The Human Evasion by Celia Green

https://www.theabsolute.net/minefield/humevas.html

It is fashionable to locate the origins of psychological attitudes very early in life. The taste for doing so is not, perhaps, entirely unmotivated.

It is obviously fairly agreeable to regard one's psychology as the result of conditioning rather than of choice. It is relaxing; one has nothing to blame oneself for; one cannot be expected to change. It is, of course, possible that the infant mind is capable of significant emotional decisions, but this possibility is never discussed.

However, a perfectly satisfactory beginning may indeed be postulated for sanity, and this does not interfere at all with standard theories of psycho-analysis. Psycho-analysis deals with that part of a person's psychology which has become fixated on other people; so it may well describe what happens to the child in so far as that child becomes sane.

It is well known that the younger people are, the less sane they are likely to be. This has lead to the heavily-loaded social usage of the term maturity. It is an unquestionable pro-word. Roughly speaking, the mature person is characterized by willingness to accept substitutes, compromises, and delays, particularly if these are caused by the structure of society.

Young people are usually immature, that is to say, they wish their lives to contain excitement and purpose. It is recognized (at least subconsciously) by sane people that the latter is much the more dangerous of the two, so the young who cannot at once be made mature are steered into the pursuit of purposeless excitement. This is actually not very exciting, and is well on the way to an acceptable kind of sanity, as it leads to the idea of 'excitement' being degraded to that of 'pleasure'.