A discernible relationship between the dreamer’s acute life problem and the problems left over from corresponding infantile phases has been indicated in Section VI. Here I shall select two further items as topics for a final brief discussion: psychosexual fixation and arrest; collective identity and ego identity.
In our general clinical usage we employ the term fixation alternately for that infantile stage in which an individual received the relatively greatest amount of gratification and to which, therefore, his secret wishes persistently return and for that infantile stage of development beyond which he is unable to proceed because it marked an end or determined slow-up of his psychosexual maturation. I would prefer to call the latter the point of arrest, for it seems to me that an individual’s psychosexual character and proneness for disturbances depends not so much on the point of fixation as on the range between the point of fixation and the point of arrest, and on the quality of their interplay. It stands to reason that a fixation on the oral stage, for example, endangers an individual most if he is also arrested close to this stage, while a relative oral fixation can become an asset if the individual advances a considerable length along the path of psychosexual maturation, making the most of each step and cultivating (on the very basis of a favorable balance of basic trust over basic mistrust as derived from an intensive oral stage) a certain capacity to experience and to exploit subsequent crises to the full. Another individual with a similar range but a different quality of progression may, for the longest time, show no specific fixation on orality; he may indicate a reasonable balance of a moderate amount of all the varieties of psychosexual energy—and yet, the quality of the whole ensemble may be so brittle that a major shock can make it tumble to the ground whereupon an “oral” fixation may be blamed for it. Thus, one could review our nosology from the point of view of the particular field circumscribed by the points of fixation and arrest and of the properties of that field. At any rate, in a dream, and especially in a series of dreams, the patient’s “going back and forth” between the two points can be determined rather clearly. Our outline, therefore, differentiates between a point of psychosexual fixation and one of psychosexual arrest.
The Irma Dream demonstrates a great range and power of pre-genital themes. From an initial position of phallic-urethral and voyeuristic hybris, the dreamer regresses to an oral-tactual position (Irma’s exposed mouth and the kinesthetic sensation of suffering through her) and to an anal-sadistic one (the elimination of the poison from the body, the repudiation of Dr. Otto). As for the dreamer of the Irma Dream (or any individual not clearly circumscribed by neurotic stereotypy), we should probably postpone any over-all classification until we have thought through the suggestions contained in Freud’s first formulation of “libidinal types.” In postulating that the ideal type of man is, each in fair measure, narcissistic and compulsive and erotic, he opened the way to a new consideration of normality, and thus of abnormality. His formulation does not (as some of our day do) focus on single fixations which may upset a unilinear psychosexual progression of a low over-all tonus, but allows for strong conflicts on each level, solved by the maturing ego adequate to each stage, and finally integrated in a vigorous kind of equilibrium.
I shall conclude with the discussion of ego identity (2,3,5). This discussion must, again, be restricted to the Irma Dream and to the typical problems which it may illustrate. The concept of identity refers to an over-all attitude (a Grundhaltung) which the young person at the end of adolescence must derive from his ego’s successful synthesis of postadolescent drive organization and social realities. A sense of identity implies that one experiences an over-all sameness and continuity extending from the personal past (now internalized in introjects and identifications) into a tangible future; and from the community’s past (now existing in traditions and institutions sustaining a communal sense of identity) into foreseeably or imaginable realities of work accomplishment and role satisfaction. I had started to use the terms ego identity and group identity for this vital aspect of personality development before I (as far as I know) became aware of Freud’s having used the term innere Identität in a peripheral pronouncement and yet in regard to a central matter in his life.
In 1926, Freud sent to the members of a Jewish lodge a speech (8) in which he discussed his relationship to Jewry and discarded religious faith and national pride as “the prime bonds.” He then pointed, in poetic rather than scientific terms, to an unconscious as well as a conscious attraction in Jewry: powerful, unverbalized emotions (viele dunkle Gefühlsmächte), and the clear consciousness of an inner identity (die klare Bewusstheit der inneren Identität). Finally, he mentioned two traits which he felt he owed his Jewish ancestry: freedom from prejudices which narrow the use of the intellect, and the readiness to live in opposition. This formulation sheds an interesting light on the fact that in the Irma Dream the dreamer can be shown both to belittle and yet also temporarily to adopt membership in the “compact” majority of his dream population. Freud’s remarks also give added background to what we recognized as the dreamer’s vigorous and anxious preoccupation, namely, the use of incisive intelligence in courageous isolation, the strong urge to investigate, to unveil, and to recognize: the Irma Dream strongly represents this ego-syntonic part of what I would consider a cornerstone of the dreamer’s identity, even as it defends the dreamer against the infantile guilt associated with such ambition.
The dream and its associations also point to at least one “evil prototype”—the prototype of all that which must be excluded from one’s identity: here it is, in the words of its American counterpart, the “dirty little squirt,” or, more severely, the “unclean one” who has forfeited his claim to “promising” intelligence.
Much has been said about Freud’s ambitiousness; friends have been astonished and adversaries amused to find that he disavowed it. To be the primus, the best student of his class through his school years, seemed as natural to him (“the first-born son of a young mother”) as to write the Gesammelten Schriften. The explanation is, of course, that he was not “ambitious” in the sense of ehrgeizig: he did not hunger for medals and titles for their own sakes. The ambition of uniqueness in intellectual accomplishment, on the other hand, was not only ego-syntonic but was ethno-syntonic, almost an obligation to his people. The tradition of his people, then, and a firm inner identity provided the continuity which helped Freud to overcome the neurotic dangers to his accomplishment which are suggested in the Irma Dream, namely, the guilt over the wish to be the one-and-only who would overcome the derisive fathers and unveil the mystery. It helped him in the necessity to abandon well-established methods of sober investigation (invented to find out a few things exactly and safely to overlook the rest) for a method of self-revelation apt to open the floodgates of the unconscious. If we seem to recognize in this dream something of a puberty rite, we probably touch on a matter mentioned more than once in Freud’s letters, namely, the “repeated adolescence” of creative minds, which he ascribed to himself as well as to Fliess.
In our terms, the creative mind seems to face repeatedly what most men, once and for all, settle in late adolescence. The “norma” individual combines the various prohibitions and challenges of the ego ideal in a sober, modest, and workable unit, well anchored in a set of techniques and in the roles which go with them. The restless individual must, for better or for worse, alleviate a persistently revived infantile superego pressure by the reassertion of his ego identity. At the time of the Irma Dream, Freud was acutely aware that his restless search and his superior equipment were to expose him to the hybris which few men must face, namely, the entry into the unknown where it meant the liberation of revolutionary forces and the necessity of new laws of conduct. Like Moses, Freud despaired of the task, and by sending some of the first discoveries of his inner search to Fliess with a request to destroy them (to “eliminate the poison”), he came close to smashing his tablets. The letters reflect his ambivalent dismay. In the Irma Dream, we see him struggle between a surrender to the traditional authority of Dr. M. (superego), a projection of his own self-esteem on his imaginative and far-away friend, Fliess (ego ideal), and the recognition that he himself must be the lone (self-) investigator (ego identity). In life he was about to commit himself to his “inner tyrant,” psychology, and with it, to a new principle of human integrity.
The Irma Dream documents a crisis, during which a medical investigator’s identity loses and regains its “conflict-free status” (10, 13) . It illustrates how the latent infantile wish that provides the energy for the renewed conflict, and thus for the dream, is imbedded in a manifest dream structure which on every level reflects significant trends of the dreamer’s total situation. Dreams, then, not only fulfill naked wishes of sexual license, of unlimited dominance and of unrestricted destructiveness; where they work, they also lift the dreamer’s isolation, appease his conscience, and preserve his identity, each in specific and instructive ways.
Bibliography
1. E. H. Erikson, “Studies in the Interpretation of Play,” Genetic Psychology Monograph, 22 (1940), 557–671.
2. ——, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1950).
3. ——, “Growth and Crises of the ‘Healthy Personality.’ ” For Fact-Finding Committee, Midcentury White House Conference (New York: Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, 1950). Somewhat revised in Personality in Nature, Culture and Society, eds. C. Kluckhohn and H. R. Murray (New York: Knopf, 1953).
4. ——, “Sex Differences in the Play Constructions of Pre-Adolescents.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 21 (1951), 667–92.
5. ——, “Identity and Young Adulthood.” Presented at the Thirty-fifth Anniversary of the Institute of the Judge Baker Guidance Center in Boston, May 1953 (to be published).
6. S. Freud, “The Interpretation of Dreams,” In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1938).
7. ——, “The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement.” In The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud (New York: Modern Library, 1938).
8. ——, “Ansprache an die Mitgleider des Vereins B’Nai B’rith” (1926). In Gesammelte Werke, vol. 16 (London, Imago Publishing Co., 1941).
9. ——, Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse (London: Imago Publishing Co., 1950).
10. H. Hartmann, “Ichpsychologie und Anpassungsproblem.” Internationale Zeitschrift für. Psychoanalyse und Imago, 24 (1939), 62–135. Translated in part in Rapaport (13).
11. E. Kris, “On Preconscious Mental Processes.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 19 (1950), 540–60. Also in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities Press, 1951).
12. ——, “On Inspiration.” International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 20 (1939), 377–89. Also in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Universities Press, 1952).
13. D. Rapaport, Organization and Pathology of Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951).
Notes
1 German words in brackets indicate that the writer will question and discuss A. A. Brill’s translation of these words.
2 “Formerly I found it extraordinarily difficult to accustom my readers to the distinction between the manifest dream-content and the latent dream-thoughts. Over and over again arguments and objections were adduced from the uninterpreted dream as it was retained in the memory, and the necessity of interpreting the dream was ignored. But now, when the analysts have at least become reconciled to substituting for the manifest dream its meaning as found by interpretation, many of them are guilty of another mistake, to which they adhere just as stubbornly. They look for the essence of the dream in this latent content, and thereby overlook the distinction between latent dream-thoughts and the dream-work. The dream is fundamentally nothing more that a special form of our thinking, which is made possible by the conditions of the sleeping state. It is the dream-work which produces this form, and it alone is the essence of dreaming—the only explanation of its singularity” (6, pp. 466–467).
3 See the chapter “Zones, Modes, and Modalities” in (2).
4 According to a report presented to the Seminar on Dream Interpretation in the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute.
5 In another dream mentioned in The Interpretation of Dreams (6), Freud accuses himself of such hypocrisy, when in a dream he treats with great affection another doctor whose face (“beardless” in actuality) he also alters, this time by making it seem elongated and by adding a yellow beard. Freud thinks that he is really trying to make the doctor out to be a seducer of women patients and a “simpleton.” The German Schwachkopf and Schlemihl, must be considered the evil prototype which serves as a counterpart to the ideal prototype, to be further elucidated here, the smart young Jew who “promises much,” as a professional man.
6 See Ernst Kris’ concept of a “regression in the service of the ego” (11).
7 As pointed out elsewhere (2), Hitler, also the son of an old father and a young mother, in a corresponding marginal area, shrewdly exploited such infantile humiliation: he pointed the way to the defiant destruction of all paternal images. Freud, the Jew, chose the way of scholarly persistence until the very relationship to the father (the oedipus complex) itself became a matter of universal enlightenment.
Sex Differences in the Play Configurations of American Preadolescents (1955)
In previous publications,1 the writer has illustrated the clinical impression that a playing child’s behavior in space (i.e., his movements in a given playroom, his handling of toys, or his arrangement of play objects on floor or table) adds a significant dimension to the observation of play. And, indeed, three-dimensional arrangement in actual space is the variable distinguishing a play phenomenon from other “projective” media, which utilize space either in two-dimensional projection or through the purely verbal communication of spatial images. In an exploratory way it was also suggested that such clinical hints could be applied to the observation of older children and even of adults; play constructions of college students of both sexes2 and of mental patients were described and first impressions formulated.3 In all this work a suggestive difference was observed in the way in which the two sexes utilized a given play space to dramatize rather divergent themes; thus male college students occupied themselves to a significant degree with the representation (or avoidance) of an imagined danger to females emanating from careless drivers in street traffic, while female college students seemed preoccupied with dangers, threatening things and people in the interior of houses, and thus from intrusive males. The question arose whether or not such sex differences could be formulated so as to be useful to observers in a nonclinical situation and on a more significant scale; and whether these differences would then appear to be determined by biological facts, such as difference in sex or maturational stage, or by differences in cultural conditioning. In 1940 the opportunity offered itself to secure play constructions from about 150 California children (about 75 boys and 75 girls), all of the same ages.4 The procedure to be described here is an exploratory extension of “clinical” observation to a “normal” sample.5 The number of children examined were, at age eleven, 79 boys and 78 girls, at age twelve, 80 boys and 81 girls, at age thirteen, 77 boys and 73 girls. Thus the majority of children contributed three constructions to the total number of 468 (236 play constructions of boys and 232 constructions of girls), which will be examined here.
On each occasion the child was individually called into a room where he found a selection of toys such as was then available in department stores (122 blocks, 38 pieces of toy furniture, 14 small dolls, 9 toy cars, 11 toy animals) laid out on two shelves. There was no attempt to make a careful selection of toys on the basis of size, color, material, etc. A study aspiring to such standards naturally would have to use dolls all made of the same materials and each accompanied by the same number of objects fitting in function and size, and themselves identical in material, color, weight, and so on. While it was not our intention to be methodologically consistent in this respect, the degree of inconsistency in the materials used may at least be indicated. Our family dolls were of rubber, which permitted their being bent into almost any shape; they were neatly dressed with all the loving care which German craftsmen lavish on playthings. A policeman and an aviator, however, were of unbending metal and were somewhat smaller than the doll family. There were toy cars, some of them smaller than the policeman, some bigger; but there were no airplanes to go with the aviator.
The toys were laid out in an ordered series of open cardboard boxes, each containing a class of toys, such as people, animals, and cars. These boxes were presented on a shelf. The blocks were on a second shelf in two piles, one containing a set of large blocks, one a set of small ones. Next to the shelves the stage for the actual construction was set: a square table with a square background of the same size.
The following instructions were given:
I am interested in moving pictures. I would like to know what kind of moving pictures children would make if they had a chance to make pictures. Of course, I could not provide you with a real studio and real actors and actresses; you will have to use these toys instead. Choose any of the things you see here and construct on this table an exciting scene out of an imaginary moving picture. Take as much time as you want, and tell me afterward what the scene is about.
While the child worked on his scene, the observer sat at his desk, presumably busy with some writing. From there he observed the child’s attack on the problem and sketched transitory stages of his play construction. When the subject indicated that the scene was completed, the observer said, “Tell me what it is all about,” and took dictation on what the child said. If no exciting content was immediately apparent, the observer further asked, “What is the most exciting thing about this scene?” He then mildly complimented the child on his construction.6
The reference to moving pictures was intended to reconcile these preadolescents to the suggested use of toys, which seemed appropriate only for a much younger age. And, indeed, only two children refused the task, and only one of these complained afterward about the “childishness” of the procedure: she was the smallest of all the children examined. The majority constructed scenes willingly, although their enthusiasm for the task and their ability to concentrate on it, their skill in handling the toys, and their originality in arranging them varied widely. Yet the children of this study produced scenes with a striking lack of similarity to movie clichés. In nearly five hundred constructions, not more than three were compared with actual moving pictures. In no case was a particular doll referred to as representing a particular actor or actress. Lack of movie experience can hardly be blamed for this; the majority of these children attended movies regularly and had their favorite actors and types of pictures. Neither was the influence of any of the radio programs or comic pictures noticeable except in so far as they themselves elaborated upon clichés of western lore; there were no specific references to “Superman” and only a few to “Red Ryder.” Similarly, contemporary events of local or world significance scarcely appeared. The play procedure was first employed shortly before the San Francisco World’s Fair opened its gates—an event which dominated the Far West and especially the San Francisco Bay region for months. This sparkling fair, located in the middle of the bay and offering an untold variety of spectacles, was mentioned in not more than five cases. Again, the approach and outbreak of the war did not increase the occurrence of the aviator in the play scenes, in spite of the acute rise in general estimation of military aviation, especially in the aspirations of our boys and their older brothers. The aviator rated next to the monk in the frequency of casting.
It has been surmised that in both groups the toys suggested infantile play so strongly that other pretensions became impossible. Yet only one girl undressed a doll, as a younger girl would; she had recently been involved in a neighborhood sex-education crisis. And while little boys like to dramatize automobile accidents with the proper bumps and noises, in our constructions automobile accidents, as well as earthquakes and bombings, were not made to happen; rather, their final outcome was quietly arranged. At first glance, therefore, the play constructions cannot be considered to be motivated by a regression to infantile play in its overt manifestations.
In general, none of the simpler explanations of the motivations responsible for the play constructions presented could do away with the impression that a play act—like a dream—is a complicated dynamic product of “manifest” and “latent” themes, of past experience and present task, of the need to express something and the need to suppress something, of clear representation, symbolic indirection, and radical disguise.
It will be seen that girls, on the whole, tend to build quiet scenes of everyday life, preferably within a home or in school. The most frequent “exciting scene” built by girls is a quiet family constellation, in a house without walls, with the older girl playing the piano. Disturbances in the girls’ scenes are primarily caused by animals, usually cute puppies, or by mischievous children—always boys. More serious accidents occur too, but there are no murders, and there is little gun play. The boys produce more buildings and outdoor scenes, and especially scenes with wild animals, Indians, or automobile accidents; they prefer toys which move or represent motion. Peaceful scenes are predominantly traffic scenes under the guiding supervision of the policeman. In fact, the policeman is the “person” most often used by the boys, while the older girl is the one preferred by girls.7 Otherwise, it will be seen that the “family dolls” are used more by girls, as follows functionally from the fact that they produce more indoor scenes, while the policeman can apply his restraining influence to cars in traffic as well as to wild beasts and Indians.*
The general method of the study was clinical as well as statistical; i. e., each play construction was correlated with the constructions of all the children as well as with the other performances of the same child. Thus unique elements in the play construction were found to be related to unique elements in the life-history of the individual, while a number of common elements were correlated statistically to biographic elements shared by all the children.
In the following three examples, the interplay of manifest theme and play configuration and their relation to significant life-data will be illustrated.
Deborah,8 a well-mannered, intelligent, and healthy girl of eleven, calmly selects (by transferring them from shelves to table) all the furniture, the whole family, and the two little dogs, but leaves blocks, cars, uniformed dolls, and the other animals untouched. Her scene represents the interior of a house. Since she uses no blocks, there are no outer walls around the house or partitions within it. The house furniture is distributed over the whole width of the table but not without well-defined groups and configurations: there is a circular arrangement of living-room furniture in the right foreground, a bathroom arrangement along the back wall, and an angular bedroom arrangement in the left background. Thus the various parts of the house are divided in a reasonably functional way. In contrast, a piano in the left foreground and a table next to it (incidentally, the only red pieces of furniture used) do not seem to belong to any configuration. Taken together, they do not constitute a conventional room, although they do seem to belong together.
Turning to the cast, we note, within the circle of the living-room, a group consisting of a woman, a boy, a baby, and the two puppies. The woman has the baby in her arms; the boy plays with the two puppies. While this sociable group is as if held together by the circle, all the other people are occupied with themselves: clockwise, in the left foreground, the man at the piano, the girl at the desk, the other boy in the bed in the left background, and the second woman in the kitchen along the back wall.
Having arranged all this slowly and calmly, Deborah indicates with a smile that she is ready to tell her story, which is short enough: “This boy [in the background] is bad, and his mother sent him to bed.” She does not seem inclined to say anything about the others. The experimenter (who must now confess that, at the end of this scene, he permitted himself the clinical luxury of one nonstandardized question) asks, “Which one of these people would you like to be?” “The boy with the puppies,” she replies.
While her spontaneous story singled out the lonely boy in the farthest background, an elicited afterthought focuses, instead, on the second boy, who is part of the lively family circle in the foreground. In all their brevity, these two references point to a few interpersonal themes: punishments, closeness to the mother and separation from her, loneliness and playfulness, and an admitted preference for being a boy. Equally significant, of course, are the themes which are suggested but not verbalized.
The selective references to the boy in disgrace and to the happier boy in the foreground immediately point to the fact that in actual life Deborah has an older brother. (She has a baby brother, too, whose counterpart we may see in the baby in the arms of the mother.) We have ample reason to believe that she envies this boy because of his superior age, his sex, his sharp intellect, and his place close to the mother’s heart. Envy invites two intentions: to eliminate the competitor and to replace, to become him. Deborah’s play construction seems to accomplish this double purpose by splitting the brother in two: the competitor is banished to the lonely background; the boy in the foreground is what she would like to be.
We must ask here: Does Deborah have an inkling of such a “latent” meaning? We have no way of finding out. In this investigation, which is part of a long-range study, there is no place for embarrassing questions and interpretations. Therefore, if in this connection we speak of “latent” themes, “latent” cannot and does not mean “unconscious.” It merely means “not brought out in the child’s verbalization.” On the other hand, our interpretation is, as indicated, based on life-data and test material secured over more than a decade.
But where is Deborah? The little girl at the desk is the only girl in the scene and, incidentally, close to Deborah’s age. She was not mentioned in the story. She is, as pointed out, part of a configuration which does not fit as easily and functionally into a conventional house interior as do the other parts. The man at the piano, closest to the girl at the desk, has in common with her only that they share the two red pieces of furniture. Otherwise, they both face away from the family without facing toward each other; they are parallel to each other, with the girl a little behind the father.
In life, Deborah and her father are close to each other temperamentally. Marked introverts, they are both apt to shy away in a somewhat pained manner from the more vivacious members of the family, especially from the mother. Thus they have an important but negative trend in common. Just because of their more introvert natures, they are unable to express what unites them in any other way than by staying close to each other without saying much. This, we think, is represented spatially by a twosome in parallel isolation.
In adding this theme to the two verbalized themes (the isolated bad boy and the identification with the good boy in the playful circle), we surmise that the total scene well circumscribes the child’s main life-problem, namely, her isolated position between the parents, between the siblings, and (as yet) between the sexes. In a similar but never once identical manner, our clinical interpretation arrives at a theme representative of that life-task which (present or past) puts the greatest strain on the present psychological equilibrium. In this way, the play construction often is a significant help in the analysis of the life-history because it singles out one or a number of life-data as the subjectively most relevant ones and adds a significant key to the dynamic interpretation of the child’s personality development.
We may ask one further question: Is there any indication in the play constructions as to how deeply Deborah is disturbed or apt to become disturbed by the particular strain which she reveals? Here a clinical impression must suffice. Deborah uses the whole width of the table. She does not crowd her scene against the background or into one corner, as according to our observations, children with marked feelings of insecurity are apt to do; neither does she spread the furniture all over the table in an amorphous way, as we would expect a less mature child to do. Her groupings are meaningfully and pleasingly placed; so is her distribution of people. The one manifest incongruity in her groupings (father and daughter) proves to be latently significant; only here her scene suffers, as it were, a symptomatic lapse. Otherwise, while there is a simple honesty in her scene, there certainly is no great originality and no special sparkle in it. But here it is necessary to remember the surprising dearth of imagination in most constructions and the possibility that only specially inclined children may take to this medium with real verve.
In one configurational respect Deborah’s scene has much in common with those produced by most of the other girls. She places no walls around her house and no partitions inside. In anticipation of the statistical evaluation of this configurational item, we may state here an impression of essential femininity, which, together with the indications of relative inner balance, forms a welcome forecast of a personality potentially adequate to meet the stresses outlined.
In addition to the arrangement on the table and its relation to the verbalization, clinical criteria may be derived from the observation of a child’s general approach to the play situation. Deborah’s approach was calm, immediate, and consistent; her selection of toys was careful and apt. Other typical approaches are characterized by prolonged silence and sudden, determined action; by an enthusiasm which quickly runs its course; or by some immediate thoughtless remark such as, “I don’t know what to do.” The final stage of construction, in turn, can be characterized by frequent new beginnings; by a tendency to let things fall or drop; by evasional conversation; by the need to find room for all toys or to exclude certain types of them; by a perfectionist effort at being meticulous in detail; by an inability to wind up the task; by a sudden and unexplained loss of interest and ambition, etc. Such time curves must be integrated with the spatial analysis into a space-time continuum which reflects certain basic attributes of the subject’s way of organizing experience—in other words, the ways of his ego.
In the spatial analysis proper, we consider factors such as the following:
1. The subject’s approach, first, to the shelves and then to the table, and his way of connecting these two determinants of the play area.
2. The relationship of the play construction to the table surface, i.e., the area covered, and the location, distribution, and alignment of the main configurations with the table square.
3. The relationship of the whole of the construction to its parts and of the parts to one another.
Let us now compare the construction of calm and friendly Deborah with that of the girl most manifestly disturbed during the play procedure. This girl, whom we shall call Victoria, is also eleven years old; her intelligence is slightly lower than Deborah’s. She appears flushed and angry upon entering the room with her mother. A devout Catholic, Victoria had overheard somebody in the hall address this writer as “Doctor.” She had become acutely afraid that a man had replaced the Study’s woman doctor at this critical time of a girl’s development. This she had told her mother. The mother then questioned the writer; he reassured both ladies, whereupon Victoria, still with tears in her eyes but otherwise friendly, consented to construct a scene in her mother’s protective presence.
Victoria’s house form (she called it “a castle”) differs from Deborah’s construction in all respects. The floor plan of the building is constricted to a small area. There are high, thick walls and a blocked doorway; and there is neither furniture nor people. However, there seems to be an imaginary population of two: “The king,” says Victoria, letting her index finger slide along the edge of the foreground, “walks up and down in front of the castle. He waits for the queen, who is changing her dress in there” (pointing into the walled-off corner of the castle).
In this case the “traumatic” factor seems to lie, at least superficially, in the immediate past; for the thematic similarity between the child’s acute discomfort in the anticipation of having to undress before a man doctor and, in the play, the exclusion of His Majesty from Her Majesty’s boudoir seems immediately clear. High walls and closed gates, as well as the absence of people, all are rare among undisturbed girls; if present, they reflect either a general disturbance or temporary defensiveness.
One small configurational detail in this scene contradicts the general (thematic and configurational) emphasis on the protection of an undressed female from the view even of her husband. In spite of the fact that quite a number of square blocks were still available for a high and solid gate, Victoria selected the only rounded block for the front door. This arrangement, obviously, would permit the king to peek with ease if he were so inclined, and thus provides, for this construction, the usual (but always highly unique) discrepant detail which reveals the dynamic counterpart to the main manifest theme in the construction. Here the discrepant detail probably points to an underlying exhibitionism, which, in this preadolescent girl, may indeed have been the motivation for her somewhat hysterical defensiveness; for her years of experience with the Study had not given her any reason to expect embarrassing exposition or willful violation of her Catholic code. We note, however, that Victoria’s construction, overdefensive as it is in its constricted and high-walled configuration and theme, is placed in the center of the play table and does not, as we have learned to expect in the case of chronic anxiety, “cling” to the background; her upset, we conclude, may be acute and temporary.
Lisa, a third girl, has to deal with a lifelong and constant problem of anxiety: she was born with a congenital heart condition. This, however, had never been mentioned in her interviews with the workers of the Guidance Study. Her parents and her pediatrician, although in a constant state of preparedness for the possibility of a severe attack, did not wish the matter to be discussed with her and assumed that they had thus succeeded in keeping the child from feeling “different” from other children.
Lisa’s scene consists of a longish arrangement, quite uneven in height, of a number of blocks close to the back wall. On the highest block (according to the criteria to be presented later, a “tower”) stands the aviator, while below two women and two children are crowded into the small compartment of a front yard, apparently watching a procession of cars and animals. Lisa’s story follows. We see in it a metaphoric representation of a moment of heart weakness—an experience which she had never mentioned “in that many words.” The analogy between the play scene and its suggested meaning will be indicated by noting elements of a moment of heart failure in brackets following the corresponding play items.
“There is a quarrel between the mother and the nurse over money [anger]. This aviator stands high up on a tower [feeling of dangerous height]. He really is not an aviator, but he thinks he is [feeling of unreality]. First he feels as if his head was rotating, then that his whole body turns around and around [dizziness]. He sees these animals walking by which are not really there [seeing things move about in front of eyes]. Then this girl notices the dangerous situation of the aviator and calls an ambulance [awareness of attack and urge to call for help]. Just as the ambulance comes around a corner, the aviator falls down from the tower [feeling of sinking and falling]. The ambulance crew quickly unfolds a net; the aviator falls into it, but is bounced back up to the top of the tower [recovery]. He holds on to the edge of the tower and lies down [exhaustion].”
Having constructed this scene, the child smilingly left for her routine medical examination, where, for the first time, she mentioned to the Institute physician her frequent attacks of dizziness and indicated that at the time she was trying to overcome them by walking on irregular fences and precipitous places in order to get used to the dizziness. Her quite unique arrangement of blocks, then, seems to signify an uneven fencelike arrangement, at the highest point of which the moment of sinking weakness occurs. That the metaphoric expression of intimate experiences in free play “loosens” the communicability of these same experiences is, of course, the main rationale of play therapy.
These short summaries will illustrate the way in which configurations and themes may prove to be related to whatever item of the life-history, remote or recent, is at the moment most pressing in the child’s life. A major classification of areas of disturbance represented in our constructions suggests as relevant areas: (1) family constellations; (2) infantile traumata (for example, a twelve-year-old boy, who had lost his mother at five but had seemed quite oblivious to the event, in his construction revealed that he had been aware of a significant detail surrounding her death; this detail, in fact, had induced him secretly to blame his father for the loss); (3) physical affliction or hypochrondriac concern; (4) acute anxiety connected with the experiment; (5) psychosexual conflict. Naturally these themes interpenetrate.
We shall now turn to a strain which is by necessity shared by all preadolescents, namely, sexual maturation—a “natural” strain which, at the same time, has a most specific relation to the clearest differentiation in any mixed group, namely, difference in sex.
Building blocks provide a play medium most easily counted, measured, and characterized in regard to spatial arrangement. At the same time, they seem most impersonal and least compromised by cultural connotations and individual meanings. A block is almost nothing but a block. It seemed striking, then (unless one considered it a mere function of the difference in themes), that boys and girls differed in the number of blocks used as well as in the configurations constructed.
Boys use many more blocks, and use them in more varied ways, then girls do. The difference increases in the use of ornamental items, such as cylinders, triangles, cones, and knobs. More than three-quarters of the constructions in which knobs or cones occur are built by boys. This ratio increases with the simplest ornamental composition, namely, a cone on a cylinder; 86 per cent of the scenes in which this configuration occurs were built by boys. With a very few exceptions, only boys built constructions consisting only of blocks, while only girls, with no exception, arranged scenes consisting of furniture exclusively. In between these extremes the following classifications suggested themselves: towers and buildings, traffic lanes and intersections, simple inclosures, interiors without walls, outdoor scenes without use of blocks.*9
CONFIGURATIONAL ANALYSIS SCALE
I. Block configurations.
A. Sidewalk. One or more blocks lying flat, the length being at least one unit length long. (One unit length and one unit width are measured with the lengths and the widths of the large standard blocks.)
B. Freestanding wall. One or more blocks forming a wall. This wall is not a part of any configuration described in categories C to L, but is freestanding and at least one unit long. It may be straight or form an angle.
C. A lane. This configuration consists of two parallel A’s or B’s. The distance between the parallels should be smaller than their length.
D. A tunnel. A lane with a roof.
E. A crossing. Consists of lanes which cross one another.
F. Miscellaneous partitions. Walls dividing a given space without forming configurations A to E.
G. Inclosures. In general, while configurations A to F have more the character of dividing a space in such a way that objects are kept apart or channelized, the emphasis in G (and partially also in H and J) is on the enclosing of a given space on four sides. The background may form one of these sides.
H. Building. A house representation in which an interior is not only enclosed on four sides, but also covered with a roof which furthermore bears ornaments such as smokestacks or towerlike additions. In this category another basic general configurational trend is added to the previously mentioned tendencies toward dividing, channelizing, and enclosing, namely, the tendency toward elevating and elaborating, which in an increasing measure dominates categories H, J, and K.
J. Tower. At least twice as high as it is wide. At least half of its height transcends the rest of the construction.
K. Miscellaneous structures not included under A and J, such as façades, boats, trains, bridges, and so on.
L. Ruin. A pile of blocks arranged to indicate that it represents a destroyed structure.
II. Configurations of furniture without any use of blocks.
A. One room.
B. More than one room.
III. Configurations of animals without any use of blocks.
IV. Configurations of cars without any use of blocks.
The most significant sex differences concern the tendency among the boys to erect structures, buildings and towers, or to build streets; among the girls, to take the play table to be the interior of a house, with simple, little, or no use of blocks.
The configurational approach to the matter can be made more specific by showing the spatial function emphasized in the various ways of using (or not using) blocks. This method would combine all the constructions which share the function of channelizing traffic (such as lanes, tunnels, or crossings); all elaborate buildings and special structures (such as bridges, boats, etc.) which owe their character to the tendency of erecting and constructing; all simple walls, which merely inclose interiors; and all house interiors, which are without benefit of inclosing walls and are thus simply open interiors.
Block Configurations
In the case of inclosures, it was necessary to add other differentiations. To build a rectangular arrangement of simple walls is about the most common way of delineating any limited area and, therefore, is not likely to express any particular sex differences. But it was found that, in the case of many boys, simple inclosures in the form of front yards and back yards were only added to more elaborate buildings or that simple corrals or barnyards would appear in connection with outdoor scenes. In this category, therefore, only more detailed work showed that (1) significantly more boys than girls build inclosures only in conjunction with elaborate structures or traffic lanes; (2) significantly more girls than boys will be satisfied with the exclusive representation of a simple inclosure; (3) girls include a significantly greater number of (static) objects and people within their inclosures; (4) boys surround their inclosures with a significantly greater number of (moving) objects.
Height of structure, then, is prevalent in the configurations of the boys. The observation of the unique details which accompany constructions of extreme height suggests that the variable representing the opposite of elevation, i.e., downfall, is equally typical for boys. Fallen-down structures, namely, “ruins,” are exclusively found among boys,10 a fact which did not change in the days of the war when girls as well as boys must have been shocked by pictorial reports of destroyed homes. In connection with the very highest towers, something in the nature of a downward trend appears regularly, but in such a diverse form that only individual examples can illustrate what is meant: one boy, after much indecision, took his extraordinarily high tower down in order to build a final configuration of a simple and low character; another balanced his tower very precariously and pointed out that the immediate danger of collapse was in itself the exciting factor in his story, in fact, was his story. In two cases extremely high and well-built façades with towers were incongruously combined with low irregular inclosures. One boy who built an especially high tower put a prone boy doll at the foot of it and explained that this boy had fallen down from its height; another boy left the boy doll sitting high on one of several elaborate towers but said that the boy had had a mental breakdown and that the tower was an insane asylum. The very highest tower was built by the very smallest boy; and, to climax lowness, a colored boy built his structure under the table. In these and similar ways, variations of a theme make it apparent that the variable high-low is a masculine variable. To this generality, we would add the clinical judgment that, in preadolescent boys, extreme height (in its regular combination with an element of breakdown or fall) reflects a trend toward the emotional overcompensation of a doubt in, or a fear for, one’s masculinity, while varieties of “lowness” express passivity and depression.
Girls rarely build towers. When they do, they seem unable to make them stand freely in space. Their towers lean against, or stay close to the background. The highest tower built by any girl was not on the table at all but on a shelf in a niche in the wall beside and behind the table. The clinical impression is that, in girls of this age, the presence of a tower connotes the masculine overcompensation of an ambivalent dependency on the mother, which is indicated in the closeness of the structure to the background. There are strong clinical indications that a scene’s “clinging” to the background connotes “mother fixation,” while the extreme foreground serves to express counterphobic overcompensation.
In addition to the dimensions “high” and “low” and “forward” and “backward,” “open” and “closed” suggest themselves as significant. Open interiors of houses are built by a majority of girls. In many cases this interior is expressly peaceful. Where it is a home rather than a school, somebody, usually a little girl, plays the piano: a remarkably tame “exciting movie scene” for representative preadolescent girls. In a number of cases, however, a disturbance occurs. An intruding pig throws the family in an uproar and forces the girl to hide behind the piano; the father may, to the family’s astonishment, be coming home riding on a lion; a teacher has jumped on a desk because a tiger has entered the room. This intruding element is always a man, a boy, or an animal. If it is a dog, it is always expressly a boy’s dog. A family consisting exclusively of women and girls or with a majority of women and girls is disturbed and endangered. Strangely enough, however, this idea of an intruding creature does not lead to the defensive erection of walls or to the closing of doors. Rather, the majority of these intrusions have an element of humor and of pleasurable excitement and occur in connection with open interiors consisting of circular arrangements of furniture.
To indicate the way in which such regularities became apparent through exceptions to the rule, we wish to report briefly how three of these “intrusive” configurations came to be built by boys. Two were built by the same boy in two successive years. Each time a single male figure, surrounded by a circle of furniture, was intruded upon by wild animals. This boy at the time was obese, of markedly feminine build, and, in fact, under thyroid treatment. Shortly after this treatment had taken effect, the boy became markedly masculine. In his third construction he built one of the highest and slenderest of all towers. Otherwise, there was only one other boy who, in a preliminary construction, had a number of animals intrude into an “open interior” which contained a whole family. When already at the door, he suddenly turned back, exclaimed that “something was wrong,” and with an expression of satisfaction, rearranged the animals along a tangent which led them close by but away from the family circle.
Inclosures are the largest item among the configurations built by girls, if, as pointed out, we consider primarily those inclosures which include a house interior. These inclosures often have a richly ornamented gate (the only configuration which girls care to elaborate in detail); in others, openness is counteracted by a blocking of the entrance or a thickening of the walls. The general clinical impression here is that high and thick walls (such as those in Victoria’s construction) reflect either acute anxiety over the feminine role or, in conjunction with other configurations, acute oversensitiveness and self-centeredness. The significantly larger number of open interiors and simple inclosures, combined with an emphasis, in unique details, on intrusion into the interiors, on an exclusive elaboration of doorways, and on the blocking-off of such doorways seems to mark open and closed as a feminine variable.
Interpretation of Results
The most significant sex differences in the use of the play space, then, add up to the following picture: in the boys, the outstanding variables are height and downfall and motion and its channelization or arrest (policeman); in girls, static interiors, which are open, simply inclosed, or blocked and intruded upon.
In the case of boys, these configurational tendencies are connected with a generally greater emphasis on the outdoors and the outside, and in girls with an emphasis on house interiors.
The selection of the subjects assures the fact that the boys and girls who built these constructions are as masculine and feminine as they come in a representative group in our community. We may, therefore, assume that these sex differences are a representative expression of masculinity and of femininity for this particular age group.
Our group of children, developmentally speaking, stand at the beginning of sexual maturation. It is clear that the spatial tendencies governing these constructions closely parallel the morphology of the sex organs: in the male, external organs, erectible and intrusive in character, serving highly mobile sperm cells; internal organs in the female, with vestibular access, leading to statically expectant ova. Yet only comparative material, derived from older and younger subjects living through other developmental periods, can answer the question whether our data reflect an acute and temporary emphasis on the modalities of the sexual organs owing to the experience of oncoming sexual maturation, or whether our data suggest that the two sexes may live, as it were, in time-spaces of a different quality, in basically different fields of “means-end-readiness.”11
In this connection it is of interest that the dominant trends outlined here seem to parallel the dominant trends in the play constructions of the college students in the exploratory study previously referred to. There the tendency was, among men, to emphasize (by dramatization or avoidance) potential disaster to women. Most commonly, a little girl was run over by a truck. But while this item occurred in practically all cases in the preliminary and abortive constructions, it remained a central theme in fewer of the final constructions. In the women’s constructions, the theme of an insane or criminal man was universal: he broke into the house at night or, at any rate, was where he should not be. At the time we had no alternative but to conclude tentatively that what these otherwise highly individual play scenes had in common was an expression of the sexual frustration adherent to the age and the mores of these college students. These young men and women, so close to complete intimacy with the other sex and shying away only from its last technical consummation, were dramatizing in their constructions (among other latent themes) fantasies of sexual violence which would override prohibition and inhibition.
In the interpretation of these data, questions arise which are based on an assumed dichotomy between biological motivation and cultural motivation and on that between conscious and unconscious sexual attitudes.
The exclusively cultural interpretation would grow out of the assumption that these children emphasize in their constructions the sex roles defined for them by their particular cultural setting. In this case the particular use of blocks would be a logical function of the manifest content of the themes presented. Thus, if boys concentrate on the exterior of buildings, on bridges and traffic lanes, the conclusion would be that this is a result of their actual or anticipated experience, which takes place outdoors more than does that of girls, and that they anticipate construction work and travel while the girls themselves know that their place is supposed to be in the home. A boy’s tendency to picture outward and upward movement may, then, be only another expression of a general sense of obligation to prove himself strong and aggressive, mobile and independent in the world, and to achieve “high standing.” As for the girls, their representation of house interiors (which has such a clear antecedent in their infantile play with toys) would then mean that they are concentrating on the anticipated task of taking care of a home and of rearing children, either because their upbringing has made them want to do this or because they think they are supposed to indicate that they want to do this.
A glance at the selection of elements and themes in their relation to conscious sex roles demonstrates how many questions remain unanswered if a one-sided cultural explanation is accepted as the sole basis for the sex differences expressed in these configurations.
If the boys, in building these scenes, think primarily of their present or anticipated roles, why are not boy dolls the figures most frequently used by them? The policeman is their favorite; yet it is safe to say that few anticipate being policemen or believe that they should. Why do the boys not arrange any sport fields in their play constructions? With the inventiveness born of strong motivation, this could have been accomplished, as could be seen in the construction of one football field, with grandstand and all. But this was arranged by a girl who at the time was obese and tomboyish and wore “affectedly short-trimmed hair”—all of which suggests a unique determination in her case.
As mentioned before, during the early stages of the study, World War II approached and broke out; to be an aviator became one of the most intense hopes of many boys. Yet the pilot shows preferred treatment in both boys and girls only over the monk, and—over the baby; while the policeman occurs in their constructions twice as often as the cowboy, who certainly is the more immediate role-ideal of these western boys and most in keeping with the clothes they wear and the attitudes they affect.
If the girls’ prime motivation is the love of their present homes and the anticipation of their future ones to the exclusion of all aspirations which they might be sharing with boys, it still would not immediately explain why the girls build fewer and lower walls around their houses. Love for home life might conceivably result in an increase in high walls and closed doors as guarantors of intimacy and security. The majority of the girl dolls in these peaceful family scenes are playing the piano or peacefully sitting with their families in the living-room; could this be really considered representative of what they want to do or think they should pretend they want to do when asked to build an exciting movie scene?
A piano-playing little girl, then, seems as specific for the representation of a peaceful interior in the girls’ constructions as traffic arrested by the policeman is for the boys’ street scenes. The first can be understood to express goodness indoors; the second, a guarantor of safety and caution outdoors. Such emphasis on goodness and safety, in response to the explicit instruction to construct an “exciting movie scene,” suggests that in these preadolescent scenes more dynamic dimensions and more acute conflicts are involved than a theory of mere compliance with cultural and conscious ideals would have it. Since other projective methods used in the study do not seem to call forth such a desire to depict virtue, the question arises whether or not the very suggestion to play and to think of something exciting aroused in our children sexual ideas and defenses against them.
All the questions mentioned point to the caution necessary in settling on any one dichotomized view concerning the motivations leading to the sex differences in these constructions.
The configurational approach, then, provides an anchor for interpretation in the ground plan of the human body; here, sex difference obviously provides the most significant over-all differentiation. In the interplay of thematic content and spatial configuration, then, we come to recognize an expression of that interpenetration of the biological, cultural, and psychological, which, in psychoanalysis, we have learned to summarize as the psychosexual.
In conclusion, a word on the house as a symbol and as a subject of metaphors. While the spatial tendencies related here extend to three-dimensionality as such, the construction of a house by the use of simple, standardized blocks obviously serves to make the matter more concrete and more measurable. Not only in regard to the representation of sex differences but also in connection with the hypochrondriac preoccupation with other growing or afflicted body parts, we have learned to assume an unconscious tendency to represent body and its parts in terms of a building and its parts. And, indeed, Freud said fifty years ago when introducing the interpretation of dreams: “The only typical, that is to say, regularly occurring representation of the human form as a whole is that of a house.”12
We use this metaphor consciously, too. We speak of our body’s “build” and of the “body” of vessels, carriages, and churches. In spiritual and poetic analogies, the body carries the connotation of an abode, prison, refuge, or temple inhabited by, well, ourselves: “This mortal house,” as Shakespeare put it. Such metaphors, with varying abstractness and condensation, express groups of ideas which are sometimes too high, sometimes too low, for words. In slang, too, every outstanding part of the body, beginning with the “underpinnings,” appears translated into metaphors of house parts. Thus, the face is a “façade,” the eyes “front windows with shutters,” the mouth a “barn door” with a “picket fence,” the throat a “drain pipe,” the chest a “bone house” (which is also a term used for the whole body), the male genital is referred to as a “water pipe,” and the rectum as the “sewer.” Whatever this proves, it does show that it takes neither erudition nor a special flair for symbolism to understand these metaphors. Yet, for some of us, it is easier to take such symbolism for granted on the stage of drama and burlesque than in dreams or in children’s play; in other words, it is easier to accept such representation when it is lifted to sublime or lowered to laughable levels.
The configurational data presented here points primarily to an unconscious reflection of biological sex differences in the projective utilization of the play space; cultural and age differences have been held constant in the selection of subjects. As for play themes, our brief discussion of possible conscious and historical determinants did not yield any conclusive trend; yet it is apparent that the material culture represented in these constructions (skyscrapers, policemen, automobiles, pianos) provides an anchor point for a reinterpretation of the whole material on the basis of comparisons with other cultures. In such comparisons houses again mean houses; it will then appear that the basic biological dimensions elaborated here are utilized at the same time to express different technological space-time experiences. Thus it is Margaret Mead’s observation that in their play Manus boys who have grown up in huts by the water do not emphasize height, but outward movement (canoes, planes), while the girls, again, concentrate on static houses. It is thus hoped that the clear emphasis in this paper on the biological will facilitate comparative studies, for cultures, after all, elaborate upon the biologically given and strive for a division of labor between the sexes and for a mutuality of function in general which is, simultaneously, workable within the body’s scheme and life-cycle, meaningful to the particular society, and manageable for the individual ego.
Case Illustrations*
Now as I show you some pictures, I wish you would pay attention to whether there are blocks at all, or whether there aren’t; if there are blocks, whether they make for high buildings or low buildings, whether the buildings are open or closed, whether the whole construction is in the foreground or in the background; and whether the buildings contain people and animals or are surrounded by people and animals. The sex differences lie in these simplest spatial relationships.
Figure 1
Fig. 1, I would classify as an open interior. There are no walls around the house, nor walls separating the different rooms of the house. This is a kind of construction which occurs significantly more often in girls’ scenes.
Fig. 2 is what I would call a “low inclosure.” A low inclosure is one that is only one block high, has no ornaments, no roof, no tower, but on occasion an “elaborate front door.” This again is on the whole a feminine construction. Boys build such inclosures primarily in connection with more complicated structures. In this case, the low inclosure is attached to the background, in fact, it opens up toward the wall.
Fig. 3 is a very feminine configuration. There are not only no walls, but a round arrangement of furniture, with either an animal or a male breaking into the circle. Sometimes both appear—such as father coming home on a lion and right behind him, upholding a semblance of law and order, a policeman. The Fig. 3 configuration was done by an Italian-American girl. You see how visibly excited that family is. The child spent quite some time turning their arms up in the air. The exciting thing is that a little pig has run into the family house, and in this case it is not the policeman but the dogs who are trying to protect the house.
Figure 2
Fig. 4 is a boy’s construction: a locomotive constructed out of blocks. I would definitely call this an “elaborate building,” and as a building it is very masculine construction. Yet, when I asked the boy, “What is so exciting about it?” he said that is a very, very narrow bridge which that train has to squeeze through. This boy had an acute and painful phimosis. Thus what dominates at the moment as a discomfort or a conflict enters by way of a unique detail in what otherwise is a normal and in fact outstanding performance.
Fig. 5 is a typical boy’s construction. There is an Indian who wants to attack a fort, which, as you see, has many guns. Boys, more often than girls, erect buildings, cover them with roofs, provide them with ornaments and other items which stick out: towers, guns, etc.
I do not need to point out that Fig. 6 is a boy’s construction. it is almost too masculine. It isn’t just height that is masculine. In connection with the highest towers and buildings there is in the exciting or unique element a downward trend, as if such height went too far. He “stuck his neck out.” In this case, the exciting element is that the proud boy sitting on top of the world is really insane, and in fact, on top of a sanatorium.
Figure 3
Fig. 7 is by a boy who at the time was highly dependent on his mother, and with a certain “façade” of aloofness. This is expressed by a high façade, leaning against the background. But not only that. When I asked him, “What is the exciting element?” he said that this man (the “father”) has placed some bombs underneath that façade. You can see the cylinders. So here again, his high façade, if you pushed slightly, would collapse. But now let’s see how such a theme may develop as time passes.
Fig. 8 shows his later construction, again a façade, this time well founded, but still against the background. The boy standing there, high and mighty. The same cylinders which before had represented bombs are now out here, each one kept by a peg from rolling towards the building. So he has regained safety. I cannot go now into that critical year in the family history.
Fig. 9 you may also find too good to be true. Here is the only child whose mother came in with her. I had to ask the mother to wait outside.
Figure 6
Figure 7
Figure 8
This child builds a boardwalk against the back wall, and another one coming out into space. Not a diagonal then, but two separate tendencies, to hang on to the background and to come out. Let me show how the repetition of a theme underlines this configuration. Here is a cowboy guarding a bull. Here is a policeman guarding a bear, a tiger and a lion. Here is an Indian guarding the baby. So that you see that in content and form the emphasis is on the “Mother watches over me, I hang on to her.” In this particular case, attempt at a symbiosis with the mother was clinically evident.
Incidentally, only two children ignored the table altogether. One was this girl, the other a very meek little black boy. He built under the table. He nearly made me cry. He didn’t dare to build where the others did.
Fig. 10 is the construction made by the same girl half a year later. The conflict over emancipation from the mother is now more clearly counterpointed. There is a “tower,” hugging the background, and there is a boardwalk reaching out, and the children sit and watch the world go by. Such changes in configuration often correspond to clear-cut changes in the interview material secured by other workers. Incidentally, the only high towers built by girls are in the back third of the table, and the highest tower built by any girl was built on the shelf back behind the table.
Figure 9
Figure 10
Fig. 11 is an example of the development of one theme during one session. This boy was an enuretic. He started with this phallic tower out in the foreground. Then he took the tower down. His configuration then went downward and backward to Fig. 12. He moved it into the background, and made it a low inclosure such as is typical for girls. At the same time, his final story “regressed,” as it were, for it concerned a sleeping baby.
Yes. In later constructions he overcame these trends. Here in Fig. 13 is his brother, at the time more “outgoing” and more masculine. The similarity of initial configuration is uncanny. I do not believe that he could have possibly known what his brother had built. He starts with a phallic tower of more moderate height. But then (Fig. 14) he builds outward, retaining the tower, and adds what I call a “barrier”—an exclusively male configuration. By the same token his story is concrete and up-to-date; this represents the entrance to the San Francisco World’s Fair.
Figure 11
Figure 12
Figure 13
Figure 14
Figure 15
Figure 16
Notes*
1 Erikson, 1937, 1938, 1940.
2 Erikson, 1938.
3 Erikson, 1937; see also Rosenzweig and Shakow, 1937.
4 The author is indebted for this opportunity to Dr. Jean W. Macfarlane, director of the Guidance Study, Institute of Child Welfare, University of California, Berkeley. The Guidance Study, in the words of its director, is “a 20-year cumulative study dedicated to the investigation of physical, mental, and personality development” (Macfarlane, 1938). Its subjects were “more than 200 children arbitrarily selected upon the basis of every third birth during a given period in Berkeley, California.” The children were matched at birth on certain socioeconomic factors and divided into a guidance group and a control group. The study thus provided for “cumulative observation of contemporaneous adjustments and maladjustments in a normal sample.”
5 At the time of this investigation, the author was not familiar with the much more comprehensive “world-play” method of Margaret Lowenfeld in England (Lowenfeld, 1939).
6 The emphasis on the element of “excitement” warrants an explanation. In the exploratory study mentioned above (Erikson, 1938), Harvard and Radcliffe students had been asked to build “a dramatic scene.” All English majors educated in the imagery of the finest in English drama, they were observed to build scenes of remarkably little dramatic flavor. Instead, they seemed to be overcome by a kind of infantile excitement, which—on the basis of an extensive data collection—could be related to childhood traumata. Conversely, a group of psychology students in another university, who decided to employ a short cut by asking their subjects to build “the most traumatic scene of their childhood,” apparently aroused resistance and produced scenes characterized by a remarkable lack of overt excitement of any kind, by a dearth in formal originality, and by the absence of relevant biographic analogies. These experiences suggested, then, that we should ask our preadolescents for an exciting scene in order to establish a standard against which the degree and kind of dramatic elaboration could be judged, while this suggestion as well as the resistance provoked by it could be expected to elicit lingering infantile ideas.
7 Honzik, 1951.
8 All names are, of course, fictitious, and facts which might prove identifying have been altered.
9 An analysis of the sex differences in the occurrence of blocks and toys in the play constructions of these preadolescents has been published by Dr. Marjorie Honzik. For a systematic configurational analysis and for a statistical evaluation see the original article (Honzik, 1951). The writer is indebted to Dr. Honzik and also Drs. Frances Orr and Alex Sherriffs for independent “blind” ratings of the photographs of the play constructions.
10 One single girl built a ruin. This girl, who suffered from a fatal blood disease, at the time was supposed to be unaware of the fact that only a new medical procedure, then in its experimental stages, was keeping her alive. Her story presented the mythological theme of a “girl who miraculously returned to life after having been sacrificed to the gods.” She has since died.
11 For an application of the configurational trends indicated here in a masculinity-femininity test cf. Franck, 1946. See also Tolman, 1932.
12 Freud, 1922.
List of References
ERIKSON, ERIK HOMBURGER. 1937. “Configurations in Play,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, VI, 2, 139–214.
——. 1938. “Dramatic Productions Test.” In Explorations in Personality, ed. H. A. MURRAY. New York: Oxford University Press.
——. 1940. “Studies in the Interpretation of Play. I. Clinical Observation of Play Disruption in Young Children.” Genetic Psychology Monographs, XXII, 557–671.
——. 1951. “Sex Differences in the Play Configurations of Preadolescents,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XXI, 4, 667–92.
FRANCK, K. 1946. “Preference for Sex Symbols and Their Personality Correlation,” Genetic Psychology Monographs, XXXIII, 2, 73–123.
FREUD, S. 1922. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. London: Allen & Unwin.
HONZIK, M. P. 1951. “Sex Differences in the Occurrence of Materials in the Play Constructions of Preadolescents,” Child Development, XXII, 15–35.
LOWENFELD, M. 1939. “The World Pictures of Children: A Method of Recording and Studying Them,” British Journal of Medical Psychology, XVIII, Part I, 65–101.
MACFARLANE, J. W. 1938. Studies in Child Guidance. I. Methodology of Data Collection and Organization. (“Society for Research in Child Development Monographs,” III, 6.)
ROSENZWEIG, S., and SHAKOW, D. 1937. “Play Technique in Schizophrenia and Other Psychoses,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, VII, 12, 32–47.
TOLMAN, E. C. 1932. Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men. New York: Century Co.
Maria Piers’s benevolent planning has made me the last speaker in this series of symposia and permits me to do two things—one hardly dreamt of, the other habitual throughout my professional life. I never dreamt of having the last word after Konrad Lorenz, Jean Piaget, and René Spitz. And I welcome the opportunity after numerous digressions to turn once more to the play of children—an infinite resource of what is potential in man. I will begin, then, with the observation of one child’s play and then turn to related phenomena throughout the course of life, reflecting throughout on what has been said in these symposia.
In the last few years Peggy Penn, Joan Erikson, and I have begun to collect play constructions of four-and five-year-old children of different backgrounds and in different settings, in a metropolitan school and in rural districts, in this country and abroad. Peggy Penn acts as the play hostess, inviting the children, one at a time, to leave their play group and to come to a room where a low table and a set of blocks and toys await them. Sitting on the floor with them, she asks each child to “build something” and to “tell a story” about it. Joan Erikson occupies a corner and records what is going on, while I, on occasion, replace her or (where the available space permits) sit in the background watching.
Figure 1
It is a common experience, and yet always astounding, that all but the most inhibited children go at such a task with a peculiar eagerness. After a brief period of orientation when the child may draw the observer into conversation, handle some toys exploratively, or scan the possibilities of the set of toys provided, there follows an absorption in the selection of toys, in the placement of blocks, and in the grouping of dolls, which soon seems to follow some imperative theme and some firm sense of style until the construction is suddenly declared finished. At that moment, there is often an expression on the child’s face which seems to say that this is it—and it is good.
Let me present one such construction as my “text.” I will give you all the details so that you may consider what to you appears to be the “key” to the whole performance. A black boy, five years of age, is a vigorous boy, probably the most athletically gifted child in his class, and apt to enter any room with the question “Where is the action?” He not only comes eagerly, but also builds immediately and decisively a high, symmetrical, and well-balanced structure. (See Fig. 1). then does he scan the other toys and, with quick, categorical moves, first places all the toy vehicles under and on the building. Then he groups all the animals together in a scene beside the building, with the snake in the center. After a pause, he chooses as his first human doll the black boy, whom he lays on the very top of the building. He then arranges a group of adults and children with outstretched arms (as if they reacted excitedly) next to the animal scene. Finally he puts the babies into some of the vehicles and places three men (the policeman, the doctor, and the old man) on top of them. That is it.
The boy’s “story” follows the sequence of placements: “Cars come to the house. The lion bites the snake, who wiggles his tail. The monkey and the kitten try to kill the snake. People came to watch. Little one (black boy) on roof is where smoke comes out.”
The recorded sequence, the final scene as photographed, and the story noted down all lend themselves to a number of research interests. A reviewer interested in sex differences may note the way in which, say, vehicles and animals are used first, as is more common for boys; or he may recognize in the building of a high and façade like structure something more common for urban boys. Another reviewer may point to the formal characteristics of the construction—which are, indeed, superior. The psychoanalyst will note aggressive and sexual themes not atypical for this age, such as those connected here with the suggestive snake. The clinician might wonder about the more bizarre element, added almost as a daring afterthought, that of men of authority (doctor, policeman, old man) being placed on top of the babies. Such unique terms, however, escape our comprehension in this kind of investigation, and this usually for lack of intimate life data.
In looking for a theme unique for this boy and unitary in its dominance, I would first focus on the block construction itself, “topped” as it is by a black boy. The meaning of this configuration emerged as we listened to Robert’s teachers. One said, “Physically, this boy can compete with boys much older than he. But when he is unhappy, he becomes quite detached and dances a two-step around the classroom with his arms stretched out sideways.” As the teacher mimicked his posture, the boy’s structure revealed itself as a body image: legs, torso, outstretched arms, and head. Another teacher gave a second clue: she had once congratulated the boy on his athletic ability, but he had responded with a despairing gesture, saying, “Yes, but my brain is no good.” She had assured him that body and brain can learn to help each other. This must have impressed him as a formula for the solution of whatever some inner conflict had come to mean to him, or his blackness, or his age, or all three. At any rate, the theme of a dancing body with a black boy as head literally stands out by priority, prominence, and centrality.
It would take a comparison of a wide variety of such constructions to make the probable meaning of this one construction convincing. Today we must accept this one performance as an example of a five-year-old’s capacity to project a relevant personal theme on the microcosm of a play table.1
Our model situation, then, owes its relevance to the observation that one child after another will use a few toys and ten to twenty minutes’ time to let some disturbing fact of his life, or some life task, become the basis for a performance characterized by a unique style of representation. Let me try to give some added dignity to the matter by merely mentioning that other play constructions done by the same child over a period of time show an impressive variation as well as a continuity of themes. And if I ever doubted that such continuity is a witness of unifying trends close to the core of a person’s development, I learned better when quite recently I had an opportunity to compare the play constructions done in the manner just described thirty years ago by children in their early teens with the dominant themes in their subsequent lives.* History, of course, assigned unexpected roles to many of these persons who are now in their early forties; and yet many of these constructions decades later can be clearly seen as a condensed statement of a theme dominant in a person’s destiny.
In studying such specimen, such condensed bits of life, the observer is loath to fit them into the theories to which he and others at different times and under other conditions have subordinated related phenomena. True, the themes presented betray some repetitiveness such as we recognize as the ‘’working through” of a traumatic experience, but they also express a playful renewal. If they seem to be governed by some need to communicate, or even to confess, they certainly also seem to serve the joy of self-expression. If they seem dedicated to the exercise of growing faculties, they also seem to serve the mastery of a complex life situation. As I would not settle for any one of these explanations alone, I would not wish to do without any one of them.
Rather, I would not quote one of my predecessors in this symposium in order to underline one of the basic principles bequeathed by him to the Erikson Institute.† Declaring that he is an “interactionist,” Piaget said: “What interests me is the creation of new things that are not preformed, nor predetermined by nervous system maturation alone, and not predetermined by the nature of the encounters with the environment, but are constructed within the individual himself.” Piaget concluded by suggesting a liberating methodology in all teaching. “Children,” he said, “should be able to do their own experimenting and their own research.” Such experimenting, however (as I felt strongly when watching Baerbel Inhelder in Geneva induce children to be experimental), relies on some playfulness and, in fact, on an interplay of the child’s inner resources with the nature of the task and the suggestiveness of interviewers who are “game.” “In order for a child to understand something,” Piaget concluded, “he must construct it himself, he must re-invent it.”
Piaget, of course, spoke of cognitive gains. But let me suggest in passing that such play procedures as the one described may well facilitate in a child an impulse to recapitulate and, as it were, to re-invent his own experience in order to learn where it might lead. If there is something to this, then we may entertain the dim hope that some such play procedure may become an adjunct to early education rather than remain a method in the service of the clinic or of research only.
But what seems to be the function of playfulness in the children’s responses both to Piaget’s cognitive challenge and to our expressive one? The most general answer necessarily points to a quality of all things alive, namely the restoration and creation of a leeway of mastery in a set of developments or circumstances. The German language has a word for it: Spielraum, which is not conveyed in a literal translation such as “playroom.” The word connotes something common also for the “play” of mechanical things, namely free movement within prescribed limits. This at least establishes the boundaries of the phenomenon: where the freedom is gone, or the limits, play ends. Such a polarity also seems to adhere to the linguistsic origins of the word play, which connotes both carefree oscillation and a quality of being engaged, committed. Language, furthermore, conveys any number of destructive and self-destructive nuances such as playing at something or with somebody, or playing oneself out; all these and other kinds of play connote the limits which end all play.
But if I should now make the first of a number of comparative leaps and ask where I would look for the closest analogy to our play constructions in adult life, I would point to the dramatist’s job. If, in this small boy’s life, the classroom and the home setting are an early equivalent of the sphere of adult actuality with its interplay of persons and institutions, then his solitary construction is the infantile model of the playwright’s work; he, too, condenses into scenes of unitary place and time, marked by a “set” and populated by a cast, the tragic (and comic) dilemma of representative individuals caught in the role conflicts of their time.
Before turning to the sphere of human playfulness in later life, let me touch on some of its fundamentals in man’s ontogenetic beginnings. Here I can point to René Spitz’s discussion of “basic education.” He, who has given us classical studies of the tragic consequences of a restriction of sensory Spielraum in early childhood, now has returned to specify what that deprivation consists of. He tells us that it is the gift of vision which first serves to integrate the “unconnected discreet stimulations” of taste, audition, smell, and touch. To him, the maternal person, visually comprehended, is both the earliest environment and the earliest educator, who “enables the child—all other things being equal—to achieve the capacity to learn.” She seems to do so by truly letting her face shine upon the newborn’s searching eyes, and by letting herself be thus verified as one “totality.” I would prefer to speak of wholeness rather than of totality, in order to indicate the very special Gestalt quality of that visual integration which permits the infant to extend what I have called his auto-sphere, and to include the inclined human face and the maternal presence in it. As Joan Erikson puts it in her essay “Eye to Eye”: “We began life with this relatedness to eyes. . . . It is with the eyes that [maternal] concern and love are communicated, and distance and anger as well. Growing maturity does not alter this eye-centeredness, for all through life our visual intercourse with others is eye-focused: the eye that blesses and curses.”2
Spitz now ascribes to organized vision the role of a first ego nucleus, anchored “in a special sector of man’s central nervous system, which permits a first integration of experience.” It will be obvious that a certain playfulness must endow visual scanning and rescanning, which leds to significant interplay as it is responded to by the mother with playful encouragement. This, in turn, confirms a sense of mutuality in both partners. It is such interplay, I would believe, which is the prime facilitator of that “ego nucleus.”
If these matters are reminiscent of religious images such as the inclined face of the Madonna and the aura of her oneness with the Christ child, I also believe that the phenomena which René Spitz (and Joan Erikson) refer to are the ontogenetic basis of faith, a fact which remains both elemental and fateful in man’s whole development. Let me illustrate this theme with an example from art history.
In our seminar on Life History and History at Harvard, Professor Helmut Wohl enlarged on some autobiographic notes left by Michelangelo. The great sculptor right after birth had been given a wet nurse because his mother was too sick to take care of him. To farm an infant out to wet nurses was, it seems, not atypical in the lives of men and women of that time; in fact, the patron of our meeting, St. Loyola, was brought up by a blacksmith’s wife. The “other woman” in Michelangelo’s case was the daughter and wife of stonemasons; and his first environment, being adjacent to a stone quarry in Settignano, must have had an inescapable auditory quality. At any rate, Michelangelo acknowledged that while his mother had given him life itself, the wet nurse (“perhaps joking or perhaps in earnest”) gave him “delight in the chisel, for it is well known that the nurse’s milk has such power in us . . . by changing the temperature of the body.”3 That chisel eventually (and under the protectorate of a fatherly patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici) became for him the executive tool of his very identity. When he created young David, Michelangelo equated “David with the sling” and “I with the chisel.”4
But if Michelangelo had two mothers, he, alas, lost both early. He was separated from the wet nurse when he returned to his mother and then his mother died when he was six years old. Wohl presented to us the sequence of Madonna images that Michelangelo sketched, painted, or sculptured, the first in his late teens and the last in his late eighties. His Madonnas always show a marked distance between mother and child, beyond the Renaissance theme of the willful boy Jesus straining away from his mother’s arms; here the Madonna herself is looking away from her child, her eyes remaining inward, distant and almost sightless. Only the very last of Michelangelo’s preserved sketches of the Madonna portrays, in Wohl’s word, a nearly “conflictless” image of mother and child. The Madonna holds the child close to her face and he turns to her fully, attempting to embrace her with his small arms. So it took the closeness of death for Michelangelo to recover what he had lost early in life, and one cannot help connecting this, the old man’s refound hope, with St. Paul’s saying, “For now we see through a glass darkly: but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”5
This, of course, would seem to be only a subsidiary theme in Michelangelo’s gigantic confrontations. He not only hammered away at his strangely tortured sculptures, sovereignly transcended by irate Moses but also painted his own vision of Adam and the Creator and of Christ at the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel. In a sonnet, he describes how, at the crippling expense of his whole physique, he gazed up at the ceiling, lifting arm and brush: “my beard toward Heaven, I feel the back of my brain upon my neck.”6 But whether or not a mighty compensatory force intensified Michelangelo’s creative furor, we may well pause to wonder at the very fact of the singular fascination which these artistically created visual worlds painted on hallowed halls hold for us. Could all this be ontologically related to the singular importance of that playfully structured visual field in the beginnings of childhood?
As we proceed, I will refer to other visualized spheres endowed with a special aura. I already have mentioned the theater. The dictionary says that the root of the word is thea—a sight, which, in turn, is related to thauma—that which compels the gaze. Maybe, the “legitimate” theater is only a special case, a condensed version of all the imagined, depicted, and theorized spheres (yes, there is thea in theory, too) by which we attempt to create coherencies and continuities in the complexity and affectivity of existence.* And we will not forget that the late Bertram Lewin spoke of a “dream screen” on which we experience our nightly visions.
But I must now ask a theoretical and terminological question. If, as we are apt to say, the maternal caretaker is the first “object” playfully engaged by the scanning eyes, who are the “objects” in later stages, up to St. Paul’s finite recognition? Are they, as some of us would be all too ready to say, “mother substitutes”?
First a word about the term object. Within a theory of cognition it makes sense to speak of object constancy as the goal of the newborn child’s gradual comprehension of the coherence and the continuity of what he perceives. It makes sense within a theory of sexual energy called libido to speak of a growing capacity to “cathex” the image of a comprehensively perceived person and thus to become able to love. And it makes sense to describe with clinical shorthand as “object loss” the various deficiencies or regressions which make it impossible for a person to maintain either a cognitive sense of another person’s wholeness or the capacity to wholly love and accept the love of other persons. All this describes the conditions for, but it neither explains nor guarantees that interplay by which the growing person and those attending him are capable of maintaining and expanding the mutuality of “basic education.”*
Today, I think we would agree on three points. Cognitively seen the first object wholeness experienced by the infant must somehow coincide with the first subject wholeness. This means that the coherence and the continuity of the object world are a condition for the coherence and continuity of the “I” as observer. This joint sense of being both subject and object becomes the root of a sense of identity.
Secondly, if for its very ‘“basic education” the child depended on a mothering supported by a family and a community, so will it, all through life, depend on equivalents (and not on substitutes) of the constituents of the early mutuality. I would emphatically agree with Peter Wolff that on each stage of development a child is “identified by the totality of operations he is capable of”; and I would conclude that the early mother’s equivalent in each later stage must always be the sum of all the persons and institutions which are significant for his wholeness in an expanding arena of interplay. As the radius of physical reach and of cognitive comprehension, of libidinal attachment and of responsible action—as all these expand, there will, of course, always be persons who are substitutes for the original mother. But that, as we know, can be a hindrance as well as a help, unless they themselves become part of that wider sphere of interaction which is essential for the increasing scope of what once was basic education. In our five-year-old’s play construction we saw reflected, in addition to impulses, fantasies and familial themes, the teacher and the school environment in the widest sense of an encounter with what can be learned. But so will, in adolescence, the peer generation and the ideological universe become part of the arena which is the equivalent of the early mother. In adulthood the work world and all the institutions which comprise the procreative and productive actuality are part of the arena within which a person must have scope and leeway or suffer severely in his ego-functioning. Thus on each step what had been “in part” will now be recognized and interacted with in its wholeness, even as the person comes to feel recognized as an actor with a circumscribed identity within a life plan. In fact, unless his gifts and his society have on each step provided the adult with a semblance of an arena of free interplay, no man can hope to reach the potential maturity of (presenile) old age when, indeed, only the wholeness of existence bounded by death can, on occasion, dimly recall to him the quality of that earliest sensory matrix.
What we so far have vaguely called interplay can be made more specific by linking it with the problem of ritualization which was discussed on the last occasion when Konrad Lorenz and I served together on a symposium.9 His subject then was the ontogeny of ritualization in animals, and mine, that in man. Julian Huxley, the chairman of that symposium, had years ago described as ritualization in animals such instinctive performances as the exuberant greeting ceremonials of bird couples, who, after a lengthy separation, must reassure each other that they not only belong to the same species but also to the same nest. This is a “bonding” procedure which, Huxley suggested, functions so as to exclude ambiguity and to facilitate unimpaired instinctive interplay. Lorenz, in turn, concentrated on the ritualizations by which some animals of the same species given to fighting matches make peace before they seriously harm each other. It was my task to point to the ontogeny of analogous phenomena in man. But with us, so I suggested, ritualization also has the burden of overcoming ambivalence in situations which have strong instinctual components (that is, drives not limited to “natural” survival), as is true for all important encounters in man’s life. Thus the ontologically earliest ritualization in man, the greeting of mother and baby, adds to the minimum facial stimulation required to attract a baby’s fascination (and eventually his smile) such motions, sounds, words, and smells as are characteristic of the culture, the class, and the family, as well as of the mothering person.
Konrad Lorenz, the foster mother of the goose child, Martina, has rightly gained fame for his ability to greet animals as well as humans in a bonding manner. In the present symposium you had the opportunity of seeing and hearing him demonstrate the lost-and-found game, which in German is called guck-guck da-da and in English, peek-a-boo. Let me call all these and similar phenomena in man ritualized interplay. This extends from the simplest habitual interaction to elaborate games, and, finally, to ornate rituals.* Today when so many ritualizations so rapidly lose their convincing power, it is especially important to remember that in this whole area of ritualized interplay the most horrible dread can live right next to the most reassuring playfulness. Little Martina was running and falling all over herself for dear survival when she pursued Konrad Lorenz, and any accidental interruption of the ritualized behavior by which animals do away with ambiguity can lead to murder. As to man, we only need to visualize again small children who cannot smile, or old persons who have lost faith, to comprehend both the singular power and the vulnerability of ritualized reassurance in the human situation.
Yet, what constitutes or what limits playful ritualization in man is as hard to define as play itself; maybe such phenomena as playfulness or youthfulness or aliveness are defined by the very fact that they cannot be wholly defined. There is a reconciliation of the irreconcilable in all ritualizations, from the meeting of lovers to all manner of get-togethers, in which there is a sense of choice and ease and yet also one of driving necessity: of a highly personalized and yet also a traditional pattern; of improvisation in all formalization; of surprise in the very reassurance of familiarity; and of some leeway for innovation in what must be repeated over and over again. Only these and other polarities assure that mutual fusion of the participants and yet also a simultaneous gain in distinctiveness for each.
Before moving on to adolescence, let me stop, in passing, to recount an experience which illustrates the relevance of all this for the school age. We recently visited a Headstart School in Mississippi, in an area where sniping nightriders and arson were then still expectable occurences whenever Blacks consolidated a new kind of community life with outside help. As visitors, we were called up to concentrate on how and by whom the children were taught and what they were learning. But we were equally struck by how these people had ritualized both “school” and “learning.” With our academic eyes it was, in fact, not quite easy to know to what extent they were playing at being a school or actually were one. Obviously the arrangements for learning and singing together, but also those for eating and conversing constituted new roles under new conditions: to grow into the spirit of these roles seemed to be the heart of the matter. This, then, was ritualized interplay in the making; and only the whole milieu, the whole combination of building and equipment and of teaching mothers and of motherly teachers, of learning children and of helpful fathers and neighbors were a collective guarantee of the survival of what was being learned—whether, at this beginning, it was much or little. We could not help thinking of other schools, more easily certified on the basis of grim accomplishment where much is learned by inexorable method but often with little spirit. And yet, the final assimilation of what has been learned would always seem to depend on any “school’s” cultural coherence with a growing environment.
The life of all schooling depends on all this; but so does the fate of the children who soon will enter the stage of adolescence—the stage when the young themselves must begin to offer each other traditional ritualizations in the form of spontaneous improvisations and of games—and this often on the borderline of what adults would consider the license of youth: will they then have learned to be playful and to anticipate some leeway of personal and social development?
Children cannot be said or judged to be “acting” in a systematic and irreversible way, even though they may, on occasion, display a sense of responsibility and a comprehension of adult responsibility which astonish us. Young people, on the other hand (as we realize in our time more than ever before), are apt to continue to play and to playact in ways which may suddenly prove to have been irreversible action—even action of a kind which endangers safety, violates legality, and, all too often, forfeits the actor’s future. And, in recent years, youth closer to adulthood has begun on a large scale to usurp responsibility and even revolutionary status in the arena of public action. This had resulted in lasting consequences even where the action itself may not have been much more than a dare or a prank on a stage of imagined power. Never before, then, has it been more important to understand what is happening in that wide area where juvenile play-acting and historical action meet.
The return in adolescence of childlike and childish behavior in the midst of an increasing anticipation of and participation in adulthood has been treated in unnumerable textbooks. They point to the impulsivity of sexual maturation and of the power of the aggressive equipment and yet also to the vastly expanded cognitive horizon. There is the intensity of peer-group involvement at all costs, a search for inspiration (now often forfeited to drugs), and yet also the desperate need (yes, an ego need) for an ideologically unified universe sanctioned by leaders who would make both freedom and discipline meaningful. To all this, I have added the discussion of identity—and of fidelity. In my book such postadolescent “virtue” is meant to represent a minimum evolutionary requirement rather than a maximized ideal.* Actually the formulation of such successive virtues was intended to follow the clinical formula (quoted in Konrad Lorenz’s paper) of our lamented friend Donald Hargreaves: “What is the normal survival function of the process here disturbed?” In other words, I have emphasized fidelity because I think I have observed the fateful deficit in ego-strength resulting from the absence of such commitments as would permit youth to anchor its readiness for loyalty in social reality; and the equally fateful deficit in meaningful social interplay resulting from a state of society in which old fidelities are being eroded. I would, therefore, follow Konrad Lorenz in asserting that all through man’s socio-genetic development, rites and rituals have attempted to attract and to invest that fidelity. Where and when both generations can participate in them with affective and cognitive commitment, these rites, indeed, are performing “functions analogous to those which the mechanisms of inheritance perform in the preservation of the species.” Today, as we all agree, a deep and worldwide disturbance exists in this central area of ritualized interplay between the generations.
But let me again take recourse in an observation which every reader can match with variations from his own experience. A few years ago I was invited to attend a confrontation between the trustees and the students of a great university which, months before, had been one of the first to undergo what for a while became obligatory crises on a number of campuses: occupation of the administration’s citadel and “liberation” of captive documents; brutally effective police intervention followed by a rapidly spreading student strike; a confused arousal of the faculty; and finally a widespread bewilderment and depression on the part of almost all concerned, including the most learned and the most politically adept minds.
At this meeting there were old and wealthy men, the trustees; there were learned men and guests like me; there were some students (however selected); and there were specialists in group meetings who lent a certain technical expertise to what could have been a natural mixture of reticence and spontaneous confrontation. After a few days of plenary speeches and more or less strained small group discussions, the students decided to present their case in their own way and to confront the trustees with an improvisation. The setting was a kind of amphitheater. One young man with long blond hair played a leading part; he had the words Jesus Saves printed in strong colors on his sweat shirt. He exhorted the elders to “give in gracefully” to certain nonnegotiable demands. Another young man, having embraced the first in brotherliness, took him by the arm and led him before some of the men of the Establishment, one by one. Pointing to the flaming motto on his friend’s sweat shirt, he asked these men whether the inscription meant anything to them—and what had they done recently for their neighbors? Now, there are probably few groups of men who (in the light of their community’s standards of charity) have done more for their “neighbors,” both openly or privately, than have some trustees of our colleges. But, of course, the students had intended to confront them with their sins against the university’s actual neighbors in the poor housing areas surrounding the campus and owned by the university. And they made it clear that they did not expect answers other than confessions of guilt. The old men, in turn, tried desperately to understand, because that was what they had come for. The situation became extremely tense, some students themselves (as they said later) beginning to feel like “freaks.” Some faculty and some visitors began to show bitter annoyance.
A scene such as this leaves the viewer in doubt as to whether he is witnessing a theatrical improvisation, a mocking demonstration, or, indeed, an act of religious ritualization. To me, it was all of this and I said so: there were ceremonial fragments assembled in a manner half-mocking and half-deadly serious, flaunting as well as protesting such themes as brotherly love, charity, and sacrifice. But what had kept the performance from coming off was a failure of ethical nerve; the students had, with total righteousness, demanded that everyone should admit his sins except themselves, thus using Jesus to mock the elders; a mere turnabout of punitiveness, however, could never lead to a meaningful covenant.
I saw in this act (even/and) just where it failed, a combination of themes for which our time must find new forms, whether or not the leaders and organizers of such events consciously intend such renewal. The students, in fact, had succeeded (at the price of taking chances with their own credibility) to elucidate an overweening problem; they had played with a ritual fire which youth alone cannot possibly contain in a new universal form, and which in changing times can emerge only from a joint adulthood willing to take chances with new roles and that means: to play where it counts.
Let me now turn to a historical example. One of the most noteworthy revolutionary ritualizations of recent times has been the founding of the Black Panther Party—noteworthy in our context as an illustration of youthful political imagination on the very border of disaster. Such ritualization can go to the core of history, whether it “succeeds” or not; it is successful if it makes an unforgettable point and if it has the flexibility to go on from there.
Much of the Panthers’ history has happened in the dark of the ghetto as well as in that legal twilight which confuses and scares the “law-abiding.” Yet, there is no denial of a certain genius in the translation of values which Huey P. Newton (he was twenty-two years old at the time) and Bobby Seale displayed when they cast themselves and other young blacks in totally new roles, and this at a time when black youth in this country needed new images of dignity and of heroism. The fact that this new image included gun-carrying in public seemed revolting to many, while it is, in fact, a traditional historical stance in formerly exploited and belittled minorities: the autonymous man with his own gun, a man ready to use it both as a symbol and as a weapon for the defense of his and his people’s dignity—this stance has been true of the first American revolutionaries as well as in the radically different contexts of the modern Jews and the Diaspora,* and the erstwhile British Indians, all youths whom successful revolutions are apt to forget. Sometimes, there is a book involved as well as a gun: a book which testifies both to tradition and to the power of literacy. In Newton’s case, it was a law book such as that found on the street on the night in Oakland when a policeman (himself only twenty-three years old) lost his life in a scuffle never clearly reconstructed. Newton survived and prevailed through years of solitary confinement with a healthy body and with undaunted stature. The image he created was based on the usurpation of the black American of the oldest right of all (other) Americans (a right engraved on the imaginations of our young and the young abroad by way of Western movies), namely to bear arms in the creation of a semblance of legality in an area not yet defined in its traditionalities.
Originally young Newton not only insisted on the traditional legality of the arming of citizens, but also attempted to sanction it with a new uniform and a discipline which, I think, even Gandhi might have acknowledged (if with some sadness) as a necessary step toward a nonviolent approach—necessary for the simple reason that he who would not know how to use a gun both well and with restraint would not know how and when not to use it. But Newton, in addition to protesting dramatically the negative identity of his own people as the meek and helpless victims of the lynch law and its daily ramifications, established as the enemy of his people the very uniformed men who had become to them representatives of a lawless law employed to protect usurped privilege rather than legality and to punish powerlessness as much as illegality. Thus he attempted to turn the very image of the protectors of such law into a negative identity, namely, that of victimizers of the poor. The Black Panthers, then, are of interest precisely because, according to Newton’s intent, this original “violence” was to be contained in a new code of discipline.
Revolutionary activity, however, is always beset with the dilemma of defining who and what is the law, and what disruptive act, when, and where, is political rather than criminal. There may be also the proud and mocking creation of a new “species,” as attested to by the very party name, which, in the case of the Panthers, is that of an animal said to be ferocious primarily in defense, and the relentless and publicist verbal weapon of calling men of the “legitimate” police force “pigs.” Such debasement of the opponent is a moral violence which not only can arouse murderous hate in the defamed, it can also become a retrogressive stance in the defamer. In the American Black, of course, such defamation is grounded more than in any other social group, both in a common history of daily and total defenselessness (or what Newton refers to as the “truly oppressed”) and in an explosive folk language long the only outlet for in-turned aggression—and in fact used with mocking as well as murderous abandon against other Blacks. The original imagery of the young leaders of the Black Panther movement (and I am talking about these origins of the movement and not about the tedious stance of its propagan-distic habituation) surely contained, therefore, the possibility of creating a new set of roles, which often may have appeared to be all too grandiosely staged, but which did link past and future by recapitulating historical images in a radically new setting. True, certain titles of command seemed rather florid in the absence of an assured body of followers; but it must be remembered that revolutionary language—at total risk to itself—always challenges history to confirm what has already been claimed as certain. This is, of course, compounded where the revolutionaries are young, for youth and revolution both play with that theater of action where personal conversion and radical rejuvenation confirm each other, to the point that history’s agreement is taken for granted. And sometimes, history assents. Our black revolutionaries differ from others in that they are not rebelling against a father generation. Their symbol of the Establishment is “the man”; yet, both examples given remind us to look for the adult counterplayers in attempted ritualizations demanding new kinds of generational transfer. And there we often find glaring vacancies in the cast required for the fulfillment of the script—vacancies impossible to fill by excitable police or by uncomfortable judges.
This is the “gap,” then; Konrad Lorenz would convince us that it exists not only because of a combination of historical and technological changes, but because of a misdevelopment of evolutionary proportions. He reminds us of the pseudotribal character of much of the present-day rebellion; and to him the widespread and truly “bizarre distortions of cultural behavior” represent a new “infantilism” and a regression to a primitivity which he considers analogous to a “disturbance of the genetic blueprint.” Looking at revolutionary youth from the point of view of an evolutionary ethologist, apparently he feels that humanity has reached a critical point when the changes in social norms necessary within the period between generations have begun to “exceed the capacity of the pubertal adapting mechanisms.”
Lorenz introduces into the discussion a term which I used at the London symposium where I drew attention to the phenomenon of cultural psuedospeciation—meaning the tendency of human groups to behave as if they were the chosen species. Lorenz discusses the matter vividly:
In itself, it is a perfectly normal process and even a desirable one. . . . There is, however, a very serious negative side to it: pseudo-speciation is the cause of war. . . . If the divergence of cultural development has gone far enough, it inevitably leads to the horrible consequence that one group does not regard the other as quite human. In many primitive languages, the name of the tribe is synonymous with that of man—and from this point of view it is not really cannibalism if you eat the fallen warriors of the hostile tribe! Pseudo-speciation suppresses the instinctive mechanisms normally preventing the killing of fellow members of the species while, diabolically, it does not inhibit intra-specific aggression in the least.
Before coming to the implications of pseudospeciation for youth and adulthood, however, let me ask what importance it may have for the problem of play. In the animal world, obviously the play of the young is linked with the adaptation of the species to a section of the natural environment. The play of the human child, however, must orient him within the possibilities and the boundaries first of what is imaginable and possible, and then to what is most effective and most permissible in a cultural setting. One of the playing child’s tasks, then, is to try out some role pretensions within what he gradually learns is his society’s version of reality and to become himself within the roles and techniques at his disposal. No wonder, then, that man’s play takes place on the border of dangerous alternatives and is always beset both with burdening conflicts and with liberating choices.
At the same time, however, human play as well as adult ritualizations and rituals seem to serve the function of adaptation to the “pseudo” aspects of human “reality,” for, as I will point out in some detail later, man, in addition to making gigantic strides in learning to know nature and the uses it can be put to, has . . . striven to maintain prejudged assumptions concerning the ordained excellence of particular versions of man. Thus, his playful imagination not only does serve all that is and could be but also is forced to endow that which, so he is clearly taught, must be if he is to be judged sane and worthy. Youthful rebellion always attempts to create new leeway for new and potential roles in such assumed realities; but the very condition of pseudospeciation has made man’s playfulness a matter both of freedom and of bondage, both of enhanced life and of multiplied death.
I have attempted to illustrate the way in which youthful playacting and the assumption or usurpation of historical roles can border on each other. But we must now account for the fact that new ritualizations are, indeed, apt to miscarry because of the “horrible fact that the hate which the young bear us is tribal hate.” And, indeed, it seems that the shift in the overall ecological and technological conditions of mankind has led, at least within the orbit of the American industrial world culture (which includes the World War II enemies of the United States), to a new grouping of pseudospecies: on one side all the young people across the borders of former empires and on the other the whole “old” generation.
It is obvious enough that the young reject, above all, the insignia and the attitudes which have marked their victimization and heroification as soldiers serving one of the pseudospecies extant now. Because they carry this protest literally on the sleeve, we can now add to the subjects to be reviewed the ritual importance of human display, for we are reminded of the prominence, in all of classical warfare, of the resplendent uniforms, topped by animal plumage, which was intended to unite and divide the young men of the world into warriors serving either the right and godly or the wrong and evil species: that the display of physical insignia signifying human pseudospeciation imitate those of animal speciation is only too obvious. And it begins to make sense that the rebellious youth of today is displaying, instead, an impressive array of self-contradicting insignia, often mocking all uniformity by mixing fragments of military uniforms (and even of flags) with the ornaments of relaxed brotherhood. For youth attempts to create not only new arenas for involvements and commitments, but also such new types of heroes as are essential to the emergence of a whole “human being” representative of mankind itself—if and when the old have abrogated their pseudospecies, or have been destroyed. In the meantime, youth often seems to feel that it can enforce basic changes only by mockingly insisting on a moratorium without end and an unlimited arena of its own, and it is often only with drugs that they can aver the remaining boundaries and simulate a free territory within. This is a state of affairs open to all kinds of group retrogressions as well as personal regressions.* But, then, adolescent regressions always have been, to some extent, semideliberate recapitulations of childhood fantasy serving the adaptive purpose of reviving what infantile playfulness was sacrificed to the established order for use on new ideological frontiers. Similarly, large-scale historical retrogressions often seem to be semideliberate attempts to invoke the revolutions of the past in the name of a future revolution as yet neither defined nor localized nor fixed in time. But the extremes noted here may be necessary aspects of shift, the outcome of which can only be appraised when it will be clear where such playful trends combine with the discipline and the competence necessary for sustained change.
If one accepts the theory of a shift from the pseudospecies mentality to an all-human one (and this is the hopeful aspect on which Konrad Lorenz and I would agree), one may well see in the radical display of youth an upheaval necessary for an elemental regrouping which transvaluates past ideals of excellence and heroism in the service of a more universal speciation. To be sure, much horrible hate and much resultant paralysis is thus transferred to the intergenerational struggle where it appears to be hopelessly raw and untrained in comparison to the age-old stance and stamina of uniformed and disciplined military behavior. This probably is the cause of occasional enactments of totally “senseless” cruelty and of dramatic murder for the sake of a vindictive illusion of extinguishing the established.
But we may well remind ourselves of two momentous developments characteristic of the other, the adult side of playing history. The first is the fact that adult man, with the help of the most creative expansion of scientific and organizational leeway (remember Einstein’s playfulness), has created a world technically ready to eliminate mankind in one instant for the sake of one nation or another that cannot stop playing empire. Is it any wonder that some of the most romantic and the most destructive behavior in modern youth seems to mock us by anticipating the day when the nuclear holocaust has occurred?
The second fact is the disintegration of paternalistic dominance, both in familiar relations and in the “minds of man.” For this again we blame primarily the antipaternal attitude of the young. Following Freud we have obediently persisted in referring to the origins of the rebellious complex in childhood as the Oedipus Complex. But (as Dr. Piers has also pointed out in these symposia) we have thus immortalized as inescapable only the behavior of the son Oedipus, who unknowingly slew his father as the Oracle had predicted, while we have paid little attention to the fact that this father had such faith in the Oracle’s opaque announcement and in his own interpretation of it, that he was willing to dispose of his son. But maybe Laius did only more openly and more dramatically what may be implicit in circumcisions, puberty rites, and “confirmations” of many kinds. As a prize for certified adulthood, the fathers all limit and forestall some frightening potentialities of development dangerous to “the system.” And they all strive to appropriate the new individual for the pseudospecies, marking and branding him as potentially dangerous, initiating him into the prescribed limits of activities, inducting him into a preferred service, and preparing him for being sacrificed in holy wars. Maybe they only underscore ritually what human development and the structure of human society accomplish anyway. For after having played at a variety of choices, most adults submit to so-called reality, that is, a consolidation fo established fact, of acquired methods, of defined roles, and of overweening values. Such consolidation is deemed necessary not only for a style of acting and interacting, but, above all, for the bringing up of the next generation of children. They, it is hoped, will, from their childhood play and their juvenile role experimentation, move right into the dominant means of production and will invest their playfulness and their search for identity in the daily necessity to work for the higher glory of the pseudospecies.
Today, Laius and Oedipus face one another in a different confrontation. For even as the youth of divergent countries begin to look, talk, and feel alike—and this whether they are rebelling against industrial civilization or are, in fact, rapidly learning the prerequisite skills—so does the older generation appear to become more and more alike and stereotyped. For they impersonate a new and universal type, the efficient member of an organized occupation or a profession, playing free and equal while being at the mercy of mass-produced roles, of standardized consumership, and of rampant bureaucratization. But all these are developments which, in fact, take the play out of work—and this not (or not only) because of a Calvinistic choice to separate the two for the sake of righteousness, but because it can’t be helped. And this seems to be the message of much of the mockery of the young, that if there must be defined roles, it may be better to go on playing at choosing them than to become their ready puppets.
A concluding section on play in adulthood can only be an opening section for another, a future essay. For here we enter both the twilight of what is called “reality” and the ambiguities of the word play—and these two assuredly are related to each other. Even as man protests the pure truth just because he is the animal who can lie—and pretend to be natural—so he strives to be in tune with hard reality just because he so easily falls for illusions and abstractions. And both truth and reality are at issue when man must define what he means when he says he is playing—or not playing.
The poet has it that man is never more human than when he plays. But what must he do and be, and in what context, to be both adult and playful; must he do something in which he feels again as if he were a playing child, or a youth in a game? Must he step outside of his most serious and most fateful concerns? Or must he transcend his everyday condition and be “beside himself” in fantasy, ecstasy, or “togetherness”?
Maybe an epigenetic view makes it unnecessary to categorize so sharply. The adult once was child and a youth. He will never be either again; but neither will he ever be without the heritage of those former states. In fact, I would postulate that, in order to be truly adult, he must on each level renew some of the playfulness of childhood and some of the sportiveness of the young. As we have seen, the child in his play and games as well as the young person in his pranks and sports and forays into politics, protected as they both are, up to a point, from having their play-acting “count” as irreversible action, nevertheless are dealing with central concerns both of settling the past and of anticipating the future. So must the adult, beyond playful and sportive activities specified as such, remain playful in the center of his concerns and concerned with opportunities to renew and increase the leeway and scope of his and his fellow man’s activities. Whatever the precursors of a specifically adult playfulness, it must grow with and through the adult stages even as these stages can come about only by such renewal. But here we are faced with a threefold dilemma: the adult’s marked inner separation (repression and all) from much of his childhood; the limitations of adolescent identity development in terms of available roles; and a certain intrinsic intolerance in adult institutions to the renewal of the identity crisis. Adult institutions want to ban the turmoil of youth even as they want to banish the thought of decline and death. This leaves adulthood in a position of double defensiveness and with a need to bolster the boundaries of what to a given generation of adults seems “real.”
“Creative” people know this, and the poet Frost said it. In an encounter with two tramps who see him chopping away at some wood and remind him of the fateful division of work and play, he intones:
But yield who will to their separation
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the play is work for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.11
We may for the moment ignore the fact that the men thus addressed were looking for work; we know that one man’s play and work may be another’s unemployment. But taking Frost’s creativity as a measure, we may add to his formulation the postulate that the adult, in combining vocation and avocation, creates leeway for himself while creating leeway for those within his scope of mutuality.
At the beginning of this essay, I compared a child’s solitary play construction with the function of a dramatic performance in adulthood: in both, a theme and a conflict, dominant in the “big” world, are meaningfully condensed into a microsphere and into a spectacle and a speculum, a mirror of inner and outer conditions. (The stage play is a tragedy, where a representative person is shown as one who can envisage greater freedom for his time and age but finds that he has forfeited it for lack of inner and outer Spielraum.) The dimly lit theater thus deals with the reflection and individual fate of all those areas of public action which occur in “all the world,” in the light of day. But if man, as pointed out, calls these spheres “theaters,” “spectacles,” and “scenarios” one wonders sometimes which is metaphorical for what. For man endows such spheres of highest reality, too, with a ceremonial and procedural aura which permits him to get engaged with a certain abandon, with intensified loyalty, and often with increased energy and efficiency, but also with a definite sacrifice of plain good judgment. Some of these special spheres are endowed with rituals in super-real halls, be they cathedrals, courts, or castles. But their hypnotic power as a visionary sphere transcends all locality and institutionalization; we may think here of the monarchy or the presidency, of the law courts or the seats of government; all these, while denoting an obligation of superhuman excellence, are also apt to cover, with everybody’s connivance, a multitude of contradictions and pretenses accepted as the “rules of the game.” Any observing visitor to a legislative chamber or a chief executive’s mansion will not escape an occasional eerie sense of unreality in such factories of decision which must determine irreversible shifts in what will seem compellingly real to so many, and in what to generations to come will seem worth living, dying, and killing for—remember the Iron Curtain! Most fateful for mankind as a species (we cannot say this too often) is the tendency to redivide the political scene in such a way that those “on the other side” suddenly appear to be changed in quality, reduced to statistical items and worthy only of “body counts.” However, the aura of some (if not all) of these spheres is being diminished in our very time by the production through the media of new spheres of vision, with their strange interplay of service, truth, and business. Some such spheres, as the “national scene,” or the “forum of public opinion,” or the “arena of politics,” are also being studied in their major dimensions by social science; but we know as yet little about their dynamic influences on personality, on identity, and, indeed, on sanity—either in individuals or in cliques, in organized groups or in the masses. The fact is that such phenomena, in turn, can only be studied by “fields” of approach and “schools” of thought and by theoretical systems which themselves fascinate by their ability to organize appearances and to make visible the factual truth. But science, at least, perseveres in an in-built critique of science itself as well as of the scientist; and this in terms increasingly accessible to all “species” of men. If factuality is the soul of all search for reality, then mankind is on the way to agreeing to a joint reality; and if truth can only emerge from an all-human actuality, all men may, someday soon, be “in touch” with each other.
I am suggesting for a future occasion, then, that we take a new good look not only at those occasions when adults claim that they are playing like children, or play-acting on the legitimate stage, but also at such other occasions when they insist with deadly righteousness that they are playing for “real” stakes and yet, sooner or later, appear to have been role-playing puppets in imaginary spheres of “necessity.”
If at the beginning of this paper I made a “leap” from play construction to theater, let me now make one back from adult reality to infancy. Could it not be that all these spheres have a place in adult man’s life equivalent to that visual sphere which in the very first year of life provides, all at once, an integrated sensory universe, a mutuality with a maternal person, and a beginning of inner order, and thus provides the basic leeway for growth, action, and interaction? I do not wish to overdo this; in adulthood such visualized spheres obviously overlap with concrete areas of established power and organized technique which have their own rationale of continuity and growth. Yet they all share in that quality of vision which not only renders experience vastly more comprehensible, but also provides man with collective and individual affirmations of an emotional kind. And, indeed, the vision is often attended to by some kind of goddess (made visible as Nike in graceful flight, or Freedom baring her breast to the storm of revolution, “blind” Justice, or somber and selfless Truth, not to speak of “smiling” Success) which, indeed, gives recognition in turn for having been recognized. These visions, it must be repeated, can bring out the best in man as they encourage, with a greater leeway, courage and solidarity, imagination and invention. The human tragedy has been and is that the highest of these goddesses are overshadowed by the demands of the pseudospecies, which eventually employs even the most heroic deeds and the most sincere gains in knowledge, for the exploitation and enslavement, the denigration and annihilation, or, at any rate, the checkmating of other “kinds” of men. As any visual order must always discriminate as well as abstract, it is hard for man not to make himself more real and his world more comprehensible without envisaging others as expendable or nonexistent—even eight hundred million Chinese behind a bamboo curtain.
And then, there are the great adults who are adult and are called great precisely because their sense of identity vastly surpasses the roles foisted upon them, their vision opens up new realities, and their gift of communication revitalizes actuality. In freeing themselves from rigidities and inhibitions they create new freedoms for some oppressed categories of men, find a new leeway for suppressed energies, and give new scope to followers, who, in turn, feel more adult for being sanctioned and encouraged. The great, we say, are “gifted” with genius; but, of course, they often must destroy, too, and will seem evil to those whom they endanger, or whom they exclude.
Freud, in freeing the neurotics of his repressed era from the onus of degeneracy, invented a method of playful communication called “free association” which has taught man (way beyond the clinical setting) to play back and forth between what is most conscious to him and what has remained unverbalized or become repressed. And he has taught man to give freer play to fantasies and impulses which, if not realized in sexual foreplay or “sublimated” in actuality, help only to narrow his Spielraum to the point of explosions in symptomatic actions.
But as Freud “took morality for granted,” he also treated adulthood and reality as matters on which all enlightened men would agree. Yet, I think, he made the point that only when man has faced his neurotic isolation and stagnation is he free to let his imagination and his sense of truth come up against the existential dilemmas which transcend passing realities.
Marx, it is interesting to recall, spoke of a coming adulthood of the species. At the celebration of Marx’s 150th birthday in Trier, Robert Tucker pointed out that “self-realization, or becoming fully human, was not for Marx a problem that an individual person could solve on his own. It could only be solved within the framework of the self-realization of the species at the end of history.’12 Marx referred to history both as an Entfremdungsgeschicbte that made of man an alienated creature, and as a growth process of the human race, an Entstehungsakt; only a kind of rebirth could overcome the submersion of the aesthetic production “according to the laws of beauty” and the deadening of all playfulness by unfree labor. Tucker suggested that we may today well be in a final “maturation crisis.” “If so,” he added, “the most serious aspect of the crisis is the . . . tendency of most people and even the leaders of nations to assume that no great change is called for, that we immature humans are already grown up.”
Now, a few years later, it is obvious that this awareness, while maybe not yet accessible to “most people” and their leaders, has spread at least to the point where the young people deny that the older ones have grown up. In fact, there is a pervasive suspicion of the whole idea of growing up; and there is also an increased awareness of history, which among other things teaches that the revolutionary leeway gained yesterday can become the obsession and the suppression of today, and this for reasons immanent in greatness itself as well as in adulthood itself. If great men inspire vast changes with a creative playfulness both driven and (necessarily) destructive, their followers must consolidate change, which means to take the risk out of it. Neither the task of a Marxian critique of unconscious “historical” motivation nor the Freudian one of an inner enslavement to the immaturity both of impulse and of conscience can be said to be accomplished in any foreseeable future.
But the method of yesterday can also become part of a wider consciousness today. Psychoanalysis can go about defining its own place in history and yet continue to observe its traditional subject matter, namely the symptoms of repressions and suppressions—including their denial. It can study successive re-repressions in relation to historical change; there can be little doubt but that our enlightened age has set out to prove Freud wrong by doing openly and with a vengeance what he said were secret desires, warded off by inhibitions. We can learn to find out how we have contributed to such developments by our exclusive reliance (also culturally and historically determined) on the “dominance of the intellect” which often made the acceptance of psychoanalytic theory and vocabulary the measure of a man’s adaptation. We know now (and the study of play confirms us in this) that the comprehension of Freud’s Wirklichkeit must go beyond one of its meanings, namely reality, and include that of actuality.13 For if reality is the structure of facts consensually agreed upon in a given stage of knowledge, actuality is the leeway created by new forms of interplay. Without actuality, reality becomes a prison of stereotypy, while actuality always must retest reality to remain truly playful. To understand this fully we must study for each stage of life the interpenetration of the cognitive and the affective as well as the moral and the instinctual. We may then realize that in adulthood an individual gains leeway for himself, as he creates it for others: here is the soul of adult play.
In conclusion, we must take note of another “gap” in our civilization which only partly coincides with the generational one. It is that between a grim determination to play out established and divisive roles, functions, and competencies to their bitter ends; and, on the other hand, new kinds of group life characterized by a total playfulness, which simulates vast imagination (often drug-induced), sexual and sensual freedom, and a verbal openness often way beyond the integrative means of individuals, not to speak of technological and economic realities. In the first area, that of habituated pragmatism, leading individuals make a grim effort at pretending that they are in full command of the facts and by no means role-playing—a claim which in fact gives them a vanishing credibility. The playful crowd, on the other hand, often seems to play all too hard at playing and at pretending that they are already sharing a common humanity, by-passing those technical and political developments which must provide the material basis for “one world.” But man is a tricky animal; and adults playing all too hard at role-playing or at simulating naturalness, honesty, and intimacy may end up being everybody and yet nobody, in touch with all and yet not close to anybody.
Yet, there are also signs that man may indeed be getting ready to renounce his claims on the ancient prerogatives of special pseudospecies, such as the abuse of others and the waste of resources in the environment and in inner life. Psychoanalysis, at this juncture, must remain vigilant in regard to the anxieties and rages aroused where a wider identity will endanger existing styles of instinctuality and identity and traditional visions of morality and reality.
But we must always also be receptive to new forms of interplay; and we must always come back to the children and learn to recognize the signs of unknown resources which might yet flourish in the vision of one mankind on one earth and its outer reaches.
Notes
1 Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963).
2 In The Man-Made Object, ed. Gyorgy Kepes (New York: Braziller, 1966).
3 Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelangiolo Buonarotti (Rome, 1553). Here translated by Alice Wohl.
4 Charles Seymour, Michelangelo’s David: A Search for Identity (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, 1967), 7.
5 I Corinthians 13:12.
6 Creighton Gilbert, Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), 5.
7 Jacques Hadamard, The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field (Princeton: Princeton University, 1945), 142–43.
8 Quoted in Holton, “On Trying to Understand Scientific Genius,” The American Scholar, 41, 1 (Winter 1971/72).
9 Erik H. Erikson, “A Discussion of Ritualisation of Behavior in Animals and Man,” organized by Sir Julian Huxley, F.R.S., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 772, 251 (1966) 337–49.
10 “Reflections on the Dissent of Contemporary Youth,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 51, 11 (1970).
11 Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud-Time.”
12 Robert Tucker, The Marxian Revolutionary Idea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 215.
13 Erik H. Erikson, Insight and Responsibility (New York: W. W. Norton, 1964), chap. 5.
First published in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 6 (1937), 139–214 under the name of Erik Homburger.
* Report on a procedure conducted as a part of the Studies in Personality at the Harvard Psychological Clinic (Dr. Henry A. Murray).
First published in Genetic Psychology Monographs, 22 (1940): 557–671.
References are cited by bracketed numbers in the text. For full citations see listing of references at the conclusion of this paper.
* Literally “play space” but meaning a sphere of active leeway for interaction.
First presented in 1949, in the form of two lectures, in the Seminar on Dream Interpretation of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Somewhat enlarged after the publication of Freud’s letters to Fliess.
First published in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2 (1954), 5–56. Reprinted in Psychoanalytic Psychiatry and Psychology. Clinical and Theoretical Papers: The Austen Riggs Center, I, eds. Robert P. Knight and Cyrus R. Friedman (New York: International Universities Press, 1954), 131–70.
References are cited by bracketed numbers in the text. For full citations see listing of references at the conclusion of this paper.
First published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 21, (1951), 667–92. Reprinted in a shorter version in Childhood and Contemporary Cultures, eds. Margaret Mead and Martha Wolfenstein, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 324–41.
* Editor’s Note: At the conclusion of this paper, there appear a series of case illustrations excerpted from another article by Erikson (1958, p. 299.) These illustrations provide vivid examples of the emergence of sex differences through spatial relationships.
* Editor’s Note: A Configurational Analysis Scale and associated block configuration drawings have been added to help illustrate these classifications (Erikson, 1951, see References, p. 310).
* Excerpted from “Sex Differences in Play Construction of Twelve-year-old Children.” In Discussions on Child Development. General Proceedings of the Third Meeting of the World Health Organization Study Group, 3, eds. J. M. Tanner and B. Inhelder (New York: International Universities Press, 1958)
* For full citations, see List of References that follows.
Presented at a symposium sponsored by Loyola University of Chicago and the Erikson Institute for Early Education. Other conference participants were Jean Piaget, Peter H. Wolff, René A. Spitz, Konrad Lorenz, and Lois Barclay Murphy. First published in Play and Development ed. Maria W. Piers, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1972), 127–67.
* As recorded in the Institute of Human Development of the University of California.
† Quotations from preceding symposia are taken from the original transcripts.
* I owe to Gerald Holton a number of suggestive references to Einstein’s meditations on the nature of his mathematical inspiration. It is said that Einstein was not yet able to speak when he was three years old. He preferred communing with building blocks and jigsaw pieces. Later (in 1945) he wrote to Jacques Hadamard: “Taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought—before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.”7 And, again: “Man seeks to form for himself, in whatever manner is suitable for him, a simplified and lucid image of the world (Bild der Welt), and so to overcome the world of experience by striving to replace it to some extent by this image. That is what the painter does, and the poet, the speculative philosopher, the natural scientist, each in his own way. Into this image and its formation he places the center of gravity of his emotional life, in order to attain the peace and serenity that he cannot find within the narrow confines of swirling personal experience.” 8
* The questioning of terms easily becomes part of wider concern about conceptual habituation. What we have now heard of the importance of vision must make us wonder to what extent the “classical” psychoanalytic technique itself may have helped shape some of our concepts. For if vision is, indeed, the basic organizer of the sensory universe and if the beholding of one person’s face by another is the first basis of a sense of mutuality, then the classical psychoanalytic treatment situation is an exquisite deprivation experiment. It may be the genius of this clinical invention that it systematically provokes the patient’s “free” verbal associations at the expense of a visual word, which, in turn, invites the rushing in of old images seeking a healing mutuality with the therapist. But sooner or later every field must become aware of the extent to which its principal procedure codetermines the assumed nature of the observed and the terms decreed most appropriate to conceptualize that nature.
* It specifically excludes, of course, the symptomatic “rituals” of isolated neurotics, as well as all derisive uses of the word ritualization as synonymous with repetitiveness and rigidification. All these, in fact, connote symptoms of deritualizations in our sense.
* I must repeat this in view of such well-meant pictorial presentations of my stages of life as that of the Sunday Times of New York, where the successive virtues were posed by models who, indeed, look “virtuous” in a class-determined and even racist way: blond and blue-eyed, healthy and well kempt, and obviously brought up on a mental health food.
* Eldridge Cleaver at one time acknowledged this parallel by saying that “psychologically” black people in America had “precisely the same outlook” as Eastern European Jews had under Theodor Herzl (New Outlook, December 1970).
* In a paper on dissent, I have offered a topology of such semideliberate retrogression, relating them to the stages of life and thus indicating both their potentially prophetic and their potentially dangerous significance for the individuals involved.10
The so-called Canadian project for the study of German prisoners in Canada was initiated by the Committee for National Morale before the United States entered the war.
It will be remembered that the press early in this war reported on a new type of prisoner: an arrogant, unfeeling robot, who mechanically spouted Nazi ideology and on occasion rioted in obscene ways. The most recent of these news items concerned a former English brigadier general who had been court-martialed because, during the Battle of Flanders, he had struck two Nazi prisoners. “They spat on the floor, spat on my shoes, and then spat on me, and called me a bloody English swine.”*
Naval intelligence data and personal communications from individual officers, while less sensational, nevertheless confirmed noteworthy attitudes on the part of German prisoners. A Canadian officer expressed it this way: “They all look alike; they all talk alike. It is impossible to know what they think. Today they swear that they are Nazis; tomorrow that they are not. Both times they have the same bland facial expression.”
Such attitudes were noted, derided, explained as a reflection of Nazi mentality but never studied and interpreted by students of personality.
The Committee for National Morale recognized that the study of available specimens of the future enemy’s mentality was an essential preparation for total war—as essential as the study by military observers of mechanized warfare on the battlefronts. It, therefore, offered its services to the authorities concerned, both in the United States and in Canada. With their approval and active interest the necessary arrangements were made, and preparatory studies of documents undertaken.
The entry of the United States into the war has restricted the availability of Nazis for personal observation and has thus emphasized the soundness of the Canadian project itself. On the other hand, it may have altered the status of the original plan. This report puts our preparatory considerations at the disposal of whatever agency may not be entrusted with this work. Preparatory considerations, it will be realized, are a somewhat personal matter. They are determined by a worker’s particular experiences and expectations. There will be no attempt to deny their tentative nature.
A Clinical Analogy
As the clinician looks back on Germany’s defeat and its resurrection in Hitler’s imagery, he is haunted by an analogy: It is as if the German nation as a whole could be likened to a not uncommon type of adolescent who turns delinquent. Gifted, ambitious, proud, he is at the same time possessed by wild drives, is immature in his social ideas, unsure of his ideals, and morbidly suggestible. During a period of rapid growth and strong aggressiveness he suffers a severe humiliation. He disavows his primitive tendencies and attempts to adjust abruptly to his neighbor’s standards. This personality, however, is not ready to sustain the change; he “overadjusts.” Nor is his “environment” decent or prudent enough to back him up. Adjustment becomes self-debasement. Anxiety within, disappointment without are the result. The adolescent finds that he has relinquished his old self without gaining a new one in his adjustment to the conflicting demands of his environment. As he begins to mistrust them, he mistrusts the values which he has just begun to share with them. At this point he meets a leader and a gang who proclaim that the adolescent is always right, that aggression is good, that conscience is an affliction, adjustment a crime. He throws off his conscience. He closes up against the people he has loved and the values he has recognized. There is only one goal: To be himself, even if there is little he can call self and even if this means social isolation and dependence on the gang and its leader. He is seduced into acts of defiance which he can justify before himself only by further acts of defiance. He must constantly act.
The analogy fades out when it comes to therapy. Germany’s “environment,” it is true enough, acted as do the relatives of a delinquent adolescent: They lost invaluable time in trying to decide whether to punish him or to love him more, to restrain him or give him rope, to ignore his “attention seeking” or to cater to it. But beyond this, Germany’s direct neighbors could hardly be compared to an adult environment, unless one conceives of its diplomacy and strategy as overadult, senile.
The analogy, however, becomes almost reality if we apply it to the psychological mechanisms involved in the change of mind taking place in every German participant of the Nazi revolution. The adolescent defenses described have an affinity to the Führer’s personality and to that of many of his sub-Führers. They explain some of the power of these people over German adolescents and over those numerous Germans who (as pointed out) never overcome a certain adolescent conflict.
We expect, then, to find among deeply indoctrinated Nazis: (1) adolescents; (2) men in whom a barely repressed adolescence was resurrected; (3) men who for economic or other reasons feel deeply enough for national socialism to sacrifice their potential individual maturity; (4) men who have become convinced that national socialism is successful, or at any rate not opposed by any potent enemy, and who on this basis try their best to live up to its adolescent imagery.
But to point to the elaboration in a cultural system of preadult potentialities does not mean to belittle it. Infantile and adolescent experiences are the psychological raw material which every human being brings to his culture. Every culture by child training and education makes a selection of infantile experiences and modes of acting and thinking; it favors some, suppresses others, and allows a third type to manifest itself only under special personal or social conditions. The adolescent potentiality is not less powerful than are other preadult potentialities. On the contrary, it is this very potentiality which ancient and modern adolescence rites have tried to suppress, to modify, or to sublimate. There are parallels so close between these rites and those of national socialism that in an anthropological interpretation Hitler can be said to lead the emancipation of the adolescent. So far in history the adolescent had to sacrifice solemnly some of his blood, some of his teeth, or a part of his genitals, or had to admit his sinfulness and bow his knee, in order to confirm his intention to become a man in his father’s world. In Hitler’s Germany he marches with his emancipated equals, led by a leader who never sacrificed his will to any father.
The acceptance of an adolescent imagery by a whole nation, however, does not mean that every single member of that nation can be suspected of having—as an individual—no more latent maturity, intelligence, and decency than does an adolescent. It means only that more mature traits are suspended or perverted beyond recognition in as far as the individual takes part in a powerful adolescent group response to common dangers, national or irrational.
Our first group alone-namely, the adolescent grown up under nazism—finds himself in complete inner harmony with the imagery of the Third Reich. He would rather die than relinquish this imagery. He probably will have to die.
The other groups, however, can be assumed to possess a tendency to identify with the values of the civilized world. Propaganda, police, prudence, and pride may keep this tendency in the unconscious and in hiding. But for some time, at least, it will remain a psychological reality. If one takes the viewpoint of evolution, one cannot see how it can ever disappear.
This latent reality, however, does not change the necessity to fight the Germans mercilessly until they are ready to envisage the advantages of Allied victory. In as far and as long as they fight with and for an adolescent imagery, they will expect and respect only powerful self-preservation on the part of their enemies; almost any words, at this time, would be understood as signs of weakness or as an attempt to repeat “Wilson’s betrayal.”
What will break down a delinquent adolescent within himself, and in a nation will bring about a break between “real” delinquent adolescents and potentially mature men, is the combination on the part of a superior power of proven outer strength and that inner strength called understanding.
As the clinician considers the possibility of our propagandists’ getting in touch with these Germans, he can conclude with only the following—maybe quite impracticable—remarks. There is no use denying to Germans that the Third Reich is a magnificent realization of collective adolescent dreams for the sake of gang leaders. There is no use denying to ourselves that the common German man temporarily has identified himself with that cause and, at present, cannot visualize any other course. But as he is fought successfully, he should be told what the Allied world stands for.
For Wilsonian promises, however, of certain almost forgotten freedoms, the German common man at present has no stomach, no training, and no use. They lead him only to the conclusion that all governments produce empty lies, and therefore, he will do just as well to keep the homegrown variety.
It is the imagery of the family as the basis of cultural life which would be the greatest contrast with the Hitlerian imagery. Our propagandists should secure detailed data on episodes, processes, and statistics in Germany which endanger the family and subordinate old and young to the delinquent adolescent and his gang leader. They should present these arrogant and indifferent Germans with a cool picture of what German “world domination” would mean to the life of their children, based as it would be on eternal wars, i.e., on the eternal disruption of German family life. Biographic sketches of ordinary Germans as well as of German leaders, presented by way of radio and leaflet in serial form, would probably help formulate more clearly what German wit already attacks in isolated cases. Statistics could be presented to show the disintegration of the idea of the family in young people.
One should endeavor to dramatize the central role of the family in anything we have called culture on this earth so far. The point is to secure the facts and, without propagandistic pathos, to weave them into an impressive whole which will be before the eyes of some Germans at the moment when our world has proven itself strong enough to promise alternatives.
This propagandistic approach is suggested by our preliminary considerations. As we succeed in collecting firsthand data for the research project contemplated, we may be able to modify this approach and to suggest details with more assurance.
A Memorandum Concerning the Interrogation of German Prisoners of War (1943)
The Council on Intercultural Relations has asked me for a memorandum concerning the psychological study of German prisoners of war.
I am not acquainted with the organization and the methods of the United States Army and Navy Intelligence Services which deal with prisoners of war. I do not know, therefore, whether what I say agrees or conflicts with the present official policy.
Intelligence work in this field commonly has the purpose of eliciting from the prisoners:
1. Military facts
2. Data concerning the enemy’s morale
3. Such knowledge of the prisoners as is necessary to maintain discipline among them
In addition, Nazi prisoners must be considered carriers of indoctrination; they are the only specimens available to American social and clinical scientists for the testing, by observation, of those innumerable theories of the psychology of nazism which have developed in this country and some of which will, for better or for worse, influence vital military and diplomatic decisions.
Nazi prisoners seem to be tough customers for both interrogators and internment administrators. I assume, however, that the extraordinary behavior of these prisoners has not changed this country’s determination to abide by the rules of the Geneva Convention and to avoid methods which would give Germany cause to institute “equivalent” reprisals against American prisoners in German hands. Outlawed methods are, in the words of the Geneva Convention, “inhuman,” “violent,” and “insulting” ways of exerting pressure “to obtain information regarding the situation in their armed forces or in their country.”
It is conceivable that for this very reason, intelligence agencies in this country would shy away from employing “psychiatric” or similar sinister-sounding approaches, which connote the use of hypnotic power or drugs. And yet clinical social psychology in this country has developed procedures which are far from being cruel, dangerous, or undignified and provide a technique which can be used in situations in which individuals and groups are not willing or are unable to reveal their thoughts and their knowledge in verbal communication.
In speaking of clinical social psychology, I have in mind the work of a group of American psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists who, during the last two decades, have applied the knowledge of psychiatry beyond its original field of individual pathological deviation to cultural and national differences and to the pathology of group life. In their original psychiatric observations, these observers have recognized that what the individual undergoing study answers in response to a specific question is only a fraction (and often the least revealing part) of what he gives away in his total bearing, in his facial expression, and in his gestures; in involuntary sounds, inflections, and grammatical deviations; in what he says about seemingly unrelated subjects; and in what he does or says after the questioning is over. In other words, they have learned to observe people under special conditions; to work with indirection where the direct approach is useless; and to employ patient observation where active-coercive methods are impractical.
It seems, therefore, that their experience should be valuable in a situation in which the subject of interrogation not only is unwilling to talk but is also protected by international law from being coerced to talk.
To analyze the situation, German prisoners of war are:
1. Men, of a certain age, condition of health, personality type, family status, economic and educational background, religious and class affiliation
2. Reichs-Germans, with a specific regional background
3. Soldiers, of a certain rank, in one military category
4. National Socialists, of varying degrees of indoctrination
5. In three standard situations:
a. Recent capture
b. Transportation
c. Internment
Clinical social psychologists are obviously best equipped to evaluate the interaction of all these personal, national, and situational factors.
The situation of recent capture, for example, offers a specific dynamic situation which the clinical psychologist can define. It is a traumatic situation for the soldier—i.e., he suffers from mental shock.
It is a conflict situation: His loyalty and his military oath are in opposition to his feeling of relaxation, of relief from danger, and of freedom from the accustomed supervision; hostility against and contempt of his captors are in opposition to his fear of and submissiveness to them; fear, suspicion, and caution in opposition to his wish to communicate, to speak his mind, to appease those who now have him in their power.
In the case of Germans, these universal conflicts are intensified by:
1. Their often fanatic, often studied contempt of their captors
2. Special training, which has prepared them for the more common methods of interrogation and warned them of the pitfalls of being interrogated
3. Their suspicion that Gestapo agents may be among them and even among their captors, ready to denounce them after the war if they do not show the contemptuous aloofness befitting Nazi soldiers.
It seems impossible that this intensified conflict, even if covered by extreme arrogance, should not lead, in every individual captive, to symptomatic behavior which would allow the clinical psychologist to separate “promising” from “useless” subjects and, at any rate, to make relevant observations concerning the Nazi mentality. In the state of humiliation, of fear, of the sudden lack of familiar supervision, what these prisoners do may, in some way, indicate the reactions to be anticipated when parts of Germany disintegrate. Then, one hears, there are those Germans, often of high rank, who throw off the whole burden of fear and fanaticism and open up (just as fanatically). Their personalities and their background should be studied clinically, for whatever motivated them to surrender psychologically may be latent in others who, if spotted, might easily be led to do the same.
Similarly, whole Nazi crews, teams, and units, when suddenly robbed of their group coherence, seem to reveal symptoms of pathological regression and of group disintegration. The rifts thus appearing, as well as the consequent spontaneous new clique formations, are apt to reveal some of the dynamic factors behind Nazi group psychology. Their analysis may suggest means to accelerate disintegration of Nazi morale.
Internment is an abnormal situation which causes its specific group phenomena and individual pathological reactions, summed up in the term barbed wire disease. One could argue that the just-captured or the long-confined Nazi is not a normal Nazi. All the more, however, can he be understood only by specialists such as clinical social psychologists, who have learned to take circumstantial distortions into account and to generalize from special cases. (The psychiatric patient, for example, is not a normal being, and still, since he has a special reason to be communicative, he will reveal psychological mechanisms which can then be detected, in less pathological forms, in less disturbed individuals. (The reservation Indian is not the “real” Indian, and still he serves, and must serve, for the study of Indian personality.) As a matter of fact, just because they are set aside from normal life, prison camps (those “cities of futility”) are well-definable social situations, almost of experimental character. Nazis, then, will behave in this situation, both as prisoners and as Hitler-Germans: they will develop special forms of “barbed wire disease”—and special defenses against it. This should become obvious, not only in their relationship to their captors and guards but also in their attitudes toward one another and in their individual behavior. Suspicions and hostilities; cliques, friendships, and sexual attachments should be telling expressions of Nazi mentality.
As to the possible official status of clinical psychologists in interrogation and internment agencies, I do not know whether there is any objection to their being employed as administrators, interrogators, entertainers, instructors, guards, censors, etc. in such a way that their routine duties will permit them to make, to record, to discuss, and to abstract psychological observations. Be that as it may, I should like to point to one article in the Geneva Convention which could be interpreted as justifying the open presence of clinical psychologists as mental hygienists and psychiatric observers in clinical units on the front and in internment camps.
Article 4 of the convention says that “differences in treatment between prisoners are permissible . . . if such differences are based on . . . the physical or mental health . . . of those who benefit from them.”
Since prisoners of war have a claim to the hygienic and therapeutic facilities offered by the interning country to its own soldiers, German prisoners should not be denied psychiatric attention in all those matters in which, according to this country’s advanced methods, psychological factors play a role. From the list of those matters, not even persistent colds can be definitely excluded, much less sluggish digestions or run-down moods. If the clinical personnel chosen for this task partakes of the sociological orientation and the clinical methods of observation which characterize what I have defined as clinical social psychology, they will unavoidably make observations relevant both to the treatment of the prisoners and to the knowledge of Nazi psychology.
Their findings should, of course, be coordinated in field research stations, as well as in a central coordinating agency which will provide workers with further questions and suggestions and give results to the agencies entrusted with strategy and propaganda.
Finally, there is an angle to this matter which makes use of advanced clinical observation in internment camps an outright national necessity. Many American prisoners now in enemy hands will be in need of mental rehabilitation after their return. It is doubtful (as it was after the last war) whether the few medical men employed to take care of absolute necessities in our internment camps will have the time and the opportunity to study the various versions of this war’s “barbed wire” symptoms with modern methods. It will be necessary to study what is available—i.e., the Nazi version (and the Japanese version) of these symptoms—in such a way that the generalizations derived have both specific value (for the understanding of Nazis) and general value (for the understanding of “barbed wire” symptoms in general). It must also be borne in mind that American soldiers returning from Nazi prison camps, in addition to being victims of internment proper, will have been the subjects of crude or subtle ideological propaganda. This will erect special problems of rehabilitation, calling for men trained in the psychiatric implications of indoctrination.
No better use can be made of our Nazi prisoners than to study them as extensively as practical, humane, and legal considerations will permit.
Comments on Hitler’s Speech of September 30, 1942 (1942)
To an observer who has always emphasized that Hitler’s lack of taste, of logic, and of truth should not be used as arguments against the man as a propagandist; to one who has attempted to analyze the strong magic imagery hidden in Hitler’s most illogical, obnoxious, and morbid statements, this Sportspalast speech contains welcome signs: The magic spell is being broken.
Hitler’s performances are, of course, always a mixture of shrewd, planned, directed elements and of unplanned, impulsive, emotional ones. Goebbels lets him loose as a trainer does a tamed beast: with some instructions as to how to act, in accordance with the German propaganda strategy of the moment, but also with the knowledge that the beast can be relied upon to produce a certain (by now standardized) sequence of “wild” gestures which throw a singular magic spell over a German audience.
As pointed out in my paper,* this spell is based on a historically well-founded synthesis of the following beliefs and facts:
1. “Fate” has selected Hitler to be the first undefeated representative of the German adolescent imagery. He usurps the power of the fathers but does not (as revolutionaries are apt to do), in the end, emulate their weaknesses.
2. In combining German romanticism with the least dreamy and most efficient German type—namely, the German soldier—he heals the split between the spiritual and the militaristic aspects of Germany’s chauvinism.
3. This treatment is expressed, both spiritually and materially, in the blitzkrieg, which frees the Germans (a) from military-political encirclement and (b) from the old conflict between oversuggestibility to and stubborn defensiveness against the surrounding cultures.
The morale issue now is: If 1918 is not repeated, then it will cease to count. It will have been merely a trick of Fate, temporarily subservient to World Jewry. A repetition of 1918, however, would make manifest Fate out of a lapse of history. Hitler therefore has to convince himself, the German people, and Fate itself that there really are no parallels between 1917 and 1942. The mere thought of such a parallel would make it appear that all his tremendous successes served only to enlarge Germany’s Middle European prison but have not broken it. Repetition would turn his victorious challenge into a final and definite proof of the (so hotly denied) war guilt and into an absolute confirmation of defeat. This, it seems to me, is the portent of his speech.
The background is the Sportspalast. Great popular successes were gained here, and here were made many boastful predictions which Fate chose to verify. Before Goebbels and Hitler enter the hall, Field Marshal Rommel takes a seat beside Field Marshal Keitel. He receives an ovation matched only by that later given to Hitler himself. It must be remembered that neither Keitel nor Rommel is an officer of the aristocratic caste. Furthermore, Rommel is probably the least compromised field marshal. Never having shared his African headquarters with the autodidact Hitler, and probably relatively independent in his decisions, he was the last German general to lead a campaign to the point where a final victorious thrust could be expected to hit the heart of the enemy’s resistance. His fight “under Africa’s sun” was a romantic symbol of the fact that German encirclement was broken and that the lifeline of the British Empire was in acute danger. And Rommel had been singled out by Churchill for a tribute in the House of Commons—a body of parliamentary critics to whose criticism Hitler is so amazingly sensitive. (Now that Rommel is defeated and the British lifeline, augmented by the United Nations lifeline, is reaching across the Atlantic and through the heart of Africa, have the shortwaves reminded the Germans of Rommel’s appearance at the Sportspalast? German memory is short. The magic spell must be worn down by ceaseless reminders, finally causing an inescapable memory.)
Goebbels opens the meeting with a slip of the tongue. “In October and November 1942,” he says (in September 1942), “the National Socialist movement entered the decisive phase of its struggle for power.” He meant to say 1932, for in 1932 the National Socialist party, after having lost two million votes, regained its power, in spite of “ridiculous and spiteful rumors.” This, Goebbels claims, is going to happen again in 1942. But his slip betrays the issue mentioned above—namely, that one defeat may be an accident, but that two defeats are Fate.
Goebbels then turns against the British claim that Germany is “triumphing itself to death.” “Never in history has the succession of victories led to final defeat,” shouts Goebbels, rather daringly denying the dangerous parallel which even a short memory could provide.
As if seeing a powerful enemy in British propaganda (to listen to which is, after all, supposed to be strictly “verboten”), Goebbels introduces Hitler’s consequent counterpropaganda. The enemies’ promises of postwar reconstruction really represent a bad copy of the National Socialist program, he says; that program which, after all, has not developed beyond a prelude solely because of the lack of living space and the war emergency.
Then Goebbels introduces the Winterhilfswerk, which he calls the “principal account of the German socialism of action,” although it is obviously nothing but a good old capitalistic collection of money, reinforced by the coercive methods of the party. Furthermore, in spite of the admission that not even “half of those Germans earning an income are members of the party,” he says that two-thirds of the money collected is turned over to the National Socialist Volksbund.
Most of this money is given to the organization Mother and Child, one-third of it for Heime. (Did anybody ask the Germans next day what kind of Heime is meant: birth clinics for “state” children? By mentioning this part of the Hilfswerk first, Goebbels himself gives an opening for the propagandistic discussion of the family under national socialism.)
Then Hitler enters, greeted as “a great bridge between the warfront and the home front.” He ceremoniously shakes hands with Field Marshal Rommel—and speaks.
Two-thirds of Hitler’s speech is devoted to derisive and sneering remarks of the kind which he is said to deliver with skill. It soon becomes obvious that he has reserved two different sets of sarcastic images for the Anglo-Saxons and for the Russians respectively.
His images are essentially identical with those discussed in the chapters “Father,” “Jew,” “Soldier,” of my previous analysis of Hitler’s images.* The Anglo-Saxon elder statesmen are depicted as senile, feudal, paralytic drunkards, the younger ones as spoiled braggarts, and both types as being too snobbish to understand the modern world. The Russians, on the other hand, are denied recognition as human beings; their undeniable power is attributed to their being subhuman beasts, or Asiatics. As is his habit, against such a background Hitler sets the image of the German soldier.
The first Anglo-Saxons to be mentioned are Churchill and Roosevelt, as representatives of a decadent feudal system. Churchill’s white silk shirt tuxedo (kluft, meaning “formal dress”), and sombrero are mentioned in connection with his extensive travels during recent months. Here Hitler uses a “sour grapes” technique concerning travels, which really are witness to the fact that Hitler’s enemies can move freely in a large part of the world while he is still hammering at Germany’s prison walls. Just as he does with Churchill’s tuxedo, he deliberately overlooks the cultural connotation of the fireplace, sitting beside which Roosevelt speaks to Americans (or rather, spoke before Pearl Harbor). In referring to Plaudereien am Kamin (in itself a verbatim translation of “fireside chat,” but also the title of a German book of the Victorian era), he replaces the American symbolism of the autonomous individual home with a strictly upper-bourgeoisie meaning, for only castles and mansions have Kamine in Germany. Next he introduces Mr. Duff Cooper and Mr. Eden. If one were to count how often Hitler mentions these gentlemen, one would think either that he considers them especially dangerous or that the Germans—even on penalty of death—have developed the habit of turning on the radio whenever Duff Cooper or Eden speaks to them. Actually, these men seem to be selected rather for the purpose of representing the “rich boys from next door,” slick braggarts with a complete lack of principles and personality; in other words, the kinds of feudal sons which one could expect fathers like Roosevelt and Churchill to produce. He calls them nobodies, blusterers, blockheads, and worthless fellows, in spite of which he seems to be much more concerned about their opinion concerning the Russian campaign than about Stalin’s. Those who know Hitler have said that he really admires the British. Still, it is hard to believe that his technique is only personal revelation; he tries to devaluate Western conscience and to counteract feelings of inferiority, not only in himself but also in every German. In elevating Duff Cooper and Eden to an allegedly exclusive representative position, he at the same time ignores the spiritual and political changes in the British people. As a matter of fact, by depicting the Anglo-Saxons as effeminate bourgeois, and the Russians as beasts born in the mud, Hitler tries to isolate the two national components of the “little man” who is standing up against him in all countries. Apparently afraid of the spiritual power expressed in British and Russian tenacity, and in American grimness, Hitler makes a wordplay out of the various meanings of the word belief. Men, he says, who “believed” that Dieppe was a success could not be expected to “believe” in the principles they profess, and he ends this play with the catchphrase “but we ‘believe’ that we have to beat the enemy.”
In his further campaign for the recognition of the somberly obvious, he then continues Goebbels’s reasoning: that nobody ever met defeat after a continuous succession of victories. He enumerates all his successes, adding derisively each time (more than a dozen times in all) that in British eyes, “all this means nothing at all.” To this observer, the emotional and repetitive way in which Hitler repeats these fateful words, “dann ist das öben nichts,” he betrays his and his countrymen’s sneaking fear that Fate may actually have snared him.
He does not make any promises; victory is a rare word in this speech. Against senile, feudal Churchill he has nothing to hold out but the old role of the defiant adolescent depicted in the very first chapter of Mein Kampf. “Mr. Churchill, you have never been able to scare me.” (It will be noted that, in a following speech, just having been informed of “Roosevelt’s invasion” of Africa, he said: “From my boyhood, I have kept the bad habit of having the last word.”) It is obvious that only an anachronistic magic spell (as partially analyzed in my above-mentioned paper can explain the reliance of a modern people on such immature personal statements.
While nervously answering imaginary critics in England, Hitler now and again drops a word indicating his line of psychological defense against the Russians. They seem to count not as men and critics but merely as a dangerous, dirty mass of bestiality, suddenly rising up from Dostoyevsky’s depths and attacking the pure German knight, while the British gentlemen in tuxedos look on and snicker. When first mentioning Russia, Hitler crossly defines her as a country which “permits a decent, reasonable war only for a few months at a time.” He repeats the old phrase of “General Winter,” avoiding any reference to Russian leaders. When speaking of Stalingrad, he adds that the name does not matter. Finally, when forced to admit that the Russians seem to be doing quite well with their nonexisting net of streets and railroads, he explains that the Russian is something like a swampman, born in mud and thriving on it. It is obvious that he thus adds a Russian image to that of the Jew, who, so far, has had a monopoly of an entirely subhuman or, rather, metahuman, phenomenon—superordinate even to Fate.
Thus again Hitler employs adolescent thinking, according to which the young hero in the outer world fights a double danger, which is also within himself: the tyranny of the old men; from whom he derived his inhibited conscience; and the temptations of the lower strata of human life, which appeal to his own rebellious drives. This, as I pointed out in “Hitler’s Imagery,” are his old standbys.
What really bothers Hitler in the Russians, he betrays in a slip of the tongue: “Es ist die Angst vor dem Regime, das Millionen Menschen”—corrects himself—oder die Millionen Menschen—noch immer erfüllt.” The equivalent in English would be as follows: “It is the fear of the regime which still holds and pervades—I mean, the fear which still holds and pervades millions of Russians.” So it is the unbreakable Russian spirit which this man cannot take and which he “tears into the mud.” What do the German officers and soldiers think about this lack of soldierly spirit as expressed in Hitler’s tendency to deny a courageous enemy human recognition?
For there is another conscience to be considered, one which Hitler cannot afford to push aside with ridicule and defamation: the conscience of the German officer. The general staff must have fought a stubborn and courageous fight with this Austrian adventurer. For, in the midst of his adolescent harangue, a mature note appears: “It always was a sober scope of aims—audacious where it had to be audacious, prudent where it was possible to be prudent, circumspect when there was time, cautious where we believed that we had to be cautious under all circumstances—but “—he repeats this like an obedient pupil—” we also have been quite daring where only boldness would save us.” This observer does not believe that Hitler wrote this paragraph, but that it represents the line to be pursued by the German general staff from now on. The line is prudent enough; however, it upsets the whole psychologic of Hitler’s inventory of magic tricks; it confines, as it were, the delinquent adolescent to his room, asking him to think it over and to be sensible. How much Hitler suffered under the military education which he received last winter at such a tremendous price to the German people can be seen from the typically adolescent projection with which he sneers at the above-mentioned “rich boys” in England who, having “no military schooling,” thought he had made a mistake in invading Russia. He, the former corporal, in Field Marshal Rommel’s presence, even calls the British generals idiots—words which he is now forced to eat.
About the fateful winter of ’41 and’42, he says: “Worse cannot and will not happen,” which implies that it would if it could. Goebbels, too, has said that the worst was behind the German people. One wonders what is intended by such reassuring words, especially when they are immediately followed by sinister threats as to the terrible fate in store for the Germans should they ever lose their nerve and give in to panic. One has the feeling that the severity of the winter of ’41 and ’42 is almost played up against a complete playing down of such future threats as the bombing raids from England. American industrial mobilization, and Russian preparations for an offensive. “The Anglo-Saxon leaders promise only sweat, blood, and tears.” The German leaders seem to believe that the Germans would not stand for more winters like that of ’41 and ’42, if they had to anticipate and to visualize their recurrence, while they will bear any hardship once it has become an irrevocable fact.
Where is the threat of American industrial mobilization? It also is played down and belittled, and this against the background of the German genius for organization, as manifested in the rebuilding of the Russian road and railway system. Immediately after having exhorted such feats, he calls enemy tanks, airplanes, and other weapons “rubbish,” “shabby stuff” (Gelump), which he would not dare ask German soldiers to use. Here his language disintegrates completely, and he becomes thoroughly adolescent, especially when he claims that Americans think that every weapon which they produce is “the invention of the world,” as if American industry were a child playing superman. This part of his speech ends with the following logic: Having denied that American airplanes and tanks are better than German ones, he adds “but, at any rate, ours are the greater heroes.” Can this be understood as anything but an (unconsciously admitted) adolescent denial of the fear of American equipment at a time when the first Flying Fortresses are shooting down his newest fighter planes? Does he—or does he not—remember the surprise experienced during the First World War by the superbly prepared German soldiers when, after years of victory, they found themselves opposed by better armament and a higher spirit?
Hitler therefore answers America’s industrial threat by counter-threatening that he will produce weapons superior every time to those of his enemies. He adds that “the insane man in the White House.” by involving America in the war, has only brought anti-Semitism to America and that the American Jews will cease laughing, just as the German Jews have done. One wonders whether the spread of anti-Semitism is not the secret weapon primarily employed by Hitler’s agents in this country at this time. The possibility has been considered that the saboteurs recently executed may conceivably have been planted by the Gestapo in order to deflect American attention from a much more thorough scheme of ideological sabotage.
As Hitler is apt to do with apparent personal satisfaction and with popular success, he turns from the image of the grinning Jew (who will not grin for long) to the image of the German soldier. As far as coherence, form level, and sincerity are concerned, this is the best part of Hitler’s speech. He even becomes paternal and human when he speaks of the anxiety of the young recruit who enters battle for the first time. To Hitler, as for many Germans, his identification with the “lonely infantrist” who does not ask questions is as basic as the identification with the “little man” is for Henry A. Wallace or Wendell Willkie. One seriously doubts that Hitler sees any other meaning in the universe than the sufferings and triumphs of the German infantrist. He probably likes to live near the front, and he will stay there for longer and longer periods because the concern with everyday strategic problems probably appeases his conscience and his worries. His whole speech reflects a narrow attention to whatever is immediately ahead—now that the Jews and Roosevelt have created this situation. In asking the German people also to identify with the German soldiers, he implicitly and explicitly suggests that they forget about war guilt and war aims and try to make the best of the situation as it is. Then, however, he introduces a new trend. It will be remembered that both Goebbels and he earlier accused Germany’s enemies of usurping some of the National Socialist doctrine and of trying to take the wind out of National Socialist sails. As could have been predicted, whenever Hitler plays the suspicious accuser, he is already preparing, on his part, to realize the intention of which he suspects his adversaries. He emphasizes the new democracy which will be born from the experience of the German soldier, whose deeds represent “a certificate of blood (Bluturkunde) which is going to replace the certificates of origin, of position, of possession, and of education (unsere sogenannte Bildung). He even promises that Germany is going to be the land of unlimited opportunities for the German, thus stealing America’s chief appeal to the German masses, who refer to the United States as the land of unbegrenste Möglichkeiten.
There are other, minor indications that Hitler gives careful attention to the American way of thinking (or to what it seems to him or to Goebbels to be). Some of his warm, intimate references to German soldiers seem to be fashioned after a propaganda technique used by Roosevelt in several of his last speeches—namely, the bridging of the gap between home front and war front—by giving intimate descriptions of the difficulties surmounted by certain categories of the armed forces. In the other direction, he tells the army the story of “a bombed town in Friesland.” Also, he tries to create a slogan by saying that every simple sentence (Satz) in the army’s communiqués really means tremendous personal risks (Einsatz): “Jeder Satz ein Einsatz.”
There is no denying that the German soldier combines the oldest tradition with the most streamlined modern techniques and even a new democratic spirit. Here Hitler is most sincere, and so are the Germans. Before long, however, Hitler probably will be promising some kind of democracy in a purified and dominant Germany. The Anglo-Saxon founders of democracy, he probably will say, also had a racial monopoly for democracy in mind; not democracy for Negroes, Jews, and British Indians. (From the counter propagandistic point of view, an ominous parallel can be drawn between Hitler’s and Goebbels’s promises of bigger and better socialism and democracy after the war and the imperial and royal Prussian promises of reform toward the end of the last war. The failure of these promises partially prepared the way for Wilson’s savior role.)
No speech of Hitler’s would come up to Goebbels’s expectations without some reference to rape. This theme undergoes many variations: Hitler’s protective furor sometimes refers to Germany’s being raped in Versailles or to the rape of the German minorities in the (now occupied) countries. It may well be significant that, in his last few speeches, the maltreated woman referred to is again the German woman in persona within Germany. Early this year, the “senile” German judiciary was blamed for not punishing sufficiently a man who maltreated a woman; now it is the good-for-nothing and criminal” who molest women going home from work at night. As always when speaking on this theme, Hitler becomes outraged to the point of universal destructiveness (the rape-and-castration themes being very dear to his heart, as pointed out by Ambassador Henderson as well as by psychoanalysts). Thus, unwittingly, he makes a strange Statement: “We shall see to it that not only the decent man dies at the front [dass nicht nur der Anständige an der Front stirbt, sondern], but that the criminal and the indecent one at home under no circumstances survives this era.” Such sentences cannot really be translated; so that the singular combination of repetitious themes, sincere emotion, propagandistic shrewdness, bad grammar, and unconscious giveaway characterizing Hitler’s speeches is usually lost in the English translation.
However, this theme, too, has an important parallel in 1917 and ’18. At that time rumors and reports of the German woman’s infidelity at home swept the front and contributed to the breakdown of morale; it was an indication that women no longer believed in the cause for which they had sacrificed marital pleasures for years. Hitler, by denouncing promiscuity as rape and by promising the protection of the state, hopes to forestall the bad effects on morale of such rumors. Moreover, national socialism has done much to break down the family in Germany. All the more reason for counterpropaganda to refer unceasingly to the disintegration of German morals under nazism.
As has been amply pointed out in the press, the greatest change manifested in this speech concerns the repeated assurance that the war will not be lost—instead of the promise that it will be won. The sequence of Hitler’s remarks, and the images used, confirm that Hitler means what he says. Thus, when declaring that the alternative to victorious endurance is extermination, he adds: “If a soldier did not know this, then you could not expect of him that he risk his life under such horrible circumstances.” Does this thought alone keep the German soldier in the field?
This passage suggests that isolated Anglo-Saxon statements which suggest horror peace aims (such as the castration of all German males or the deportation of all German children for compulsory education) need to be refuted officially, explicitly, and repeatedly by Allied propaganda. It must be remembered that the Germans are guilty of aiding or tolerating comparable sweeping solutions of “population-and-in-doctrination problems” and therefore can actually visualize alleged Allied plans which, to Americans, seem to be too ridiculous for refutation.
The most fundamental change in Hitler’s imagery is the replacement of images of movement by those of stationary endurance. “We stand behind our soldiers, just as our soldiers stand in front of us. And together we stand in front of our people and in front of our Reich and will not capitulize under any circumstances.”
This imagery of standing guard is, of course, an old and universal one: “Fest steht und treu die Wacht am Rhein.” It must be remembered, however, that the last war has compromised the guard on the Rhine, while this war’s greatest German triumph was the defeat of the French stationary guard on the Rhine (the Maginot line) by the German blitz, which promised once and for all to forestall trench warfare and encirclement. As I (following many others) have pointed out in my paper on Hitler’s imagery, the psychological structure of nazism stands and falls with the imagery of blitz warfare; furthermore, in this war Allied counteroffensive power (“artillery of the air,” “Flying Fortresses”) by far surpasses that of the last war. Stationary warfare is not even defensive warfare anymore. The grandiose United States policy of surrounding the Reich with an (at first seemingly unconnected) circle of springboards for an “all-around” air offensive therefore undoubtedly causes grave concern in Berlin.
This American plan, like the German blitz before it, is primarily based on military logic. However, it represents at the same time a sweeping synthesis of America’s mechanical genius, industrial spirit, and traditional personality traits (as historically based on the hate of tyrants, the spirit of the advancing frontier, the impetus of the ranger, etc.)* Only such a synthesis will be tough enough to impress the Germans, for only a people that can synthesize, at a historical moment, acute necessity and traditional character structure has (as Hitler would put it) a claim on Fate.
Comments on Anti-Nazi Propaganda (1945)
The clinical analysis of Hitler’s imagery* is here concluded with a few remarks concerning the study and use of anti-Nazi imagery.
First: The suggested analogy between Nazi group phenomena and adolescent delinquency rests on the following psychological mechanism: If adolescent individuals or young nations find themselves unable to integrate their more civilized (or mature) values, they may, under certain conditions, repress these values and treat their existence in others with scorn and violence. This inner arrangement temporarily leads to feelings of safety, elation, and dominance, and permits the shrewd pursuit of antisocial goals.
In an individual case of this kind, the clinician must be able to demonstrate to the patient: (1) that he is invested with the power (or has influence over those invested with the power to put a stop to the delinquency and that he would not hesitate to use his influence or his power for the protection of the community; (2) that he understands delinquency as one potential outcome of universal human conflict and is willing to review with a brotherly and objective attitude the particular anxieties and aspirations which have induced the patient to turn against the values of his community; (3) that he has the power to protect the delinquent from irrational punishment, as well as from inner chaos, during a period of reconstruction following the demonstration by the delinquent of a sincere wish to give a new trial to the ways of his community. However, psychotherapy is applicable only in cases where the desirable values, although in a repressed state, do exist in the patient.
In the case of a whole gifted nation which has fallen prey to the delinquent-adolescent, the suggestions would be: (1) that those individuals who, because of their chronic adolescent personalities, or because of indoctrination during childhood or adolescence, are unable to visualize any other imagery be put out of action; and (2) that those individuals who have remained potentially sensitive to civilized values be given psychological support, so that they may gain the courage to reinstate these values and to reaffirm their educational and political responsibility.
Here, too, only demonstrated actual power, convincingly combined with the power of understanding and self-discipline, can become a decisive psychological influence.
So much for the analogy.
Second: The Germans expect and respect only signs of powerful self-preservation on the part of their enemies. They interpret any attempt to talk, rather than to act, as a sign of weakness or as an attempt to betray them again. For Wilsonian promises, the German common man, at present, has no stomach, no training, and no use. They lead him only to the conclusion that all governments produce empty lies and that, therefore, he may just as well keep his homegrown variety and defend his soil and his kin to the last.
Third: There is no use denying to Germans that the Third Reich, in many respects, is a magnificent realization of certain collective adolescent fantasies. As such, it has provided the German nation with the first modern synthesis of its national personality traits—a synthesis which replaced the general discontent in being German and which, so far, is not matched by any convincing vision of a synthesis of German anxieties and aspirations with those of the democracies. In fact, every alternative to nazism, at the moment, implies not only the threat of slaughter and of anarchy to the German but also that of individual psychological chaos. Therefore, there is no use denying to ourselves that the common German man temporarily has good reason to identify himself with the Nazi cause, either because he is obsessed or paralyzed or merely because he cannot visualize any other cause. But in preparation for the breakdown of this identification, the German must be told what the Allied world stands for. He must be told convincingly, because otherwise there is no saying where his inner chaos will lead.
Fourth: No matter what idea one wishes to get across to the Germans, it should be clothed in an imagery which, to them, sounds as familiar as—or, preferably, more familiar than—Hitler’s imagery (the “familiarity” of which is pointed out in my paper). The very antithesis of Hitler’s imagery is that of the family, the township, and the region as the basis of universal cultural life. This is the imagery on which all genuine cultural achievements in Germany were based; it is, at the same time, the only imagery with which true democratic experiences are associated (the integration of democratic ideas on a national scale having failed). This imagery undoubtedly exists in most Germans in a latent, bewildered, repressed form. Within Germany, however, it has no mouthpiece and no leader. It is being shouted down by the loud, boisterous, Reich-German voice in power. Therefore, cultural propaganda promises to be most successful where its verbal inventory is based on regional imagery. For example, the relationship to family, class, nation, or mankind differs in various regions (Prussian, Bavarian, Austrian, etc.) in the emotional emphasis on, let us say, categorical duty, mechanical efficiency, childlike sentiment, religious universality, affiliative sociability, righteous indignation, forgiving humor, moral and physical cruelty against the self and against others. Thus, while the most promising content of propaganda consists of truths (both in the sense of facts and in that of simple verities understood by the common man everywhere), these truths become most “evident” if selected and phrased according to the emotional requirements of regions and classes.
Fifth: Propaganda agencies probably have at their disposal detailed and accurate data on episodes and developments which show how, in Nazi Germany, the imagery of the family and the region is subordinated to or betrayed by the delinquent imagery of a gang leader. Such material could provide the Germans with a cool picture of what German world domination, even if possible, would mean to the moral future of their own children. Biographic sketches of ordinary Germans, as well as of German leaders, help to substantiate suspicions which, in the meantime, have already been spread by German rumor and folk wit.
Sixth: While the imagery of propaganda demands a knowledge of regions and classes which can be established only with the help of American natives of Germany, it is imperative that the propaganda be American in character. Not “This is one particular segment of Free Germany speaking to you from Washington, D.C., in the hope of regaining lost political power with the help of American battalions, but “This is the powerful American people speaking to the German people, with an understanding based on the fact that the American nation, while Anglo-Saxon in its guiding principles, is comprised of people from all the nations of Europe and therefore embodies now principles of national integration in the evolving industrial world.”
Seventh: Essential goals are:
a. That only images be used which exist in strong, latent form in every German, but are neglected, suppressed, or cynically misused by Hitlerism
b. That only data be used which can be observed or substantiated by every German or which, at any rate, will surely not be found to be inaccurate
c. That these images and facts be woven into a simple, realistic, and artistic design
d. That this design receive its inner strength from the acts, intentions, and latent aspirations of the Allied nations, and especially of the United States
e. That alternatives to nazism be presented as integrated part solutions for universal evolutionary striving, rather than something which allegedly exists in its complete form in the allied world of today
A Memorandum to the Joint Committee on Post War Planning (1945)
The questions of the Panel on Education arrived here about three weeks ago. Not having been in Germany proper since 1929, and having been unable to come to New York and to hear your experts on Nazi educational institutions in Nazi Germany, I had not much to say until a week ago when the psychiatric and anthropological memoranda arrived. I assume you are interested in individual reactions to your formulations, and I am sending you a spontaneous statement.
My paper “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth”* largely agrees with the more extensive formulations of such historically minded analysts and sociologists as Alexander and Parsons and, as your anthropologists indicated, with much of their cultural findings. However, my paper also proposes to take into account the deep changes which the Nazi revolution may have brought about in German thinking. (See page 480.)
Psychiatric-historical formulations need to be tested in close and systematic observation of available sections of contemporary history (analogous to what we are doing in the psychoanalysis of individuals). In your statements there is no reference to source material concerning the various phases of German history under the Nazis. Such data are indispensable (1) as a test of the psychiatric-historical theories; (2) as a basis of efficient planning.
More than two years ago some of us made suggestions concerning the way in which the behavior of German prisoners of war might be studied immediately after capture and later, without violation of either word or spirit of the Geneva Convention. I do not know whether this opportunity to observe successive samples of Nazi mentality under defined and controlled conditions has been utilized. There are other sources, such as the study of changes in propaganda. My first question, therefore, would be: Is the committee in touch with agencies that are now in possession of relevent firsthand data concerning the behavior of Nazis during the various phases of this war?
Without such data I see a new Tower of Babel arising, not one with a disturbing number of languages but rather one with a small vocabulary (ego, libido, character structure, reeducation, neuropsychiatric, etc.) which, however, has a disturbing number of meanings and countless practical implications.
It is obvious that only history can change peoples. The question is not what discipline alone or what disciplines combined could solve this historical dilemma but rather: What combination of disciplines is now well enough integrated to present the Germans with a total situation which must convince them that their history, as they see and saw it, is over? Only an unequivocal change in its total historical situation will convince a people that its common panics and its traditional enthusiasms are outlived and that its habitual forms of self-assertion do not pay any longer. Only after such conviction has had time to sink in can changes in those family patterns and attitudes of child training be expected, which, according to everything we now know, is the model and basis for later education. In this sense, too, I am unable to answer the questions of the educational panel as to how home, school, college, etc. could each by itself be changed so as to produce “similar” results.
A few years ago, when H. S. Mekeel and I studied difficulties in the education of Sioux Indian children, we came to the conclusion that governmental education failed where economic changes had not been consolidated and child training had not changed in its basic attitudes. I cannot refrain from quoting myself: “The young American democracy lost its first battle with the Indians when it could not decide whether it was conquering, colonizing, converting, or liberating them, and when consequently it sent to the Indians a succession of representatives who had one or another of these objectives in mind. The Indians considered such historic doubt uncivilized and highly suspicious.”
Let us assume for a moment that Germany’s reeducation is an American problem: He who wants to reeducate another nation or “change” another nation’s “basic character structure” has to be a part of an unequivocal historical force. This committee, a professional group within one nation, endeavors not only to play a useful part delegated to it by the usual executives of national history but also expressly wishes to suggest or to determine a scientifically planned history, based on a psychiatric master plan. My second question, therefore, would be: Is this committee informed about the nature of the concerted pressure that will be brought to bear on the German people, first by the three main occupying nations, secondly, by the various functionaries within each occupying nation? One may assume that Russian influence on the areas it occupies will perforce be uniform. In the case of the United States, are there any expectation and promise that there will be thorough agreement as to basic administrative and propaganda procedures within the military, diplomatic, political and commercial categories, on the one hand, and, on the other, the reeducational forces?
The general orientation of this committee is that of mental hygiene. Is mental hygiene an unequivocal historical force in the United States? Has it established a machinery of mutual collaboration with those who do the “dirty work” of history? If such machinery is not now established in this country, would it be sage to use defeated Germany as an experimental ground for psychiatric theories which may constitute a descriptively and theoretically promising beginning of a new discipline but which so far have no practional tradition?
It will not be enough during the coming days of German reconstruction for one American group, let us say the reeducational one, to claim that according to the American system at home it has no power over another group—let us say the potential carpetbaggers of the coming reconstruction era or the royalist diplomats. The Germans, trained to think totalitarian, and suggestible to paranoid historical concepts, will consider ideological disunity among the educational, the political, the military, the diplomatic, and the commercial forces of this country either another sign of democratic corruption or a gigantic pretense comparable to the Wilsonian principles, behind which they expect a new sinister scheme of cultural emasculation or economic exploitation, or both.
My third question: In the absence of a detailed machinery for the governmental execution of a psychiatric master plan, in the absence of research concerning the prospective acceptibility of such a plan to the American people, what useful subordinate role could mental hygiene play in specific, specialized tasks within the framework of the United Nations’ policy? This, of course, may have been discussed. Yet the material sent to me so far and the questions which I have been asked to answer do not indicate either the information or the ready tools on which such far-reaching planning must be based. What impresses me in some formulations is their daydreamish totalitarian character. On occasion, I discern wolf Goebbels himself in psychiatric clothing.
Germany is a nation, not a tribe. If I were asked (in spite of the pitfalls inherent in such formulations) to state in the shortest possible fashion what difference between a tribe and a nation seems most relevant in this connection, I would say that primitive tribes attempt to arrive at a synthesis of economic and emotional safety on the most centripetal, exclusive basis: The tribe constitutes what is relevant of mankind. Modern nations are the outcome of a tendency to base such a synthesis on the inclusion by expansion or identification of ever-larger portions of mankind: regions, nations, classes, continents. This inclusion varies in focus, scope, tempo, and intensity: accordingly it burdens individuals and groups with varying specific problems of identification. The fact that wars are becoming ever more intensive and extensive probably is not so much the result of an insurmountable devilishness of human nature as rather of the fact that now and from now on, larger entities than ever before experience both the triumph of identification with one another and the fear of loss of identity. There are periods of consolidation of that which has been included but wherever the more inclusive tendencies periodically prove insufficient to allay (1) panic (fear of loss of collective safety and identity); (2) ego anxieties (fear of loss of libido and ego satisfactions within the cultural sanctions of one’s childhood ideals) temporary regressions to quasi-primitive ideologies occur, all isolationist in character and accompanied by open sadistic horrors.
It will not do to call one nation psychiatric names. Every nation has particular regressive syndromes to which it is apt to revert when safety and identity are threatened. The Germans overdo this greatly, too, yet a neuropsychiatric theory of historical events should be universally applicable.
The idea of reeducating the Germans seems to be expressed alternately by the concepts of a basic character structure which has to be changed or a kind of collective affliction the existence of which could even be diagnosed in individuals. The concept of a basic character structure, by its use of the words basic and structure, seems to imply something very static, which fits tribes better than nations. Dynamically seen, much of what is described as character is often rather what in individuals we would call reaction formation, maintained with the more monomanic effort and the more panicky intensity, the more a collective loss of identity is threatened. In the so-called German character structure repressed guilt feeling toward mankind is discernible behind arrogance; all too clear insight behind defiance; and a great love for the non-German world behind paranoia and projection and hate. All this belongs to the basic character structure, too; in every German there is guilt feeling, insight, and love of progress, together with arrogance, defiance, and paranoid hate.
I venture to say that even in Germany a European spirit must be in the making. In most discussions on the subject of “reeducation,” there is a strange assumption that those Germans who now make an impression of dependability on Anglo-Saxons are also the Germans who have the proper images, the insight born of bitter experience, and, most of all, the necessary training to build a progressive Germany. The condemnation of Nazi horrors should not keep observers from considering the possible evolutionary merits which may even be inherent in the Nazi movement in the sense that more than any other revolution, it has already begun to destroy the parental images which in the reports of this committee are ascribed to the German character structure. The Nazi movement, with its desperate totalitarian attempt to test the age-old German idea of German superiority against the whole world, may have prepared the unequivocal historical answer which the Germans have never been faced with before, largely because of the neglect of other nations that forgot that historical existence is and remains a constant test; there is no such thing as a world safe for democracy.
If one wants to weed out those Germans who will be useful in a democratic Europe and those who could not be, the last thing I would consider of importance is party membership. It is possible that some young Nazis (of the type which the Russians seem to be utilizing now in their committee of German officers and soldiers in Moscow) will be realistic and cynical enough to know a historical decision when they see one; that they more than any other German group have undergone a decisive break with the feudal and narrowly nationalistic concepts of pre-Nazi Germany; that they more than any others have learned to think in terms of scientific planning on a European scale. One fact which deserves study is the replacement in Germany of some of the old hierarchic values by Volksggenosseuschaft and party membership; while we may not like the Nazi party, still we ought to study the revolutionary change in the forms of mutual identification which this has brought about. This, after all, is the historically relevant question in revolutions. Incidentally, our advocates of psychocultural approach may find that intelligent Nazis rather than educated socialists speak their language and, in fact, have read their very papers.
Such Nazis are guilty, of course, of having acquiesced with and, even more, of having planned and executed the machinery which crushed and tortured millions. Undoubtedly, they could not have obeyed and they could not have done their work as superbly as they did without mobilizing in themselves the last ounce of that German spirit which is now described as paranoid. Undoubtedly they fell prey to suggestions and drugged themselves with autosuggestion. But whether you can call their “paranoia” “learned” or not, it probably did not keep them from learning. In order to meet the requirements of their tasks they had to study other countries. They probably know more about the world now than Germany ever knew before. That to the last they are trying to uphold the racial fiction will make the lesson only the more final when the fiction breaks down. I think one should be ready with all the integrated theories and techniques of observation to observe Germany’s defeat, and then one should observe and test these theories and adapt them. On the other hand, one cannot warn too much against the lip service that will be offered to the Atlantic Charter by some Germans who, because they have been excluded for a decade from the history of their country, actually have forgotten nothing and have learned little. Once before, Germany was permitted to turn its unique need for supremacy into a supremacy of masochism, priding itself that it had been elected by Fate to suffer and humiliate itself. It will be no triumph to make Germans admit that they are guilty, for they will do it with a feeling of being superior, because they were able both to commit such crimes and to atone for them into the bargain. Both defiance and atonement need time to crystallize into patterns of European action.
I wonder whether it is promising to view the problem in terms of “Germany” or “the German.” The problem of Germany’s reeducation seems to me neither a national nor an individual one. Maybe it ought to be understood as a European problem, and it ought to be attacked as a regional one.
European: Europe is not the Europe we knew. The recent catastrophe undoubtedly has created the core of a European spirit which alone will reeducate Europe and Germany with it. I personally have no sympathy with the world outlook in which Americans plan to emasculate Germany just in order to permit the rest of Europe “peacefully” to pursue monarchic or postmonarchic small-nation politics backed up by their three powerful big brothers. Beware of another Congress of Vienna. As far as I can discern, the future lies in cultural autonomy for regions and the economic interdependence for the continent, with an adjustment of borders and politics to this aim.
National: It probably would be a mistake to face the whole German nation with conditions which it would have to accept as a whole or not accept at all. Such an attempt may lead to passive resistance on a large scale.
Individual: While the problem has psychiatric aspects, it does not, to my mind, admit of a psychiatric practical approach. To weed out on a large scale untrustworthy Germans from trustworthy ones seems to me impossible. The analogy with army psychiatry is dynamically incorrect. Army psychiatrists select a man on the basis of whether they think that he will stand up in a situation which the majority of his pals have to endure and in which they exert pressure on him to be as good as they are and not let them down. Whether or not he would get panicky if his whole regiment were gripped by panic cannot be predicted on a neuropsychiatric basis. No matter what an individual German seems to be thinking now or to have thought in the past, his behavior under changing group pressure is hard to predict.
Regional: I therefore hope that the problem will be attacked region by region, community by community, in a group psychological manner. Promises as to freedom of self-government, free trade, and freedom of education etc. should probably be varied according to the nature of the region. Certain regions would probably yield at an early date and by their example and their consequent experience bring the pressure of example and identification to bear on other German regions and communities. (Military safeguards are, of course, not considered here.) Such a plan also would take care of the completely unpredictable fate of the various German regions between now and the as yet quite mythical unconditional surrender of the whole nation.
In order to bring educational pressure to bear on anybody, you have to make him desire education through identification. If faced with an unequivocal historical decision, German schools will change, I think. I would leave it to them how and when this will be done, merely establishing military safeguards and minimum requirements for the self-government and resumption of national and international trade for each region. On the positive side a European Institute of Education for peace could be established which would at first admit only a limited number of Germans and which would foster discussion and research free enough to assure its graduates high status in Germany as well as in the schools of other countries. But I do not think that the United States should sponsor such an institute.
If you want more panels, I would suggest a panel on the status of women in Europe. It is not quite comprehensible that there is not an organization of European women in exile who would get together with the best (not the loudest) of American and British womanhood in order to study the ways and means by which German woman can be approached by propaganda now, and in which the women of Europe might be trained to help prevent wars in the future. Who more than the women would have the right and the duty to form a permanent congress for the preservation of human resources? But this will take long training, which should begin now.
The matter of reeducation will logically begin with women and small children through health centers and baby clinics. Here again, however, it will be necessary to be well informed about the Nazi methods of child care. Where their methods are efficient, or, on a general scale, more efficient, it is merely a problem of permeating child care with a new spirit of interest in every human child as against the strictly German interest in pure racial offspring.
As for the propaganda material which the panel may want to prepare, it would be quite necessary to tone down the oversimplified descriptions and diagnosis of the German character structure.* These diagnoses, after all, correspond to our case reports in psychiatric meetings. The case looks that way certainly, but the person often does not. When American soldiers in Africa saw their first Nazi prisoners, they found them to be “guys like us.” I have heard the same statement from a Jewish member of the military police who guarded Nazi prisoners on a transport. There are, of course, other statements of United Nations’ guards standing completely dumbfounded before the blind arrogance of German prisoners—a contrast which only shows how easily groups can turn off and on “paranoid” attitudes. When American soldiers, after having killed, captured, or driven into hiding the worst Nazis, come to see their first German villages, their first German mothers, and especially their first German girls, nostalgic feelings will join their surprise as to how human these Germans are after all. Add to this the by now proverbial American sentimentality toward the defeated, especially at a time when America will still be untouched by war while German homes will have been destroyed by American bombs and shells: The danger will be great that American occupational forces will consider everything that has been said in too vivid and too strong colors as propaganda (which it is). Then they will want to go home and forget the whole thing.
This leads to a last suggestion: Has this committee considered the “reeducation” which American soldiers may be going to receive when they occupy Europe, and especially Germany? The American soldier above all should be able to recognize in the United Nations’ actions toward Germany a solidly unified policy. Otherwise, the breach now developing between the Americans who fight actual Nazis and those who are planning at home will only widen.
Written for the Committee on National Morale (for the Coordinator of Information), 1940. Published here for the first time. Some of the other renowned participants on the Committee for National Morale were Gordon Allport, Gregory Bateson, Edwin Boring, Kurt Lewin, Margaret Mead, Gardner Murphy, and Henry A. Murray.
* New York Times, February 21, 1942.
Written for the Committee on National Morale (for the Council on Intercultural Relations), 1943. Published here for the first time.
Written for the Committee on National Morale (for the Council on Intercultural Relations), 1942. Published here for the first time.
* “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth.” Psychiatry, (5 November 1942), 475–493.
* See note page 351.
* For present-day manifestation of the American personality structure, see: Margaret Mead, And Keep Your Powder Dry. (New York: William Morrow, 1942).
Written for the Committee on National Morale (for the Council on Intercultural Relations), 1945. Published here for the first time.
* See E. H. Erikson, “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,” Psychiatry, 5 (November 1942), 475–93.
Written for the Committee on National Morale (for the Conference on Germany After the War), 1945. Published here for the first time.
* “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth.” Psychiatry, 5, (November 1942), 475–93.
* On page 5 of the anthropological report “FEAR OF LOSS OF STATUS” is put in capitals as the major negative sanction in German society. Is this not too generally true to characterize Germans? Fear of loss of domineering status would seem more accurate, since status can give many prerogatives such as earthly possessions, a place in heaven, equality, the right to isolate oneself, the right to serve, the right to advance, etc. The German idea of status is that of the bicyclist: He bends down deeper in order to tread down harder.