Some therapists place a great deal of emphasis on engaging the inner child.

      The emphasis placed on the need to free the inner child is based on the conviction that we were forced to leave behind elements of childhood that should have been retained. The greatest loss was suffered by those who were emotionally, physically or sexually abused.

Recovery

      What is it that we are being urged to recover?

Distinguishing

      We will begin by indicating what is not being suggested. We are not being advised to become children again, to wind back the developmental clock.

      There are many positive qualities associated with childhood, including openness, trustfulness, teachability, innocence, spontaneity, wonder and a capacity for play and creativity. Those who speak about the need to reclaim the inner child highlight these capacities.

      However, there are other characteristics associated with childhood that that we would not want to reclaim.

      Children are physically, emotionally, mentally and sexually vulnerable. Being impressionable, they are easily moulded into the shape of family and communal pathologies.

      Young children also lack caution. They have no road sense. In this context, their innocence works against them. They lack experience. They think magically, rather than rationally. They lack self-discipline, which has to be learned. They throw tantrums. They are self-focused. They are dependent on caregivers. They are [213] credulous--the shadow side of their trustfulness.

      Children are fascinating, and mostly lovable. Nevertheless, childhood, while free from adult responsibility, is no ideal state. It is during childhood that the damage is done that scars us for life.

      While children are children, and not little adults, it is possible to discern the future adult in the child.

Spirituality

      Children, like adults, are spiritual beings. Their spirituality, while not as developed as that of adults, is present in germ.

      Elsewhere I have argued that the exercise of our spirituality finds expression in meaning making, communication, and self-transcendence.¹

      Children exercise these capacities. Robert Coles has indicated that children are capable of wrestling with existential issues, of communicating and of experiencing moments of self-transcendence.²

      However, while the future adult can be seen in germ in the child, childhood is not an ideal state, nor is it a developmental goal. Childhood is stage-appropriate for the child, but not for the adult.

Loss of innocence

      To proceed beyond childhood involves a loss of innocence. This innocence has to be left behind if we are to progress towards maturity.

      Maturity is not associated with the plasticity of childhood, or with untested potential. As William Blake argued, innocence must give way to experience.³ If children are shielded from experience they will never grow up.

      Experience, however, is painful. If we are to grow, the pain cannot be avoided. Considered from a Jungian perspective, the emergence of the ego, in childhood, is accompanied by the development of the shadow.⁴ This is the inevitable by-product of the interplay of maturation and socialisation. It is out of the shadow that our demons emerge. [214]

Reclaiming

      Those who advocate reconnecting with the inner child are not suggesting regression to childhood. Children are psychological embryos. It would be inappropriate for us to foster communities of psychological embryos.

      What is being suggested is a recovery of what was filched from us during childhood, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes abusively, and sometimes due to misinformation.

      Among those elements that it is important for us to reclaim are body-awareness, access to our feelings, intuitive ways of knowing, creativity, joy and openness to new insights, new ideas, new constructions of reality, new ways of being or doing.

Moving on

      Once we have re-traced our steps; once we have recovered capacities that were stolen from us or voluntarily surrendered, we should move on.

Second naivete

      We move forward into what Paul Ricoeur has called a "second naivete".⁵

      Childhood represents the "first naivete". This is the naivete of untried innocence. Innocence is overtaken by experience, which involves error and confusion. We make mistakes and learn to live with the consequences.

      Some proceed beyond experience to a new innocence, innocence consistent with fallibility and imperfection. This transition from innocence, to experience, to a new "innocence" is parallelled by a progression from simplistic perceptions, to complex analysis, to a new simplicity in which life's complexities are reduced to a few central principles. Those who have reached this maturational stage are willing to dirty their hands, to involve themselves in issues that are morally ambiguous, to assist others.⁶ Dietrich Bonhoeffer's involvement in a plot to kill Hitler is a case in point. [215] Thomas Merton labels this stage as "final integration".⁷

      Alan Watts describes the dimensions of the experience in his autobiographical, In My Own Way. He argued that life must be played by ear, in the sense that we should give attention, not to rules and regulations, but to our nature and our ability to think through issues. This means that we must learn to trust nature not to make mistakes. From this perspective, a decision that results in our death is not necessarily a mistake.

      Watts went on to contend that we cannot avoid seeing decisions or consequences as good or bad, right or wrong--these dichotomies being the stuff of perception. Without such contrasts, perception would be impossible. Reality, however, is not linear in this sense and the linear cannot accurately represent a non-linear world.

      In exploring this deeper reality, a reality beyond contrasts, beyond dichotomies, we are reduced to silence. This intellectual silence, however, is not an abrogation of responsibility, but a return to the vision we enjoyed as children, a vision unclouded by judgements, commentaries.

      This return to childhood is not a regression, but a rebirth, because we bring to the experience all that we have learned about life--its rules and tricks. We talk to others as normal adults and can feel compassion for the confusions adults experience. This style of compassion is beyond the capacity of children.

      Those reborn, as children, are also aware that the confusions that perplex adults cannot be sorted out without adding to the confusion. They also realise that the issues that confuse us are not as serious as they imagined. The world thus becomes for them richly diverse and colourful, for they perceive elements that most adults, who think in contracts and dichotomies, screen out. It is a world in which there is no self or other, no subject and object, only a "thisness", or "thusness"--an all, a foundational energy. This comprehensive reality is God by no name.⁸

Arcadia

      To avoid confusion, James Hillman argues that we should [216] not speak about going "back to childhood". Instead we should encourage those in need of a healing to journey to Arcadia.

      Arguing that we begin life as acorns, unique bundles of potentiality presided over by a daimon, or genius, he contended that this Arcadia, particularly in French and English poetry and painting, was an imaginal landscape associated with nature. It was a sort of Eden or Paradise, where the "primitive" lived symbiotically with nature. Modern therapy has located Arcadia in childhood and the natural being, living on acorns, has been transformed into the "inner child". The Garden of Eden, with all of its wonderful animals and reptiles, and the acorn eaters inhabiting it, have been replaced by the idealised and abused inner child. This substitution, Hillman argued, is itself a form of abuse.

      The pagan mind didn't envisage a "return to childhood", nor did it idolise innocence. To recover one's freedom, one went to Arcadia, an imaginal world where one is nurtured by one's genius.⁹

Pre-trans fallacy

      Ken Wilber has drawn attention to what he describes as the pre-trans fallacy. He argues that we often confuse trans-personal existence with pre-personal existence, the mystic with the child.¹⁰ The child has not differentiated himself from his primal environment. He has not distinguished himself from his mother, nor has the ego emerged from its unconscious ground. He has no sense of separate self. He is at one with his nurturing environment because he has not yet escaped it. The mystic, having developed a personal identity, has reconnected with the environment. It is the one reality that both discern, but the mystic is more aware of the shape, or shapelessness, the suchness, of the mystery of that reality, than is the child.

      We need to celebrate the child, not by regression to childhood, but by moving forward towards a "second naivete". [217]

Dreams

      Over recent years my dreams have been highlighting the importance of honouring the inner child, the child of the wisdom mind. This wisdom mind, to which Buddhists refer, is associated with the intuitive wisdom of the bodyself, the wisdom of egolessness.

      Translated into self-talk, these dreams have presented me with the following imperatives:

• Play with the day
• Allow the child to supplement your work and energise you
• Don't permit staid voices to silence the child
• Look at what the child is presenting for consideration
• Listen to the child rather than lecturing him
• Allow the child to dirty his/her hands [218]

[LS 213-218]