Bruno Bettelheim

Feral Children and Autistic Children

Belief in the truth of the occasional reports of children having beenreared by wolves and behaving like animals may in part be accounted for by a narcissistic unwillingness to acknowledge the human nature of the so-called feral children. However, Ogburn has successfully proved that in a recent instance there is no sound evidence of animal foster-parents. Moreover, the behavior of the children strongly resembled that of servere cases of infantile autism with seemingly animal-like traits and habits being treated at the Orthogenic School of the University of Chicago. These are for the most part children of intelligent, educated parents, reared in middle-class homes, and there is no question of intervention by non-humans. As far as the etiology of such behavior is established, it seems to lie in extreme emotional deprivation, which may be equated with the traumatic experiences of wolf children reported from India.

Play and Education

In this century, the importance of play in educating and socializing children has been recognized in theory, while greatly neglected in practice. The more we became consciously aware of the psychological significance of unstructured, spontaneous play, the more we curtailed the childs opportunity to engage in it. We supervise and direct his play, and we schedule his day with so many in and out activities that there is little time left for his own play. Freud noted that play is the means by which the child accomplishes his first great cultural and psychological achievements. Play is his language of expression and also, if we are ready to understand, of communication. Freud was impressed with how much and how well children express their ideas and emotions through play particularly those thoughts and feelings they fear to acknowledge to themselves and to others. Through playing out feelings, children master emotions which would otherwise overwhelm them.

Segregation: New Style

First there was Little Rock. Then came Sputnik. First there was excitement about equal schooling for all children regardless of race. Then came anxious demands for special schooling for gifted children. To the casual observer, the disorders at Central High School in Little Rock and the worry about Russian scientific progress may seem totally unrelated. Public concern with school desegregation and the education of the gifted may seem completely unconnected. Persistent headlines on both issues may seem to be the product of pure chance or the unfathomable vagaries of history. But is something more than chance or caprice at work here? The possibility is worth entertaining. Let us think back to that memorable autumn of 1957.

The Social-Studies Teacher and the Emotional Needs of Adolescents

N PERIODS of developmental growth the individual either can progress toward the next developmental stage or can remain stationary. If he already feels insecure, if he fails to master adequately the problems which confront him at the moment, there is little incentive to progress. The insecure person is usually too afraid to try newer and more complex things. Instead, he clings to the old developmental tasks which he knows and which, therefore, seem less threatening than the new

Violence: A Neglected Mode of Behavior

Despite Freuds recognition of mans tendency towards aggression and violence, our educational system pro ceeds as if these tendencies exist neither in society nor in man. Therefore, our children do not receive any help from our schools in recognizing the omnipresence of the tendency to act with violence, nor in techniques for dealing with it in con structive ways. In the following paper, examples are presented on how education to learn to read, for example, could proceed much more successfully if our teachers would take cognizance of childrens fascination with thoughts of violence and aggres sion, and teach them both to recognize this and to deal with it.

The Anatomy of Academic Discontent

While history does not repeat itself, and while the present situation in the United States is radically different from that of pre-Hitler Germany, some similarities between the present student rebellion in this country and what happened in the German universities to spearhead Hitlers rise to power are nevertheless striking. Politically, of course, the German student rebels embraced the extreme right, while here the dissenters embrace the extreme left, but what is parallel is the determination to bring down the establishment. In Germany the philosophy which gained the rebels a mass following was racist and directed against a discriminated minority (the Jews), while here the radical students intend to help a discriminated minority. This is an important difference, but it does not change the parallel that universities then and now were forced to make

Attitudes and Prejudice

The development, maintenance and change of attitudes of an individual and the complex relationships between a person’s attitudes and his behaviour may be considered a core problem of social psychology. This chapter complements the preceding sections — those on ‘socialization’ and ‘personality development’ — since attitudes are learned through socialisation and may be considered part of an individual’s personality.

Orthopsychiatry and the School

Symposia do not make for satisfactory reading, particularly when, as in this volume, more than one symposium is combined in book form. Considering the original sense of the term, one wonders why, in speech feasts, the spirits are so watered down. Of the twenty-six papers forming the volume, some are excellent, others good, and the rest mediocre rather than bad. This seems to reflect the present nature of contributions of psychiatry to education. What, I asked myself, would a symposium volume be like in which educators discussed the present state of psychiatry, the contributions that they, as educators, could make to its practice, and what, from their point of view, was wrong with it? I concluded that such a volume would probably make equally poor reading. So perhaps it is well for both disciplines that teachers do not hold symposia in which they discuss their contribution to psychiatry, and what

Educational News and Editorial Comment

ENTAL HEALTH is the teachers new frontier, a problem that has come to be of major importance to all educators. This new emphasis is illustrated by the Midcentury White House Conference on Children and Youth held in December, 1950, and by the International Mental Health Conference held in December, 1951, in Mexico City. Both of these conferences were largely devoted to discussions of childrens emotional problems -how children can be helped with them and, more important, how such problems can be prevented or at least mitigated. The White House conferences, which during this century have