EPA-1660 – The Child is Father of the Man

Abstract

’The Child is father of the Man,’ thus goes a famous line in William Wordsworth's celebrated poem,’My Heart Leaps up when I Behold.’ It is not that a child gives birth to an adult, as is obvious, but that events in childhood shape adulthood, the adult personality; its worldview, its emotions, interpersonal relationships and – unfortunately – its pathology.

There has been an on-going controversy between the roles of nature versus nurture in the development of personality. The tabula rasa theory maintains that the child's mind is like a blank slate on which experience writes the personality. On the other hand, the epigenetic model says that the personality and its pathology are already pre-conditioned, but they unravel in the due course, like the unpeeling of an onion, or blossoming of a flower. Our own Hindu concepts have many things to add to this. Our sanskara theory says that everything is important and contributes to the personality. In a way, it can be viewed as a holistic theory of genetics.