Conscience And The Acquisition Of Values

Conscience and the Acquisition of Values Alan Challoner MA MChS

Where lies the difference between the development of children who grow into reasonable and responsible adults, and those who enter the fraternity of the criminal? Are children born innocent; or are some, as certain authorities believe, born evil? How can we help children to grow into decent citizens? What part, if any, does attachment play in this scenario? Some of the background, and may be some of the answers lie here.

Until fairly recently the processes by which a child acquires the values of his culture and his various overlapping subcultures was, according to Dukes, still rather obscure.1 Negative values, or conscience, have received much more attention than positive values. Educators seeking to improve children’s characters, psychoanalysts concerned with the tyranny of the super-ego♦ , anthropologists trying to distinguish between shame and guilt cultures, and experimental psychologists noting the persistence of avoidance responses have shared this emphasis on values of the “Thou shalt not” variety. Sears, Maccoby, and Levin suggest that the rôle of reasoning with the child is an influence on the measure of conscience. 2 They give three criteria for recognizing the operation of conscience in young children:

♦

CONSCIENCE & THE SUPER-EGO. The super-ego is the third and last system of personality to be developed. It is the internal representative of the traditional values and ideals of society as interpreted to the child by his parents, and enforced by means of a system of rewards and punishments imposed upon the child. The super-ego is the moral arm of personality; it represents the ideal rather than the real and it strives for perfection rather than pleasure. Its main concern is to decide whether something is right or wrong so that it can act in accordance with the moral standards authorized by the agents of society. The super-ego as the internalized moral arbiter of conduct develops in response to the rewards and punishments meted out by the parents. To obtain the rewards and avoid the punishments, the child learns to guide his behaviour along the lines laid down by the parents. Whatever they determine is improper, and then punish him for doing, tends to become incorporated into his conscience, which is one of the two subsystems of the super-ego. Whatever they approve of and reward him for doing tends to become incorporated into his ego-ideal that is the other subsystem of the super-ego. The mechanism by which this incorporation takes place is called introjection. The conscience punishes the person by making him feel guilty, the ego-ideal rewards the person by making him feel proud of himself. With the formulation of the super-ego, self-control is substituted for parental control. The main functions of the super-ego are: •

to inhibit the impulses of the id, particularly those of a sexual or aggressive nature, since these are the impulses whose s highly condemned by society;

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to persuade the ego to substitute moralistic goals for realistic ones and;

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to strive for perfection.

That is, the super-ego is inclined to oppose both the id and the ego, and to make the world over into its own image However, it is like the id in being non-rational and like the ego in attempting to exercise control over the instincts. Unlike the ego, the super-ego does not merely postpone instinctual gratification; it tries to block it permanently.

•

resistance to temptation,

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self-instruction to obey the rules,

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and evidence of guilt when transgression occurs. (Sears et al, 1957)

These three criteria are treated jointly as defining conscience, and no attempt is made to analyse their separate developments. Although the authors mention that the aspects of conscience do not necessarily all appear at once, they regard conscience as representing an internalisation of control that is fundamentally different from external control, whether by force, fear of punishment, or hope of material reward. THE FIRST CRITERION, resistance to temptation, may be viewed simply as avoidance learning. Solomon & Brush, (1956) studies of avoidance behaviour without a warning signal and Dinsmoor’s 3 analysis of punishment show how feedback from an individual’s own acts can become a cue for avoidance, and how persistent such avoidance may be. 4 The fact that the child avoids the forbidden acts even in the absence of the parents is presumably due to the parents having in the past discovered and punished (in the broadest sense of that word) transgressions committed in their absence. This is often as a result of identification. Sears, Maccoby, and Levin found that there was ample evidence that the process of absorbing parental values and adopting some forms of parental behaviour was not a passive one. They believed that it was associated with very vigorous motives and emotions, and the qualities thus learned were so strongly established that the normal experiences of adult life could influence them but little. (Idem, 1957) The process of identification in this sense works either for good or bad dependent as it is on the quality of the parental mechanisms of control. As Sears, Maccoby, and Levin have written: In the long run, then, if our theory of identification is correct, the process itself places limits on the range within which human morals and values can fall. If there must be some parental warmth in order for a child to identify with his parents, then the very same warmth will be an identified-with quality and will become a property in the personality of the child. The same will hold true of the choice of withdrawal of love as a means of discipline. Thus, mainly within the range of parental qualities required to insure identification in the child will there be a continuation of the social and personality qualities that constitute those parents. (Idem)

Within certain limits, the greater the intensity of the punishments (Milner, 1951) and the shorter the delay between transgression and punishment, (Mowrer & Ullman5); Solomon & Brush, idem 1956) the greater should be the resulting inhibition. Jenkins & Stanley consider that the greater certainty of punishment might be expected to produce inhibition that would be more complete in the short run but also less persistent once punishment was permanently withdrawn. 6 This prediction suggests that even this one criterion of conscience may not be unitary; that different laws may apply depending on whether one asks how completely the child obeys the prohibitions or how long he continues to obey them after leaving the parental home. If partial reinforcement should turn out to be a crucial variable in the human situation, these two criteria might even be inversely related. The prediction also suggests that the question, “Is inconsistent discipline bad?” is far too simple; one must at least ask, “Bad for what?” 7 It must also be kept in mind that punishment is not restricted to physical chastisement or even to noxious stimuli in general, including scolding and ridicule. Withdrawal of positive reinforcers may be very effective as a punishment, a fact that complicates the analysis. Dynamic aspects of personality depend upon a supply of instinctual energy from the id. Freud made the same distinction between the mind and its source of energy that an engineer would make between an engine and its fuel; although he modified his two great groups of instincts that provide energy for the id. One group serves the purposes of life: their energy is called libido. The life instincts are a constant source of emotional tension, whose conscious impact is painful and unpleasant. One of Freud’s first and most fundamental 2

assumptions was that all activities of the mind are driven by the need to reduce or eliminate this tension. Because a conscious experience of pleasure was supposed to accompany all tension reduction, Freud called this fundamental assumption the pleasure principle. In a very young infant the functions of the id are purely automatic. But when reflex action fails, as eventually it must, frustration causes emotional tension to build up. The baby must then learn to form an image of the object that reduces its tensions. At first, this image, which is generated by the primary process, is offered as a kind of substitute satisfaction whenever frustration occurs. This use of imagery is pure wish-fulfilment. Freud believed that wishfulfilment, or attempted wish-fulfilments, persist into adulthood; dreams were his prime example. The ego is the executive branch of the personality. It operates according to a reality principle, rather than the pleasure principle. When reflex action and wish-fulfilling imagery have both failed, the child begins to develop a secondary process: the thinking, knowing, problem-solving processes necessary to produce the desired object itself. As a consequence of the secondary process, a plan of action is created and tested. The testing is called reality testing. Most of the psychological functions that had been studied prior to Freud’s work sensation, perception, learning, thinking, memory, action, will, and so on are pure ego functions in Freudian terminology. The ego has no energy of its own, so it steals energy from the id by a process known as identification. The theft is perpetrated as follows: the id invests its instinctual energy in the images that its primary process creates, but the id has no way to distinguish between its own wish-fulfilling imagination and the real images of perception. To achieve gratification the id’s awakening energy must be invested in an accurate image of a tension-reducing object; the imagination image that the id desires and the perceptual image of the goal object must be in good agreement. When the internal image corresponds closely to the perceptual object, the idea can be identified with the object, and the idea’s psychic energy can be transferred to it. This identification process enables the energies of the id to be guided by an accurate representation of reality, and makes possible the further development of the ego. The super-ego, which develops at a later age, is said to include two sub-systems, an egoideal and a conscience. Both are assimilated by the child from examples and teachings provided by his parents. The ego-ideal is the child’s conception of what his parents will approve; his conscience is the child’s conception of what they will condemn as morally bad. The ego-ideal is learned through rewards, the conscience through punishments. The superego, in short, is the repository of social norms Freud’s way of dealing with the kinds of problems that Durkheim discovered in his studies of social action. The process of investing instinctual energy is called cathexis. The id has only cathexes, but the ego and the super-ego can use the energy at their disposal in either of two ways, for cathexis or anti-cathexis. Anti-cathexis, that manifests itself in terms of self-frustration, is the way the ego and the super-ego keep the id in check. Perhaps the most important example of anti-cathexis has to do with memory. A person may fail to recall something, Freud would say, because the memory trace is not sufficiently charged with energy it is too weakly cathected. But sometimes his memory may fail because the cathexis is opposed by an even stronger anti-cathexis; in that case a memory is said to be repressed. The repressive mechanism is one way a very common way the ego protects itself against painful memories and the discomfort or anxiety they would arouse. 8 THE SECOND CRITERION OF CONSCIENCE self-instruction, obviously makes the human case different from the animal case, but it does not introduce any new motivational principle. One of the advantages of membership of the human species is the possibility of using verbal symbolization in dealing with one’s problems. It is natural that a person learning an avoidance, like a person learning any other difficult response pattern, should give himself verbal instructions, especially since verbal coaching by others is so important in the learning of social prohibitions. (Sears, Maccoby, and Levin, Idem, 1957)

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Hurlock suggests that such self-instruction is an imitative act that might be learned according to any of the reinforcement paradigms discussed above. Presumably the learning of prohibitions proceeds differently in verbal and non-verbal organisms, but observations of the relation between moral statements and moral behaviour argue against the assumption that there is a high correlation between verbal and other criteria of conscience, except as both are influenced by the values represented in the social environment. 9 THE THIRD CRITERION OF CONSCIENCE guilt at violations of the prohibitions, is itself complex, with many verbal, autonomic, and gross behavioural aspects. However, the striking paradox about guilt, which has seemed to some students to set it apart from the ordinary laws of learning, is that it often involves the seeking of punishment. The person who has transgressed, rather than trying to avoid punishment, or even waiting passively for it to come, actively seeks out the authorities, confesses, and receives his punishment with apparent relief. He may also, or instead, go to great lengths to make restitution. Were it not for these phenomena of punishment-seeking and self-sacrificing restitution, it would be easy to dismiss guilt as merely the kind of fear associated with anticipation of certain sorts of punishment. As it is, the existence of guilt serves as an argument for regarding conscience as something more than the sum of all those avoidances that have moral significance in one’s culture. (Hill, Idem, 1963) Mowrer and Kluckhorn’s theory of conscience10 may be defined, as a capacity to anticipate in imagination the unpleasant emotional tone that is associated with disobedience to the admonitions of parents or other care-takers, and the pleasant emotional tone that is associated with achievement. They comment that many glib statements are made about the genesis and function of conscience, but believe that a theory that is satisfactorily reducible to its concrete behavioural referents remains to be devised. They agree it is well established that conscience is related to identification, but the problem cannot be disposed of by the statement that the conscience, or super-ego, is formed by “incorporation of the ego-ideal.” (Hill, Idem, 1963) One concept, conscience cannot be explained simply by relating it to another concept. Ego, id, and super-ego are considered not to be behavioural facts but simply as language. Conscience requires an inductive basis from empirical data. Dollard, et al., made a theoretical advance when they said, “Super-ego or conscience is now believed to be established primarily through the existence of affectional bonds (i.e., expectations of reward and security) between a child and his parents”. 11 Introjection is a phenomenon that is well-documented clinically, and there is no doubt that in many cultures most of the content of conscience in the effectively socialised person is formed by the internalisation of parental demands (that turn out, of course, to be mainly the demands of the culture). But the formulation of Dollard, et al., is too narrow; it does not have either sufficient cross-cultural or idiosyncratic perspective. In some cultures the valuestandards of grandparents or of age-mates seem to be absorbed at least equally with those of parents. Additionally, and especially when identification has not proceeded normally, the conscience seems centrally dominated by a rejection or even a reversal of the standards of one or both parents. (Hill, Idem, 1963) Hill asks whether it is possible for sub-human organisms to have conscience. She says it is clear that animals can have anxiety, i.e., they can anticipate painfully intense stimulation. However her explanation is that the type of anxiety that pertains to conscience is of a special kind. If a person is considering whether he should or should not perform a dubious act, i.e., if he is “struggling with temptation,” we can hardy speak of his conscience “hurting” him. Perhaps we could say his conscience is “warning” him that he will feel uncomfortable if he commits the act. Only after the action has been performed could we say that his conscience is indeed “hurting” him. These reflections suggest the hypothesis that conscience is a form of anxiety, but that the danger signals that set it off are cued-stimuli resulting from the individual’s own behaviour, behaviour that if found out is likely to be followed by chastisement. It is thus essential that punishment may be indefinitely postponed, but that if the guilty act is discovered, either by humans or by supernaturals, it may then be 4

punished, however much later this may be. In short, conscience seems to stem from the indeterminacy but inevitability of punishment for forbidden acts. (Idem, 1963) Hill writes as if conscience was entirely negative, and we might find it easy to concur with her view. However Rollo May12 is concerned to see conscience as having a creative potential. He wrote: The creative use of tradition makes possible a new attitude toward conscience. As everyone knows, conscience is generally conceived of as the negative voice of tradition speaking within one the ‘thou-shalt-not’s’ echoing down from Moses on Mount Sinai, the voice of the prohibitions which the society has taught its members for centuries. Conscience then is the constrictor of one’s activities. This tendency to think of conscience as that which tells the individual not to do things, is so strong that it seems to operate almost automatically. Conscience is not a set of handed-down prohibitions to constrict the self, to stifle its vitality and impulses. Nor is conscience to be thought of as divorced from tradition as in the liberalistic period when it was implied that one decided every act afresh. Conscience, rather, is one’s capacity to tap one’s own deeper levels of insight, ethical sensitivity and awareness, in which tradition and immediate experience are not opposed to each other but interrelated. When Fromm speaks of conscience as ’man’s recall to himself,’ the recall is not opposed to historical tradition as such, but only to the authoritarian uses of tradition. For there is a level on which the individual participates in the tradition, and on that level tradition aids man in finding his own most meaningful experience. I emphasize the positive aspects of conscience conscience as the individual’s method of tapping wisdom and insight within himself, conscience as an ‘opening up’, a guide to enlarged experience. This is what Nietzsche was referring to in his paean on the theme ‘beyond good and evil,’ and what Tillich means in his concept of the transmoral conscience. With this view it will no longer be true that ‘conscience doth make cowards of us all.’ Conscience, rather, will be the taproot of courage.

On the learning of conscience, Hill suggests that Sears, Maccoby, and Levin found that the development of conscience, as defined jointly by their three criteria, was greater in those children whose parents used love-oriented forms of discipline (praise, isolation, and withdrawal of love) than in those whose parents used “materialistic”, forms of discipline (material rewards, deprivation of privileges, and physical punishment). A similar finding, though not highly reliable statistically, is reported by Whiting and Child13 in a cross-cultural study of guilt as measured by attitudes toward illness. This is consistent with the widely held view that the acquisition of parental values occurs most fully in an atmosphere of love (e.g., Ausubel14; Davis & Havighurst15). Hill however believes that it is possible that this finding may be due, not to love-oriented discipline as such, but to other characteristics of discipline that are correlated with it. The effect of this kind of discipline may be to accentuate the learning of several different responses, all of which contribute to the overall diagnosis of high conscience. (Idem, 1963) The various kinds of punishments usually applied to children probably differ extensively, depending upon the time and place at which they occur. Outside of the psycho-social families, physical punishment is likely to happen all at once and be over quickly, while punishment by deprivation of objects or privileges is likely to be either for a fixed period of time or for as long as the perpetrator determines. Hill describes discipline by withdrawal of love, as probably more often lasting until the child makes some symbolic renunciation of his wrongdoing as by apologising, making restitution or promising not to do it again. The child is deprived of his parents’ love (or, as the parents would claim, of the outward manifestations of it!) for as much or as little time as is necessary to get him to make such a symbolic renunciation. When he has made it, he is restored to his parents’ favour. If the normal relation between the parents and child is one of warmth, such discipline strongly motivates the child to make the renunciation quickly. On repeated occasions of transgression, punishment by withdrawal of love, and symbolic renunciation, the child may be expected not only to learn the renunciation response as an escape from parental disfavour but eventually to use it as an avoidance rather than merely an escape response. Thus if the wrongdoing is not immediately discovered, the child may anticipate his

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parents’ impending disfavour by confessing in advance and making the symbolic renunciation. (Idem, 1963) The child, as a consequence, persuades himself not to repeat his misdemeanour. When he is tempted again, he is likely to remind himself of the previous event. This does not guarantee that he will not repeat his fault, but it is likely to reduce the probability. If he succumbs to temptation, he is more likely to confess before being caught and thereby avoid the temporary loss of his parents’ love. Hill suggests that if the above reasoning is correct all three criteria of conscience should be present to a greater degree in the child who has been disciplined in this fashion than in other children. According to the present hypothesis, however, this will be due to the fact that punishment continues until the child makes a symbolic renunciation, rather than to the fact that the punishment involves withdrawal of love. If physical chastisement or loss of privileges are used in the same way, the same outcome is predicted. (Idem, 1963) She goes on to suggest that there may be a possible weakness of this hypothesis in that children might learn a discrimination between the symbolic and the actual avoidances, so that they would develop a pattern of violating parental standards, immediately confessing and apologising, and then transgressing again at the next hint of temptation. If forgiveness is offered freely and uncritically enough, such a pattern presumably does develop. In this case the correlation among the criteria of conscience would be expected to drop, actual avoidance of wrongdoing no longer being associated with the other criteria. (For this reason, Sears, Maccoby, and Levin might have found lesser relationships if they had studied older children.) However, if the parents’ discrimination keep up with the child’s, so that the child cannot count on removing all the parents’ disfavour with a perfunctory apology, the efficacy of this kind of discipline should be at least partially maintained. Hill asks, if this explanation of greater conscience in children disciplined by withdrawal of love is correct, why was greater conscience also found with the other kinds of love-oriented control? Since these were all found to be inter-correlated, and since their relations to the degree of conscience were uniformly low, interpretations either of separate techniques or of love orientation as a general trait are necessarily somewhat dubious. As an example of the difficulties involved, it may be noted that reasoning with the child is counted as a loveoriented technique solely on the grounds of its correlation with other such techniques. Nevertheless, it shows a higher relation to conscience than do two of the three clearly loveoriented techniques. In view of such complexities, it seems legitimate to suggest that the crucial factor in those techniques associated with conscience may not be love orientation as such, but something else correlated with it. The kind of punishment that terminates when the child makes a symbolic renunciation of wrong-doing suggests that such discipline may involve an additional source of partial reinforcement. As was indicated above, the child may learn that he can avoid punishment by confessing and apologising. When this happens, the avoidance starts to extinguish. However, the discerning parent learns not to accept the apology, and the child is punished anyway. The child must then make a more vigorous and convincing symbolic renunciation than before in order to terminate the punishment. In addition, the discrimination he has made between the symbolic renunciation and the actual avoidance is broken down; punishment can only be prevented by actual avoidance of wrongdoing. If, however, after a period of obedience he once more transgresses and then confesses, he is likely again not to be punished. This starts the cycle of extinction and reconditioning of the avoidance response going again, thus continuing to provide a reinforcement schedule in which only part of the child’s transgressions are punished. (Hill, Idem, 1963) To test this hypothesis, it would be necessary to have further detailed information of the sort that Sears, Maccoby, and Levin used, so that disciplinary methods could be classified according to the time relations discussed above. It is predicted that the parents’ tendency to make termination of punishment contingent on symbolic renunciation would be correlated with love-oriented discipline. However, if each were varied with the other held

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constant, conscience should be more closely related to response contingency than to love orientation. (Hill. Idem, 1963) Erikson’s view is that the development of a conscience can provide a sense of definition and of clarity, and can guide growing initiative in approved and fruitful directions but it also brings the “bad conscience”. Conscience, he writes is part of that “super-ego formation,” that makes man his own inner, and worse, his often unconscious, judge. The resulting inhibitions and repressions could be expressed in terms of alienation, for they can turn man’s most intimate wishes and memories into alien territory. It is not always understood that one of the main rationales for marital and familial loyalty is the imperative need for inner unity in the child’s conscience at the very time when he can and must envisage goals beyond the family. For the voices and images of those adults who are now internalised as an inner voice must not contradict each other too flagrantly. They contribute to the child’s most intense conscience development a development that separates, once and for all, play and fantasy from a future that is irreversible. Threats, punishments, and warnings all have in common the designation of certain acts (and by implication, thoughts) as having a social and, indeed, eternal reality that can never be undone. Conscience accepts such irreversibility as internal and private, and it is all the more important that it incorporates the ethical example of a family purposefully united in familial and economic pursuits. This alone gives the child the inner freedom to move onto whatever school setting his culture has ready for him. 16 Along with this overall analysis of conscience, more detailed analyses could be made of the various components of conscience. According to the present view, inter-correlations among these criteria would be moderate for the entire sample and low when method of discipline was held constant. The learning sequence discussed above is only one of several possible, explanations of the Sears, Maccoby, and Levin finding. By suggesting that the crucial causal factor is not the distinction between materialistic orientation and love orientation, but another distinction correlated with it, the present hypothesis gains an advantage in objectivity and in practical applicability. Whether it also has the advantage of correctness must be empirically determined. The chief purpose is to point to the availability of such reductionist hypotheses in the study of values and to argue that they deserve priority in the schedule of scientific investigation. (Hill, Idem, 1963) In a study by Kohlberg and Diessner they argue that the concept of attachment is enhanced by the cognitive-developmental view that stresses that imitation is a cognitive act. Imitation is the first “stage” of attachment and leads the way to identification. Identification is a second stage in which imitation qualitatively changes from an interchange of concrete and specific acts to that of generalised and symbolic interaction. The motivation to act morally they say, comes from the attachment cluster of the following: •

empathy with the object(s) of attachment,

•

the vicarious self-esteem derived from identification with the idealised moral virtue of the attachment object(s),

•

and feelings of obligation to persons and relationships to whom the self is attached.

These features of the motivation to act morally can he considered to be a balance between effectance motivation and self-valuation (self-esteem). 17 They present a cognitive-developmental approach to moral attachment as a subsuming processes that they associate with attachment and identification. They offer five components of attachment and five components of identification that they believe form the moral self, viz. Moral identification arises from: •

natural tendencies to imitate the parent or other model; 7

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a desire to conform to the parent’s normative expectations;

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a perception of similarity to the parent (intensified by imitation);

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a perception of the greater competence or higher status of the parent;

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and an idealisation of the parents’ competence or virtue.

Moral attachment is comprised of: •

an emotional dependency on parents and empathy with them;

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vicarious self esteem derived from the parents’ competence or status;

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the ability to derive self esteem from the parent’s approval and affection so as to forego other sources of success or competence, with associated security or self esteem, in the absence of direct signs of success;

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reciprocity and complementarity in this relationship;

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and a feeling of obligation to persons and relationships characterized by attachment processes.

The relationships that characterize the attachment processes are not, they say, necessarily limited to the biological parent, but may be to any significant other. The moral attachment process begins in early childhood, usually with a parent as the object, develops with experience, advances in cognition in the two- to eight-year age span, and later is found aimed toward admired others (e.g., peers, teachers, trainers). Their study has focused on the child’s relations to adults in the years two to eight, the period of the formation of a moral self and a sense of moral responsibility as in the theories of Baldwin, Mead, Ausubel, Kohut, and Piaget; as well as the period of super-ego formation in Freudian theory. Their theory shares with Freudian theory a concern with identification in the formation of the moral self or ego, but construes identification in a very different way than does a Freudian theory of unconscious drives and defences. It also shares with Freudian theory a concern with love or attachment to parents as related to the development of the moral self, but again in a very different form than the Freudian theory of super-ego formation. (Idem) Tracing the theories of love, attachment and social dependence, they touch on what White called primary competence motivation or motivation for self-esteem18; primary drives or need gratification (or its frustration) as is held by psychoanalytic theory; and in a much weaker sense by ethological theories of attachment like that of Bowlby. 19 Baldwin tells us that the young child’s sense of dependence or attachment to the parents and significant others arises, because his self is socially constructed from imitation and idealization of the parent 20. Mead adds that it is from the social or communicative interaction between self and other in which the self, the “me,” is constructed by taking the perspective of the other on the self. 21 In the first of Baldwin’s three early stages, the projective, the child discovers its own body (i.e., the reflexes, movement, senses) and differentiates humans from physical objects in the environment. Imitation arises with the growth of “effort” or “volition” and the subjective stage is born. Other people then interest the child, and he makes efforts to capture and copy their novel behaviours, whilst simultaneously experiencing the feelings associated with the observed event. The child is aware of himself as an individual and the distinctiveness of his own body. Thus, he then enters a third stage in which he has noticed that his subjectiveness also exists in others, this Baldwin calls the elective stage. Kohlberg and Diessner (1991 idem) have outlined an interrelated double cluster that logically goes together to form the moral self. It includes the following components: IDENTIFICATION •

Tendencies to imitate the parent or other model.

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Tendency to conform to the parent’s normative expectations.

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•

Perceived similarity to the parent, which is enhanced by imitation.

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Perception of the greater competence or higher status of the parent.

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Idealization of the parent and/or of his/her competence and virtue.

ATTACHMENT •

Emotional dependency, affection, and empathy with the parent.

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Vicarious self-esteem derived from the parent’s competence or status.

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Ability to derive self-esteem from the parent’s approval and affection so as to forego other sources of success, prestige or competence, with associated security or selfesteem, in the absence of direct signs of success.

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Reciprocity or complementarity in relationships.

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Feeling of obligation to persons and relationships characterized by attachment processes.

What is it that motivates children of this age? Kohlberg and Diessner conclude that in one sense, moral attachment sets the stage for what may be seen as a motivation for moral action. This is implied by the notion that moral attachment leads to the formation of a moral self with moral obligations to parents and parental standards. This sense of obligation to the human foci of attachment precedes and induces a sense of responsibility and resulting commitment to moral action regarding those obligations. The sense of responsibility and the commitment to moral action, however, presuppose a more general motivational system that has been termed the self. This is a primary tendency to value the self, commonly called a concern for self-esteem. There is no reason to understand such self-valuing as narcissism except within a drive theory of motivation. The primacy of such self-valuing is preserved by the notion Kohlberg and Diessner have developed following Ausubel 22, that identification and attachment are related to one another and rested on the phenomenon of vicarious self-esteem.

Conclusion The motivation to act morally comes from the attachment cluster that includes: empathy with the object(s) of attachment; the vicarious self-esteem derived from identification with the idealised moral virtue of the attachment object(s); and the feelings of obligation to persons and relationships to which the self is attached. These features of the motivation to act morally can be considered to be a balance between effectance motivation and selfvaluation (self-esteem). It has been argued that the concept of attachment is enhanced by the cognitivedevelopmental view that stresses that imitation is a cognitive act. Imitation is the first “stage” of attachment and leads the way to identification. Identification is a second stage in which imitation qualitatively changes from an interchange of concrete and specific acts to that of generalised and symbolic interaction. The present situation whereby government (and its agents) seem to believe that children are responsible for their own aberrant behaviour is a sign that the principles of the acquisition of conscience from interaction with parents has been forgotten. The fact that many parents do not now have the time or the inclination to help their children through the ways of natural parenting is not only sad but it is also a dereliction of duty. Teachers, social workers and the police do not and cannot offer a separate way of teaching children that will allow parents to abrogate their responsibilities.

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