The Child and Society
THE bland scientific disregard by psycho-analytic theory of most of the chief taboos of our society has for years infuriated a large public. A smaller, not quite so vocal, public, has been exasperated by its disregard of all the factors that interest the social and political reformer. " Why do you assume that the patient is always wrong ? " this section of the public protests. " Can't you see that, in this, that and the other particular, it is more likely to be society that is at fault ? " Students of the history of the older sciences have, however, been more patient. if there was anything in this new scientific way of looking at human behaviour, then the time would come when, having gained some insight into the dynamics of one side of the clash between Western civilisation and the individual, the psycho- analytic theorists were bound to begin to interest themselves in the other.
That time has apparently come. The historians of the future will probably decide that the enlightenment of the psychiatrists on this side of their problem has come through their association with the social anthropologists. Margaret Mead and others have pointed out that what is mad and bad in one society may be held to be sane and good in another. Thus the epileptics or obsessional neurotics of one society are the successful prophets or business-tycoons of another. Everywhere social approval or social rejection has a determining influence. The foaming .speaker-with-tongues or the gold-cigarette-cased scrutineer of the ticker-tape may, will, if born into the right environment, go to his grave confident that he is an enviable specimen of humanity. And why—we the general public may ask—did this modest little truism, that there are usually two sides to a conflict, take so long to emerge ? The reason is simple. It is the nature of man in general, and of specialists in particular, to try to grasp one set of ideas at a time, and to be able to grasp the dynamics involved in the developing individual who has some- how become at odds with his or her environment is so difficult that, as knowledge of them grew, it shut out everything else. In short, analysis preceded synthesis.
The present book illustrates another reason. Dr. Pearson; like many of his fellow theorists, writes not for the public nor for the reformer but for the clinician, specifically for the doctor who may be called in in the hope of curing a -child who, though very ill, very unhappy or very troublesome, appears to have nothing wrong physically. Thus he does not give much space or attention to the question: " What is wrong with Western Society ? " For even if he knew, even if he could impart his knowledge, what is the man in the white coat, for whom he writes, to "do about it ? But here and there he drops a word or recommends steps which would once have been well outside the austere purview , of the strict Freudian. He does not go as far as Ruth Benedict—for she, after all, was an anthropologist, and moreover was writing for us, the public, who, in a democracy, are supposed to be responsible for what we may call " public form " and what she called the culture pattern." What she said was (and it is the type of saying that will increasingly remove a load of guilt from harassed parents) is that it is impossible to take the whole Weight of social pressure off a child by small changes in nursery routine.
Let us in the meantime be grateful to those who, like Dr. Pearson, " bring together a body of well authenticated knowledge on child psychiatry." Perhaps the only danger in preparing such a book is that the pediatrician ichild-doctor to you and me) who reads it may fancy himself now equipped to treat his patients' emotional illnesses. Fortunately there are sections of this book which may prove suffi- ciently alarming to disabuse the good easy fellow of this notion.
AMABEL WILLIAMS-ELLIS.
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