{[['
']]}
']]}
In my early 20s, armed with a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago and a master’s degree in psychology, I spent two years up country in Kenya studying Gusii methods of child-rearing. This fascinating but highly academic research was part of a larger, cross-cultural programme, which posed identical questions about socialisation that had derived from a combination of Freudian and learning theories. So certain were we of the universality of our theoretical approach to an understanding of human development that comparable evidence was collected in India, Mexico, the Philippines, Okinawa and a small town in America.
Five years later I returned to Africa, having completed a PhD at Northwestern University in Illinois; I had gathered survey evidence to test the effects of parental techniques of punishment on the development of children’s moral sensibilities. When the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ibadan questioned me about the usefulness of my rigorous studies of Nigerian child-rearing practices I was flummoxed. I replied that a nation
which could fund a vast space programme (my research was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation) could afford the pursuit of psychological knowledge which was pure and theoretical. Over the years this self-righteous reply has returned to haunt me. On returning from Nigeria in the mid-1960s I taught developmentalsocial psychology in academic settings, first at Birmingham University, and then at Sussex. By the 1970s issues of social significance had begun to loom large. It was the second wave of feminism and I was caught up in creating an undergraduate course which would offer first-year students some knowledge of the great debates about the differences between the sexes. Slowly I began to think about the impact of psychological knowledge upon everyday lived experience. I desired an in-depth understanding of individual development and felt a growing unease with standard evidence-gathering procedures which dictated highly controlled and limited contact with a statistically satisfactory cohort of subjects. This discontent, as well as contemporary theorising about gender, re-wakened an adolescent interest in the writings of Sigmund Freud
