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;

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

• 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.

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• resistance to temptation,

• self-instruction to obey the rules,

• 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

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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 wish-

fulfilment, 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 ego-

ideal 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 super-

ego, 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 value-

standards 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

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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 love-

oriented 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 love-

oriented 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;

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

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

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

• and an idealisation of the parents’ competence or virtue.

Moral attachment is comprised of:

• an emotional dependency on parents and empathy with them;

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

• 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;

• reciprocity and complementarity in this relationship;

• 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.

• Tendency to conform to the parent’s normative expectations.

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

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

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

ATTACHMENT

• Emotional dependency, affection, and empathy with the parent.

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

• 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 self-

esteem, in the absence of direct signs of success.

• Reciprocity or complementarity in relationships.

• 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 self-

valuation (self-esteem).

It has been argued 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 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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10

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