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This chapter examines discourses concerning child mental development in England during the 19th century. It offers extended literary readings of two mid-century novels which address questions of child education and development, set alongside an analysis of the social and scientific debates on over-pressure and precocity. These are Charles Dickens' Dombey and Son and George Meredith's The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. These novels addressed education in the context of temporal models of development and natural processes of growth and suggested that conceptions of child development are intricately enmeshed in the familial, social, and economic structures of their time.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the essence of toddlerhood and the development of social-linguistic intelligence. This describes the incidents covering approximately two-month intervals in the life of a toddler called Ricky and discusses what his behaviour means for understanding a toddler's growing mental, social, and language skills. It covers the life of Ricky from 15 to 36 months old.

This chapter focuses on the policies and initiatives that created a new governance architecture for child development based on the idea of the child as an adult-in-the-making. It became the duty of the State to ‘provide adequate services to children, both before and after birth, and through the period of growth, to ensure their full physical, mental, and social development’. But despite the availability of a single policy framework that covered the entire childhood experience, services for children were designed and administered by a range of government ministries and departments.

The growth point is an attempt to think out the implications of speech–gesture synchrony. When words and gesture co-occur, we ask, what does this imply? A growth point is the initial organizing impulse of the utterance, its cognitive starting point viewed micro genetically, and is the core idea of the utterance as it comes into existence. A growth point is meant to be a micro genetic idea unit; that is, a unit on a diachronic axis, a unit of mental development over short realtime intervals. To understand the growth point's incorporation of context, it is first necessary to understand its relationship to differentiation.

Research is presented showing that an implicit sense of self-agency is probably developing from birth, and possibly even before that. These time points are months before the child begins to manifest explicit (conceptual) self-knowledge, an event that is reported to occur typically in the second year. Implicit self-knowledge in infancy, including the sense of self-agency, is rooted in intermodal perception and action. This chapter proposes a particular role for embodied synesthesia involving proprioception—the modality of self-perception par excellence. From around 6 weeks postpartum, infants show signs of increasingly systematic and deliberate exploration of their own body, and in particular the perceptual consequences of self-produced actions. Infants have expectations regarding such consequences, getting much pleasure when they are met, experiencing displeasure and frustration when they are not. The pleasures of control associated with self-agency would form the affective core and driving motivational force behind mental development from the outset.

This chapter explores the tension span occupied by the schizophrenic boy in Melanie Klein’s case of Dick and Lord Byron’s Faustian drama Manfred. In her 1930 chapter “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego,” Klein explores a case of childhood schizophrenia, the treatability of which as arrested development is the very measure, measured in reverse, of treatment difficulties encountered with young adult schizophrenics who must fill in the blank of held-back development with the double whammy of regression. Klein opens with the all- importance of sadism in early mental development and its transmutation through symbolism. She treats Dick successfully because his so-called psychotic traits are, in the real time of development, inhibitions that can be overcome. In Manfred, Byron wrests Faustian striving from Christian pact psychology and sends his Faust figure through a series of sessions that leads through mourning to a cure.

This chapter focuses on the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Friedrich Nietzsche. According to Freud, uncanny experiences occur whenever repressed infantile complexes are reanimated through some current impressions. The uncanniness of the double must also be charted back to a surmounted era of mental development. The chapter argues that one’s tribal past, including infantile or archaic beliefs associated with mourning comes in, like a ghost, under and over the threshold of repression. In taking cognizance of the exceptional status of belief in ghosts, Freud touches on the wound of terminable mourning. Freud could never fathom why mourning should be so painful, why mourning should leave behind open wounds even as it provides prosthetic replacements for each lost attachment.