I have a confession to make. When people start talking to me about their inner child I really struggle. It just makes me want to giggle (which I suspect may be largely to do with some relatively immature part of me). I don’t know quite what it is about the whole inner child thing that produces this effect.After all, I regularly work with people in various states of regression in therapy, including severely traumatised individuals who genuinely dissociate into child states to which the adult personality has little direct access. This certainly isn’t funny. I also believe that early childhood experiences, especially the tone of our relationships with our parents, can continue to ricochet through the years and blight our adult lives. Indeed such stuff is the mainstay of therapy.

I suppose my problem is that a lot of the literature and teaching specifically aimed at ‘healing the inner child’ feels so mawkish and sentimental that part of me just rebels against the whole business. Naturally, those who promote such work would probably respond that my ‘issues’ with the approach merely reflect deep childhood wounds of my own. Perhaps I can’t bear to be in contact with my own pain? Perhaps the little guy inside just needs reminding he is the ‘Divine Child’ (thank you, Dr Jung) or the Wonder Child Emmet Fox assures me he really is. Maybe he needs to ‘reclaim the magic that was lost in the wounding experience’ as Cathryn Taylor’s mystical Seven Layers of Healing technique recommends. Quite possibly.

Now, I think children are great. I even have two of my own at home that I’m quite fond of. I respect and value many of the qualities we quite rightly associate with early childhood: their spontaneity, curiosity and creativity, their emotional directness and capacity for playfulness. However, I do think that people who like to focus on the inner child also cling on to a beatific and saccharine view of what a child actually is.

The idealisation of childhood as a state of intellectual and spiritual enlightenment admittedly has a long heritage. Its origins can probably be traced back to Greek ideas about the perfectibility of man but certainly re-emerged with new vigour during the Romantic Movement in the nineteenth century, when poets like William Wordsworth portrayed pre-socialised children as closer to the sources of inspiration and ultimate truth than the obtuse, careworn adults they become. For the Romantics, each child arrived freshly minted from on high, ‘trailing clouds of glory’ before the inevitable lifelong process of forgetting sets in and ‘Shades of the prison house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy ...’ (or presumably Girl for that matter). During the writing of this book, I attended a Neurolinguistic Programming hypnosis workshop in which Wordsworth’s position was again urged upon us. The lecturer assured the delegates with quiet authority that as infants we were all confident, brilliant, perfectly adjusted little individuals. It was only once life had got its grubby hands on us that things had started to go downhill.

But the reality of children, it seems to me, is often at odds with this comforting notion. Children can be genuinely endearing, and Mother Nature ensures they draw out the protective instincts in most of us, particularly if they happen to be carrying our DNA. However, human youngsters can also be hideously self-centred, tyrannical, ruthless, spiteful, aggressive, manipulative and sometimes just very hard work. They are poorly regulated, impulsive and dependent. We don’t use the adjective ‘immature’ as a criticism of adult behaviour for no reason. Even if it were possible, would any of us really embrace our neglected younger self without at least a dash of ambivalence?

The research evidence increasingly suggests that we are not all born with well-balanced personalities that hostile life events and bad parenting subsequently chip away at. Pioneering studies of temperament conducted in the 1970s revealed that of the 65 per cent that fell neatly into Thomas and Chess’s four proposed categories, only 40 per cent were ‘easy’ babies – in other words, generally content and sunny-natured, good sleepers and eaters – while 15 per cent were ‘slow to warm up’ and 10 per cent were downright ‘difficult’, irritable, fussy babies prone to driving their parents to distraction in a relatively short space of time. These children were like this right from the word go.

In fact, more recent research suggests that the differences Thomas and Chess observed are innately hard-wired into the brain but may have long-term developmental consequences. The child psychiatrist Jerome Kagan observed that children varied greatly in their level of arousal when presented with unfamiliar stimuli. Although the profile of many children evolved over time, those at the extreme ends of the scale remained much more likely to be diagnosed with either conduct disorder or anxiety disorders. Suffice it to say, not all infants arrive on the scene with Buddha-like serenity and the wisdom of the ages flowing through their young veins.

Of course, the main focus of inner-child enthusiasts is on the wounded child rather than the pristine one. The line is that the psychosocial injuries of childhood must be salved in order for you to fulfil your true potential as an adult. It is the neglected, rejected, criticised and ignored child who cries out for your attention and must be re-parented to properly heal your present.

Several critics have pointed out that, seen in this way, the inner child can become the focus of a victim mentality that can be highly unhelpful for the person concerned. One of the salient features of an actual child is that they often lack power to determine what happens to them, so when bad things do happen to them it is very clear that this is someone else’s fault. Encouraging people to see themselves, or even part of themselves, in this light can subtly discourage them from taking responsibility for their own lives, or holding themselves accountable for some of the things that may have gone wrong. In my clinical experience, real therapeutic progress is usually hard if this kind of mindset is too embedded.

My very favourite response to this particular hazard of inner-child work comes from author, speaker and workshop leader Colin Tipping. Tipping has absolutely no truck with the inner child whom he describes (rather harshly) as ‘the whining little brat that lives in the back room of our mind, that unhappy victim who can always be relied upon to blame everyone else for our unhappiness ...’ So strong is Tipping’s antipathy that he proposes a radical intervention: a guided visualisation in which the wounded child is not so much healed as euthanised! Having unearthed the inner child skulking in its bunker of resentment, Tipping proposes that you imagine throwing open the curtains and letting the sunlight blaze in. Grateful to be released from their suffering, the child will apparently wither, like Nosferatu, into a wizened, grey husk before your eyes. I will let Tipping paint the rest of the scene for you:

‘With that, the little person dies, looking peaceful and serene. Lovingly, you wrap the little person in a white cloth and take the body upstairs and out into the light. There waits a horse and buggy, and angels hover nearby. A choir of angels sings softly. All the people who have ever been in your life are waiting to pay their respects. All past hurts are forgiven. Love is everywhere. The bells on the horse and buggy ring softly as the entourage slowly begins its journey to the hill where a grave has been prepared ...’

One has to ask: have the inner social services been informed?

The project of embracing your inner child can also result in surreptitiously licensing behaviour and attitudes in adults that may be acceptable in children but are pretty unbecoming in grown-ups. In our culture we are all familiar with the injunction to ‘prioritise a child’s needs’ but if we start allowing ourselves to behave impulsively in every situation, or place too high a value on the merits of unguarded self-expression or the meeting of our own childlike needs, other people are going to pay the price. Hence one inner-child guru recommends that in order to heal the child within you must ‘temporarily or permanently end all relationships in which you are being hurt’. His advice is that only after extensive therapy is it a good idea to even consider re-engaging – after all, ‘... you have a precious child to protect ...’. I’m all for people exiting genuinely destructive relationships, but isn’t this taking things a bit too far? If we become too precious about ourselves we risk becoming self-absorbed and insensitive to the needs of those around us. Pretty soon, most likely, no one will want to know us.

We haven’t yet touched upon the question of whether it is even possible to recover a previous, younger version of ourselves. There is some neurological evidence that we can. Many readers will associate the notion of the Child as a distinct persona with Transactional Analysis, the brainchild of Eric Berne who proposed that Parent, Adult and Child continue to exist within all of us and determine the dynamics of our relationships with each other. Berne based his theories partly on discoveries made by the celebrated neurologist Wilder Penfield. A maverick but brilliant Canadian neurosurgeon working in the 1950s, Penfield had pioneered a surgical technique for treating epilepsy in which he destroyed parts of the brain. In order to target the relevant brain centres only, he inserted electrical probes into various sites and discovered that when the temporal lobes were stimulated, some of his patients described vivid re-experiencing of childhood memories and other sensory experiences.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks presents a more recent case of Mrs O’C, who suffered a massive stroke that affected her temporal lobes (amongst other brain regions) and invoked ‘an overwhelming sense of being-a-child-again, in her long-forgotten home, in the arms and presence of her mother’. This was all the more significant for her since before the stroke Mrs O’C had had no recollection of her early childhood prior to being orphaned before her fifth birthday. On the basis of similar evidence, Berne proposed that childhood experience and attributes most likely continued to make their presence felt in adult life.

Such observations certainly offer tantalising insights into the way the brain may process and store experience. Nevertheless, we also need to be mindful that all memory is ultimately an act of re-creation, not simply a matter of delving into accurate mental records of past events. Even very vivid and convincing memories can sometimes turn out to be unreliable. A recent study conducted at Hull University demonstrated that many of us have clear ‘memories’ of childhood events that never actually happened. In fact, the child psychologist Jean Piaget also reported having had absolutely vivid recall of being kidnapped as a two-year-old, right down to the scratches on his nurse’s face as she sought to ward off the attacker. However, 13 years later the nurse confessed that she had made up the tale, even though the event continued to feel utterly real for Piaget.

Some have turned to hypnotic regression in order to try and settle whether we can revisit our younger selves, but here the waters become frustratingly muddied. The upshot seems to be that there are real limits to what aspects of the developmental clock are actually turned back. In a very comprehensive review conducted in 1987, Michael Nash at the University of Tennessee concluded that under hypnotic regression an adult’s brainwaves do not resume the slow arrhythmic patterns found in infancy and childhood reflexes are not reinstated. Hypnotically regressed adults also continue to outperform actual children on IQ tests. Although in one study hypnotised subjects were able to name the day of the week when their birthday or Christmas fell aged at 4, 7 or 10 years old, later studies couldn’t reproduce the result. There is some suggestion that the investigator may have unwittingly been giving participants clues in the original study by the way he asked the questions.

Cognitive abilities and reflexes are one thing, but surely the key issue is whether somewhere inside us we preserve the emotional dynamics, ego functions and personality characteristics of our early years? Some inventive studies have been conducted using projective tests (like the famous ink blot test) and, lo and behold, the hypnotically regressed subjects did produce responses that resembled those of children. The only fly in the ointment was that non-hypnotised control subjects who were asked to ‘fake’ childlike responses also managed to produce convincing immature reactions. However, regressed adults did interact with a variety of transitional objects in a childlike way that controls couldn’t match, but the regressed subjects were actually less likely to identify the type of object they had used as a child (only 23 per cent got it right) than the non-hypnotised adults who usually had a fairly good idea. Mothers of both groups were consulted to confirm independently the accuracy of participants’ perceptions (because what your mum says goes). The researchers concluded that while hypnosis seemed to activate some of the emotional responses of children, they certainly weren’t reliving specific events as they had actually occurred when they were children.

Maybe there is indeed a child lurking in all of us: in fact I’m sure of it. I for one am capable of behaving in thoroughly childish ways at times and I know I’m not alone. However, I suspect this is often not because we necessarily carry a fully formed psychic child about with us like a live echo of our past, but rather because we have never properly grown up in the first place. This may be no bad thing: children can have a lot of fun. However, they are clearly ill equipped to cope with every aspect of life in an adult’s world. Perhaps that’s the real source of our fascination with our inner child. It’s not just that we want to believe that all aspects of who we are continue to exist and that nothing is ever truly lost. It’s that we all secretly would like to turn the clock back to a time when we had fewer responsibilities and anything still seemed possible.

If you want to give your inner child a hug, by all means go ahead. But be aware that any unmet needs you have now, whenever they originated, are now part of who you are in the present and must be dealt with as such. We can’t go back, what’s done is done, but our future is still unformed and unblemished. Just as it was when we were kids, it still resembles a hushed garden of freshly fallen snow, waiting to receive whatever new tracks we make across it. What children know instinctively, but adults these days seem to forget, is that it’s generally a good idea to keep your gaze fixed on where you’re going, especially when it’s slippery underfoot. If you spend too much time looking back over your shoulder you are very likely to end up on your backside.