Introduction

Summary

Development is one of psychology’s given components. Psychologists and consequently the lay public in Western cultures see childhood as well as adult character in terms of what I call here ‘the developmental idea’, describing a scientific category that exists ‘out there’ in nature. The human interior, it seems, passes through a necessary series of stages that play out over time. And so the youngest of us are only potential human beings; we do not start to display signs of ‘empathy’, say, until we are three, or ‘logical reasoning’ until we are six: or so we are told. Adult character and conduct are the desired outcome of those stages (though a few of us, it appears, never reach them even when we arrive at adulthood by calendar age).