Unresolved childhood experience is claimed to persist as a distinct part of the personality that can be addressed directly in therapy.
The framing became widespread through 1980s and 1990s recovery literature, and it coincided with the recovered-memory episode, in which suggestive techniques generated confident memories of events that had not occurred. The metaphor may be clinically useful in the hands of a careful practitioner; no study supports the reification of it into a part of the self.
In practice
- A framework that locates every present difficulty in childhood cannot be wrong and cannot be tested.
- A technique that invites vivid imagining of the past is operating in the conditions that produce imagination inflation.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is that unresolved childhood experience persists as a distinct part of the personality. Schema therapy covers similar ground with a specified model and outcome evidence, treating the pattern as a learned mode rather than a person inside.
- In its favour
- Early adverse experience does predict later difficulty, and addressing how people relate to their own history is a component of therapies that work.
- Against it
- It is a metaphor treated as an entity that no study establishes, and the recovered-memory practices of the same era, which shared its assumptions, produced confident memories of events that had not occurred and caused documented harm.
- Standing
- A metaphor treated as an entity. No study establishes the construct, and the associated recovered-memory practices of the same era caused documented harm. Schema therapy addresses adjacent material with better method.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop