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Conscience and the Acquisition of Values
Alan Challoner MA MChS
Where lies the difference between the development of children who grow into reasonableand responsible adults, and those who enter the fraternity of the criminal? Are children borninnocent; or are some, as certain authorities believe, born evil? How can we help children togrow into decent citizens? What part, if any, does attachment play in this scenario? Someof 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 hisvarious overlapping subcultures was, according to Dukes, still rather obscure.
1
Negativevalues, or conscience, have received much more attention than positive values. Educatorsseeking to improve children’s characters, psychoanalysts concerned with the tyranny of thesuper-ego
♦
 
, anthropologists trying to distinguish between shame and guilt cultures, andexperimental psychologists noting the persistence of avoidance responses have shared thisemphasis on values of the “Thou shalt not” variety.Sears, Maccoby, and Levin suggest that the rôle of
reasoning with the child 
is an influence onthe measure of conscience.
2
They give three criteria for recognizing the operation ofconscience in young children:
♦
CONSCIENCE
 
&
 
THE
 
SUPER-EGO. The
super-ego
is the third and last system of personality tobe developed. It is the internal representative of the traditional values and ideals of societyas interpreted to the child by his parents, and enforced by means of a system of rewards andpunishments imposed upon the child. The
super-ego
is the moral arm of personality; itrepresents the ideal rather than the real and it strives for perfection rather than pleasure. Itsmain concern is to decide whether something is right or wrong so that it can act inaccordance with the moral standards authorized by the agents of society.The super-ego as the internalized moral arbiter of conduct develops in response to therewards and punishments meted out by the parents. To obtain the rewards and avoid thepunishments, 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 becomeincorporated 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 thisincorporation takes place is called
introjection
. The
conscience
punishes the person bymaking 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 aggressivenature, 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 worldover into its own image However, it is like the
id
in being non-rational and like the
ego
inattempting to exercise control over the instincts. Unlike the
ego
, the
super-ego
does notmerely postpone instinctual gratification; it tries to block it permanently.
 
2
 
•
 
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 toanalyse their separate developments. Although the authors mention that the aspects ofconscience do not necessarily all appear at once, they regard conscience as representingan internalisation of control that is fundamentally different from external control, whether byforce, fear of punishment, or hope of material reward.
T 
HE FIRST CRITERION 
,
resistance to temptation
, may be viewed simply as avoidance learning.Solomon & Brush, (1956) studies of avoidance behaviour without a warning signal andDinsmoor’s
3
analysis of punishment show how feedback from an individual’s own acts canbecome 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 ispresumably due to the parents having in the past discovered and punished (in the broadestsense 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 theprocess of absorbing parental values and adopting some forms of parental behaviour wasnot a passive one. They believed that it was associated with very vigorous motives andemotions, and the qualities thus learned were so strongly established that the normalexperiences of adult life could influence them but little. (
Idem
, 1957) The process ofidentification in this sense works either for good or bad dependent as it is on the quality ofthe 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 onthe range within which human morals and values can fall. If there must be
some
parentalwarmth in order for a child to identify with his parents, then the very same warmth will be anidentified-with quality and will become a property in the personality of the child. The same willhold true of the choice of withdrawal of love as a means of discipline. Thus, mainly within therange of parental qualities required to insure identification in the child will there be acontinuation 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 shorterthe delay between transgression and punishment, (Mowrer & Ullman
5
); Solomon & Brush,
idem
1956) the greater should be the resulting inhibition. Jenkins & Stanley consider that thegreater certainty of punishment might be expected to produce inhibition that would bemore complete in the short run but also less persistent once punishment was permanentlywithdrawn.
6
This prediction suggests that even this one criterion of conscience may not beunitary; that different laws may apply depending on whether one asks how completely thechild obeys the prohibitions or how long he continues to obey them after leaving theparental home. If partial reinforcement should turn out to be a crucial variable in the humansituation, these two criteria might even be inversely related. The prediction also suggests thatthe question, “Is inconsistent discipline bad?” is far too simple; one must at least ask, “Bad forwhat?”
7
 It must also be kept in mind that punishment is not restricted to physical chastisement or evento noxious stimuli in general, including scolding and ridicule. Withdrawal of positivereinforcers 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 anengineer would make between an engine and its fuel; although he modified his two greatgroups of instincts that provide energy for the
id 
. One group serves the purposes of life: theirenergy is called
libido
. The life instincts are a constant source of emotional tension, whoseconscious impact is painful and unpleasant. One of Freud’s first and most fundamental
 
3
 
assumptions was that all activities of the mind are driven by the need to reduce or eliminatethis tension. Because a conscious experience of pleasure was supposed to accompany alltension 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 actionfails, as eventually it must, frustration causes emotional tension to build up. The baby mustthen learn to form an image of the object that reduces its tensions. At first, this image, whichis generated by the primary process, is offered as a kind of substitute satisfaction wheneverfrustration occurs. This use of imagery is pure wish-fulfilment. Freud believed that wish-fulfilment, or attempted wish-fulfilments, persist into adulthood; dreams were his primeexample.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 imageryhave 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 consequenceof 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 egofunctions 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 theimages that its primary process creates, but the
id 
has no way to distinguish between its ownwish-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; theimagination image that the
id 
desires and the perceptual image of the goal object must bein 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 transferredto it. This identification process enables the energies of the
id 
to be guided by an accuraterepresentation 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 teachingsprovided by his parents. The
ego-ideal 
is the child’s conception of what his parents willapprove; 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 ofproblems that Durkheim discovered in his studies of social action.The process of investing instinctual energy is called
cathexis 
. The
id 
has only
cathexes 
, butthe
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 theway the ego and the super-ego keep the
id 
in check. Perhaps the most important exampleof anti-cathexis has to do with memory. A person may fail to recall something, Freud wouldsay, because the memory trace is not sufficiently charged with energy it is too weaklycathected. But sometimes his memory may fail because the cathexis is opposed by an evenstronger anti-cathexis; in that case a memory is said to be repressed. The repressivemechanism is one way
  
a very common way
  
the ego protects itself against painfulmemories and the discomfort or anxiety they would arouse.
8
 
T 
HE SECOND CRITERION OF CONSCIENCE 
  
 
self-instruction
, obviously makes the human case differentfrom the animal case, but it does not introduce any new motivational principle. One of theadvantages of membership of the human species is the possibility of using verbalsymbolization in dealing with one’s problems. It is natural that a person learning anavoidance, like a person learning any other difficult response pattern, should give himselfverbal instructions, especially since verbal coaching by others is so important in the learningof social prohibitions. (Sears, Maccoby, and Levin,
Idem
, 1957)
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