Philippe aries biography of christopher

During the war years, he taught briefly at a Vichy-sponsored training college, then accepted a post as director of a documentation center for international commerce in tropical fruit, where he worked for most of his adult life. But history was his passion, and he led a parallel life as a researcher and independent scholar in a new kind of cultural history.

While initially sympathetic with the proposals of Vichy's leaders for the family's rehabilitation, he disputed their claims about its moral decline and their fears about the biological decay of the French population. He embarked on his research in historical demography to challenge such notions. The new attitudes toward children, he argued, were not so much about simple affection which is timeless but rather solicitude for their proper development.

Philippe aries biography of christopher: PHILIPPE ARIES. CENTURIES OF.

Once relegated to the margins of family life, children increasingly became the center of its attention, and their particular needs for nurture and direction were openly acknowledged. Schooling, institutionalized first under religious and later under secular auspices, furthered this process. Such thinking presaged the elaboration of a developmental conception of the life cycle, delineated over time in an ever more elaborate demarcation of the stages of life — first childhood, then youth, later adolescence, and finally middle age.

L'Enfant et la vie familiale elicited widespread interest during the s, especially among the helping professions in the United States , where its argument spoke to worries about the loosening ties of family life and an emerging crisis of adolescence in contemporary society. It also accorded well with the current vogue of ego psychology as epitomized in Erik Erikson 's theory about the lifelong psychosocial growth of the individual.

By then he had turned to the study of historical attitudes toward death and mourning, published what some consider his greatest work, L'Homme devant la mort , published in English in as The Hour of Our Death and participated in a much-publicized running debate on the topic with a friendly rival, the left-wing historian Michel Vovelle.