Experimental Psychology on Children: The Coleridgean Method
Sometimes I laugh myself back into sanity over the things I read. Here is an excerpt that grounded me via hilarity right at the end of a long day of reading; it concerns Coleridge’s investigations into psychological phenomenon in the early 1800s:
’The key issue, however, was still the learning of language. Did it not seem to be the case that the growth of linguistic ability was in essence an organic rather than a vital process? On one occasion, when Derwent [one of Coleridge’s sons] was nearly three years old, Coleridge tried to explain to him what his senses were for, and found that he did not as yet associate sense-organs with their respective perceptual functions. In order to teach him about his tongue, Coleridge held it, and found him quite unmoved. A little later Coleridge told him to hold his tongue and try to say, ‘Papa’:
…he did, & finding that he could not speak, he turned pale as death and in the reaction from fear flushed red, & gave me a blow in the face/ (Coleridge’s Collected Notebooks I, 1400)’ (John Beer; Coleridge’s Poetic Intelligence; pg. 252)
Not only is the idea of Coleridge causing his son psychological trauma to advance his abstruse researches amusing, the image of his son freaking out and smacking Coleridge in the face because he suddenly can’t talk is just too much. Apparently Coleridge found the whole experience enlightening.