In trying to explain how different disciplines attempt to understand autobiographical memory the literary critic Daniel Albright said, “Psychology is a garden, literature is a wilderness.” He meant, I believe, that psychology seeks to make patterns, find regularity, and ultimately impose order on human experience and behavior. Writers, by contrast, dive into the unruly, untamed depths of human experiences. What he said about understanding memory can be extended to our questions about young children’s minds. If we psychologists are too bent on identifying the orderly pattern, the regularities of children’s minds, we may miss an essential and pervasive characteristic of our topic: the child’s more unruly and imaginative ways of talking and thinking. It is not only the developed writer or literary scholar who seems drawn toward a somewhat wild and idiosyncratic way of thinking; young children are as well. The psychologist interested in young children may have to ____________________________________________________ in order to get a good picture of how children think.
* unruly: 제멋대로 구는 ** pervasive: 널리 퍼져 있는 *** idiosyncratic: 색다른