The Cartography of Inner Childhood: Fragments from the book

Abstract

Presented here are fragments of my book The cartography of inner childhood in the translation from Russian. The main hero of this book is our childhood experience. Or, rather, the book is about our remembrances of our childhood experience. Some people would exclaim, “These remembrances are extremely subjective, utterly personal and therefore untrue!” I wonder, however, if one’s ultimate subjective experience may very well be one’s innermost human core, exactly what is important about any person. For an ‘objective’ external onlooker, the childhood of different children is largely indistinguishable. All children play certain games, absorbedly listen to fairytales, react to various events, and so on. In fact, nearly all modern psychology research testifies to these ‘childhood uniformities’ and their typologies. The reason for this supposed uniformity is a flaw in the main approach of modern psychology. Modern psychology often focuses on universal, generalizable, predictable, and regular principles, which is the standard of the science. Anything else is viewed as non-scientific. How else it can be?!

The problem with this conventional approach to psychology, however, is that the human being is the only ‘object’ in the Universe that is defined by a subjective cognizing world of her or his own, building above the subjective lived experiences and feelings and redefining them – a world, unique for each person, which cannot possibly be viewed from outside, except for some of its outward objective artifact manifestations of this subjective cognizing world. That is why the childhood of each one of us is not simply a childhood of some external events or a childhood of typical or universal, but rather a childhood of absolutely unique and un-borrowed inner life that makes every person’s internal experience absolutely precious. This very situation compels one to look most carefully into ‘the inner child’ each of us is capable of re-discovering in her-or himself.

The structure of the book is the following: Each chapter presents excerpts of the memoirs of one of the world-famous people, after which, there is a commentary analysis. Presented here are only three of those memoirs: by Orhan Pamuk, George Orwell and Ingmar Bergman.