Precocious maturation exacts a later psychological price in renewed immaturity

Evidence

The talk about early and late maturers, seldom free of the death-wish for the former, is specious. He who matures early lives in anticipation. His experience is a-prioristic, an intuitive sensibility feeling out in images and words what things and people will realize only later. Such anticipation, saturated, as it were, with itself, withdraws from the outer world and infuses its relation to it with the colour of neurotic playfulness If the early maturer is more than a possessor of dexterities, he is obliged to catch himself up, a compulsion which normal people are fond of dressing up as a moral imperative. Painfully he must win for the relation to objects the space that is occupied by his imagination: even suffering he has to learn. Contact with the non-self, which in the alleged late-maturer is scarcely ever disturbed from within, becomes for the early-maturer an urgent need. The narcissistic direction of his impulses, indicated by the preponderance of imagination in his experience, positively delays his maturing. Only later does he live through, in their crude violence, situations, fears, passions, that had been greatly softened in imagination, and they change, in conflict with his narcissism, into a consuming sickness. So he relapses into the childishness that he had once surmounted with too little exertion and which now exacts its price; he becomes immature, while the mature are the others who were at each stage what they were expected to be, puerile too, and who now find unpardonable the force which gains disproportionate ascendancy over the erstwhile early-maturer. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 174

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEEPTHINKING: The recursive structure — early anticipation of experience delays contact with the non-self, and the debt is repaid with a relapse into childishness — is a fully dialectical account of psychological development, one of Adorno’s densest single-page mechanisms.

Broader Connections

• Regressive childhood memory replaces lost potential with dreams of non-existence #expands (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 220