, reduce the significance of
possible flaws in the research design, but neither should these
findings be totally ignored.
An improvement on the retrospective types of investigation are the
types known as current and longitudinal. Current and longitudinal
studies seek direct confirmation of childhood training procedures,
either by interview, questionnaire, observation, or a combination of
these measures. These studies, however, are not without problems of
their own. While the data on infancy and childhood successfully deal
with the problem of veracity, many of these studies have plotted
these data against personality patterns apparent only in pre-pubertal
Page 68 , Shrinking History, - David E. Stannard