The new psychology and the parent

Author's Preface

THIS volume was planned and has been compiled to offer to parents the irreducible minimum of the New Psychology in the simplest possible terms, and with such practical applications as might seem to illustrate the central findings of Analytical Psychology. It is mainly based upon the course of lectures delivered to teachers under the auspices of the Tavistock Clinic for Functional Nerve Cases. Hence much of the subject matter of this volume is contained in its predecessor. The reader who may happen to have perused The New Psychology and the Teacher will therefore exercise patience — and his inalienable prerogative of "skipping" — over passages that are common to the two books.

It is imperative to remind the reader of the impossibility of presenting in a form so simple and brief anything more than the barest rudiments of Analytical Psychology. The literature of the subject has already attained vast dimensions. The original school of Psycho- Analysis as controlled by Freud, has many viii

Author's Preface seceding groups. On all sides the complexityincreases. Under these circumstances a short and simple presentation must imply the slurring, if not the actual elimination, of countless important points. It is the writer's hope that only those aspects of the subject which are of secondary importance have been sacrificed.

Finally the reader must remember that the views contained in these pages are in no way the official views of any one school, but merely the result of the writer's own clinical experience and the conclusions to which he has attained through it.

The author's indebtedness to his wife for invaluable co-operation in the preparation of this volume has been expressed more directly, but is here placed on record.

Contents

CHAPTER PA«E

I Parenthood : and Some of its Failures i

II The New Psychology and its Relation

Chapter I

The principal cause of all nervous breakdown lies in the wrong treatment of the child by his parents.

The business of parenthood is the greatest in life: the need of the world is for new parenthood: the aim of the parent should be that the child should grow up a better parent for the next generation.

Failures in parenthood are many.

1. Failure to realize the child's make-up: parents are

not potters to mould clay, but gardeners to protect bulbs.

2. Tendency to patronage: discouragement of real

independence in the child.

3. Unwillingness to take risks for the child.

4. Sin of standing between the child and self-realiza-

tion : domination of family tradition and its effects. The child must be allowed to choose his own track and scale his own pfeak of the mountain of God.

THE life of a physician, and pre-eminently that of a psychotherapist, consists largely in the treatment of what are described popularly as nerve cases. In the process he is apt to discover with a frequency which is very arresting, and which to the general public would be perfectly incredible, that the principal cause of all nervous breakdown is to be found in the wrong treatment of the patient in childhood by his parents. Years before have the seeds of the present disorder been sown, and often by the hand of love: by means of wrong ideals, by excessive affection through stupidity — but very rarely through the parent's neglect — has the mischief been wrought. And it is because with so much good will so large an amount of damage has been done to the souls of these children, who are our whole asset as a nation, that the present writer desires to set before his fellow-parents some of the results of his clinical experience in this department of life,

The business of parenthood we must agree is the greatest and best in life. This is not a mere fagon de parler but a very deep truth. Anything that a man may do in society to justify his existence and serve his generation is after all subsidiary to the business of parenthood, in which his own share is so relatively small and in which the mother plays so much more important a part. And if we would hope and work for the new world and the new society that was promised us after the war, let us realize that the only channel through which it can come is that of new parenthood — parents with new outlooks and new ideals. The new world cannot come from new organizations, new housing, new governments — it cannot even come from new education, because, as all teachers tell us, the teachers look to the parents every time: it can come through one channel only, and that is new parenthood. While one hopes that the present generation of parents may still be capable of readjusting or improving their outlook from year to year, yet we must recognize that the new parents must be the parents in next generation. So the child we are bringing up to-day we ought to be bringing up — not with a view to his being a doctor because his father was a doctor, or to his taking Orders because his grandfather was a dean — but with the bigger aim, that he should be a good parent, a better parent than his own.

We all are prone to the temptation of regarding the State, Society, the Family as being not so good as they used to be in our own young days, and from this standpoint we embark upon a wholly fallacious line of thought. We wish the child to keep up the standard of the world and we ""hope he will be as good a man as his father," failing to realize that if every man and every woman did attain to that ideal, there would nevertheless be no possible progress in society — and the world would never be able to advance beyond its present point of attainment. We must instead adopt as our fundamental principle in life that what we represent, or even the ideal for which we try to stand, is not big enough to be the ideal for the next generation's parents. We must have a bigger ideal for them than we had for ourselves — and yet how apt we are to feel that if only our son will turn out as good a man as our father was, we shall be amply satisfied. We start from the fatal assumption that an adequate ideal may be sought in the past, and that our own business is merely to transmit the ideal which we ourselves received. This is the sin of the one-talented servant who preserved unenriched the inheritance with which he had been entrusted. There is no disloyalty to the past in using it not as an arm-chair in which to repose, but as a stepping-stone to further achievement.

lie. Ma 4l& *M

When we come to the practical problems of upbringing we find that the parent is apt to fail in several outstanding particulars.

(i) Failure to realize all the factors in the m<ike-up of the child. To begin with there is the factor of heredity so often overlooked by the parent in an honest attempt to understand the child. The child comes into the world with a temperament largely determined by that of his ancestors, and it is moreover a blend of two separate ancestries, so that parents who realize the strong practical bent of a boy with an engineer father, forget sometimes to allow for the artistic strain derived from his maternal grandfather. In laying our plans for a child's education many of us forget to consider not only the main trend of his ability, but also the subsidiary and very important strains which bught to be given scope, and which may later on provide for the boy such inyaluable lines of self-expression and of relief from the dominating interest of his life. We are always in danger of constructing a tidy and consistent character into which we proceed to fit him without regard to the vagaries and individualities which make the real boy so much more complicated than our conception of him.

Further, we are all as parents so prone to imagine that our function towards the children is that of the potter to the clay. We are apt to take a solemn, an almost sententious interest in the way in which we are moulding the clay — these children that are entrusted to us. We feel, with an amazing lack of insight, that we are commissioned to mould them into the shape that seems best in our eyes, and we do not realize that it is not a question of moulding at all but a question of growth. It is useless to determine beforehand what course the child's development will take, because it has not yet been revealed to us. When we have a bulb in our hands we often do not know whether it will turn out to be a blue hyacinth or a white lily. What we have to do is to plant it, to see that it gets all that we can give it in the way of favourable environment — and then to leave it alone. And it is by our well-meant interference with a child's natural self-development that much early damage is done.

"Some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose, And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows!'

(2) Then there is the snare of patronage, the tendency which is ever with the adult to enjoy (unconsciously) the feeling of power over the young, and which shows itself in a hundred subtle ways. We cling to our children's infantility with a sacrilegious neglect of the principles of growth and development. We make much of it, we imitate the language of babyhood and encourage its continuance, we persuade the child to sit on our knee when it would so much rather stand upon its feet. We cherish the thought that there are still many things that the children cannot do for themselves — that the little seamstress still turns to her mother to have her needle threaded, that the boy who has learned to bicycle requires paternal aid over his puncture — yet all the time we are standing between the child and his achievement. We find it so difficult to efface ourselves, to be glad that our children can do without us.

(3) Again we often fail as parents because we do not realize that we are called upon to take risks for our children. And here we often prescribe the path of safety believing that we do so for the children's sake, whereas the chances are that it is for our own. We could not stand the strain of seeing them in any kind of danger. Tommy wishes to climb the high elm as his older cousin has done. "Oh no," exclaims his mother, "my heart would be in my mouth all the time." "Mary wanted to do Care Committee work, but of course I could not have her exposing herself to infection in the slums." "I would never have an easy moment if John went into the Indian Army," urged a parent but yesterday, as a cogent argument for a son's acceptance of a berth in the City. "Better risk a life than risk a character," was the noble maxim of a mother, whose son to-day is universally acknowledged to have deserved well of the Empire.

(4) But the greatest of all the sins of parenthood is to stand between the child and self-realization — to obstruct his psychological freedom. In order to realize himself the child must get free from psychological authority in the widest sense — from family tradition, and the bias of any clique or sect in which he may have been brought up. He need not necessarily hold any divergent opinions, but he must hold his opinions on an adequate rational basis of his own and not because they are the tradition in his family. We think perhaps that we have carefully refrained from any form of coercion, but how easy and pleasant have we made it for a growing son or daughter to differ from us fundamentally in matters of church or politics, or even over such minor questions as smoking or Sunday tennis? If by our persistent use of authority we have succeeded in producing a family Jhat accepts our every dictum with a reverent "father says," or if on the other hand we have reared the rebel offspring, who will automatically diverge from the home path at every possible fork — then we must confess to two lamentable types of parental failure. But if we find ourselves able in all matters to offer our experience and our views to our children in such a way as to command their interest, while leaving them to discriminate with a minimum of prejudice on every subject, and with the knowledge that there will be no strain upon mutual affection in the event of a disagreement between us — then we may justly feel that we have achieved a triumph.

We must realize that these children of ours are climbing : they must be allowed to choose their own paths to the peaks above; the trail which we blazed may not be for them the most direct: moreover the peak which they are trying to scale may not be ours at all — and yet it may be a summit, possibly a higher summit, of the mountain of God.

n

Chapter II The New Psychology And Its Relation To Life

The great discovery of the New Psychology is the Unconscious Motive. Arising from this we find the idea of Repression, which is the method of solving a mental conflict by a process of intentional forgetting.

The New Psychology reveals that our dream life represents factors which are not receiving adequate recognition in our conscious mental life. System of treatment known as psycho-analysis consists in the revelation to the individual of his unconscious motives.

Nerves are more often based upon mental conflict than upon a derangement of purely physical origin.

The New Psychology was founded by Freud of Vienna, who bases upon it a deterministic philosophy of life. Jung of Zurich here parts company with Freud, and has founded a school based upon free will and human spontaneity in the mental and moral sphere.

The gift which the New Psychology has to offer the parent is the knowledge, not so much of the child, as of himself. A little knowledge of psycho-analysis is dangerous, but an experience of it, however elementary, is sobering and can lead to no harm and much possible good.

This does not, however, imply that every intelligent person should necessarily undergo a course of psycho-analysis.

THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY AND ITS RELATION TO LIFE

IN order to gain a true idea of what the New Psychology stands for we must try to understand clearly the fundamental change that the discoveries of Freud and Jung have brought about within the whole realm of Psychology. The magnitude of this change is comparable only to that wrought in the realm of Physical Science by the discoveries of Galileo and Darwin. It involves a complete recasting of the facts of mental mechanism, and — more important still — an entirely new conception of the operation of mental laws. And the practical result to the lay public is that it finds itself called upon to-day to accept a new attitude to Psychology, which in many cases involves a new adjustment to life and religion. The immediate value for the race of any discovery lies in its power to carry with it the large body of sane and open-minded opinion of its generation. To convince the pseudo-prophets — those who are always seeking to hear or to tell some new thing — is always easy. To convert the rigid traditionalist priest is invariably hopeless. But a vast body of the intelligent life of the country falls between these two extremes, and is as much open to reasonable presentation of a new idea, as it is worth enlisting on the side of the truth. If psychologists at the present juncture fail — through lack of patience or through lack of explicitness — to make good their new attitude in the eyes of the intelligent and unprejudiced section of the public, a great misfortune will result by the alienation of those who ought to be the most helpful and reasonable exponents of the new doctrine. It is true that we can do nothing against the truth, but if a large proportion of those who ought to have been won to it have been allowed to drift into the reactionary camp, by an unconciliatory attitude on the part of the Prophets, society suffers a heavy loss, and the gain which should have accrued to this generation is postponed indefinitely.

It is because it is always worth while from the sociological point of view to carry with us the intelligent lay opinion of the country that I venture to offer to parents and others interested the following popular statement of the main principles involved in the New

Psychology.

*****

In a word, the great discovery of the New Psychology is the discovery of the Unconscious Motive. That is to say Psychology previously had only dealt with conscious motives and mechanisms: the New Psychology deals with Motives and Mechanisms which are unknown to the individual. The idea of conflict between the constituent elements of our conscious mind is one with which the academic world was already familiar. But the New Psychology introduced the idea of Repression, i.e. the method of solving a conflict by rendering one side of it unconscious — a process which may be described as purposive or intentional forgetting.

As a simple illustration we may take the case of an undergraduate who appeared for an important examination. He was not at his best, he felt nervous, and came home thoroughly disappointed and despondent. In the course of the evening he produced from a pocket a letter. It was unopened and he had entirely forgotten that it was there. On the back it bore his tailor's name. It had arrived at breakfast time but the probable nature of the communication had been regarded as disquieting and as the letter was thrust into a pocket, so the subject was relegated to the unconscious — as the envelope was unopened, so the menace of the uncongenial had not been faced. Nevertheless the repression had influenced the day's work. .

Thus we constantly see the tendency of the instinctive emotions to conflict with one another, or with social, ethical and other claims and the various factors that determine on this basis what is to remain in consciousness and what is to be relegated to the unconscious. We are familiar in ordinary life with the manner in which a motive remaining wholly hidden from the individual, may yet constitute a permanent bias in life, and the consequent necessity for discounting the validity of the individual's judgment in given cases —e.g. the inability of most people to give a detached judgment on a question where family loyalty, patriotism or caste feeling enters in. Now comes the great revelation — that our dream life consists largely — // not entirely — in a representation of factors that are not receiving recognition — or adequate recognition — in our conscious mental life.

The system of treatment known as Psycho- Analysis consists largely in the revelation to the individual (generally by dream interpretation) of the unconscious motives which are either vitiating his judgment or producing physical manifestations with a definite significance. "Nerves" are thus to be regarded no longer as being of physical origin, but as based — at least to some extent and often entirely — upon conflict, and upon an attendant unconscious process.

The founder of this School of Psycho- Analysis is Professor Freud of Vienna, and up to this point the debt which psychology and humanity owe to him for his discovery may well be said to be incalculable. Unfortunately, however, he proceeds to base upon it a system of psychology which aims at offering a completely deterministic philosophy of life. Freud's psychological doctrine is that we are simply the product of forces working upon us both from within and without — our temperament, our innate instincts (sexual and otherwise), our whole make-up and environment. These forces, playing together upon us, are the sole cause of our conduct, character and behaviour. It is the proud claim of many of the modern Freudians that Freud is "the first psychologist who has shown us the way to introduce a thoroughgoing determinism in the mental sphere"

Now a thoroughgoing determinism in the 19 mental sphere is in my opinion, and in that of many far greater psychologists, a meaningless thing, and it is largely at this point that the Zurich School of Psychology diverges from the School of Vienna. Professor Jung of Zurich has carried the new system of Psychology far from the original doctrines of Freud. To him man is still a free agent, however helped or hindered by unconscious factors. To him the dream deals not merely with an objective situation, but with a spiritual prompting. His interpretations are not merely reductive but also prospective.

It follows then that the difference in the Psychological teaching of these two schools implies a diversity of even greater moment than their philosophic implications. Adherence to the School of Vienna — as many of us understand it — rules out idealism, freedom, spirituality. But the followers of the Zurich School are not ashamed to retain "the illusion of human spontaneity" as the central fact in all that is worth most in human life and character. To the present writer, and to many, the only philosophy that has any bearing upon life is an idealistic philosophy, and as such we would pass on to you, as far as we can, the teaching of Jung, believing that to all parents and teachers who truly apprehend it, it will be a source of inspiration and sound counsel in the practical problems of life.

*****

Readers will ask, then, what this New Psychology has to give the Parent? Let us begin by considering what it has not to give : the New Psychology has no magical solution to offer of the educational problems with which we parents are confronted. The solution— and it is by no means magical — of our problem lies in the knowledge of ourselves; and it is because the New Psychology has something great to off er parents for themselves that it is of such importance that they should not pass it by on the other side. It is not the light which psycho-analysis or the New Psychology throws upon child character and the mental process of the child; it is something different — the illumination which we get ourselves, the ability to see things from a different angle, that is its great contribution. Some of us have worked with a microscope, and know how little work can be done from the direct illumination. We rarely wish to throw the beam of light with which we are working upon the object we are examining; almost invariably we are directing that beam of light upon the reflector below, and the reflector has to be at the exact angle, to fully illuminate the object we are studying. So with ourselves: it is our own minds that have to be illumined, not the child upon which our attention is focused.

It has often been said of this fashionable psycho-analysis that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. This is true. An acquaintance with the subject of psycho-analysis is dangerous for all except those who are dumb. But an experience of psycho-analysis, or rather of the analytical outlook on life, is a different thing. It is something which we are not compelled to talk about, and that is its first advantage. It is something which will not be entirely pleasing to us, and it is something which is very unlikely to lead us astray in any way. It may, indeed, lead us nowhere ; but it is very unlikely to take us in the wrong direction.

Therefore the first fact about psycho-analysis or the New Psychology is that it is a thing we have to learn to use before we can understand it; and it is only in so far as it has meant to us an experience that it is going to be valuable to others. We cannot make it of use to others if it remains a merely objective thing, external to ourselves, like a knowledge of hydraulics or astronomy.

And the service it does us is not so much to help us to wise judgments upon abstract questions of the kindergarten or the public schools, as to help us to think straight and to think clearly. When our experience of the New Psychology has helped us to rid our mental life of unconscious motives, and unconscious bias, then it will have made us — as parents — infinitely better than we were before. And that is where the New Psychology can help the child.

One is constantly asked whether this point of view implies that every intelligent person should be analysed. It is not possible to give a general answer to such a question. In the first place it is obviously a material impossibility for every one to undergo a full analysis, seeing that the process may take anything from two months to two years or even more. Who then have the most pressing claim? First, one would say, those whose actual contribution to the community is most disproportionate to their potential contribution. Secondly, those whose contribution is made at undue cost of effort or strain to themselves. Thirdly, those who cannot be happy without occupation or distraction. This group is one that appears to be rapidly growing. Its members do not recognize that there is anything wrong in their life. They seem to consider it is logical to feel bored in the absence of work, or the failure of amusement or excitement. This is the symptom of a social ill that has a very menacing aspect. It betokens the vast number of unharmonized individuals whose values are purely hedonic or material, and who conduct their mental lives on an avowed basis of repression.

The need for analysis is mainly a question of degree. It is like the problem of having the appendix removed. There is something to be said for a universal recourse to this operation, but sane surgical judgment advises it only when there is symptomic evidence to justify the time, risk and expense involved. Furthermore, the writer feels bound to say in the interests of honesty that he knows many individuals who have not been analysed, and who yet appear to him to be better harmonized in themselves and more generous contributors to the community than certain analysts of his acquaintance, and sundry patients who have been analysed either by himself or others a Voutrance.

Finally the analogy of the appendix suggests the obvious point that in a doubtful case the decision for or against operation might turn on whether or not a reputable and skilled surgeon were available.

It was said by some one at the Educational Conference which discussed psycho-analysis last January, that the new view-point upon the whole outlook of education was that in order to teach John Latin, we had to know not only Latin but John. That is not enough. The point is that if we wish to teach John Latin or anything else, we must know not only Latin and John, but above all ourselves. That is the real crux of the New Psychology.

CHAPTER III All education has two aspects

1. Transmission of racial experience.

2. Development of the child's psyche.

We have seen three eras of modern education:

(a) Pre-Froebelian.

(b) Froebelian.

(c) Montessorian.

The aim of education is the self-realization of the child. The child's urge to self-realization is primarily biological— viz., the unconscious aim of ultimate parenthood. The barriers met are twofold :

(a) The wrong use of authority.

(b) The harsh presentation of reality.

» The child must learn to adjust to both authority and reality, and is equipped by Nature with two mental mechanisms whereby it may face these two demands of life:

(a) The acceptance of authority is rendered easy to

the child by his suggestibility.

(b) The acceptance of reality is helped by his power

of escaping into phantasy.

Both suggestibility and phantasy should diminish as the child reaches maturity and the adult should act purely upon an independent rational principle, but in childhood the existence of both mechanisms is invaluable* As the child grows older parents must help towards their disappearance. When the gate of authority is unwisely barred, the child tends to become the ultra-suggestible type — or the rebel type.

Phantasy is mainly of three kinds: Compensatory Inspiratory Creative.

Excessive indulgence in phantasy leads to insanity. Fairy tales: their use and abuse.

ALL education has two objects — the trans- JljL mission in one form or another of racial experience, and the actual development of the child's own psyche.

During the last half-century education has undergone a great evolution. In pre-Froebelian days it dealt almost exclusively with the transmission of racial experience; the conception was that knowledge had to be — as it were — pumped into the child; and the only method was that of enforced attention. Education was essentially a matter of discipline. Then came Froebel and a great change swept over the face of things. His doctrine was that we must make the child interested in the thing to which we demand his attention, and the new idea spread like wild-fire. Stimulated interest was the new conception, and so far as it went it marked a great step forward. Finally came Dr. Montessori with her epochmaking discovery of spontaneity in education.

She gave us an amazing revelation of the rapidity and ease with which a child who had been subjected to almost no discipline at all, but had been given free scope in a suitable environment, could acquire all the knowledge really necessary for it. This conception has revolutionized the ideas of educationalists, and even those who could by no means be described as Montessorians have come to realize that the mediate experience which we hand on to the child (and of which we have hitherto made such a god) is really far less valuable to him and far less time-saving than the immediate experience which he gains for himself if he is placed in an environment which enables him to do so without undue cost.