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OUR SPECIES LEARNS TO BE HUMAN *

Perhaps the most important knowledge we have about man for social purposes concerns the role of experience and learning in human development. As a member biologically of the human species, the nature and the quality of our humanity and our individuality are not fixed at birth. Contrary to most other, lower, forms of life, we do not fulfill our innate species potentials merely as a result of instinct or of maturational unfolding. We begin to learn to be human shortly after birth through our experiences with, and the conscious teachings of, older persons who have already been made human by their social experiences. When compared with the lower animals, man exhibits three general classifications of behavior: unlearned behaviors we share with other mammals; learned behaviors we share with other higher mammals; and learned behaviors we share with no other form of life. Species-determined patterns of physical growth play a basically important psychological role during our earlier years in three ways particularly: They impose limits on what we can do, experience, learn when; they make the infant and young child totally dependent on other, more mature, persons for his continuing existence; and, especially during the first several months of life, they impose, as a result of the mammalian principle in our species’ dual genetic inheritance, the necessity for certain kinds of direct, “gut-level” experiences with another responsive human being if later patterns of psychological development are to emerge and develop normally. If such “responsive relationship” experiences are provided during this early period, innate developmental forces are able to take firm hold and to provide a natural impetus for increasing maturity; psychologically healthy children require no “pushing” in order to grow up (and certainly, for disturbed children, such pushing is a most endsdefeating incentive for growth). Genetically determined individual growth patterns also play a fundamental role; they impose limits on the nature and the quality of each person’s experience and learning at every stage of his development, and as a result have much to do with his individual uniqueness. But the consistent direction of individual behavioral development is from expression of behaviors that are determined by innate maturational forces relatively uninfluenced by experience, to the expression of behaviors that emerge only as a result of highly individualized experience and learning. Freud, whose therapeutic work with upper-middle-class adults led him to an almost exclusive interest in the role of early emotional frustrations in later psychological development, did not adequately appreciate the role of culturally determined learning, both in these early experiences and in later development.