We speak of adulthood as though childhood were something we complete. Psychology gives us little reason to be so confident. Adult attachment remains organised around needs for security, recognition and proximity formed through early relationships, while emotion regulation continues to depend upon patterns of attachment, learned strategies and the presence of other people. The adult becomes vastly more capable of explaining, inhibiting, redirecting and socially disguising these forces, but they do not simply disappear beneath knowledge or intelligence. Much of maturity may be less the elimination of emotional infancy than the increasingly sophisticated organisation of it: we learn how to work, negotiate, defer gratification, justify ourselves and perform the forms of emotional regulation that adult social life requires.
There is another way to read this development. A society does not merely raise children into adults; it reproduces the kinds of adults through whom that society can continue. We acquire professions, manners, explanations, identities and elaborate systems of justification, while underneath them remain remarkably old needs to belong, to be safe, to be recognised, to possess, to prevail and not to be abandoned. The child has not vanished. It has learned the language, rules and costumes of the systems it inhabits. Much of what we call adulthood may simply be childhood made socially functional.
Daedelus Kite 