I. PSYCHOANALYSIS AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Dorothy Burlingham’s School
Dorothy Burlingham’s School in Vienna (1980)
WITH JOAN M. ERIKSON
Anna Freud has asked me to tell you about Dorothy Burlingham’s small school in the Wattmanngasse in suburban Vienna. I, in turn, have asked Joan Erikson, who was also part of the staff for a while, to join me in writing this account of how some of us remember this innovative experience.
We believe that to begin with, Dorothy Burlingham as well as Eva Rosenfeld and Anna Freud dreamed the whole idea up together. Dorothy’s four children were then being tutored by Peter Blos, a remarkably craftsmanlike young teacher with clear concepts about how children learn. But tutoring is, of course, individual and isolated learning, and the children lacked the interplay and companionship with other children which a group setting affords.
So a school was formed of children who were spending some time in Vienna—children of different nationalities whose parents were undergoing analysis or who were perhaps in analysis themselves. It was never a very large group, rarely more than twenty children. All the parents, however, were intensely interested in new pedagogic ways and the impact of psychoanalytic understanding on education in the modern world.
This little school, then, was quite a private educational undertaking. The classes met at first in the home of Walti and Eva Rosenfeld and later in a small building constructed for the purpose in the Rosenfelds’ garden. For Eva, this role of hostess of the school (at the beginning, daily lunch was served in her home) was most meaningful in that period following the death of her teenage daughter.
One might assume that such a school would be quite obviously psychoanalytically oriented. In a sense this was, of course, so—but never to the casual observer or in any overly intellectual or modish sense. Dorothy was implementing the best possible school situation which could be devised so it would be congenial to the special needs of English-speaking children living in Vienna and yet also conducive to an atmosphere hospitable to a psychoanalytic orientation. Anna Freud, of course, was discreetly omnipresent in the whole improvisation.
Peter Blos, who became the director of this enterprise, had learned about and become impressed by the kind of curriculum then known as the Project Method which had revolutionized various school systems (first, we think, in Winnetka, Illinois) in America. This educational approach was in accord with John Dewey’s theory that children learn only where their interest is fully engaged and centered. They are then amazingly capable of drawing all the facets of learning the mandatory “three R’s” into the focus of a given project and of mastering otherwise dreary-to-learn skills.
So we taught by the Project Method. The whole school would for a time become, for example, the world of the Eskimos. All subjects were then related to Eskimo life—geography, history, science, math, and, of course, reading and writing. This called for an ingenious combination of playful new experience, careful experiment, and free discussion, while it conveyed a sense of contextuality for all the details learned.
A Christmas Journal carefully designed by the children in 1929 (a copy of which was sent to us by one of the children, Professor Peter Heller of Buffalo) is introduced with an overall statement of the teachers:
Since the beginning of this school year our work has been newly divided. The basic subjects (math, geography, Latin, languages) are taught every morning in the first two hours. The rest of the time is dedicated to “free work” and English. Every two weeks the teachers outline in big strokes a new theme for the “free work” which is then elaborated by the students with the help of books, pictures, and models. At the end of the second week every student reports on his work, be its emphasis geography, history, nature study, or physics, the most important aspect of which is noted down in a summary way by all students.
This statement is followed by an unbelievable list of themes worked on during the three concluding months of that year by students aged 11 through 14. In one of the individual essays there is a remark which throws some light on the functioning of one of us as a teacher-artist: “To illustrate the lessons Herr Erik drew so many posters that by the end of the year they covered all of the walls.” We may add that the journal contains a number of the children’s woodcuts (Herr Erik’s specialty) which markedly illustrate their “themes.”
Since “doing,” itself, is a vital component of the Project Method and the skills of the different aged children had to be carefully brought into play, the little school was a veritable beehive. The children loved it, and they and the teachers learned a good deal. There were also trips into town to see whatever was to be seen of things related to the project, and art and music had an important place in it all. The Christmas Journal also notes that from time to time August Aichhorn would come for some free discussion with the children. In our memory, we experienced that rare joy which is evoked where a setting permits us to respond to the growth potentials of young people as they reveal and develop our own potentials.
Let us now share with you two more personal memories of the school experience which attest to the free spirit which prevailed in the setting. After our marriage we lived on the Kueniglberg, above the school. When our son Kai was born (after some time out for Joan) we daily carried him between us in a laundry basket to the tiny schoolyard or the Rosenfelds’ back porch. It became routine that the children would tell us during class when he was crying (“Kai weint”), and in the intermission some watched him being nursed. It was enriching for us all to share this experience.
And there was a memorable old English Christmas—Yule log, carols, acrobats, dancers, and a boar’s head and mistletoe—at the Burlinghams’ house, and “the Professor” appearing to watch it.
In what respect, then, was this a “psychoanalytic school”? One was aware of some of the children’s near-daily appointments. Not infrequently, one was told that this or that child was “having a difficult time,” and some reasons for it were sometimes discussed in staff meetings. But otherwise, there was hardly any clinical talk, and certainly no individual interpretation. In this connection, however, it must be reported in this account that observations made at the school provided themes helpful in psychoanalytic training and suitable for early psychoanalytic writings. They illustrate, we think, how psychoanalytic awareness can inform the staff and enrich such a school’s work pedagogically. One of these papers is, in fact, based on a role which Dorothy Burlingham played in the school in her inimitable fashion. She would appear a few times a year to ask the children to freely answer a question in writing such as, “What would you like to be, if you could choose it?” or “How are you going to educate your children?” or “What would you do if you suddenly were alone in the world (that means without parents) and would have to help yourself?” One can learn much from the imaginative answers given to such questions. In regard to the last question, however, we felt that it was really not quite necessary for the children to respond as “psychoanalytically” as they did: twelve children described in detail the death of fifteen parents, three of whom were murdered, four died in accidents, and two in prisons. To paraphrase Nietzsche, the children had spent more time describing from whom they wanted to be free than for what. But maybe there was another factor at work: How could the children imagine so suddenly to be “alone in the world,” without parents, except because of violent events? And, of course, there was very much else in these essays.
Kai
Jon
Mikey
Tinky
Bob
Marie (an older sketch from the Black Forest)
Another paper was based on some sessions Erik had during two successive years with a seven year old boy whose mother felt that he was asking her questions under a certain pressure: what did he “really” want to know? To give an illustration, the first questions in the second year were:
“I don’t know whether I should ask about people or the world.”
“What about rain?”
“And what about the sun?”
“How about ships—do they bump underneath?”
“But you told me all that before and about trains and fire too.”
All the questions were answered briefly and clearly, while no interpretations were given. But a careful comparison of the questions asked a year apart indicated the fate in the boy’s mind both of the questions and of the answers and permitted some insight into the inner processes which determined that fate. At the same time, the whole procedure seemed to confirm Freud’s conclusion that “. . . little Hans’s case shows the importance of letting children express repeatedly, in conversation and in play, their questions about, and their conceptions of the world. The history of little Hans proves that more than half the battle is won when the child succeeds in expressing itself.”*
This last paper (which, incidentally, was entitled, “Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education,” indicating that young as we were, we expected our work to have a pretty decisive impact) also refers to a discussion with our twelve and thirteen year olds about rage and asocial behavior as well as about cultural uses of aggression such as the Eskimos’ singing contests where the goal is for each contending group to outdo the other by making the most devastating fun of it and make everybody laugh. Here, the children made a strange confession:
One of them said, “In the other schools it was fun to pin a paper on the teacher’s coat. Here there’s no fun in it anymore.” We were too nice!
In this memorable little school the children, no doubt, did learn many things. The teachers, however, observed unforgettably what Freud called the “strahlende Intelligenz” (the “radiant intelligence”) displayed by children who for some moments are permitted (by themselves and by circumstances) to function freely.
Psychoanalysis and the Future of Education (1930)
Of all those who through their analytic training hope to be able to make some fundamental contribution to therapeutic or educational work, the teacher is the least able to foresee what he may achieve through analytical insight, which he gains from his own clinical analysis. The analytic situation does not offer him any direct suggestion as to how to face the specific situations he meets on returning to his work. An analyst is obliged for the most part to remain a silent observer while the teacher’s work involves continuous talking—this fact alone roughly distinguishes the methods of analyst from that of teacher, representing the two extremes of all possible educational methods of approach. The clinical analyst maintains an attitude of impartiality throughout, thus making it possible for his patient’s affects to reveal themselves according to their own laws and in the forms given to them by a pitilessly selective life; the passivity of the analyst is the necessary prerequisite for the proof of the scientific value, as well as for the therapeutic success, of the method. In the work of the teacher the relations are much more flexible. He not only has to deal with affects in his children, the ultimate forms of which are not yet fully determined (a feature also found in child analysis), but he also cannot avoid registering his own affective response. Although he is the object of transference, he cannot eliminate his own personality, but must play a very personal part in the child’s life. It is the x in the teacher’s personality which influences the y in the child’s development. But, unlike child guidance workers, he accomplishes his educational purposes chiefly through the imponderables of his attitude in the pursuit of his work as teacher. There he finds the specific means for exerting his influence. His duty is to train, to present, to explain, and to enlighten. Therefore he should ask himself not where his work touches on the work of the analyst or the worker in child guidance, but where and how it in itself gives him the opportunity to make use of his new knowledge of human instincts.
Let us discuss enlightenment, taking the word first in the narrower sense of sexual enlightenment, and then let us inquire where and how this touches the problem of enlightenment as a whole. In the problem of sexual enlightenment, teaching and psychoanalysis can be seen to come to a fundamental convergence.
Some years ago, when I was engaged in teaching, the mother of a seven-year-old pupil of mine asked me to talk with him. She said that Richard revealed such a drive to ask questions about everything that she felt unable to satisfy his curiosity and she preferred to have a man answer his questions concerning sexual matters. I spent several afternoons with Richard. He asked questions and I answered; we talked about God and the universe, and where children come from. Every question was answered conscientiously. Richard was a very intelligent and receptive boy. One rule proved to be important—namely, never to give more information than was asked for. His questions ventured to the point of inquiring about the man’s role in begetting children and there they stopped. He did learn, however, that the semen of the man enters the woman and that this makes it possible for her to bear a child.
One year later Richard again expressed a wish to ask questions. As soon as he began, however, I noticed a certain reserve. His questions were no longer eager and punctuated with large question marks; they rather took the form of statements—whispered, careful statements. I again answered him conscientiously but with enough reserve so as not to disturb the next question already formed in his mind. The continuous flow of his questions was not interrupted. I took notes during the interview, explaining that we would use them later to check up and make sure he had omitted nothing. The following are his questions, with tentative analytical interpretations. Let me state, however, that I interpreted nothing to the child. Throughout the interview I remained the teacher whose place it was to answer questions.
Richard’s Questions
THE FIRST HOUR
“I don’t know whether I should ask about people or the world?”
“What about rain?”
“And what about the sun?”
“How about ships—do they bump underneath?”
“But you told me all that before and about trains and fire too.” PAUSE.
The little scientist would like to keep far away from the interesting and the dangerous world of people and remain with atmospheric phenomena. When, however, he does discuss men, he circumscribes a wide circle around the genitals. But increasing pressure from within leads him to associations which touch on an inner anxiety. At this point, as at the word “fire,” he pauses. The reason will soon become clear.
“How long can a diver stay under water?”
“Must he always pump?”
“What does he do when he wants something?”
“Once someone made a man. Why did he spoil him again?”
“I heard that a house was burned and everybody who was in it.”
“But—when a prison burns? Are there windows in prison?” PAUSE.
Again at the mention of “fire” comes a pause. In the depths, in prison, in a burning house—one cannot call, cannot breathe, one burns. A man was made and then destroyed again. We begin to see that these associations have something to do with a narrow room in which a man is made—revealing to the analytic eye an unconscious fantasy and anxiety about the womb and the child it contains.
“I’ve never seen a house burning.”
“I’ve never seen a fire engine burning on a house—that must be fine but not nice.”
The fantasy which was restrained before each time by silence now comes to the surface. It does so by means of a slip—the fire engine is burning instead of squirting water. The dangerous sensation of “burning” has replaced the pleasantly harmless and “manly” activity of the squirting fireman. The deeper meaning of this slip becomes clear later.
“After all I think I’d rather ask about people.”
Apparently he does not know how much the inner voice has already asked about man. It would be interesting to know if and how the slip itself made this daring question possible.
“What about cars?”
“How can you talk?”
“How does hair grow?”
With the word “hair” he loses his wish to question further for the day. At this point I remember that already, the year before, a group of questions were always recurring which no answer satisfied—they dealt with “hair” and “blood.” These probably were the expression of the deeper question whether the blood, which he had doubtless seen on the clothes of a woman as she undressed, signified the castration of the male organ or if the latter were only hidden by the hair.
These questions, according to their tone and content, form two special groups and may be classified as follows: (a) simple questions of interest, which seem to be only a kind of pretext, and the answer to which he already knew by heart; (b) the “hair and blood group,” repeated from the first year, representing increasing anxiety. It is noteworthy that among all the new questions, which are obviously filled with dangerous matters of unconscious sexual meaning, there is not one direct sexual question.
THE SECOND HOUR
“Where does the air begin to get thinner?”
“What’s around the sky?”
“What’s a cloudburst?”
Now we have come back to earth, but along with a suggestion of something unpleasant—namely a cloudburst. Therefore, he pauses. Nevertheless, he makes a courageous decision.
“After all, I’d rather talk about people.”1
“I know everything about the head.”
“About the legs, too.”
“Do I know everything about arms?”
“About elbows too?”
The wide circle around the genitals is worthy of note; but the boy’s anxiety about them bursts through in the next question: “How do you snap back the elbow when it’s come out of joint?” Does “coming out of joint” suggest erection? (Arms and legs are “members,” called “Glieder” in German, while penis is also called a “member or “Glied.”) In any case there is again a pause.
Then follows a still clearer anxiety about the penis. In the throat there is a tube for air and another for food. They must come out somehow below when you put your head down:
“And when food gets into the air tube?”
“Is it like that in a hen too?” (The association “hen” will be explained later.)
“In a snake too?”
“How does a snail push itself forward?”
“Where are there purple snails?”
The tubes that come out below, the snake, the snail that “pushes itself forward,” the purple snail, all point clearly to the penis. The purple snail connects two ideas—snail and blood. Richard had heard the myth of the Greek shepherd who found his dog, bleeding, as he thought, at the mouth and then discovered that the animal had bitten a purple snail. Now, consequently, we approach the fear of “castration,” which, being unconscious, threatens to overshadow everything:
“When you cut off your hand do you have to stop the blood with bandages?”
“When you’re dead does the skin fall off? Do the bones go to pieces?”
“A celluloid factory can explode easily, can’t it?”
The hour began with “cloudburst” and ended with “explosion.”
THE THIRD HOUR
“How fast can a man run?”
“And an animal?” (Does he mean “run away”? It would seem so.)
“I’d like to know something about war. If Vienna hadn’t stopped fighting would it have been all ruined?”
“Who started the fighting?”
“That was mean of England to help against Vienna.”
Here it is necessary to consider what “fighting” and what “England” and “Vienna” mean. For some time Richard had shown occasional timidity on the street. Once, when questioned about his fear, he declared anxiously, “The dogs fight.” A very enlightened little girl, hearing this remark, immediately explained, “They don’t fight, they are marrying.” Now people marry, too, and there are sufficient indications that physical conflict is involved. Many children overestimate these indications, especially in families where physical or psychic pain seems somehow to be connected with the events going on in the parental bedroom. Richard’s mother, who seemed to be unhappy, had married in England, but shortly after the war had been compelled by various circumstances to leave his father and settle in Vienna. Richard explained this change by connecting the war, the fighting and his father, from whose aggression his mother had fled away to Vienna. The unconscious identification of the country in which one lives with the threatened or suffering mother, and the enemy with the brutal father against whom the boy, the young hero, has to defend her may be pointed out as a common one. It is important to see where Richard’s fantasies are based on his special œdipus situation. “The sun and the moon,” he once remarked, “can never be in the sky at the same time. They would eat each other up.”
“How are the teeth made firm?”
“Why are lips so red?”
“Why is the head up straight?”
“When you bend it back it gets all red.”
“Why do you bleed when you cut yourself?”
“The hair under the arm . . .”
References to blood and hair again terminate his desire to question further. The possible interpretations of this hour may, then, be summarized as follows: (1) pitying identification with the suffering mother; (2) the wish to be like her; but also (3) fear of this wish, because becoming a woman means castration. A further anxiety about becoming a woman, appearing in the next hour, demonstrates that we are on the right track.
THE FOURTH HOUR
“In your head there’s an opening. Why doesn’t everything run out?”
“Some people have something here” (goiter).
“Some people have a hunchback.”
“If somebody hits somebody in the eye will he be blind right away?”
“Why are women so fat here?” (breast)
“And how is it when the woman has too much milk and the baby doesn’t drink it all?”
“And when a woman has too little?”
Bursting skull, goiter, hunchback, the overfull breast, the dislodged eye; women grow fat, have children in their bodies and milk in their breasts. How do their bodies stand it? It is now possible to understand the strange intrusion of the “hen” in the second hour. It appeared in connection with the question as to what would happen if food should get into the wrong tube. [If we take] into account the familiar mechanism which disguises unconscious thought or fear by reversing the term used, as for example “below” to “above,” “out” to “in,” the question about the “hen” may mean: what would happen if that which should come out below (the egg from the hen, the child from the mother) tried to come out of another opening which was too small and burst?
At this point it is well to bear in mind Richard’s actual difficulties at the time of this interview. He had attacks of pavor nocturnus in which he cried and asked if his bowel movement had been sufficient. When he was assured that this was the case he slept quietly. As this symptom disappeared he began to have difficulty with eating. His symptoms followed one another with a transposition similar to that of his questions, that is, from “below” to “above.” Both were obviously aspects of the same anxiety: through which organ is the child begotten and through which is it born?
“Why do you see a strong man’s muscles so plainly here?” (The veins of the arm.)
“What part of people do cannibals eat?”
“There were many in the war?”
“Once someone told me about cannibals and I always thought they ran around in the streets.”
“When you stand for a long time your feet get all red.”
These questions are followed by a clear symbolic description of the anxiety about the penis:
“Is there a quite smooth ball here on your knee?” (i.e., gland)
“When you stretch your mouth open why doesn’t it tear here?” (in the corners)
“But when you cut yourself somewhere on your skin, it could go on tearing couldn’t it?”
“There’s a sort of bone around the eye?”
“Why don’t they put armor inside a soldier’s uniform?”
“Are there armored cars in Vienna?”
“Around the neck there’s a sort of skin collar?” (i.e., foreskin).
Again, in accordance with the displacement mechanism, the part most in danger is transferred above, but to a part of the body which also shares the danger of being cut off—namely, the neck.
THE FIFTH HOUR
As this was to be the last hour before the holidays, and as it was preferable not to let the boy leave without any enlightenment in the matter which was troubling him, I reminded him that he had asked no question about childbearing, which had interested him so greatly.
“That’s so.”
“Why is it [women’s buttocks] so fat behind?”
“What happens when the child stays in too long?”
“How do you know when it’s coming?”
“And when you marry then the semen comes from the woman into the man, doesn’t it?”
It is apparent that Richard, who had shown such intelligence in the understanding of all the enlightenment given him up to this point, had nevertheless been unable to maintain his sexual knowledge against the repressing forces. These had led him away from the masculine role and at the same time subjected him to intense anxiety concerning the factors likely to threaten him in the woman’s role. The slip with which he first disclosed this change is noteworthy: the fire engine burns instead of squirting.
From this very limited insight into one child’s mind which Richard’s questions have provided, we may conclude that the formation of anxieties, fantasies, and unconscious and conscious theories continues regardless of sexual enlightenment. It is important to consider whether or not there is reason to believe that the infantile psyche (or, can we simply say the psyche?) always reacts in this manner.
At first the child had asked questions openly. His desire to question was very naturally so divided that his wish for general information appeared in the foreground, while behind it lay his easily accessible curiosity about sexual things. The further development of the œdipus complex brought about a repression of the now dangerous sexual questions. Questions are now set carefully, half dreamily and disinterestedly, and behind the words which would endeavor to hide the sexual content lurks a general permeation of sexual anxiety, born of the conviction that a catastrophe must take place. The grownups, of course, deny or conceal this, but there are too many indications of actual force in sexual life and too many catastrophic desires in one’s own mind. Because of anxiety and one’s own desire for aggression, all signs of aggression become overvalued. These signs are not lacking, since a sado-masochistic component is always evident in the tension of sexuality, even though in normal sexual life, in the general attitude of the adult, it may be balanced and imponderable. In any event the child in his preoccupation overvalues something real. Changing according to his stages of development, his affective relationship to the single components of sexuality is based on what he observes in the outer world, as well as upon the sensations of his own body.
For the adult these components have become imponderables, scarcely measurable in normal sex life, and only in the artificial situation of psychoanalysis is the old scheme of weights and measures temporarily reëstablished. In life, adult and child represent different stages of a development or, more accurately, are the result of different mathematical operations which are employing the same values; the sexual development of a child resembles a gradual addition while adult sexuality is the product of the same figures.
These oral, anal, phallic, sadistic imponderables, however, which the adult can no longer measure or name, are just those which are experienced in crude isolation by the child, one following the other inexorably. The child develops them, fights against them, tries to balance them, and this struggle is complicated by the fact that he is busily occupied with the pleasure zones of his age level (or of an earlier one from which he has only partly progressed), as well as that he experiences sensations which prevent him from grasping what the adult tells. In general, the sexual act as represented to the child is rationalized and made more or less gentle and noble according to the personal attitude of the individual adult. In any case sleeping restfully together is sure to be emphasized by the adult as the only pleasure involved, but it is just this feeling of protected rest from which the child is drawing away into the tumultuous fight for existence. Only yesterday he forsook his mother’s arms and his possessive share of her body. Today he has a respite in which to accustom himself to his loss, but tomorrow, so he feels, something quite new and different and dangerous will present itself. Rest, however, is the reward for his successful battle. He, therefore, accepts sexual enlightenment exactly as he accepts general enlightenment in other fields—passing it off with an almost patronizing gesture and with the feeling (sometimes even conscious): “Maybe you’re right, though you tell me enough lies. But I’m interested in something else, and that you apparently won’t tell me about because you think I’m too stupid—or perhaps you can’t tell me because you’re too stupid yourself.”
An example offered by one of Richard’s classmates may be cited in this connection. He had upon occasion heard from me that children are nursed at their mother’s breast, and very probably he had also had an opportunity to observe this. Nevertheless, he exclaimed one day in school: “You said that women have breasts to give milk, but that isn’t so. What women have there is something to have fun with.” What does the boy mean by “have fun with,” the pleasant appearance or feeling of the breast or the enjoyable vague memory of nursing? In any case, he is not alone in this feeling. But when he asks about it no one appears to know anything, and his confusion and excitement are met with idealistic or scientific conceptions. Here, too, the interest of the child lies in a certain vividly felt emotional relationship, in response to which he is told something about sucking calves and lactating cows. But cow’s teats resemble more nearly a multiple penis to the boyish mind, and the milking he observes very likely brings further confusion and new evaluations. In the face of such emotional relationships, education enforces repression and sets up in their place scientific law and order. We enforce with the patience of the drop that wears away the stone. But is there not ground for reflection when one reads what the laughing philosopher Zarathustra at the height of a gay science offers his fellow men as wisdom? “Es gibt doch wenig Dinge, die so angenehm und nützlich zugleich sind, wie der Busen des Weibes.”2 The philosopher, of course, can rediscover and express the obvious facts which the adult refuses the child.
On the basis of clinical experience, psychoanalysis has recommended sexual enlightenment as of very real assistance, but what the enlightenment presents remains a fairy tale for the affects of the child, just as the story of the stork remains a fairy tale for his intellect. Let us not forget that the stork story does offer the child something. Recently Zulliger [Hans Zulliger (1893–1965), a well-known Swiss analyst] interpreted it as follows: “The complete stork tale, as a more exact psychoanalytic examination is capable of showing, contains anal and genital birth theories (the chimney, the stove and the pond), the idea of the forceful and sadistic in connection with the acts of begetting and bearing (biting in the leg), castration idea (leg biting), the genital begetting idea (stork-bird as masculine symbol), etc.”
Modern teachers forsake the symbol-filled darkness of ancient tales which combined so attractively the uncanny and the familiar, but in doing so they have no reason to be optimistic, for while replacing them with more logical interpretations expressing some facts more directly and clearly, they neglect to include even vaguely much that is more fundamentally important. Neither fairy tale nor sexual enlightenment saves the child from the necessity of a distrustful and derisive attitude toward adults, since in both cases he is left alone with his conflict.
Noteworthy in this connection is the section in The Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy where the child derides his father by means of remarks about the stork fairy tale.3* How dangerous must it then be when, instead of the fairy tale-telling adult or the adult who tries to carry out his theoretical duties, matters are taken in hand by the adult with pretensions of truthfulness or moral gravity.
That the adult who is questioned by a child is in the position to give interpretations seems to be only a first step forward. Above all, the adult must know that consistent and effective interpretation belongs in the realm of clinical analysis. Then, once he recognizes the twofold meaning of the child’s questions, he is faced with two possibilities. He may either ignore the hidden meaning and consequently answer inadequately—perhaps even more dangerously and less adequately than the stork tale—or, disregarding the disguise of the question, he may interpret its hidden meaning, answering more than was intentionally asked. This may prove a shock for the child or, as is more probable, it will remain absolutely ineffective. And few things undermine the position of the adult more disastrously than serious but ineffective effort!
For the teacher there remains another individual problem. He must not only appreciate the sexual curiosity masquerading as desire for knowledge, but he must make the greatest possible use of it. The child never learns more than he does at the time of disguised curiosity. At this time he learns with the cooperation of his affects, and now when he hopes finally to find out “the hidden secrets,” the statement “vita non schola discimus” really holds good, for he is learning now for the sake of the life he dimly divines, and not for the sake of his lessons.
One might think that the teacher could make use of this situation to smuggle into his answer the sexual enlightenment that the child’s questions have unconsciously requested. By general frankness he should be able to establish the certainty that there is nothing more secret about sex than about everything else. However, glimpses into the unconscious, such as described above, show that the sexual questions as they reach a complicated and dangerous point (a moment which enlightenment is supposed to guide) inhibit the desire for further questioning and the wish to learn. Softly the child speaks of the purple snail and fire engines, the food tube of the hen and the goiter that some women have. And still more softly come the inmost questions of the child which only barely make themselves heard to his interpreter: “What about the desire and the fear of destroying, and the fear and desire of being destroyed?” With his most earnest questions, then, the child still remains alone.
Here, besides the limits established by mental and physical development, we meet an affect-barrier blocking openmindedness and readiness to learn. That which the affect has under its power is released only by means of stronger affective experience, and not by any intellectual interpretation alone. Here again the analytic situation in itself meets both requirements: it provides experience through interpretation and interpretation through experience. The teacher is only able to give a carefully selected picture of the world according to his best knowledge, and this is true also of sexual enlightenment.
However, since all early experiences disappear only to reappear later as a powerful stream, we must assume that both the infantile disappointments and the derision or surrender with which the child meets them play an important role in the unconscious life of adult human beings; that because of these childish doubts and despairs “healthy” humanity clings to its group neurosis—its conflict concerning knowledge and faith—just as the neurotic clings to his individual symptoms. It is, therefore, not alone the attitude of the child toward the adult which is touched on by our question, but the attitude of humanity toward itself. The command which one received as a child is passed on to the coming generation, and it is the adult with the repressed doubts who unknowingly increases the confusion of unfruitful belief and knowledge in children who are desirous of learning. This is shown in a practical way by the method used by educators in selecting and arranging the material to be taught. Almost all courses of instruction, from the picture book to the study of history at the university, are as if designed to confuse man concerning his visual, perceptive, and other relationships to himself and his history. After prohibitions, doubt, revolt and surrender have helped to establish the basis of his intellectual life, it is difficult for him to direct his intelligence to the necessity of dealing with the dangers within himself; it is impossible for him to decide whether “to ask about the world or people.” Deciding in favor of the first may often imply the unconscious prohibition of the second—an inhibition in thinking which will naturally also have its consequences for his conception of “the world.”
A broader conception of enlightenment, the expansion of which will undoubtedly arise from psychoanalysis, is needed.
There is a footnote in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents:
‘Thus conscience does make cowards of us all. . . .’ That the upbringing of young people at the present day conceals from them the part sexuality will play in their lives is not the only reproach we are obliged to bring against it. It offends too in not preparing them for the aggressions of which they are destined to become the objects. Sending the young out into life with such a false psychological orientation is as if one were to equip people going on a Polar expedition with summer clothing and maps of the Italian lakes. One can clearly see that ethical standards are being misused in a way. The strictness of these standards would not do much harm if education were to say: “This is how men ought to be in order to be happy and make others happy, but you have to reckon with their not being so.” Instead of this the young are made to believe that everyone else conforms to the standard of ethics, i.e., that everyone else is good. And then on this is based the demand that the young shall be so too.4
About aggression as well as about sexuality the child hears at best a rationalization in the form of biological, historical, or religious purposefulness and is left alone with his own “purposeless” instinctive energies. He must feel himself alone, wicked in an apparently noble and purposeful world. He must repress the doubt born of firsthand evidence. How could we then believe that sexual enlightenment is sufficient, or, on the other hand, that all enlightenment is useless if sexual enlightenment is not sufficient? As a matter of fact the soul is a melting pot of inimical drives which urge the child from infant into adult life, forcing it through the vicious circle of guilt and expiation. The inwardly directed aggression (the most important psychic reality of civilization) is, according to Freud, best and first recognized in its sexual alloy—but not entirely to be understood in it.
Observing about ten of our twelve-and thirteen-year-old children outside of school and finding in their behavior some thought-provoking features, I determined to have a talk with them. Our discussion began with the explanation on the part of some of the children that much unsocial behavior lay in outbursts of rage—a rage (as they soon discovered) which was often unreasonable. Others soon became clear about the fact that this rage was inwardly directed and that it excluded them from an unconcerned participation in the activities of the group. With this knowledge the analyzed and unanalyzed children then began to show an understanding which would have seemed impossible. As the opportunity arose in the discussion, I was able to give them examples from our history study which corresponded to the feelings we were speaking of. The children had learned facts about the Eskimos5—for example, that they have a so-called “singing contest” instead of law court procedure, whereby the two opponents are forced to make fun of one another until the laughing observers declare one party or the other “knocked out.” A little girl immediately had the correct idea: “They can do that,” she declared, “because they haven’t any nasty names. We would say ‘pig’ or ‘idiot’ right away and then everyone would be mad again.”
Another example of applied history was offered by the story of Amundsen who, during the flight of the Italia, held himself strictly under Nobile’s command in spite of an intense rage against the leader. In short, we discussed examples of rage, justified and unjustified, and examples of the social control of this emotion. With this acceptance of rage as a general fact, that is, as something that is not merely the fault of the individual who carries it within him, a variety of thoughts began to stir in the children’s minds. They spoke of aggression that is displayed and of aggression that is felt, of guilt and the desire for punishment, with an inner comprehension of which adults are hardly capable. They even discovered “civilization and its discontents” in our little progressive school. They admitted openly that their desire for punishment was not satisfied by us. One of them said, “In the other schools it was fun to pin a paper on the teacher’s coat. Here there’s no fun in it any more.” Another declared, “We’re like balls that are all ready to explode and suddenly are put into an air tight room.”
Then we were able to discuss what one should do with this desire for punishment. The Puritans were mentioned—men who though expelled for their belief became the grimmest of religious tyrants as soon as they had the power to exercise tyranny. The older children discovered that their behavior towards the smaller ones represented a tendency to abreact their feelings regarding control by the teachers. This began to make it clear that valuing fairness so much more than mutual suppression, as we did, only one thing was possible—submission through understanding of the situation. Finally the children came to the conclusion that the only thing possible would be to speak often and penetratingly about the force which endangered this understanding from within until it lost its power.
Now, of course, all this is very easily said, but the reactions following such talks are not as easy to predict. This was demonstrated the next morning when, for the first time in two years, two of the older boys fought. I was reminded of Chancellor Snowden’s remark at the London Conference: “Another such peace conference and we’ll have war again.” However, [because we knew] the neurotic condition of the two boys, it was possible to accept as a good omen the fact that they for once actually and spontaneously “went for each other.”
In view of such experiences, one would think that modern education must often stand abashed before its own courage, the courage with which it hopes to lead young people, by means of good will, toward a new spirit and future peace. It is psychic reality which forces itself through, and this the more unexpectedly and unpleasantly the more it is denied. One can understand that many are panic-stricken and, as it were, throw to the winds the ideal of the primacy of intelligence.
Freud has written that an increasing sense of guilt must accompany the development of culture. It is certain that (wherever the temptation to forget what has already been learned is withstood) education will become increasingly understanding. However, experience and theory teach that the feeling of being loved and understood does not diminish the strength of the feelings of guilt but rather increases them, and this brings about an economic discrepancy similar to that discovered by Freud in sexual life when he found that the development of culture had brought with it a shift in the unconscious evaluation of sexuality which made worthless both of the conscious alternatives—asceticism or living out one’s nature. The only remedy for this upset economy is to make unconscious material conscious, and to prevent the accumulation of unconscious material by continuous enlightenment. Apparently pedagogy now faces a similar problem in the question of aggression, guilt and desire for punishment, and perhaps here, too, steps taken toward suppression or liberation will not really touch the heart of the problem.
Perhaps a new education will have to arise which will provide enlightenment about the entire world of affects and not only about one special instinct which, in an otherwise entirely rationalized outlook of life, appears too obscure. This would imply a presentation of life in which the omnipresent instincts “without usefulness” (in reality the instinctive urge that opposes all “use”) would no longer be denied. It is this denial which brings about the hopeless isolation of the world of children with their conflicts.
This isolation, it is true, is frequently overcome, but often only apparently. But the general fact, that the inner enemy is left concealed in darkness instead of having light focused upon him, gives him the power time and again to overthrow the sound will of the individual and the best-made plans of well-meaning leaders.
Certainly men are like this, but have you asked yourself whether they need be so, whether their inmost nature necessitates it? Can an anthropologist give the cranial index of a people whose custom it is to deform their children’s heads by bandaging them from their earliest years? Think of the distressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of a healthy child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.6
It is surely no coincidence that the desire for a science of education should appear on the scene at the moment when, in the form of psychoanalysis, the truth of the healing power of self-knowledge is again establishing itself in the world. And to this truth much has been added since the time of Socrates, namely, a method. If education earnestly seeks to rebuild on a new conscious basis of knowledge and intelligence, then it must demand radical progress to the point where clear vision results in human adjustment. Modern enlightenment can best achieve this through psychoanalysis.
Notes
1 In the [Zeitschrift für psychoanaly tische Pädagogik] V. 7, Dr. Edith Buxbaum describes an experiment with a class of 10–11 year old girls of a public school in Vienna, to whom the liberty was given of asking any questions they wanted to. The girls as a group behaved almost exactly and literally like the questioning Richard. With the first questions they tried to cling to things which led far away, such as telephone, airplane, Zeppelin: “What is it like when you fly up into the sky, on and on, straight ahead?” Then came the opposite direction, “And if you bore down into the earth?,” which led them to dangerous questions—“Why don’t the stars fall down,?” to lightning on earthquake. The latter was explained by one girl as coming when “things which don’t get along together bump underneath.” One girl’s question: “Why do you feel your heart beat?” was unanimously disapproved of by the class. And still they seemed to be waiting for something. When a girl asked: “Wie berwegt sich der Mensch?” (“How do men move?”, half the class understood: “Wie entsteht der Mensch?” (“How are men made?”)—and giggled. But finally they admitted just as Richard did: “After all, we would rather ask about people.”
2 “Indeed there are few things which are at the same time as pleasant and as useful as a woman’s bosom.”
3 Though it seems rather hopeless to succeed in giving children the biological truth while they are concerned with the reality of affects, little Hans’s case shows the importance of letting children express repeatedly, in conversation and play, their questions about, and their conceptions of, the world. The history of little Hans proves that more than half the battle is won when the child succeeds in expressing itself.
4 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Jonathon Cape and Harrison Smith, 1930), 123–24.
5 Included under project work directed by Dr. Peter Blos.
6 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion, tr. W. D. Robson-Scott, (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1928), 81–82.
Children’s Picture Books (1931)
At our Montessori seminar we reviewed a number of highly diverse picture books. Our ultimate impression was that on the whole, they constitute a small, circumscribed world that reflects the big real world—with specific distortions. This I would like to document in psychological terms although the great variety of books may at first be confusing. We looked at the ominous Struwelpeter with its magical drawings, the pictures of toys in powerful colors, and some of those strange pages that delicately render a pale, sweet, mimosalike world.
Aside from all these, one bright genre of writing shone clear: the irresistible humor of Max and Moritz and Adamson. These books are not aimed directly at children; their mature humor addresses any receptive human being. We will discuss them later.
Let me first single out a critical word that I hear frequently. Struwelpeter is supposedly “sadistic.” Yet this adjective must have a somewhat different meaning when applied to a different type of book. I am referring to a picture book that seeks to deplore animal torture by showing a tortured creature on every page. Obviously such depictions tend to stir up cruel impulses rather than revulsion. Struwelpeter, in contrast, presents not only scenes in which a creature (a creature identifiable with the child reader) is tormented but also some in which a child is punished. We all expect that any reader will identify with the hero of a book. So we may conclude that the children reading this book feel punished when Struwelpeter is punished, and we know how lasting such an impact can be, and how unforgettable the perverse enjoyment. Even terrified children return to this book.
We recognize here two interpretations of the word “sadistic”: not only “cruel to others” but also “cruel to oneself”—a far more dangerous interpretation, as we shall soon understand. For cruelty to others is checked by the strength of those other living creatures, who defend themselves. But what is it that curbs the paradoxical tendency to be cruel to oneself? I will say a few things about this later on, for it seems to me that if we condemn certain effects, we should try to recognize their root causes. Otherwise, they will return along unforeseen paths.
We ask ourselves: Why is it that adults draw cruel or childish pictures for children’s books? And why do children feel joy and comfort at seeing themselves depicted as punished or excessively childish and saccharine? If we tell the artist that he doesn’t know how a child sees the world, he will merely cite the appeal of his drawings and suggest that artists probably know more about children than we do. This seems to be true in some way, and we have to try to find the common ground that draws them together, the artist and the child.
I would like to digress for a moment and point to certain medieval paintings that are not difficult to find. In some depictions of the Mother of God or the Holy Family we see, among the mature, tender human faces, that the countenance of the little Savior or other children are strangely distorted: ill; somewhat embryolike; somewhat senile. One might initially believe that the Christ Child was meant to be depicted as an “old infant,” mature at birth and childlike in death. Yet we cannot help feeling that here the adult artist, ascetically and mystically earnest about the true nature of childhood, has unconsciously shrunk back, refusing to recognize a child as he really is. The manner of distorting the child in order to contrast him with the Holy Mother is a special problem. What we are looking for in this phenomenon is one more symptom of a conclusion that forces itself upon us in picture books, too: that there is a general tendency to distort, to deny childhood.
In reality the very young infant certainly evinces nothing of this. He delights in himself and in the growing radius of his movements and impulses. His psyche seems to say, “This is good,” to everything that he produces with his body and perceives with his senses. And he is used to having the big people (the powerful adults on whose love he depends) applaud his behavior—until he reaches an age at which he can be educated. Now, when he comes out with his most genuine and favorite behavior, adults more and more often state emphatically, “You mustn’t do that. We won’t love you when you’re like that.” Thus the child learns that certain action is not generally lovable. He has to find some way of maintaining his old self-love (which is necessary for human survival) while also keeping the love of adults, which he needs just as badly.
This solution operates (according to the research of psychoanalysis) as follows: The child condemns some of his impulses on his own; by some enigmatic mechanism, he internally develops an authority that appropriates and represents the prohibitions of adults. One part of his ego is transformed—psychoanalysis then calls it the superego—and repudiates the part that remains as it was originally. The positive aspect of this development is that the prohibiting part, too, belongs to the child’s mind, representing the prohibition as his own desire, with which his self-love can side. But such disparate self-love survives at the price of one’s inner unity.
The child likes himself now insofar as he, like the adult, has learned to watch over his thoughts and deeds. Thus he develops an often puzzling mechanism deciding what is “good, well behaved,” and he enjoys picture books in which good children are rewarded and bad ones punished. And so it comes about that while he may very recently have hated much younger children, whom he saw as rivals, he now finds them “sweet, cute,” at the urging of his inner authority, and enjoys sweet picture books that we would find silly and would rather keep away from him.
However, the adult who drew these pictures for him long ago went through the same transformation and experienced something highly important to boot: He then forgot what had happened. “ ‘I did this,’ my memory says. ‘I cannot possibly have done this,’ my pride says, and remains adamant. Finally, the memory gives in” (Nietzsche). Thus, repressed childhood wishes are replaced by paradisiacal surrogate images or moralistic prejudices, as though one had been born a well-behaved creature. The adult (impelled by some urgent memory) feels the desire to draw a picture book for the child. He either establishes good and evil in his book or makes up a world of such doll-like infantility that it is without punishment only because it has no drives. Because of this connection, I can explain why I initially refused to be distracted by the difference between the punishing books and those books that use a delicate or schematic depiction to strip the world of flesh and blood. The former books show the world as threatening and advise caution; the latter advise capitulating immediately to the threat by behaving like a doll or a delicate mimosa, the kind of child so many adults like to see.
The advantages in the mechanism of conscience formation are obvious: The child catches up in a short time with thousands of years of upbringing. The natural creature of drives turns into a being with a twentieth-century conscience. The entire heritage ready for this development is now manifest. And the energy underlying the first instinctual expressions is now employed for purposes of general usefulness; it is integrated in mankind’s efforts to endure its alienation from nature and to compensate for it. People accept this development without further ado, saying, “A normal child doesn’t suffer all that much from this process.”
I must therefore introduce the fact that the disadvantages of this process present us with our actual theme, leading us directly to an important pedagogical problem. For these disadvantages are great as they pile up with the growth of civilization. They threaten to turn into the mountain with which modern education, after a bold approach, finds itself unable to cope.
Let me repeat what we have said: A child can be educated because of a split in his mental makeup. Under the pressure of the alternative—forgoing love and protection—between remaining what he is or becoming like the adult in order to please him, the child undergoes a transformation in the psyche. An inner voice arises, taking over the prohibitions of the adult milieu and making sure that the child’s instinctual energy is tamed and, whenever necessary, punished for unruliness. This authority, as we have said, censors all memories of the original and now-condemned world of the senses. The page of the psyche is blank again—not because nothing was written on it but because the censor has meticulously pasted over the primeval writing.
Now we have only to emphasize the distinct differences between the external prohibiting power and the internally established authority in order to recognize the danger of this inward shift. The internal authority becomes an absolute dictate and no longer a human being. A human being sees in another only what circumstances allow him to see: seldom his thoughts; never his unconscious feelings. But the conscience apprehends everything and finds even the most unconscious things punishable. A human being can be lenient when he sees that his prohibitions go too far or are made invalid by changed conditions. But the inner dictate is not the likeness of such a changeable person; it is only the reflection of his earlier, perhaps joyless and unperceptive admonition. (How many perceptive now-modern parents suddenly find themselves unable to cope with their over conscientious child, who is stuck in old ideals! They would gladly erase, modify, revoke, yet their earlier image in the child’s mind is stronger than their living voice.) The overseverity with which this reflection in his psyche keeps the original part under constraint, this overseverity, that demands and prohibits, receives then additional support, which only an inner authority can accept. The cruel and deadly hatred that the small infant once aimed at the overpowerful adults is even internalized in the course of his capitulation, and since the child must despair of any resistance, his hatred is turned against his own flagging inner world. For no mobilized strength remains dormant: It rages inwardly as soon as the mind’s eye perceives even an unconscious stirring of drive intensification. It harms us in a thousand possibilities of obvious or concealed self-punishment and self-degradation, illness and inhibition. And if it is not visible in flagrant symptoms, it is at least sensed in what Freud calls the “discontent of civilization,” a malaise shared by us all.
In order to explain this dangerous self-directed sadism of the soul, I have introduced a small piece of psychoanalytical theory, to show in how many different connections such moralistic renderings as Struwelpeter can be called sadistic. For what is expressed as moralistic cruelty against others is merely a reflection of the effects of that internal sadistic impulse. As for the person who “moralizes” against others, we may assume that he presumably keeps his own instinctual impulses calm only by means of heavy fetters. *
Let us look back once more at the humorous picture books that we set aside before. What is the appealing ingredient in the depiction of human nastiness and human misfortune: humor. We can focus on a page in Adamson, the appeal of which to children is well known to you all. Adamson wants to smoke. But his better self, which (identifiable by its angel wings) stands behind him, takes the cigar from his mouth and throws it out the window. For a moment the Adamson self is stunned, but then it races downstairs and catches the cigar before it has reached the ground. Rebellion has acted faster than conscience and the force of gravity. Immoral? Yet the most conscientious person laughs.
“The wonderful thing [about humor] is obviously the victoriously defended invulnerability of the ego. The ego refuses to be offended and forced to suffer by any provocation in reality. It insists on not letting the traumas of the outer world get too close for comfort; indeed, it shows that they are merely an occasion for pleasure” (Freud).
Several external features of the Adamson figure show to what great extent it depicts the child in a human being, the infantile ego, which has to struggle with hindrances, prohibitions, and accidents. In the ratio of his head size to his torso Adamson is a childlike figure; he has a big hat, like a little child acting grownup; he is always alone; he has no manly adventures. And his adversaries, human beings (“the big man”), all are taller than he to the same degree that an adult is taller than a child.
How does humor speak through the depiction of this sly, struggling ego? It confronts the nasty superego with a kindly laugh, which says, “Just look, this is what the world is like, even though it appears dangerous. Child’s play, just good enough to be joked about” (Freud).
We now can look through what is so liberating about these books: For an instant they relieve the ego of the pressure of the superego. Max and Moritz and Adamson are stupidly sly and cruel, as all of us feel we are at some point. But humor smiles at this, and we smile, too. We like ourselves a bit more and perform some tiny detail better than we would have managed without that bright moment.
On the other hand, there is probably nothing that forces us more to sin and do wrong than the constraint of an oversevere conscience. True, the development of the superego may be what shapes our civilization and its powerful characteristics, but the sense of guilt and the need for punishment can go beyond the usefulness of this process. They not only inhibit but can also hinder any improvement on, or restitution of, mistakes. And with the increase today of decent and peaceful ideals and of social awareness, mankind’s heritage of guilt threatens to be renewed in every individual, for it more and more sharply contradicts the primal language of the drives, and with sternness of upbringing, it becomes more and more cruel to the ego. Therefore, human psyches increase both their tension and hypertension. We also notice that all the emancipations (whether sexual, political, or religious) toward which our era is striving fail sooner or later as they are overcome by the discontent in our civilization. They thus become retrogressive, simply repeating earlier patterns. Emancipators are apt to reckon without the superego.
Educators, however, insofar as they are willing to orient themselves psychologically, should certainly not proceed without counting on this factor. Here I call to attention an admirable element in Signora Montessori’s work. We hear about it every day in the House of Children. The equipment surrounding us is arranged in a way that automatically and matter-of-factly points out the child’s mistakes. The teacher is supposed quietly to leave the child who is as yet unable to perform his task alone and, if necessary, simply to supply an easier task. The process of educating the child is made “foolproof,” as it were, by a sympathetic observance of this rule: The two superegos, the teacher’s and the pupil’s, are kept apart while the child’s superego is still labile. A growing severity should preferably not adhere to his very first intellectual efforts. But the question of which strains on the superego formation we can spare the child without weakening the strength of his conscience—that is the problem of psychologically oriented pedagogy.
Montessori’s solution is part of a system based on a rare combination of intuition and science. It is harder for us to draw individual practical conclusions from psychological research. Let us make sure that we are not again overzealous in allowing our lawmaking superego to assert itself. For example, should we simply suppress picture books and fairy tales* without further ado because we consider them dangerous? We can do so, but we should also know that an isolated action can be without significance. A child who is frightened by a picture book has already been disturbed and has merely been waiting for a chance to express it. But this opportunity he has everywhere in today’s world, for anything to be found in fairy tales is also to be found in the air around us. The educator, however, has to know what is happening when the child is unable to tolerate some tendencies in certain books; he should investigate and become familiar with methods of recognizing the prevailing psychological symptoms. He may then refuse to offer books that are in any sense sadistic to an already frightened or easily frightened child. But that is an issue of pedagogic therapy rather than of pedagogy itself.
In order to get at purely pedagogical considerations, we still need one general reflection, with which I would like to conclude. The child pays less attention to the adult’s actions than to the inner tension behind them. Whatever behavior we adopt toward the child, it has less influence than our real impulses—whether or not we have tried to suppress them. Children (like animals) can sniff the real essence through any surface: the cruel of kind, the strong or insecure tendency. If we wish to bring up a child harshly or kindly, suggestively or by merely observing, we must, above all, be able to do so inwardly. That is, it has to correspond to the relationship between our own ego and superego. This relationship is the crux of any effort to create a truly different environment for a child.
The Fate of the Drives in School Compositions (1931)
Foreword
The school essays of adolescents that are discussed here are from the collection of Mrs. Dorothy Burlingham, who founded a little school years ago in Vienna.1 Several times a year she would ask the children to write freely about a given question. For instance: “What do you want to be when you grow up if you had a free choice?”; “How would you like to raise your children?”; or “What would you do if you were suddenly alone in the world (you perhaps had no parents) and had to take care of yourself from now on?” The question did not have to be answered too literally; Mrs. Burlingham (die Schulmutter) explained each time that a story (or fairy tale) was also welcome. Thus encouraged, the children let themselves go and followed their impulses and wishes beyond the confines of a usual school essay.
The answers to the third question, particularly, led us to search for the inner connections between the earlier and later writings of these children and to try to understand their meaning in a psychoanalytic framework. For the third question, for example, a number of children allowed themselves a striking digression: They launched into such a detailed description of their fantasies of their parents’ death that they lost sight of the point of the original question. Twelve children described the death of fifteen parents. Only six of these had died peaceful deaths, three had been murdered; four had died accidentally; two had ended in jail. Thus (as Nietzsche might say), maybe the children chose to write about what they wanted to be free of rather than what they wanted to be free for.
The question obviously arises: Have these children been influenced by psychoanalysis? As it happens, several had undergone a child analysis; others had little idea of psychoanalysis. On the other hand, only a psychoanalyst would notice a difference in the way in which these children handled their fantasies. What the analyst discovers, if he himself has analyzed one of these children, is quite interesting: The unconscious seems to express itself in a such a naïve manner as if it had never been touched by psychoanalysis; however, the symbols the children produce confirm the findings and therapeutic results of psychoanalysis. So we seem to find corroboration of Freud’s afterthought, his remark made at the end of his first (indirect) child analysis (indirect, since the subject being analyzed was an adult recalling childhood)—namely, that the children forgot the analysis just as adults forget their dreams. One can analyze one’s dream at night with the intention of using it consciously on awakening, but “in the morning, dream and analysis are forgotten.”
I. The Bright-Eyed One
A girl of eleven laughs merrily when the theme is given, (question 3) as if to say, “Now I’ll show you!” Then she writes:
Once in spring, I got spring fever. All I wanted was to look out the school window to see whether the sky was still blue and whether the buds had already burst. I was so excited. After school I ran off and let my hair fly behind me. That was so beautifully cooling. At home I gulped my food quickly, pulled on my sandals, no socks at all, and ran out over a lovely green lawn. The bees buzzed, and the butterflies fluttered from one flower to another. I stormed all over the lawn and threw myself on the cool, moist grass. I rolled around and squinted into the sun and did not move for a long time, but I was baked like a pudding. As I lay there, a little rabbit hopped over and wiggled his snub nose. I stretched out my hand and caressed him a bit. Suddenly I saw a horse running as wildly as I had done. So I jumped up and over to the horse and onto his back. And it stormed away. Throughout gallop and gallop, through racing and trot, I sat on the horse, but then I fell down and stretched my arms and legs in the burning spring sun. The bees hummed and buzzed, and the red sun shone through my lids . . . I awakened and looked around me.
Here she notices that she’s gone a bit too far—for a little girl her age. And defiantly she adds in the margin, “That would be the way to get a bit toughened, just what my mother does not allow!” For, as she feels it, it is the prohibitions of Mother that are overridden in this flight into nature, simple commonplace prohibitions—One mustn’t gulp down one’s meal; one mustn’t go without socks and roll in moist grass—but also a less clear and more dangerous taboo: against stroking a rabbit and dreaming of a masterful steed. Illicit in any case; the whole tone rings with the will toward unharnessed feelings and not the will to toughen up, as the girl tries to make the indulgent teacher (and reader) believe.
For the rest we shall note a detail. The first of the impetuously realized wishes is to let her hair fly loose. Now, on another occasion, the teacher heard that the child had had unusually beautiful hair that her mother had shortened. This loss is said to have made an inexplicably profound impression on the young girl; for a long time it was the focus of all resentment against her mother. Can it be accidental that the first event of this rebellion is to let the hair fly loose?
Another time she writes: “I would like to have as many children as possible. They shall not be so swaddled in diapers and covers when they are little. That’s really too hot and sticky.”
And then, with her mother in mind:
Before I have children, I would love to travel crazily: to Italy and Greece, to Egypt, Siberia, and Africa. I would also like to carve wood. I would like to grow very old, so as to see what happens afterward, and then, if I die, I’d like to be told afterward everything that I didn’t know on earth. Then I’d like to return to earth every 1,000 years to visit everything new that has happened. I’d like to have a glass house.
So here is another wish, imagined, like the earlier ones, as limitless: Looking! But here, too, she becomes frightened: “I hope my husband will approve, if not, then woe is me!” For she thinks someone will always fill the role of the no-sayer.
Besides, she wishes to reproduce, not just to look; she wants to carve wood. In fact, the child is highly talented in drawing and painting. Her productions are round and cheerful, like her handwriting and her sentences.
The third time, we hear a little story in answer to the (same third) question of what she would do if she were suddenly on her own:
The story is about a family that’s very well off; they have two cars and riding horses at their disposal. They have a girl, about fourteen years old who was very vain about her long, curly hair. Then came bad luck: The father had an accident, became an invalid, was debt-ridden, drank, and ended in jail. The girl’s first idea was to rush out to the edge of the city to pick many flowers and sell them. While her mother searched for work, she picked flowers, huge bunches, and tied them together with her gorgeous hair. Then she ran back, asking her way again and again, until she arrived exhausted at home. On the next day she tried unsuccessfully to sell the bouquets. Only one man came, asked for a few flowers, and gave two pennies. He told her she had splendid hair and could get a whole lot of money if she sold it. She thought, “That’s a good idea,” and ran across the street to the hairdresser and asked if he wanted her hair. “Oh, what lovely hair you have, but it is dirty. Let me wash it and then I’ll buy it.” She was given a very small sum, with which she ran to her mother, who was so happy and who found her daughter clever and kind.
So the theme of hair has reappeared, in a more weighty form. But we are left to deal with a puzzle: The girl who feels her mother has robbed her of her hair tells a story of a child who sacrifices her hair for her mother’s sake.
A connection can be made between the first and third fantasy, albeit only thematic to begin with, but where does the second one fit? It contains the wish to look as well as the desire to create and reminds us that the girl has outstanding artistic gifts. Seeing the themes of “artist” and “hair” next to each other, however, immediately suggests a somewhat vulgar association. Many artists seem to value their hair and to set themselves clearly apart from other people by their haircuts. We might call it a cult of the self, a kind of narcissism, which they reveal in this way. Following this idea further, we note that it isn’t necessarily the particular acts of personal vanity that document the narcissism of the artist; he has, after all, in his works a grander way of lifting the image of his being to the level of cultural refinement for all to share. And the very charm of a work of art and of the artist himself is undoubtedly attributable to that “self-sufficiency and inaccessability” that Freud saw as the attraction of the child, the animal, and the narcissistic woman, a parcel of sovereignty that does not tolerate any reduction. Still, we know from the lives of artists the setback, the kind of despair into which an artist is driven just when he has expressed his self-love most triumphantly, more triumphantly than his own culturally inhibited soul can bear, given its fear of its own hubris.2
In a long life an artist may experience this polar oscillation repeatedly and give form to this alternating despair and exuberance again and again. But confronted with a short life and a serene, luminous body of work like Raphael’s or Mozart’s, human opinion concludes that the dream of being the darling of beauty can’t last long.
I find this theme in the first fantasies of the young girl, if, of course, on an infantile level: unlimited surrender to one’s feelings and to nature as their soothing complement and then sudden fright. Her fright, however, springs not from the force of Providence, nor is it a pang of conscience that warns from within; no, it is Mother who prevents her from acting on her sensual desires. That Mother cut her hair was the most active example of how she opposes all cravings; it struck at the girl’s strongest wish: to find herself beautiful and to allow others to admire her. If I were to follow our little girl and her problems along this path, which begins with her vehement and vulnerable self-love and then proceeds along many branching trails into the pathological and the musical domains, then I must admit that just this path of the gifted loses itself in dark paths as yet to be illuminated by psychological research, while narcissistic illness is being approached by psychoanalysis with better prospects in view.
About talent, psychoanalysis so far has had little to say. Still, we find some road signs among the works of I. Hermann. He writes in the Zeitschrift für psychoanaytische Pädagogik (this journal), vol. IV, 11–12: “If we direct our attention . . . to the complex of physical beauty and to what in my experience is the necessary spark of the talent for drawing, we find that in many cases the artist was indeed beautiful, especially in childhood. One outstanding painter (a patient) was so beautiful as a child that pregnant women would come to feast their eyes on him.”
Did hair play an important role in the childhood of his patients? Hermann doesn’t say. Therefore, I’ll add the story of a little boy’s fate which seems somewhat analogous to the little girl’s. Unusually beautiful as a child, this boy noticed in particular that people admired his full head of hair. When his mother had it all cut off, he thought he had lost all his charm, and in fact, he did eventually because of all his grieving. Later he became gifted in drawing.
Absalom, the narcissist of the Bible, darling of his father yet rebel against him, would not let go of his hair. Only when it became too heavy to support did he have it cut and weighed to the applause of onlookers. Much admired, he sought posthumous fame through a memorial column for himself, a very unusual gesture among his people. In the end, however, his long hair became his doom (Verhängnis!); in a battle against his father he was hanged by his hair in the branches of a tree and was killed. The people celebrated the death of the insurgent whom they had previously encouraged with their applause, but David, his father, wailed his grief—until one of David’s loyal followers spoke the bitter truth: “Were only Absalom alive and all the rest of us dead today, you would find it fitting.” Thus is self-love punished, says the Bible, but see how ineradicable is the power of those beings who manage to carry the certainty of their childish self-love throughout adulthood. For people are constantly uncertain about whether they should be admiring or outraged (people admire what succeeds) when one among them reveals his impulsive drives for all to see, the very same impulses that had been buried within them early by taboos and feelings of guilt. The insurgent Absalom apparently had little sense of guilt. His upbringing had failed to fit him for a patriarchal society.
Also, for those who want to “elevate” the narcissism which, in any case, they cannot give up and even for those artistically gifted people who manage to raise their narcissism into the musical sphere where self-love clothed in beauty may silence the conscious judgement of others, it will still be an open question whether this self transcendence will entirely work for them or whether their efforts will yet be weighed down by strains of vanity—and illness.
Here a fundamental question arises, before which we must halt, but let us envisage it. Both the little girl and the little boy who are gifted in drawing have been subjected to a mother’s interference with their sense of beauty. Can this experience be viewed as a positive factor in the development of their talent? Is it a loss by which artistic effort will be spurred—in compensation?
Here it is worth rereading a passage from Goethe’s memoirs (cited by Hermann). He describes how painful Goethe’s disfigurement by smallpox had been for him. “Particularly one of my lively aunts who used to adore me before could scarcely see me in later years without crying out: ‘Horrors! (Pfui Tenfel!) Cousin, how ugly he has become!’ Then she would tell me how she had previously found me adorable and what excitement she’d create when she’d carry me around to show off to others. …” One is tempted to see the mother behind the mocking, rejecting aunt in this example. As a matter of fact, Goethe, the great poet, was also a talented artist in drawing. Hermann speaks of his occasional “regression to artistic expression” when Goethe would turn to drawing at those times when a woman had disappointed him.
In fact, the children about whom I am writing are not yet “creative” but merely very talented at drawing. The alternative to our question is: Perhaps the experience of belittlement of their awareness of their own beauty does not contribute to the development of their talent but may yet limit it.
Hermann makes the interesting point that although Goethe provides the psychoanalytic researcher with material from his youth that might relate to his artistic talent, and although Leonardo, in turn, provides such material about his poetic and scientific gifts, both fail to throw light on their central achievement the radiance of which has enveloped mankind.
As to a straight sense of guilt, the scope and manifestation of which we might recognize in the stories of the little girl, Freud (in his Civilization and Its Discontents, [London, 1930]) recognizes two kinds. The first grows out of a “fear of parental authority,” an authority that suddenly forbids tendencies which only a short while ago were displayed with the praise of the elders. This memory and occasional lapses create guilt in the form of a fear of losing protective love. But a greater guilt lies ahead for the little creature when acceding to the pressure at last, he has made the adult’s demands his own and thus acquired a conscience of his own. Then, when the drives (Triebe) rebel nonetheless, the child’s own judgment stands up against them, and one feels so incomprehensibly guilty; who will punish him now since the external authority doesn’t even know about it or is no longer present? Subjected to this tension, man seeks punishment from fate; he needs the punishment of God and the world to satisfy his nagging conscience. He needs to humiliate himself, needs to make himself ill—or to remain “stupid.”
The fear of authority, which is a simple form of guilt, is what we see in our little girl’s first two fantasies. These say: “I want this and that, but Mother won’t allow it.” The need to be punished, which is connected with a more complicated form of guilt, is expressed in the last fantasy. By making this connection we can solve the puzzle of this curious story.
The little girl rebels no longer; she sacrifices what she loves most. The rigor of this renunciation clearly indicates the difference between the “fear of authority” and the “fear of one’s own conscience.” Would the mother ever have demanded the sacrifice of the hair had she suspected what this meant to the child? In reality—and from an aesthetic and practical point of view—she had merely sacrificed a few curls that to her seemed of no significance. Why, then, is the child’s conscience—after all, a part of her very self—so much crueler afterward? It is because (according to Freud’s view her conscience has inherited an idle aggression from another part of herself: hatred against the no-saying authority. This hatred is condemned to the unconscious, where it does battle and eventually submits to the ego ideal: the ego is now overwhelmed and used by the superego against itself. Now we understand why the fantasies of the little girl (which represent a more primitive period of her development) reveal her in the first story as a proud being.
Yet the puzzle of the sacrifice would still not be solved if we did not also discover the gratification hidden within it. Just as we could say about the artist that he withdraws behind his art even while offering an image of himself in his work, so does the little girl present herself to the eyes of her public through her hair, as if to say, “See, this is how beautiful I am.” And an audience imagined by her will accept what the real people around her will no longer grant. The very words which have barely awakened feelings of triumph immediately dim it by devaluating the desires of the child, saying, “How beautiful is your hair! But it is dirty.”
This theme of “sacrifice of hair” is of some historic significance, which urges us to heed the symbolism of the hair, for we know that the unconscious harbors the meaning of old customs and develops them. However, few symbols are so difficult to focus on, for its emphasis swings alternately toward raising the value of the woman and toward raising the value of the man. What applies equally to both appears to be this: gender value, beauty, and fecundity. Finally, the body itself announces its ripeness for procreation through the secondary sex characteristics of hair growth.
As a symbol of fecundity, hair seems to come closest also to expressing the value of the artistically creative person. Only when we approach the idea of maternity do the symbols become harder to grasp—an experience that the sciences of history share with those of the soul.
There actually were hair sacrifices in history. More recently it is the church that demands the offering of hair as a sign of final commitment. In Sparta girls’ heads were shaved before their wedding night; experts consider this a remnant of the ancient Aphrodite cult. Sacrifice of one’s hair seems to have been a redemption of the earlier obligation to satisfy the cult of prostitution for the temple.
Thus psychoanalysis has noted first that hair is a symbol for a payment to be made. In this interpretation sacrifice of hair may also signify the redemption from castration, or for women, at any rate, hair belongs to the realm of symbolic representations concerned with being a man or not being a man. I believe, however, that a continuing search along the scope of Freud’s findings will do more justice to the wider meaning of such a symbol. Freud himself, when speaking of his new insights into the preoedipal phases of female sexuality, compares the astonishment which these ideas created with the alarmed surprise with which classical scholars greeted the discovery that before Greek culture there had been a Minoan-Cretan one.
II. The Adolescent
A wordless prelude illuminates the state of a fourteen-year-old as he is about to write his first “free school composition.”
The other children had already gone to their rooms. But this boy was still standing, lost in dreams, in the schoolyard, ever again tossing his knife so hard against a wooden wall that it stuck there. He answered my call reluctantly. At his desk he grabbed the first sheet of paper and drew on it with hard strokes. Then he pushed the sheet carelessly aside. I looked at it; on it was an erect male organ which, because of its angularity, appeared like a curious symbol of aggression, probably made unrecognizable for the dreamy boy himself.
After the theme was given, he sat for a long time without doing anything and chewed on his pen. Suddenly he shot up, asked for permission to speak, and asked his teacher, “Can one say, ‘Today Father is somewhat nervous’?” The teacher declared this grammatically correct. Thereupon inner excitement and external stimulus met on this bridge of words. The story:
It is evening. Father Alfred comes home and is as nervous as he usually never is. He has two children: one girl—eighteen—who also goes to work, and another girl, four.
At six the next morning the father and the [mother]3 older daughter get up and go to work. The father arrives at [school] the factory fifteen minutes late and has five percent of his salary deducted. The [child] little girl wakes up and realizes that her mother is not awakening her. So she gets up, dresses, eats a piece of bread, and goes to school. The [father] elderly man who comes every day suddenly hears someone scream in the apartment. He goes in and sees the [mother] the old woman lying on the4 covered with blood. Now she’s no longer screaming—she is dead. The father is brought home from work. An investigation ensues. It turns out that the father (who as we know arrived at the factory late) returned home again and murdered the mother. Despite his denial he was “condemned to life imprisonment.”
This part is stylistically simple reportage, and at the end the whole story is crossed out. Only a finale is kept, short and punitive as it is: “The only remaining relatives the children now had left were very stingy and said the children should feed themselves.”
To get at some of the unconscious meaning in this story, we will concentrate on its most obvious feature: the deletions, first, of single words and, finally, of the whole text. The eliminated words are “mother,” “school,” “child,” “father,” and “mother.” For a boy whose whole life is spent in school or around his closest relatives, these words are surely not irrelevant. Nor are they accidentally rejected. The eradication, at first, of single words proves that he attempted to avoid such in intrusion of the unconscious. It is probable, then, that each time he describes an imaginary family an association to his own family intervenes—and is suppressed. Thus the final crossing out of the whole story can be seen as the recognition (at some level) that the thoughts he had attempted to avoid had sneaked in after all and could be denied only along with the whole story.
In the family of our adolescent figure: the father, the mother, the older sister (with whom he shares part of the way to school), a younger brother, and he himself. The story, however, refers only to father, mother, older sister, and younger sister. The author is seemingly missing. Yet in all these stories it is easy to recognize the writer in the main character even when he appears in the third person. When the boy tells us by mistake that the father went to “school,” he only confirms that he feels he is (also) the father in the story. When he mistakenly sends the “mother” (instead of the sister) along with the father on his way (to work), he has confused the constellation of a (family) pair because his feelings are unclear. Once he is that uncertain, he can no longer deny his younger brother’s existence simply by replacing “mother” with the word “child.” He replaces it with “little girl.” Perhaps we go too far when we suspect that he almost had the “father” discover the murder—the very person who was supposed to have committed the crime. But that the word “mother” is unbearable and has to be replaced by the neutral “old woman” strengthens our assumption of a dangerous thought process involving the writer’s next of kin. To summarize: The boy is, in this fantasy, the father and the murderer of the mother.
What “murderer” means in the language of his unconscious the boy has more clearly and naively expressed in a story he wrote two years earlier5:
I often went on little digs—and once I found a stick which appeared very weird to me. There are so many different kinds of sticks, but this one in particular struck me very much. I went to my room, looked at it more closely, and saw nothing remarkable. In the evening my wife came home. “Well, did you find something again?” she asked me. I said, “No.” Once in bed6 she said, “How shall we live, then, if you don’t find anything?” and she was in such a rage that she went to bed. While she was asleep, I sneaked around, took the stick which I had found, and beat her on her brain with it. She shook a little, and then it was over. The neighbors did notice something, though, and notified the police. The police came and asked me where my wife was. I said, “She’s sleeping.” But they didn’t believe me, and I had to lead them to my bedroom. On the chair lay the stick. They asked me, “What’s this stick?” “That’s a stick which I found on one of my digs.” They looked at my wife and said that she was well. They left again. I was happy. I realized that my stick had magic in it. So I have not murdered my wife after all. The two of us lived happily with our magic wand until we died.
Thus the wish, which seems more tolerable to his conscience disguised as murder, is to do something sexual to the woman. Together with the urges of his awakening potency, there exist fantasies of early childish-sadistic origin, when sexual union was suspected to be something destructive, an idea that was partly welcomed and partly repressed. These urges change the desire for possession into something furious, childishly raging, which is defensively projected onto the woman. It is she who went to bed in a rage; no wonder one gets so enraged oneself. Consequently what one then does seems neither free from being dreadful guilt nor close enough to what adults really seem to do to one another. And so it must be, not an act of destruction but magic—and even happiness—deserving a fairytale ending: “until they died.”
We have not brought some analysis of one symptomatic act and two fantasies together into one formulation which the drawing illustrates unequivocally as genital-aggressive. But we must not generalize this too far for our real, live little boy. In truth I know hardly anyone who is more gentle and shy with little girls than he is and who, when he is in love with one, is so close to tears. This is no contradiction since every erotic wish for possession, as we have seen, arouses in him simultaneously some stormy aggression, which can find expression only in its antithesis: shyness and tears, the expression of inner-directed torment.
Till now we have described a well-known phenomenon of puberty. Many a reader may have found superfluous our projection of the origin of sadistic tendencies onto early childhood—that is, the genital phase of the child’s sexual development. But when we examine our pupil’s childhood records in the school files, we find it all points to a central phase of a still earlier period, when the mouth was the pleasure-giving and pleasure-denying organ. “After being weaned from the mother’s breast, the boy had severe attacks of asthma. These dominated his life henceforth (until a few years ago).” Incidentally he is a bad student, lacking, above all, perseverance.
Several other children had similar records. When I compare their childhood accounts, I find that after weaning, they, too, developed pathological symptoms. One boy developed a glottal spasm at six months. These spasms recurred later as some fainting, followed by gentle weeping whenever a wish was denied. There was a third boy who was given the breast every two hours because he would scream excruciatingly for it. Then, in his greed, he would bite wildly. He developed the following symptom, which we found hard to explain: During his sleep he would bang his head so hard against the wall that he had to be moved into the inner rooms of the apartment on account of the neighbors.
All three boys had the following in common: Confronted with difficult tasks, they were quick to give up, but they also had sudden raging temper tantrums which rapidly changed into a mixture of pallor and breath holding.
Sudden violent irascibility usually betrays repressed unconscious aggression. Where more normal people would become very angry or deliberately vengeful, these suddenly enraged people mostly succeed only in hurting themselves. For they are afraid that their aggression, undeliberated and unrestrained as it is, is so excessive that it could really destroy their opponents. At the same time there is a reawakening of those infantile feelings of powerlessness that were engendered by their first objects—against whom this excessive rage was meant to be directed in the first place—and their wrath turned against themselves. It seems to me the origin of this mechanism is to be found in their reaction to their deprivations during the oral phase. Their particular oral aggressivity had to be turned back to help combat and dissipate oral symptoms or excitement, such as asthma or glottal spasm.
Reading and learning are like an oral taking in. As proof, look at language: It speaks of “devouring a book,” of “spiritual nourishment,” and of “drinking at the fount of wisdom.” The mastery of material requires a measure of oral aggression; one has to “chew up” the material in order to “digest” it. Also, let’s not forget the vanity and aggression that are required in order to compete against one’s colleagues and get ahead in one’s job.
III. The Gentle Girl
The fantasies of a girl who presents herself as gentle are contained in a story of this character trait:
FUTILE FRIENDSHIP (by Margaret, twelve years old)
Once upon a time there was a child named Margaret. One day her father, mother, and brother died. Margaret was very sad, but the mother had said to her, “Don’t be sad, for things will be much better for me in heaven, and God willing, you will see me again in heaven.” She paused and then continued: “Be really pious and put your trust in God, and someday you will have twice as much joy.” The dying mother asked the family Castelneau to allow Margaret to come to them, for this is where she would find Yvette, whose friendship she sought. Never before had Margaret loved anyone heartily enough so that it could become a friendship. Margaret had already shed many tears. The Castelneaus were pleased to take her, and her mother died in peace. Happiness at the Castelneaus’ did not last; the family was called back to its property in India. Parting was difficult. The train now began to move. She looked in the direction where it disappeared. She stood there a long time. Then, after crying, “Yvette,” she fell into a deep faint. When she came to, she found herself in the Meyerheims’ big room. She said not a word. Silently she looked in the direction of India. She moaned often. The expression of her face had changed. She looked sad; deep shadows of mourning moved across her face. One detected a seriousness which had not been there before. She was silent; a silent submission was painted on her face. Sometimes one heard her sighing softly. “Yvette!” Finally she got up and went out into the garden. There she could air her pain undisturbed. There she sat, loudly sighing and moaning. Suddenly she fell silent and still, said, “Yvette,” once more and sang a song to the setting sun. Then, more self-possessed and more calmly than before, she returned to the room.
The next day was Sunday. Quite early she rose and went to church, where she was again consoled, since the pastor spoke of the persecution of the Christians. On her way home she met a weeping boy, and she suspected that his mother was dying. The father (she learned in answer to her question) had left home in the morning “more silent than ever.” She went home with the youth and spoke very reassuringly with him at the deathbed of his mother—until he quietly fell asleep at her bedside. She went away contented.
Subsequently she led a consistently sad life, in school—the only girl. The others were all coarse boys. One night, however, she could not sleep. She looked out; the moon shone pale on the plain. She went out, looked in the direction of India, and called very loudly, “Yvette. Yvette, if I cannot see you here on earth anymore, oh, God, help children, with something like this; take me up into your kingdom.” Then she sank down, repeated, “Yvette,” once more, and died.
When this child is asked to imagine herself alone in the world (this was the theme given), she avoids the practical side of her question and digs so deeply into its affective aspects that the death of a friend takes on overwhelming importance. Only the meeting with the forsaken lad and the description of the persecuted Christians could console her momentarily, and finally only death is an appropriate ending for the calamity. Among the welter of feelings, the “help” at the end sounds suddenly very immediate; one pricks up one’s ears and only wonders all the more that such a capacity for pain was not at all stimulated by the death of the father, the mother, or the brother who all disappeared in one day, and their deaths were rapidly passed over with quickly consoled grief. Who might Yvette represent, that she merited the greater grief? But first let us hear once again about the death of a mother.
HOW A GIRL MEEKLY BORE HER MOTHER’S DEATH
Once upon a time there was a maiden named Yvette, she was a very meek girl, she lived in a tiny house, her father had been sent to Siberia. Yvette was very attached to him, but she submitted quietly to this fate. The mother lay sick in bed. Christmas neared. Christmas Eve was a glorious, moonlit night. Yvette walked for a long time in the snowy landscape until a voice called to her from heaven that after death things will be even better. Consoled, she walked through the front door, then listened at the door of the room; she heard not a sound, so Yvette quietly opened the door. She found her mother dying. It was completely still in the room, only from time to time some words were exchanged, no one understood them. Then Yvette laid her mother back into bed; her arms fell lifeless; she was dead. But on her face was a blessed glow. Yvette sank to her knees by her bed and let her head fall on the pillows and prayed. And so she fell into a deep, healthy sleep.
Now Yvette is the daughter whose mother dies. She, too, is consoled by the promise that life after death would be much more beautiful—the stars have told her so—and she confirms her faith in this promise by sleeping a deep, healthy sleep. But before that the two have “exchanged words which no one understood”—a sentence the interpretation of which remains open.
Nursing, the profession for which the child has revealed a clear inclination, will become the profession of the adult Margaret in her final story. Since nursing now becomes the key theme, let us turn to the guidelines which helped us to understand the “murder” described by the adolescent. With this approach, we can deduce an earlier and therefore unambiguous indication of what “nursing” means to the innermost self of this child. Two years before, she wrote the following story:
A maiden got lost in the woods and finally, by evening, sank down, exhausted. Sadly she said, “The brook”—she had to stop to get her breath—“the brook misled me.” In the middle of the night a hissing awakened her, and not far from her she saw two stags and a snake; the stags fought each other, and the snake steadily bit one of the stags; the maiden fled up a tree; from there she watched the merciless battle, always thinking: “What is going to happen now?” The moon illuminated the landscape; only now she noticed that one of the stags lay sick next to the snake, who continued to bite him; the other stag kicked him; so then the maiden jumped from the tree, took the sick stag, nursed him till he was well; with his help she got home on his back, and her poor mother was happy.
We recognize in this dream image the rendition of the love act, accompanied by a child’s question of such immediacy—she thought always: “What is going to happen now?”—gives it such immediacy that it makes us wonder whether an experience, whether a real observation could have been reproduced here. However it may be, the child’s view of the grown-ups’ love act is clear: She is sorry for the party who has been bitten by the snake; she nurses the female. This part of the story, which dominates the newer fantasies, was thus originally the ending of an older, previously buried, representation. It is a remnant, elaborated only later, which asserts itself obstinately.
Repeatedly used forms of fantasy owe their durability to two opposing forces: on the one hand, an unconscious wish that does not diminish in intensity, and, on the other, stubborn resistance to that wish. Since the little girl shows us again and again, through the fantasy of a nursing scene, that she is agitated by the “primal scene” and still in the grip of her reaction to it, the recollection of the primal scene is doubtless related to an always present instinctual desire, which the fantasies simultaneously ward off and fulfill. Moreover, according to Freud’s observations about obsessive compulsive symptom formation (and the constantly repeated fantasies can be seen in this light), there is doubtless in the development of these defensive fantasies a tendency to move the hidden wish fulfillment gradually to the fore.
Now it becomes clear: The child perceived the love act as cruel, and she has not been able to overcome her ensuing fright. That she softens the fantasy into the story of her caring for the mother we may ascribe to the fact that she is a gentle and loving child.
But this is contradicted by what we find in the early-childhood school records of the girl. These describe her as a stubborn child who on occasion could be remarkably cruel. I don’t feel I have the right to detail these traits. The intimate details are personal, but the most intimate ones are again typical. So it was an occasionally cruel child who considered the love act a cruel experience for the woman. We here first imagine the kind of relationship this girl had with her mother—one-half of her oedipal situation then. What we know of it leads us to suppose that she wanted to wish her mother away, wished her dead. This impulse, particularly strong in her case, had to be abandoned nevertheless—along with the other strivings of the oedipal phase. Its original vehemence corresponds to the immensity of the resistance that has been built up against the impulse: her pity. Mother is nursed in a thousand fantasies. That it ends in death suggests that the energy of the drive can be bent but not broken.
In the last story Margaret is the loving head nurse of an idyllic children’s hospital. Deer and rabbits move among the garden beds where charming children await their recovery. But one little girl is more seriously ill. It is because of her that Head Nurse-Margaret stands so sadly at the window, looking out. “A dark cloud hangs over her brow. Then she turns and says sadly but firmly, ‘Our Ellen will be blind, and perhaps God will take her up into heaven soon—but she was given a kind heart and a pure soul, and those she shall keep.’ ” On the eve of this day when Margaret’s decision to go to the hungry of Russia ripens she sits with the dying Ellen. She points to heaven, where she will soon be happy. “As the sun set behind the mountains, Ellen said, ‘Help the hungry children. My father beat me; but my heavenly father will be good.’ Very softly she added something, but Margaret didn’t understand it; then Ellen fell dead onto her cushion with a peaceful smile. Margaret continued to sit there until the stars appeared in the sky. Then she said, ‘We have saved a soul,’ and then went into the house.” Now her soul has been saved. She pays for it with her sight and with her life. The chief (Margaret), the head nurse, praises such complete renunciation, for she—as her better self, as her caring self—knows that Ellen became guilty through her sight. Until now conscience has triumphed.
But there is something more. Once more we hear the plea to help the children. And we learn this time what they are suffering and dying of: Their father beats them. The father? What role did he play in these stories? In the first story he died unmourned. In the second he was sent to Siberia. The father of the little boy “left quietly,” and that stag, which can be taken to be the masculine partner of the pair, disappeared when the girl turned toward the feminine one. Now we hear about a palpably present father—in contrast with the farthest-away heavenly one toward whom the father imago obviously is moving.
Freud has written an essay “A Child Is Beaten.” He found this beating fantasy frequently in hysterics or in obsessive-compulsive patients, more frequently female, and he assumes its occurrence is probably more common among the healthy. He describes this notion as the last in a developing sequence of fantasies that he unrolls before us. The first notion, originating in early childhood, is called “The [my] father is beating the child whom I hate.” This representation is clearly rivalrous. It is “not clearly sexual, not in itself sadistic, yet the stuff from which both will later come.” But the second form of the fantasy is masochistic: “I’m being beaten by my father.” This one is the most momentous of all and seldom becomes conscious. “In one of these cases the content [being beaten by the father] was allowed to venture again into consciousness as long as the [child’s] identity was made unrecognizable by a thin disguise.” But the third, conscious fantasy goes something like this: “Boys are being beaten [by their father or teacher].”
We could look for Margaret’s fantasy behind her idea that she is “the only girl among a lot of bad boys.” The second, masochistic fantasy we have heard in the scene of the dying Ellen. How did this previously sadistic child ever get that idea?
Freud thinks that before the appearance of the second fantasy, the oedipus complex must have passed and, with its repression, created guilt feelings: “It is the moment when sadism is transformed into masochism.” All oedipal wishes now become their opposites or are directed against the self. If one wishes Mother ill, one nurses her. Instead of having something bad happen to her, something bad happens to the child or the child is beaten. Instead of the love one expects from Father, however, one is mistreated and consequently hates him instead of desiring him.
The father, the original sexual love object, will come back only if the girl has punished herself most cruelly: when she slides from her nursing role into her dying one. At that moment he appears as the agent of all that is bad in her, all that she has wished on her mother for his sake. But the unconscious has retained knowledge of the connection between mistreatment and lovemaking and demonstrates it in the way the language uses opposites to mean the same thing. By activating her earlier masochism, the girl may also wish for the love she earlier thought so cruel.
IV. The Inaccessible Boy
A boy with empty eyes and round face is the first to bring his completed composition to the teacher, and (in contrast with a certain shyness of the other children) he tells him, “Read it, read it right away!” Soon he returns. “Have you read it? Nice? This I would really like!” or “All this has really happened to me!” And with these words he lays his hand on the teacher’s shoulder, needy of recognition, even love—a habit well known to the teacher from a hundred previous occasions when the boy usually prattles some confiding nonsense, without ever attempting to make serious contact. When the teacher attempts to encourage the boy to approach, he encounters his empty, uncomprehending eyes.
Once upon a time there was a boy who wanted very much to see the canal. So he sneaked aboard a ship, and as the ship left the harbor, he hid in a lifeboat, where he had a lot of food with him. When they reached the canal, he peered out through a little hole, and whom do you think he saw?
He saw his mother and his father on the deck of the ship, and so he watched who would get off at the next stop, but they did not.
But then he heard his father say that they wanted to get off at the next stop. So the boy followed them. He had a little money so he could stay overnight in the same hotel as his parents. On the next morning he was already downstairs eating when his parents came and saw him and asked where he had come from. He said that he had stolen his way here, and so they ate and went home after breakfast.
What, it seems, the boy “really wanted” was to meet his parents on a ship and to have breakfast with them and go home. Here is the real background: His father, divorced from his mother, lives in a colony abroad. It is this boy’s unshakable dream to see his father again and to live with him in masculine friendship. This dream cannot be discouraged by his mother’s assurance that the father doesn’t want to see him or even through small hints from his father which prove that this is so. A man doesn’t behave that way! He tries to demonstrate this to his teacher and to every man who appears in his circle by importuning him with confidences and fatiguing him with trivia. And he is always very touchy and angry when the inevitable rejection comes. It is as if he had a natural right to be loved without giving anything in exchange. How does he reach this conclusion?
HOW ONE SHOULD BRING UP A CHILD
Let’s imagine that one is born, and it is a boy. First of all, you must not scare him and always tell him the truth.
When he is three or four years old, you shouldn’t fondle the child all the time; for example, I will now tell you what happened to me when I was three or four or five years old. I can’t remember the time anymore when my father was still living at home, but I learned that my father left me with my mother when I was three. When I was four, I was sent to a woman in the summer and my mother traveled to Europe. While I was there, she teased me and told me lies and wouldn’t let me write to my mother anything of what was going wrong, and that’s how it was. When I got up and dressed, I had to go to the pasture with the cows even though I had a red sweater on. I liked being in the pasture and I like cows and other animals, but there was a bull in the field and I knew that and I told the woman that there was a bull and she only laughed and I became furious and really couldn’t write my mother, so I had a very bad time.
One day I was again outside with the cows, and the bull came and I became scared because he came toward me; in between there was a fat stone or boulder, I don’t know the rest of it anymore. But one day I had to throw up, and my hair became wet and my whole bed, too, and in the morning I was bathed and then suddenly the woman took down the shaving strap and beat me like a dog. I’ve never forgotten that. And another day the boys took a folding chair and set it up in such a way that I had to fall down when I sat on it and I cut my left hand at the thumb; one can still see the scar today.
So I think you should be careful where you send your boy, and you should be certain that you know who these people are through other people’s experience.
Most important of all, you should reflect a little before you do anything with your boys or your girls.
So our boy is in the position of creditor with adults rather than in the usual position of a debtor. His claim to love seems his right, justified by his fate. He has gotten too little love.
This certainty is more or less conscious in many young recalcitrant people who resist being educated. What they can actually reproach adults for is not so much lack of love as inconsistency in loving. They usually come from a family constellation where the world of the child is not illuminated equally by both parental stars. What love the child would get would vary with the moods of the single parent who has been robbed of his wedded partner and is needy of love himself or herself. The pressure to educate, to train the child would suddenly slacken and then again abruptly tighten. The boy describes it: “You shouldn’t fondle the child all the time; for example I will now tell you what happened to me.” And then he describes the harshness that struck him so cruelly after the pampering. After months of a dreamy, pastoral life when he was left to his play, he was chastised. If he thinks this was because he had a vomiting fit, he may permit us the supposition that he had wet his bed; we are familiar with this happening as a substitute for recently restrained masturbation. The punishment for this must have awakened a most horrifying earlier memory, which he doesn’t tell us because he has repressed it and hidden it behind the episode he has just told. In his early childhood his mother, who had long vacillated, suddenly decided to call a doctor for help. The doctor used tying up and raw threats to cure him of his early habit of masturbating. The cut-up thumb is, of course, a reference to the doctor.
The scene with the bull also appears to have had a dramatic origin. This animal in the pasture brings to mind the steed in the field and the snake-stag in the woods; they are all father-animals. The choice of the bull seems to be determined here by the last impression the boy had of his father: It was an unexpected outburst of rage that put an end to family life.
We must remind ourselves once again how difficult it is for a child to feel the difference between an incomprehensible aggressive happening and the sexual act, which he perceives to be sadistic. And one must not forget that although the boy yearns to become a strong man like his father through the decisively masculine part of his being, he has kept more or less intact another fantasy, which also dates from a particular period of childhood, and that is to serve the father in a feminine way. He is also left with the fear that in his mother’s place he is liable to be exposed to a similar paternal outburst of fury; he sees the bull charge toward him, and then he knows nothing more because within him has been built a wall that does not allow the knowledge of the fear engendered by the father, doctor, and teacher to penetrate. If they threaten, they are just lying, and “First of all, you must not scare him [a child] and always tell him the truth.” He now tries to present himself to us as an unintimidated child. He looks glowingly at the teacher as long as work is a childlike game (and thus is a permissible substitute for his old dreamy “playing”). At the first serious word, however, he drops the visor.
One day a little glass tube broke in school. The teacher inquires half-absentmindedly who did it. He is accustomed to get an answer to such an inquiry. No one replies. So he is forced to ask more urgently. The children indicate with their gaze that it is our boy; he was the last to play with the little tube and water. We can now imagine what crime this signified for him, and we are not surprised (as the uninitiated must have been) that he denies, even though he knows that no one will be as angry at him for the deed as for the denial of it. Occasionally a sum of money is missing. Difficult not to suspect the boy since he has taken money on occasion in the past. “What for?” he was asked, and he replied that he was collecting money for the trip to see his father. We remember that in his reunion fantasy he says to the surprised parents that “he had stolen his way here.”
So far there doesn’t seem to be a royal road to the understanding of such “asocial” behavior. There are only smaller, more perilous tracks. A third composition prompted us to follow just one of these a little way.
MY ADVENTURES IN THE TENTH YEAR OF MY LIFE
Once I was in a church choir. I would always ride home in the car of a gentleman with another little boy who had brought me into the choir. And I was paid fifty marks for travel expenses and fifty marks for singing. One evening the car broke down while we were just on our way. The man said that we should get out and he thought that a suburban train would come by, but it did not. So we waited a half hour.
Then we saw several boys, about thirteen years old; they looked through a shopwindow, and then they screamed quite suddenly, “Hands up!” and called over that we should give them our money. The little boy did that, but I thought it would be better to take all my money into my fist and that was the right thing; they didn’t find it; only the boy had one mark taken.
We ran screaming into the shop and said that some boys had taken money away from us; then all the people ran out and looked around for them, and that was very strange, suddenly to see no one left in the store. But at any rate they caught the boys, and I came to the police station with my friend. They telephoned our mothers and two of them came home with us and we found it nice to sit between them in the train.
We came home and our mothers did not believe us, but when they heard that everything was true, they turned into the colors of a rainbow. We then had to appear three times in court. In the end I got five marks and the other boy also. That was a good store, I mean, business.
I’d like to point out three passages. First, the boy receives an unusually large amount of money for singing in the church choir. Anyone who has dealt with problem children is familiar, through the fantasies and tales of these “creditor” youths, with such exaggerations of gifts and earnings—that is, youths who are immoderate in their demands and in their taking. Furthermore, this boy stands there with the money in his clenched, raised fist and looks at the robbers. Can anyone doubt that he looks as if he were standing there denying that he had stolen the money? Here, too, we see clearly how he betrays himself, for what robber would allow his victim to hold up his hands high with fists closed? Finally, it is all over, the denial worked, and he even gets a little present, which is probably greater than the amount which he actually received for singing, while everything else, including the inquisition and the denial, has a dark background of failure. The tale of this small alleged gift is also typical of the stories of youths who steal; these youths justify their all-demanding behavior by insisting on their right to a reward.
Another youth with these typical traits, who, just like our youth, feels tenderness toward men and a hate-dread of the mother, had the same fateful experience in his earliest childhood. Our boy had his mother’s milk for only a few days while the other had none at all. But nothing could have persuaded the other boy to admit this deprivation. In any case, he would have declared it trivial. In fact, he asserts stubbornly that he had been nursed for half a year, as if he knew what a traumatic effect the earliest denial must have had. His mother, however, tells of a touching symptom that sounds as unbelievable as our entire emphasis is on the importance of an experience: As a little child the boy grabbed after every woman’s breast, and later he reached into their decolletage. He tells dark tales about big girls whom he loved as a little child (“she went into the woods with me, and there was a little house with two dwarfs inside”). These stories mask the earliest episodes of grabbing.
Such boys appropriate or comfort themselves with all manner of love bequests, of grants of money or playful things that serve as love substitutes. Yet withal they have a certain stubborn toughness, the degree of which provides a measure of the depth of their loss. What, in their unconscious, they fear to have lost is, first of all, the penis. They close themselves off from learning what other people learn because they would otherwise have to come face-to-face with proofs of possible castration. They flee into stupidity and unscrupulousness and even into something like a mental disturbance. They would rather appear mentally disturbed than face their feelings of guilt and its social consequences, for they do not believe in the bloodlessness of that general castration which we call education. Here one finds in all their starkness the first oral loss that kindled castration fears, or direct threats of castration, or the devaluation of protective love which can result from the atmosphere of broken homes.
The deepest (oral) layer can still be vaguely recognized in the compositions of our boy: how he betrays or betrayed its determining force through chattering and unctuous flattery, through lies and denial. Not only that, but bed-wetting, which brought about such dreadful damage, was transformed in his story into vomiting. In all these, and also where he fantasizes fulfillment, he fantasizes some oral gratification. And so the fairy tale of reunion ends with “they ate and went home.”
V. The Sons
The last part of this review, rather than follow the stories of individual children, takes up a general theme—namely, the father image of boys—and shows how three boys treat it in their stories. The theme is, of course, of the greatest importance for the male teacher since he steps, somewhere, into the father’s image—for better or for worse—if he succeeds in establishing any contact at all. Where the aware teacher arouses hatred or love his responsibility really begins.
EXERCISE
A fourteen-year-old, of poor family, must now earn money for himself because his parents do not have money to further his continuing studies. He has to stop studying and find a job somewhere as a helper. He is reading the ads in the newspaper. He takes some stationery and writes. Now he awaits an answer. He gets none. He goes to the factory that placed the ad in the newspaper. No one could give him any information, and so, discontented, he went home. On his way he asked a newsboy if he might borrow the paper a moment, and he allowed him to do so. Upon looking through the ads, he found that a businessman could use a boy as helper. And so he decided to go there right away. When he arrived at the designated house and at the store, a salesman asked him what he needed. “I’d like to ask if I could get the job,” asked the boy. “One moment,” answered the salesman. After a few minutes the boss himself came and bargained for a long time about the salary. He wanted to begin his service the next day. But the boss treated him very badly and let him go after a few days. In the meantime, his mother had found him a job with a goldsmith. He went there and had to start work right away. He was always tired when he came home. He begged the goldsmith for one free day in order to be able to visit school on that day. He always had to give his parents his earnings. One day, when he came home, his mother lay dead in bed. His father had very little money. But he went to the pub often to forget his misfortune. The father’s money shrank more and more. When he had no money left, he took his son’s money. So their misery became worse and worse. In his drunken state the father prevailed on him to steal some jewelry from the goldsmith. At first he didn’t want to do it, but when things got even worse for them, he stole. At first no one noticed it, but eventually he was discovered, and he was locked up. His father, too, soon had the same fate.
This is the story a fourteen-year-old wrote in answer to the question of what he would do without his parents. It is sparer in form than the answers of the other children. The icy breath of reality surprises the reader. It is a reality that he would normally have to face only in the courtroom or in a welfare agency. The reader thinks: What horror must a youth have experienced if his glance into the future plummets him into such depths? But the puzzle really begins with the fact that this story was written by a well-nourished son of the bourgeoisie, in a family with a certain flair for elegance.
When this youth entered the school, he was, to the teachers’ surprise, unanimously rejected by the other children. “He is a bad, mean person,” they said. The teachers, however, saw only a polite, somewhat anxious, otherwise hard-to-understand youth. What the children had sensed immediately only becomes clear in the following passage taken from another essay: “When I was an even smaller boy,
I always wanted to be a detective. But when I grew older, I changed my mind because I realized that I was much too fearful. The major reason was my mad passion for shooting [underlined three times]. If I could, I would buy a sample of every type of pistol and gun.”
It’s interesting how he won his comrades over. After several days of his shy stance he suddenly began to speak in the most sinister dialect and to play the idiot and the bum in the style of a common suburban clown. The children laughed and shook their heads. The more they laughed, the paler became the dispenser of all this levity, until the children, taken aback, were ashamed of themselves and let him off. Now he was accepted.
I tell this little story as an example of the stance this boy characteristically takes when he feels in danger: He sinks, so to speak, voluntarily to the depths. It so happens that he has a learning disability in the sense we discussed earlier; he is one of those irascible ones who are quick to fly into uncontrollable rages followed by rapid paralyses. I have described how these children shrink back from tasks because they get the feeling that they will destroy everything they take possession of. They feel a “mad passion” which they dare not or cannot act on but in the end can only turn against themselves. We may now interpret the fantasy of destitution as a retreat before the tasks of life.
Still, we haven’t explained the most remarkable feature of the fantasy: its realism and its objectivity. Behind it must lie a real motive. One fact alone links the boy with the depths of social despair. His father is a physician in a reformatory for the young. He is a man who is passionately devoted to helping and donates his time from morning until night to the foster children.
Thus we can see the path the youth sees before him not only as an expression of self-denigration but also as the only way that will, according to his jealous experience, lead to the heart of his father.
A ten-year-old writes:
Mr. Morningfield was in a very bad mood because he realized that his workers were demanding higher wages. While he was arguing with his wife, some street kids were fighting in the factory yard. They fought awhile until suddenly one of the boys picked something up and ran away. The others ran after him. After a while one could see all those boys calmly sitting and smoking on the barrels of the Morningstar petroleum and gasoline storage houses. They thought that they were all grown up and that cigarette smoke was wonderful. Suddenly one heard steps in the factory yard. The boys quickly threw their cigarettes into the gas and petroleum barrels and ran away. After several minutes there was a dreadful crash; one saw a few walls fly into the air. Then it was over.
Some people came running. “What happened??” “The Morningstar factory has exploded into the air!” “Who has done it????????” A young worker stands there swaying back and forth, and he is as white as paper. “He did it,” everyone thought. Several called loudly, “He’s the one who did it!!!!!!” The young worker falls to the ground. “Here’s proof that he did it!!!!” Several people go up to the worker. They say softly to him, “Hey you, Fritz. I wouldn’t have thought it of you. Say, did you really do it?” They looked at the face of the worker. It was still as white as chalk. The two workers went away.
The door rang at the Morningstar home. “Mr. Morningstar, there’s a worker outside, and he has something dreadfully important to tell you,” says the maid. “I never receive anyone during the day. Send him away.” But the worker at the door didn’t go away. Mr. Morningstar got worried. But no, he thought. “My factory is safe, nothing can happen to it.” Mr. Morningstar goes outside. “Get out of here,” he screams at the worker. He opens the door; the worker goes out the door and throws a tenpenny piece toward Mr. Morningstar. “You should be grateful to me, Mr. Morningstar. You have less than I have. Your factory has exploded into the air.” Mr. Morningstar faints. The worker runs down the stairs and laughs.
There’s little one can add to this story except that the father of this boy is an industrialist, but not, as one can well imagine, of Mr. Morningstar’s type. It is only in the different tellings of his fighting that the boy’s settlement of accounts with his father can be recognized. He represents it in three persons: As a boy he explodes the factory into the air with his cigarette (attribute of his being already grown up) and disappears. As a worker he humiliates his father with the news; he proves to him that he is now superior. But as a younger worker, lying pale on the ground, he cannot free himself from the oppressive feeling of guilt.
The story of a third boy shall speak entirely for itself. He has been the oldest in that school and has puberty behind him. Although he is still as preoccupied with conflict (sometimes a hateful confrontation) as is his younger friend, he demonstrates through his powerful description that he has learned to see and choose people without a sense of guilt. His language thereby gains a certain tension of the kind we felt only with the little girl artist at the beginning of this study.
He will thus be the one to show us the difficult years of youth by giving them another form—one more ready to face life.
UNKNOWN
The old man sits in his living room, reads the paper and smokes a cigar. This man is over fifty years old and actually knows nothing—that is, although he knows a lot, has a huge library, and has read many books and newspapers and has had many conversations and debates, he was too lazy or too lacking in willpower; he didn’t have enough energy to take advantage of all the opportunities that life offered him. Now he has been married for several years, has children, thinks, perhaps, that he is happy, has a fortune, a house, and other things. But if one were to ask him whether he was really happy, he would perhaps say yes, but behind that would still be another feeling, something dark, unpleasant, perhaps only a little, but in any case it would be there like a shadow, like something bleak, sad. And if one would ask him about honor and conscience, he wouldn’t be able to say what this feeling is because he is too lacking in will and hasn’t enough strength really to reflect about himself. … Well and good, this man is sitting in his living room; he is quite portly but not really fat. His face has tired, sagging features, and although he laughs sometimes, he really doesn’t look in the least fresh or appealing. Now he is reading about politics. He’s upset that the Social Democrats didn’t get many votes or some other such irrelevance. But in reality this anger is not about this matter at all, but behind it is the anger about that “certain something,” that dark shadow, that nagging, uncomfortable feeling. And so he throws his newspaper away and rings for the maid and scolds, lets himself be helped into his overcoat, and orders the chauffeur to take him to a restaurant. He goes to sit down at his table, orders a coffee and has some newspapers brought to him and reads (as if he would improve himself by doing so).
A young lad, poorly dressed, a tall, slender figure, enters the café. He looks a little emaciated, but behind that one can see him as he really is. One sees strength, power, self-confidence. He is tired; he lets himself fall into a chair; the chair creaks a little. The youth brushes his hair back, unaware, mechanically, with his left hand as is his wont. He pushes some used glasses and cups away from himself and leans both arms on the table, his head buried in his hands. The gentleman, the old man about whom we already know so much, looks around him uncomfortably when he sees the young man come in. He is thinking perhaps: “That’s the life; that must be one of those . . .” He probably intended to say “bums,” but probably he’s really thinking: “One of those who will go far, who will make his way everywhere, who knows how to do everything.” It makes him feel uncomfortable. Actually he would like to leave the place right away, would like to go away, but he stays nonetheless (because this shadow of his prevents him from doing what he would like to do). He looks at the youth indifferently with an arrogant, superior mien. The youth squints lazily at him and doesn’t think anything in particular about him. What can one think about such a flaccid, unsympathetic older man, anyway?! The waiters know the older man very well: He gives them a good tip every time, he is a refined, distinguished man, and he comes very often. He is a source of income; they like him and are polite and helpful to him. But just as the older man expresses his distaste for the young lad, so, too, the waiters, knowing this young man is a bum, a criminal, an unworthy man, treat him accordingly. The lad orders a bowl of soup. The waiters look at him out of the corners of their eyes. Would he be able to pay? If not?! Well, he’ll get it; we’re not a soup kitchen! The waiter looks at the lad, and something in his gaze, something in the eyes of the young man, tells him that he will get his soup. He lies with one arm entirely on the table; with the other, he shovels in his soup slowly and greedily. He holds his spoon in his fist. “He has no manners,” the old man thinks, and that’s what all the waiters are thinking, standing at the buffet with their napkins under their arms and throwing glances at each other. “How this guy eats!” and of course, they hope that the old gentleman also sees it.
There is now no one in the restaurant beside the waiters, the lady who works at the buffet, and the old gentleman (and perhaps also a shabby dog of unknown breed, sleeping lazily behind the buffet). The lad has finished, pushes his plate away. He would like more, he is still hungry, but he has no more money or he can’t spend what he has for more food because he needs it for other purposes. He waits. “Well, what’s he waiting for anyway?” the waiters think, and gaze at each other knowingly. But not a one thinks of removing his dish or of bringing him a newspaper. They hope he will leave soon. Why, really? Now they know it! He is an unsympathetic, dirty bum, a weakling (yet every one of them would run away if he began to make use of his fists). They stand high above him. Naturally that’s only logical. Much better clothing, good food, steady income, a good job. The youth rummages in his pocket. Coins jingle. He counts his money in small coins so that each clatters on the table in turn. He leaves no tip. The waiter is incensed, and the old gentleman makes a special effort to turn himself around with legs spread apart (because he is too fat and lazy even to turn his head). The young lad gets up, takes his cap, puts it on, and goes out. His broad shoulders swing a bit. When he has passed by the old gentleman, the latter looks after him disdainfully. He opens the door and disappears; the door clacks back and forth awhile. “Dumb guy,” mutters the one waiter, and disgruntled, he goes to the door and closes it unwillingly. He would just love to call him back and scream at him, but he is really too afraid of the strong young man and so has to content himself just to grumble to himself.
It is becoming very still, even though it had already been still before. But now it’s getting oppressively still. The old gentleman smiles compassionately and knowingly at the waiters, half gesturing in the direction where the young lad disappeared. Then he, too, leaves. What else can he do? Outside, his car is waiting and he’s not even glad that he doesn’t have to walk. But the feeling, this shadow within him, has become even stronger. He is actually jealous of this young boy; after all, he has to be disdainful: He is so far beneath him. Doesn’t even have enough to buy a decent meal! Haha! So I am better off . . . and he buries himself again—in reality, without any interest—in the paper.
Once again we find the familiar elements of the conflict with the father: the wanting to be grown up, the hatred, and the guilt feelings. Like his younger comrades, he has the tendency to project the conflict onto the social sphere. Unlike his younger friends, he seizes hold of and shapes a story that expresses a strong will and a capacity to order his reality. He shows his ability to take on his future: here the past with feelings of guilt; there the future still untouched. In fact, in his life history as known to us, we can find no clue for the assumption that the old man of this story is intended to represent his real father. Infantile hatred is heightened, and out of it is created an exaggerated personage on whom all discontent can be projected. No doubt, the story has to deal with feelings, only recently overcome, about aging—whether in the sense of growing up or growing old—and has to deal with the life-and-death fears of the pubescent boy. The dangers of inner bankruptcy are taken in, penetrated, and finally rejected. In contrast, the young man is seen from the outside. He represents an ideal, evolving out of man’s finest feelings, while skirting psychic disintegration around him. He is the only one who recognizes all that’s become rotten around him. We are not told what’s going on in the depths of the young person, but his portrait is rendered with bold, strong gestures, uninhibited and expansive.
The style of the boy’s composition conveys two other thoughts to the reader: one, that the writer was brought up in a psychoanalytically enlightened environment, and the other, that he seems to promise that he’ll not reduce things to simple intellectual dichotomies, to simple opposites. Rather, in small, particular strokes reality is so precisely conceived that one senses the boy’s future power clearly.
Postscript
Those not familiar with psychoanalytic pedagogy are all too quick to suspect it of merely turning the inner process inside out and letting it go at that. So I’d like to point out that such compositions as are reviewed here were written at least a quarter of a year apart—and this not because there were any external constraints imposed by the school. Thus the psychoanalytically oriented observer must be intent on a spare and careful application of such methods, even if they are used for research purposes. I’m actually convinced that the success of their use is based on the kind of surprise such as is provided by the opportunity for the children to spend a few hours in contact with a person they can quickly and easily raise to a trustworthy ideal. Not every adult will succeed as well as Mrs. Burlingham in achieving such contact, and some, who think they have earned the children’s confidence in their own strange ways will find the transference troubled by unconscious interferences. This will require skilled investigation.
When one succeeds in getting the children to speak freely, their compositions may be more naïve than the usual compositions, because in this way they will be forced to say more than they are aware they know and their stories will be more full of life. And whoever knows something about unconscious Korrespondenz between people will appreciate what it means to a teacher on occasion to take into himself a picture of the inner world of his children and to allow its imponderables to work themselves gradually out. If one wants to contemplate a wider influence, one might, of course, think of collecting such essays throughout the entire schooling of the children. They could also be used for diagnostic purposes and in the case of need to impart more fitting kinds of advice, since one more intimately works through the material produced in one’s own circle. At this writing there are, of course, only few teachers who have the requisite psychoanalytic training.
Even eventual psychoanalytic treatment of some children will not make such compositions useless—either for the teacher or for the child. For such productions offer, in addition to material produced in a psychoanalysis, something else (perhaps akin to what poets do). Thus what they are trying to say merits being heard.
Notes
1 The director was Peter Blos. Among the teachers were Joan Erikson and the writer.
2 Greek. An arrogance which is too close to the pride of the gods and therefore punished by them.
3 Words in brackets were crossed out in the original text.
4 One word is missing.
5 At that time this account was written for a teacher who was not psychoanalytically oriented and who allowed the children to write freely but, subsequently appalled, hid the results.
6 Crossed out. Compare with the omitted words in the previous story.
In response to the invitation to contribute to this very special issue, I can only focus on a few well-known facts of Anna Freud’s life in order to comment on her position in history. For while her death has evoked much individual mourning, we must all thank fate for letting us witness the uniqueness of her life and the dedication with which she rounded out and complemented the role ascribed to her by her life history—and by history.
Youngest daughter of a great father who came to need her in his most creative endeavors and then also in his most helpless states of physical suffering, responsive student of his newly created method of healing and of observing the dynamics of unconscious motivation, she proved prepared to complement his most complex conclusions by systematically demonstrating the early traces of human conflict in the most telling behavior of children.
But let me begin with an episodic item from the way in which Anna Freud’s life history touched mine professionally. She conducted my training psychoanalysis in Berggasse 19. Therefore, to me, as to a now diminishing number of survivors of my kind, what comes to mind as I look back are the front door and stairway leading up to the Freuds’ apartment—and then the ever-welcoming Paula Fichtl responding to my ring and showing me to the waiting room shared by Sigmund and Anna Freud. On occasion, Freud’s next patient or visitor might be waiting there, and I would see the old “Professor,” with a formal bow, invite that person into his study, having briefly bowed to me as well. And then Anna Freud would open her door for me.
Readers acquainted with this setting will remember the atmosphere of utter privacy, on the one hand, and of a kind of historicity, on the other, both evoked by the closeness of these two studies and the closure of these doors. And here I mean the meditative style that marked the “fifty minutes” of almost daily psychoanalysis and the tangible historical meaning of the most minute dynamics observed right here where this unique method had been created.
Well, it is not necessary to underscore Anna Freud’s overall calm and restrained therapeutic style. But there was also an occasional easy place for a tactful freedom from “technique.” As an intimate illustration of this I recently, at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, used a story from my analysis which I would like to tell once more in this context. Anna Freud occasionally attended to her handiwork in my psychoanalytic sessions, too. This for the most part seemed natural, although it could be rated as a somewhat chauvinistic prerogative of women analysts. I remember having referred to it once when I was speaking of Joan’s and my newborn son. A number of sessions later Anna Freud, at the end of an hour, having said the usual goodbye with a firm handshake, smilingly handed me a small blue knitted sweater, saying, “This is for Kai.”
This little story also leads me to a pervasive theme—namely, Anna Freud’s role as a woman in those historical days. Here, let me return to the waiting room, as indeed I actually did on regular evenings during the concluding period of my analysis in order to attend the “kinderseminar” held there. This was characterized by a rare and on occasion even gay intimacy in the exchange of astonishing experiences with children while evoking at the same time a, shall we say, historical awe, often expressed in a most determined nodding of heads while considering conclusions never verbalized before. I happened to be one of the very few men in this seminar, and was sometimes astonished at the observations made by a (yes, overwhelming) majority of women analysts. And these observations naturally included the children’s parents—a generational dimension missing from the oh-so-theoretical “adult” seminars.
If I seem to underscore Anna Freud’s feminine generativity in her early decision to complement her father’s creative intuition—as he no doubt wished her to do—I also mean to suggest that this life-historical complementarity was providential for their shared genius.
Now if I also seem to imply that only a woman could have carried through this historical assignment at that epoch in history, then—yes, I do. In principle, however, I by no means wish to dichotomize this matter: no doubt a man, and especially one of particular genius, has a complementary feminine as well as masculine intuition., This may have been, in fact, how Freud knew that he needed this daughter and understood what she was seeing—even though he is quoted as having joked afterwards that she was his only (= true) son. And as for her role in his life, there is, as mentioned, that other life-historical fact of Freud’s fateful cancer, which called for Anna Freud’s role as a nurse and no doubt at times as a very maternal daughter. We know today how aging and declining old people can be in need of younger caretakers and as patients can develop the corresponding parent transference to younger analysts.
At any rate, Anna Freud became her father’s caretaker—even as she also represented him in person, for example at the Goethe Prize ceremony and the strenuous meetings of newly created national and international associations.
In matters theoretical and literary, of course, Anna Freud developed her own style, full of such terms as “technique” and “mechanisms” and “developmental lines,” and yet opening to sensory awareness as well as to theoretical curiosity the many ways in which children seem to experience the developmental affairs of childhood often so vaguely and theoretically reconstructed from adult cases.
It is here that it became clear early, and against a persistent alternative view in some psychoanalytic institutes, that Anna Freud’s work in no way represented a mere addition of another professional specialty that a psychoanalyst could choose to use or to ignore. For as Freud’s conclusions regarding the origins of psychopathology of childhood had early suggested, some of the laws of unhindered growth thereby revealed themselves at the same time to the thoughtful imagination. How this trend eventually found mutual enrichment with other developmental schools such as Montessori and Piaget is well known. And here it was doubly helpful that Anna Freud’s pre-psychoanalytic experience as an imaginative volkssechul-Lehre (a “people’s-school teacher”) helped to build a bridge to contemporary liberal and educational trends in Viennese eduction and re-education such as were represented by the powerful figures of Bernfeld and Aichhorn.
Emergent child analysis, then, was closely related to trends in the history of education. Nor did Anna Freud let it become a mere variation of private practice: from the very beginning it included the children of the poor, a fact that was not only an expression of socialmindedness but also opened up data beyond those provided in the analysis of child patients whose parents could afford to pay for treatment. This gave occasion for another favorite story of ours, namely, mother Freud’s remark on seeing Paula take a plate with food into Anna Freud’s study for a hungry little customer: “Sie lässt sich’s was kosten, die Kinderanalyse,” meaning that Anna Freud spent quite a bit of money on child analysis—or, in shorter American, “A costly affair, child analysis!”
At the same time, of course, Anna Freud’s concern with human development as a whole also enabled her to pay close attention to the ego and its central role, beyond its defensive inventiveness, of giving form and presence to each developmental step as it mediates between the id’s physical nature and society’s (then still called “the outer world’s”) institutional variations.
And here, finally, I must point to the gigantic historical paradox that eventually engulfed the Vienna scene—where psychoanalysis had come to represent an intellectual concentration on the inner dynamics of the human species as a whole while mannish political forces succeeded at the same time in imposing on the country a new type of political order dedicated to the murderous division of mankind into unreconcilable pseudo-species.
It made deep sense, then, that following her emigration and at the beginning of her work in England Anna Freud devoted her efforts to the emotional rehabilitation of German children saved from concentration camps and of bombed-out English children—concerns and services to be extended in the course of more peaceful times to the needs of various neighborhoods in London and to the training of professionals concerned with the practice and application of child analysis. In Maresfield Gardens Anna Freud has, it seems, re-established on a large scale the intimate sphere of shared privacy and of open historicity that had characterized life in the Berggasse.
I cannot emphasize all these themes of Care and Generativity, however, without mentioning what one must consider the necessary, “dystonic” counterpart of these adult strengths. We call it Rejectivity. This means here that any creative individual vitally preoccupied with universally important matters must at times firmly reject other theories and practices which seem to endanger his main objectives. In doing so, he arouses, of course, corresponding reactions in others. But here again, what is decisive in the long run is the style in which such matters are spelled out at a given historical moment—and settled at another.
To end with a word on the impact of Anna Freud’s contributions on corresponding work in the United States: When Joan Erikson and I had a chance to contribute to the Midcentury White House Conference (which carried with typical American optimism the motto “A Healthy Personality for Every Child”), we became most aware of the fact that, beyond their professional impact, Anna Freud’s ideas (with the help of such messengers as Margaret Mead) had become a vital part of modern enlightenment.
We will need it in today’s desperate search for the human potentials for peace.
First published in the Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic 3, 2 (1980), 91–94.
* Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909). In Collected Papers, Sigmund Freud, ed. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis). 1924–1950. Vol. Ill, 149.
Written under the name of Erik Homburger. Read before the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in April 1930. First published in Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, 4 (1930), 201–16. Reprinted in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 4 (1935), 50–68.
* Sigmund Freud, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), ed. Joan Reviere (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1924–50), Vol. Ill, 149.
Paper given at the House of Children, Vienna, 1930. First published in Zeitschrift für Psychoanalytische Pädagogik, 5 (1931) 13–19 under the name of Erik Homburger. Translated from German especially for this volume by Joachim Neugroschel.
* I hardly need mention that as we review some picture books, we stumble upon numerous psychological essentials that I must leave aside here: the symbols in the depiction; the style of depictive manner itself, the fairytale element in picture books; and fairy tales in general.
* Since I have digressed to the parallel problem of fairy tales, I would like to reestablish the distance. The folk-fairy tale is related to the picture book by common use. But it is essentially remote from the picture book in terms of history and art. We must clearly distinguish the utterances of the modern person who deals with a child by the use of those fables that have trickled down through (and have virtually been filtered by) centuries and generations. Like humor, they appeal, with their reconciliatory strength, to all human beings, not just children, and they possess the magically solid form that has always been the higher condition for a comforting touch on the stern unconscious.
A longer version of this paper was first published in Zeitschrift für psychoanalytische Pädagogik, 5 (1931), 417–45 under the name of Erik Homburger. Translated from German especially for this volume by Inge Schneier Hoffmann.
First published under “Personal Tributes” in the Bulletin of the Hampstead Clinic, 6 (1983), 51–54.