Object impermanence: A developmental inquiry.

Abstract

Developmental inquiry has overlooked the fundamental problem of the real impermanence and perishability of things. The question of the development of the rational understanding of impermanence is as yet unposed, despite the fact that the metaphor of impermanence is central to Piagetian and neo-nativist accounts of representation. By claiming that young infants without representation treat absent objects as if they were destroyed or "impermanent," Piaget created the impression that the development of representation resolves the impermanence problem. Discussions of conservation compound this confusion by interpreting young subjects' beliefs in the destructibility of objects as failures of conservation, as if the development of conservation somehow does away with the real vulnerability of things. These confusions keep developmental inquiry from a consideration of the fundamental role which the impermanence concept plays in many aspects of human experience and subjectivity. A review of the theoretical and empirical literature reveals that the impermanence problem has received little attention. The basic fact that objects really are perishable however, has made the impermanence concept an implicit factor in many areas of developmental inquiry, even when researchers have failed to recognize it as such. Two areas of developmental inquiry where the impermanence concept has played an important implicit role are research into children's first words and research into children's conceptions of death. An implicit impermanence concept is especially important in psychoanalytic thinking about development. This is evident when we review psychoanalytic notions about the drives--especially the idea of the death instinct--and psychoanalytic speculations about the origins of anxiety. An empirical study into the ability of children ages 3 to 6 to distinguish displaced from destroyed objects is presented. This study provides support for the contention that an impermanence concept is in place by early childhood. Evidence is also presented which suggests that the impermanence concept may form an important cognitive precondition for the experience of some of the central anxieties of early childhood, especially those concerned with bodily vulnerability and the integrity of attachments to primary caretakers.