Two Principles of Early Moral Education: A Condition for the Law, Reflection and Autonomy

We establish the thesis that in moral education, particularly in the first years of the child's development, unreflexive acts or unreflexiveness in certain behaviours of adults is a condition for the development of the personality structure and virtues that enable autonomous ethical reflection and a relation to the Other. With the notion of unreflexiveness we refer to resolvedness in the response of adults when it is necessary to establish a limit, or cut, in the child's demand for pleasure, as well as to resolvedness as one of the structurally essential elements in behaviours with which the adult subordinates the child to the symbolic order or language. In philosophy, a symptomatic position in this context is represented by Kant's theory of education. On the basis of the "traditional" concept of "negative education", and through Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalytic concepts, we identify two principles that should, in contemporary times, be an essential part of the moral educational behaviours of adults: (1) the principle of a delimited response to the child's demand for the satisfaction of pleasure, and (2) the principle of reasoned, reflected, but nevertheless certain, persevering, resolved unreflexiveness in the subordination of the child's desire to the symbolic order (the discourse). On the basis of the preceding analysis, we highlight certain consequences of this structure of the subject for the contexts of particular theoretical discussions and for school practice.