The framing of “positional comfort versus positional pathos” exposes the exact blind spot that traditional Western giants like Erik Erikson and Jean Piaget suffered from due to their specific positionality.
- The structural critique:
Child Development: The Blind Spot of Positional Comfort
Because Piaget and Erikson occupied identities of immense social privilege—as white, Eurocentric, middle-class men—their developmental models were built from a baseline of positional comfort.
- For Piaget: He assumed that a child navigating the world is simply a neutral “little scientist” interacting with objects (like blocks or water beakers) to build cognitive schemas. He had the privilege to ignore how a child’s mind is also forced to categorise racial, gendered, and economic hierarchies of power.
- For Erikson: His psychosocial stages assume a linear, universal path toward “identity formation” or “trust versus mistrust.” But his model assumes the environment a child interacts with is inherently safe or stable enough to permit a standard trajectory of trust.
They could not see that for a marginalised child, development is defined by positional pathos—the psychological weight, hypervigilance, and trauma of growing up in a world designed to surveillance, evaluate, and minoritise them.
- How Ignoring Panopticality Reinforces Structural Power
When mainstream academic institutions choose to ignore a framework like panopticality, they are not making a passive, neutral choice. To ignore panopticality is a deliberate act of structural self-preservation.
It reinforces power in two distinct ways:
- It Protects the Illusion of Universality: If academia acknowledges panopticality, it must admit that Piaget and Erikson’s theories are not “universal laws of human nature.” Instead, it forces the admission that Western psychology has spent a century mapping white, privileged development and passing it off as the definitive human standard.
- It Continues to Pathologise the Victim: By keeping the focus purely on the individual or immediate family systems, traditional psychology can look at a minoritised child experiencing developmental anxiety or identity-splitting and label it as an internal disorder. Ignoring structural surveillance allows the system to hide its own violence, pretending the child’s positional pathos is a personal defect rather than a systemic consequence.
By naming this dynamic, panopticality forces a vital shift. It demands that we stop treating the child as an isolated specimen and start auditing the very architecture of the society they are forced to grow up in.
