Does it make sense to you that you were meant to be born, live out your life in unconscious servitude to delusions, conditioning, and unintegrated parts of a self that was constructed before you had the capacity to understand it, and then die?
Do you ever wonder why you struggle with feeling like a fraud, and why no amount of spiritual practice or self help makes any lasting difference in the way you feel?
Spirituality sells promises of elevation and escape. Therapy helps you manage symptoms. But neither explain the deeper process behind humanity’s widespread developmental arrest, or how nearly everyone reaches physical adulthood without reaching existential maturity.
Humanity’s arrested development can be described as a developmental process that successfully constructs the psychological child but doesn’t complete the job of outgrowing it.
Most development makes its earlier stage increasingly inadequate, but the human psychological/existential structure remains functional enough that neither biology nor culture forces the next transition. Biological maturation continues automatically, while existential maturation doesn’t.
As such, we inherit ready-made identities, roles, beliefs, and coping strategies long before we understand what we’re adopting, and the socially constructed self remains in charge long after its original developmental purpose.
This is a peculiar form of arrested development because it differs from many of the developmental processes we recognize elsewhere in human life.
A toddler’s body eventually makes crawling insufficient. Language gradually replaces pointing and crying as the primary means of communication. Concrete thinking expands into greater abstraction. In much of development, the organism changes in ways that make the previous structure inadequate, forcing some degree of reorganization.
The psychological child is different. Nothing necessarily makes it stop working.
Rather than following the typical transcend and include model of development, the identity structure built in childhood can expand right along with the rest of us. It learns more words, acquires more sophisticated ideas, develops better emotional control, earns qualifications, makes money, has sex, raises children and becomes very good at navigating the adult world. Instead of being incorporated and gone beyond by development, it becomes increasingly capable.
This is the central developmental anomaly. The structure appropriate to childhood doesn’t remain visibly childish. It matures functionally without maturing existentially, and this arrested development ends up hiding in plain sight.
It can be impeccably dressed. It can have a doctorate, manage a hedge fund, perform neurosurgery, negotiate international treaties and quote Nietzsche in the original German. It can obviously even become President.