A. Freud supplemented the psychoanalytic teaching the concept of the integrity of the mental system ("I" as its center). In the doctrine of the mental structures of the personality, she traces the formation of the "It", "I" and "Super-I" of the child, studies the ratio of their influence on the psyche. The main merit of A. Freud in this area is the allocation of the so-called genetic lines of development.
Developing and filling with specific psychological content the main provisions of classical psychoanalysis, A. Freud described in detail the patterns of the change in the phases of the normal development of the child.
She also considered a wide range of mental disorders- from "ordinary" difficulties of upbringing (fears, whims, sleep and appetite disorders) to severe autistic disorders - and offered practical methods for their treatment.
She singled out several lines of individual development: from infantile dependence in childhood to love in adulthood, from selfishness to friendship, from breastfeeding to rational nutrition, etc. give recommendations for solving practical issues: what age is most favorable for entering kindergarten and school, what is the optimal time for the appearance of a second child in the family, etc.
Anna Freud believed that a psychoanalyst working with children should set himself three additional tasks at once:
1. Convince a neurotic child that he is sick.
2. Win his trust again and again.
3. Persuade the child to get treatment.
· An adult comes to a psychoanalyst because he is driven by suffering. He pays for treatment, and this payment makes him penetrate deep into his problems. Finally, an adult goes to the psychoanalyst he trusts. The child is not yet able to compare himself with others, does not realize the severity of his mental state, and it is unusual for him to reveal himself to a stranger. Therefore, Anna Freud did not consider it a waste of time to play with a child, to embroider, knit, in order to become “necessary” in his eyes.
Anna Freud originally used game as a way to establish contact with the child. But working with children who survived the bombings of London during World War II, she made a surprising discovery. A child who had the opportunity to express his feelings in the game was freed from fears and neurosis did not develop in him. Anna Freud described in detail the differences in reactions between adults and children to the bombing of London in Children and War (1944). Adults strove to tell the therapist about their feelings again and again, but the children were silent. Their reaction to the fear experienced was expressed by the game: the child built houses from cubes, dropped imaginary cube bombs on the houses, the house was on fire, sirens howled, ambulances arrived, the dead and wounded were taken to the hospital. These games could go on for weeks...
· Already at the stage of gaining trust, you can learn a lot about the child by analyzing his fantasies, drawings and dreams, which the little patient tells about at his own request. The only difficulty that not every psychoanalyst can cope with is the child's inability to freely associate, because the whole psychoanalysis is built on the method of associations. When trust has been won, Anna Freud recommends that you discuss with the little patient those actions of his, because of which he experiences constant anxiety. The purpose of such conversations is for the child to realize that many of his bad deeds do not bring him any benefit, but only harm him. The child must know that everything he tells the psychoanalyst about will remain a secret. The adult environment of the child must come to terms with the fact that the psychoanalyst will for some time occupy a significant place in the inner world of the child. The child and the psychoanalyst make a kind of alliance against problems.
· When an adult comes to a psychoanalyst, the treatment begins with an analysis of the past. But the child has a past or not, or it is small! It is pointless to appeal to the memory of the baby. What to do? Firstly, maintain constant contact with the baby's family. Secondly, record all the childhood memories of a small patient. Thirdly, pay special attention to the analysis of dreams. Surprisingly, children understand the rules for interpreting dreams no worse than adults. As Anna Freud herself writes, the child “amuses himself with this study of the individual elements of sleep, similar to a game of blocks, and is very proud when he succeeds in something ...” Many children can not only fantasize, but also tell stories with continuations. “From such stories with continuation, the doctor better understands the internal state of the child,” Anna believes. Drawing is the richest field for the psychoanalyst's interpretations. The drawing symbolically reflects the baby's anxieties, feelings for others, desires, dreams and ideals.
Sigmund Freud believed that psychoanalysis is contraindicated for stupid or narcissistic people, psychopaths and perverts, and success can only be achieved with those who understand what morality is and seek to be treated themselves. As French researcher Elisabeth Rudinesco writes, if we take his statements literally, it turns out that such treatment is suitable only for “educated people who are able to dream and fantasize.” But in practice, the patients he received at his home on Berggasse in Vienna did not always meet these criteria. T&P publishes an excerpt from the book Sigmund Freud in His Time and Ours, which was published by the Kuchkovo Pole publishing house.
It is known that the patients accepted by Freud as “sick” before and after 1914 came to him for treatment to one degree or another under duress: these are all the women mentioned in the “Etudes on Hysteria”, these are Ida Bauer, Margarita Chonka and many others. Under such conditions, the likelihood that the treatment would be "successful" was small, especially when it came to young ladies who rebelled against the established order in the family, in their eyes Freud appeared as a lustful doctor or an accomplice of parents. Conversely, patients who came to Berggasse for analysis of their own free will were generally satisfied. Hence the paradox: the more the treatment depended on the patient's free will, came from himself, the more successful it was. And Freud concluded from this that the patient must fully accept all conditions, otherwise no psychoanalytic experience is possible. It must be clarified that if the analysand wanted to become an analyst himself, then the treatment had a much better chance of becoming therapeutic, then scientific, because the patient was directly involved in the matter itself. As a consequence, and without exception, the treatment, which was completely completed, that is, from the point of view of the person who turned to Freud, the most satisfactory, was a treatment that, on the one hand, was voluntary, on the other, assumed the most active participation of the patient*.
* This is precisely because psychoanalysts did not want to compare their cases with those that Freud did not report, and they could not give a real assessment of his practice. All other mixed trends - Kleinists, Lacanists, post-Lacanists, Ferventists, etc. - were satisfied with commentary; such is the canonical corpus, the story of Anna O. and the "cases" given in the "Etudes on Hysteria" and also in the famous "Five Cases", of which only three can be regarded as a cure. This left a free field for the anti-Freudians, who took advantage of it to turn Freud into a charlatan incapable of curing anyone. The reality is much more complicated, and we have seen it.
Freud's patients were overwhelmingly Jewish, suffering from neuroses in the broadest sense of the word, which was given to him in the first half of the century: neuroses, sometimes mild, but often serious, which would later be called borderline states and even psychoses. A considerable number of patients belonged to intellectual circles, often they were well-known people - musicians, writers, people who create, doctors, etc. They wanted not only to be treated, but to experience what treatment with a word, which is led by its creator himself. They mainly came to Berggasse after having already visited other luminaries of the European medical world - psychiatrists or specialists in all kinds of nervous diseases. And, no matter what they say, before 1914 they all encountered that very notorious “therapeutic nihilism”, so characteristic of the mental medicine of this era.
A huge success in psychoanalysis was the development by Freud of a system of interpretations of the affects of the soul, which was based on an extensive narrative epic, which was more involved in deciphering riddles, rather than psychiatric nosography. On the couch of this original scientist, who also suffered from bodily ailments, surrounded by a luxurious collection of objects, touchingly beautiful dogs, everyone could feel like a hero of some theatrical scene, where princes and princesses masterfully play their part, prophets, deposed kings and helpless queens. Freud told fairy tales, summarized novels, recited poetry, resurrected myths. Jewish stories, anecdotes, tales of sexual desire hidden in the depths of the soul - all this, in his eyes, was perfectly suited to endow modern man with a mythology that would reveal to him the splendor of the origins of mankind. Technically, Freud justified this position by arguing that a well-conducted, that is, successful, analysis aims to convince the patient to accept the authenticity of some scientific construction, simply because the highest advantage is simply to win back the acquired memory. In other words, successful treatment is such a treatment that allows you to understand the underlying cause of suffering and failure, to rise above them in order to fulfill your desires.
Freud saw eight patients a day, his sessions lasted 50 minutes, six times a week, sometimes many weeks or even months. It happened that the treatment was delayed indefinitely, there were repetitions and failures. In addition, Freud received other patients for routine consultations, prescribed treatment, and conducted several sessions of psychotherapy. He usually did not take any notes, doing "sofa art". It was an introduction to the journey: Dante leads Virgil, as in the Divine Comedy. If he recommended abstinence, he never followed any principles of "neutrality", preferring "half-hearted attention" to allow the unconscious to operate. He talked, intervened, clarified, explained, confused and smoked cigars, without suggesting to patients what they reacted to in different ways. Finally, if an occasion arose, he recalled some details from his own life, mentioned tastes, political preferences, and convictions. In a word, he himself was involved in the treatment, confident that he would overcome the most stubborn resistance. When this failed, he always sought to understand why, as long as there was hope for success. Sometimes he was tactless, informing his correspondents about what happened during the sessions he conducted, and sometimes he read letters received by him to some patients, which dealt with them, when all this was supposed to remain confidential.
* The mathematician Henri Roudier calculated for me what Freud's condition was at various stages of his life. Until the First World War - in florins and crowns, then, since 1924 - in shillings and dollars. It should be noted that all the “monetary conversions” proposed in order to determine the price of Freudian sessions and convert it into euros or dollars of the 21st century have no scientific basis, and the authors, among other things, contradict each other: some it turns out 450 euros, others - 1000, others - 1300. Such calculations should by no means be taken seriously, they are aimed at presenting Freud as a swindler or a greedy person. One can speak about his condition only by comparing him with other contemporaries who did the same thing as him and came from the same social class. Of course, Freud became rich, considering that at the same age his father lived in relative poverty.
Freud summed up accounts day after day, kept notes in a special diary (Kassa-Protokoll) and talked endlessly about money in letters. Between 1900 and 1914 his social status was equal to that of eminent professors of medicine, who meanwhile received patients privately*. He was well off, like all the more or less prominent practitioners of his generation, and led the same way of life.
During the war, revenues collapsed - along with the Austrian economy. But beginning in 1920, he slowly recovered his fortunes, accepting patients not only from former European powers devastated by the financial crisis and the depreciation of money, but also other psychiatrists or wealthy foreign intellectuals who came from the United States or who wanted to study psychoanalysis. Freud gradually became the analyst of analysts.
When it was possible, he asked to pay for the treatment in foreign currency. Over the years, he managed to place savings abroad, to which were added quite significant amounts for copyrights. If he earned less than a psychoanalyst living in New York or London, he certainly was better off than his German, Hungarian and Austrian followers, who were struggling with the collapse of the economy. In October 1921, inviting Lou Andreas-Salomé to come to Vienna because she expressed such a desire, he wrote: “If you are breaking with your homeland because freedom of movement is being encroached on in the country, let me send you money to Hamburg, necessary for the trip. My brother-in-law manages my mark deposits there, as well as income in hard foreign money (American, English, Swiss), I have become relatively rich. And I would not mind if wealth gave me some pleasure.
* At the same time in New York, the price per session was $50. Here are economist Thomas Piketty's notes on Freud's earnings, calculated at my request: The average income ranged from 1200 to 1300 gold francs per year per inhabitant. Today, the average income (excluding taxes) is about 25,000 euros per year per adult. To compare the totals, it would be better to multiply the gold franc amounts of 1900-1910 by a factor of about 20. Christfried Tögel credits Freud with an income of about 25,000 florins, which corresponds to 500,000 euros in annual income today. This, of course, is a fairly high profit, but also quite indicative for the highest level of the era. With constant inequality, this would rather correspond to about 250,000 euros of annual income today.”
For comparison, note that in 1896 Freud charged 10 florins per hour; in 1910 - from 10 to 20 crowns per session; in 1919, 200 crowns, or $5 if the patient is an American (which is equal to 750 crowns), or a guinea, which is a little more than one livre sterling (600 crowns), if the patient is a low-income Englishman. Finally, in 1921, he considered asking for between 500 and 1,000 crowns, then settled on $25* an hour, which did not stop him from charging some patients less exaggerated amounts.
At times, he could not contain unfair and harsh anti-American sentiments, to the point that he claimed, for example, that his followers across the Atlantic were only good because they brought him dollars. Just one interlocutor, he frightened by saying that the Statue of Liberty can be replaced by another, which "holds the Bible in his hand." The next day, during analysis, one of the students was told that Americans are so stupid that their whole way of thinking can be reduced to an absurd syllogism: “Garlic is good, chocolate is good, put some garlic in chocolate and eat!”.
Freud experienced the fall of the Central European empires and the gradual dominance of the American psychoanalysts in the international movement as a deep humiliation. He agonized over the fact that he had to make all patients pay, and was sympathetic to the idea that medical institutions should provide free care to the poor. The American notion of democracy, individual liberty, and the right of peoples to self-determination in general horrified him. “Americans,” he once said to Shandor Rado, “are transferring the democratic principle from politics to science. All in turn should be presidents. But they can't do anything."
Freud always believed that psychoanalytic treatment is contraindicated for people who are stupid, uneducated, too old, melancholic, manic, anorexic or hysterical, however occasionally. He also ruled out psychoanalytic experiences for psychopaths or perverts "not willing to come to terms with themselves." Since 1915, he has added to the category of "unanalyzed" those who are subject to severe narcissistic disorder, possessed by the death drive, to chronic destruction and not amenable to sublimation. Later, when Ferenczi suggested that he undergo an analysis, he joked that we were talking about a man who was under seventy, who smoked, who had a cancerous tumor, nothing would help him. Freud also said the opposite - that psychoanalysis is intended to treat hysteria, neuroses associated with obsessive persecution, phobias, anxiety, depression, sexual disorders. And he added that success can only be achieved with smart people who understand what morality is and strive to be treated.
“Maniacs, psychopaths, melancholics, narcissists consulted other specialists who, like Freud, did not achieve successful results. But only one Freud was accused both during his lifetime and after his death.
In 1928, he made it quite clear to the Hungarian follower Istvan Hollos, the initiator of the reform of psychiatric hospitals, that he hated patients with psychotic disorders. “I was finally convinced that I don’t love these patients, they make me angry, because they don’t look like me, they don’t look like anything that could be called human. It is a strange sort of intolerance which makes me quite unsuitable for psychiatry. "?".
Taking these statements literally, one can decide, believing the founder, that psychoanalysis is suitable only for people who are educated, capable of dreaming or fantasizing, aware of their condition, concerned about improving their own well-being, with morals beyond all suspicion, capable of being cured by virtue of positive transfer or antitransference for several weeks or months. Well, we know that most of the patients who came to Berggasse didn't fit that profile.
* As an example, the Viennese architect Carl Meyreder (1856-1935), whom Freud treated for ten weeks for chronic melancholy in 1915, set a kind of record when he turned to fifty-nine doctors, whose prescriptions and other treatments turned out to be completely ineffective. But only Freud was accused of not curing him.
In other words, since the beginning of the century, there has been a great contradiction between the guidelines for the implementation of treatment, which Freud advocated in his articles, and his own practice. Recognizing this, he corrected his theory by describing in Introduction to Narcissism and Beyond the Pleasure Principle cases of which he doubted the therapeutic success in every possible way. And meanwhile, trying to resist nihilism, but under the pressure of financial necessity, always striving to throw down a challenge, he undertook to analyze "unanalyzed" people - in the hope that he would be able, if not to cure them, then at least to alleviate suffering or change their attitude to life.
These patients - maniacs, psychopaths, melancholics, suicidal, depraved, masochistic, sadistic, self-destructive, narcissistic - consulted other specialists who, like Freud, did not achieve successful results *. But only one Freud was accused of all the infamies both during life and after death: a charlatan, a swindler, a money-lover, etc.
That is why it is very important to study in detail some of the courses of treatment - of those that turned out to be the most failed and, on the contrary, completed. Let us first emphasize that out of all 170 patients admitted by Freud, no matter what they treated, twenty people did not receive any benefit, and about a dozen refused him, so much so that they hated the doctor himself. Most of them went to other therapists, on the same terms of payment, without getting better results. Today, no researcher can say what the fate of these patients would have been if they had not done anything at all to get rid of suffering. […]
After 1920, Freud could enjoy great happiness, contemplating the huge success that psychoanalysis enjoyed on the other side of the planet. Then it was perfectly clear that his work was moving forward, and yet he did not find satisfaction. Everything went as if he was afraid that, having abandoned his ideas, they would be accepted only in order to distort. "Who will bumps fall on when I'm not alive?" - he said to himself, thinking about all sorts of "deviations" that his theory had undergone through the fault of his contemporaries. Like most of the founders, Freud did not want to be a Cerberus guarding his discoveries and concepts, taking on the risk of elevating idolatry and stupidity into a law.
In such and such a state of mind, he received patients from the victorious countries at Berggasse, in particular Americans who paid him in hard currency and came to learn the trade of psychoanalysis and get to know each other personally. In vain Freud was indignant, he was forced to admit that any treatment, frankly carried out in English with students who are ready to cooperate, carries a possible future for psychoanalysis, one that he had not even thought about. Therefore, he was forced to moderate his anti-American views and admit that other promised lands were opening up for his theory: France, the United Kingdom, the USA, Latin America, Japan, etc.
* Among Freud's 170 patients, there are 20 Americans, almost all from New York. Tadeusz Eimes (1885–1963) met Freud in Vienna in 1911 or 1912. Monroe Meyer (1892–1939), melancholic psychiatrist, committed suicide at 47 with a sharp piece of glass. Freud was accused by anti-Freudians that he was to blame for this voluntary death, which occurred 18 years after Monroe's stay in Vienna. Leonard Blumgard remained an orthodox Freudian.
Abram Kardiner was born in New York and came from a family of Jewish tailors who came from Ukraine. In October 1921, as a young doctor in his thirties, he went to Vienna to be treated by Freud, as many of his compatriots would do: Adolf Stern, Monroe Meyer, Clarence Obendorf, Albert Polon, Leonard Blumgard*. Passionate about anthropology, rejecting dogmas, he had already practiced psychoanalysis when he was treated for the first time, on the couch of Horace Frink, regarding this experience as unsuccessful.
He met with Freud for six months, talking about poor migrant parents fleeing anti-Semitic persecution: arriving in Ellis Island, looking for work, his mother dying of tuberculosis when he was only three years old, praying in a language he did not know , fear of unemployment, hunger, the appearance of a stepmother, who herself came from Romania and aroused in him a strong sexual desire. Kardiner talked about musical tastes, about the doom of his own Jewishness, about Yiddish, then about anti-Semitism, his desire to become a big "doctor", about his interest in minority communities - Indians, Irish, Italians, about that notorious "melting pot", which in what something like the Central European.
Kardiner also recalled the times when he was a teenager. The stepmother had an underdeveloped uterus, which did not allow her to have children, which he was glad about. He told about his father that once he scolded and hit his mother, whom he married not for love. In his memory he retained the memory of the unfortunate woman who gave him life, but did not have time to grow. It was under the influence of the stepmother that the patient's father was able to become a real husband devoted to the family. After an unsuccessful love affair with one girl, followed by depression, Kardiner became interested in studying medicine, thinking how he, the son of a Jewish tailor who became an American, would become a brilliant intellectual, who had gone headlong into psychoanalysis and cultural studies. And yet he was tormented by anxiety, which made him vulnerable to any life accomplishments.
He told Freud two dreams. In the first, three Italian men urinated on him, each with a penis sticking up, and in the second, he slept with his own stepmother. Kardiner was clearly the ideal "Freudian patient" - intelligent, dreamy, suffering from a phobic neurosis, from a love fixation on a stepmother who replaced his mother, a victim of an abusive father who married before leaving, under the contract. But before his Viennese teacher, he did not bow at all, he simply wanted to go through this experience with him. Admiring him, he willingly challenged his interpretations.
Another was the case of Clarence Obendorf, who founded the New York Psychoanalytic Society with Brill and was treated at the same time as Kardiner. Freud despised him, considered him stupid and arrogant. Obendorf, on the other hand, turned out to be much more faithful to him than Kardiner, although he was very cautious, and with good reason, about the search for "primary scenes" by psychoanalysts, wherever possible. He believed that the old-fashioned treatment was no longer suitable for modern times.
* Clarence Obendorf (1882-1954) was an orthodox Freudian, hostile to his simplistic psychoanalysis. He wrote the first official work on the history of psychoanalysis in the United States.
On the very first day of analysis, he spoke of a dream in which he was being driven in a carriage drawn by two horses, black and white, in an unknown direction. Freud knew that the patient was born in Atlanta to a southern family and had a black nurse as a child, to whom he was very attached. He immediately gave a stunning interpretation of this dream, saying to Obendorf that he would not marry, since he would not be able to choose between a white and a black woman. Having lost his temper, Obendorf argued about the dream with Freud and Kardiner for three months. He was all the more humiliated because he was a veteran analyst trained on the couch by Federn and had stopped interpreting dreams. According to Kardiner, he remained a bachelor, and Freud continued to despise him.
“If the analysand wanted to become an analyst himself, then the treatment had a much better chance of becoming therapeutic, then scientific”
Freud was far more fortunate with Kardiner than with Obendorf. A sort of Danubian prophetess, he explained to him that he identified himself with the misfortune of his own mother, and this spoke of "unconscious homosexuality", that the three Italians from his dream were his father who humiliated him, and that the break with the bride repeated the original refusal, which would not happen again because he himself overcame it. Regarding another dream, Freud explained to Kardiner that he wanted to be subordinate to his father in order "not to wake the sleeping dragon." On two points - unconscious homosexuality and submission to the father - Freud was wrong, and the patient noticed this.
When six months had passed, Freud reasoned that Kardiner's analysis had been a success, and predicted for him a brilliant career, exceptional financial success, happiness in love affairs, and he was quite right. In 1976, having moved away from psychoanalytic dogmatism and leaving behind the widespread Oedipianism and canonical interpretations of covert homosexuality or the law of the father, Kardiner recalled with pleasure his time at Berggasse: “Today I would say, when I have a general understanding, that Freud brilliantly carried out my analysis . Freud was a great analyst because he never used theoretical expressions - at least then - and formulated all his interpretations in ordinary language. The exception is the reference to the Oedipus complex and the concept of unconscious homosexuality, he processed the material without interruption from everyday life. As for the interpretation of dreams, it was extremely insightful and intuitive. I should add about Freud's "slumbering dragon" error. “The person who justified the concept of transfer did not recognize it. He was missing one single thing. Yes, of course, I was afraid of my father when I was little, but in 1921 the person I was afraid of was Freud himself. He could give me life or break it, and this did not depend on the father.
This evidence is all the more interesting because Kardiner came to Vienna, since he considered his analysis by Frink insufficient. In any case, he did not know that he himself was being treated by Freud, and the treatment was going on with great difficulty. Of course, Kardiner noticed Frink's aggressiveness, but he showed no signs of psychosis. A more dogmatic Freudian than Freud himself, Frink interpreted Kardiner's relationship with his father as a desire for Oedipal death. “You were jealous of him, jealous that he owns your stepmother,” he told him. This erroneous interpretation caused Kardiner a new outbreak of anxiety and a legitimate desire to complete the treatment. Not wanting to harm Frink, Freud rejected this intention. At the end of the analysis, he told Kardiner his fears. He was no longer interested in therapeutic problems, he said. “Now my impatience is much less. Some obstacles prevent me from becoming a great analyst, and I suffer from them. By the way, I am more than a father. I do too much theory."
In April 1922, when Kardiner told him that psychoanalysis could not harm anyone, Freud showed two photographs of Frink, one taken before the analysis (in October 1920) and the other a year later. In the first, Frink looked like a man Kardiner knew, and in the second, he looked confused, haggard. Were these metamorphoses really the result of experiments on the couch? Kardiner doubted this more than Freud, who never got rid of the nightmare of this tragic treatment, which mixed marital relations, adultery, psychoanalytic endogamy and misdiagnosis.
* "Painful Fears and Obsessions" by Horace Frink: Horace W. Frink, Morbid Fears and Compulsions, Boston, Moffat, Yard & Co., 1918.
Horace Westlake Frink was born in 1883. He was neither Jewish nor the son of European immigrants, neither rich nor neurotic. Gifted with an exceptional mind, he began studying psychiatry early and wanted to become a psychoanalyst. Suffering from a manic-depressive disorder from youth, he was analyzed by Brill, then joined the New York Psychoanalytic Society, and a few years later published a genuine bestseller that helped popularize Freudianism across the Atlantic*. In 1918, he became one of the most famous East Bank psychoanalysts, suffering from bouts of melancholy and mania, accompanied by delirium and an obsessive desire to commit suicide. His life was divided in two: on the one hand, his legal wife Doris Best, from whom he had two children, on the other hand, his mistress Angelica Bijour, a former patient, a fabulously rich heiress who married the famous American lawyer Abraham Bijour, who was analyzed by him, and then - at Tadeusz Ames.
The mistress hurried Frink to divorce, and he went to Vienna to undergo treatment with Freud and finally decide who would become the woman of his life. In turn, Angelica (Anzhi) also consulted Freud, who advised her to divorce and marry Frink, otherwise he risks becoming a homosexual. He diagnosed repressed homosexuality in his patient. In fact, he was infatuated with this brilliant man, calling him "a very sweet boy, whose condition has stabilized due to changes in life." He encouraged him to take Brill's place.
It was impossible for Frink to accept such a diagnosis. Meanwhile, having lost his discretion after all that the "Herr Professor" did, he decided to leave Doris and marry Anzhi. Outraged by this behavior, which, in his words, goes against all ethics, Abraham Bijour wrote an open letter to the New York Times, in which he called Freud "a charlatan doctor." He gave a copy to Thaddeus Ames, who forwarded it to Freud, emphasizing that the New York Psychoanalytic Society might be endangered by this case if the letter went to press. Jones, who was trying to put out the fire, he said that Anzhi had misunderstood everything. And he emphasized, however, - such was his deep thought - that society would react much more favorably to adultery than to the divorce of two unfortunate spouses who wanted to start a new family. Thus, he, as it were, admitted that he had pushed Horace and Anji to divorce not by washing, but only because, as it seemed to him, both of them would not find a common language with their current spouses.
In other circumstances, Freud made different decisions, in particular, when he was sure that adultery was just a symptom of a problem that had not been settled with a still beloved spouse. In short, as much as he cursed adultery, he also favored "kindly partings", provided that they led to a new marriage. As for this particular case, he was cruelly mistaken in Frink. And he persisted, sending him a meaningless letter: “I demanded from Anzhi that she not repeat to outsiders that I advised you to marry her, otherwise you might have a nervous breakdown. May I remark on your idea that she has lost some of her beauty, can't she be replaced by another - that she has gained some of her fortune? You complain that you don't understand your homosexuality, which implies that you can't imagine me being rich. If all goes well, we will replace the imaginary gift with a real contribution to psychoanalytic funds.
Like all of his followers, Freud contributed to the funding of the psychoanalytic movement. Therefore, it is not surprising that he gave Frink the idea to also participate financially with some kind of offering in order to recover from fantasies. As for the interpretations according to which a woman who has lost her attractiveness in the eyes of her lover can interest him in her condition, it stemmed from traditional ideas about the bourgeois family. Freud behaved with his patient, as in the old days - a matchmaker, confusing the couch and marriage advice. Proof that he did not understand Frink's disorder, mistaking him for an intelligent neurotic with repressed homosexuality in relation to his father. Having gained the opportunity to marry his mistress, he experienced a terrible sense of guilt and in November 1922 he returned to Vienna again. When he had a brief spell of delirium, he felt as if he were in a grave, and during the sessions he walked frantically in circles until Freud called another doctor, Joe Asch, to treat him and look after him in the hotel. The situation worsened when, after her ex-husband married Anzhi, Doris died from complications of pneumonia. Frink claimed that he loved his first wife, then began to harass his second.
In May 1924, Freud was forced to abandon his patient, declare him mentally ill and incapable of leading the New York Psychoanalytic Society. “I pinned all my hopes on him, although the reaction to the psychoanalytic treatment was of a psychotic nature. […] When he saw that he was not allowed to freely satisfy his childhood desires, he could not stand it. He rekindled his relationship with his new wife. Under the pretext that she was intractable in matters of money, he did not receive in return the signs of recognition that he constantly demanded from her. At the request of Frink himself, he was placed in a psychiatric clinic at the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, where he was treated by Adolf Meyer, and here he learned that Anzhi wanted to break up with him. All his subsequent life, he fell into enthusiasm, then into melancholy, he died in 1936, forgotten by everyone.
40 years later, his daughter Helen Kraft discovered among the papers of Adolf Meyer his father's correspondence with Freud, as well as many other documents, and, having publicly disclosed their contents, called the Viennese teacher a charlatan. Adherents of anti-Freudianism took advantage of this to accuse Freud of manipulating patients who, under his pen, became victims of his insidious theory. As for psychoanalysts, they continued to look at the clinical mistakes of their idol through their fingers. […]
General view of the problem
The process of transition from all kinds of deviations that are within the normal range to a real pathology occurs smoothly and depends more on changes in the quantitative ratio than on qualitative differences. In accordance with our psychoanalytic ideas, the mental balance of a person is based, on the one hand, on the relationship of his internal instances, and on the other hand, on the relationship of his personality as a whole to the outside world, that is, on connections that are subject to constant fluctuations. Instinctive energy spontaneously increases or decreases depending on what phase of development the individual passes through. So, for example, in the latent period, it weakens, in puberty - an increase, in menopause also an increase. If the instances of the "I" and "Super-I" are under pressure, the forces of the "I" and the influence of the "Super-I" decrease, just as it happens in a state of fatigue, during physical illness and in old age. If, due to the loss of the object or other deprivations, the possibilities of satisfying desires are reduced, their distribution increases. In this regard, 3. Freud argued that "we are not able to draw a sharp line between "neurotic" and "normal" children and adults; "disease" is a purely practical summary concept, and it is necessary that predisposition and experience converge and reach such a summation that will be sufficient to overcome a certain threshold. Thus, all the time, many individuals pass from the class of healthy to the class of neurotic patients, although a much smaller number of them make this way in the opposite direction ... "(1909).
Since these provisions are valid for a person of any age, "for children as well as for adults", then the border between healthy and sick, normal and abnormal in the first case is no easier and no more difficult to draw than in the second. The picture of the essence of childish nature described above shows that the balance of forces between the id and the ego is in constant fluctuation, that adaptation and protection, favorable and painful influences penetrate each other, that each advance from one stage of development to another brings with it the danger of stops, delays, fixations and regressions, that the instinct and the "I" develop at different rates and therefore can introduce disorder into the movement along separate lines of development, that temporary regressions can turn into long-term states, finally, that it is hardly possible to estimate the number of negatively influencing factors, that undermine or disturb mental balance.
The currently available classification systems can do little to help the diagnostician, who is obliged to understand these phenomena, and therefore he is in a very difficult position.
Currently, child analysis is moving in many different directions. Having created its own prescriptions, despite numerous difficulties and obstacles, the technique of child analysis freed itself to a large extent from the basic rules of adult analysis. Theoretical discoveries have been made that are a new contribution to analytic knowledge as they go beyond the mere confirmation of materials reconstructed from adults. Only when it comes to the classification of phenomena does the child analyst continue to use the diagnoses that are accepted in adult analysis, psychiatry and criminology, thus taking a conservative position and adopting long-established forms for his work, which are clearly not enough to make a correct diagnosis, prognosis and choice of treatment method, since they are poorly suited to the conditions of modern childhood psychopathology.
Differences between descriptive and metapsychological ways of thinking
The descriptive way of thinking in classifying both childhood and adult disorders is contrary to the metapsychological way of thinking, since the former is based on the similarities and differences in the symptoms that appear, and the latter on a comparison of the hidden causes behind them. Only at first glance, the classification of disease states in the description seems satisfactory. In fact, in this case, it is not at all about deepening ideas and not about finding significant differences between individual states, which are so necessary for us. Therefore, an analyst who is content with this kind of diagnostic thinking will inevitably confuse his own therapeutic and clinical views, built on other principles, and will be misled.
We will prove this with examples: fits of rage, passion for travel, fear of separation, etc. are diagnostic terms that combine under one name the most diverse states of the disease (clinical pictures), which are similar or even identical in their behavior and symptoms, but require completely different therapeutic effects, since they belong to completely different analytical categories in their metapsychological structure.
So the phenomenon called a fit of rage in children has three completely different meanings. For example, for the youngest, they usually mean nothing more than a motor-affective process, appropriate for this age, of withdrawing instinctive excitations, for which there is no other way out yet. This symptom disappears of itself without treatment, as soon as the "I" of the child has matured so that other possibilities of substitution open up for instinctive processes (especially in speech). But the same symptoms can also mean that manifestations of hatred and aggression against the objective world cannot manifest themselves in their entirety and therefore are directed back to the child’s own body and objects available to him (self-harm, banging his head against the wall, breaking furniture, etc.). . P.). In this case, the transferred affect must become conscious, connections with its causal goal must again be formed. A third interpretation of these symptoms is that the alleged rage is actually a fit of fear. If something prevents phobic children from carrying out their protective actions or avoidance (suppression of agoraphobia when a phobia of school attendance appears), they react to this with violent outbursts of fear, which an unskilled observer may not distinguish from ordinary fits of rage and rage, perceiving them as a manifestation of aggression . However, unlike the latter, such conditions can be eliminated only by two types of measures - by restoring phobic protection, that is, by avoiding fear-causing circumstances, or by analytically determining the causes of fear, interpreting and resolving them.
Approximately the same can be said about the so-called wandering of children (vagrancy, running away from home, school "truancy", etc.). We find the same symptom under different circumstances and in different interpretations. Some children run away from home if they are abused in the family or their libidinal attachment to the family is unusually weak; some skip school (wander around the street instead) if they are afraid of teachers or classmates, do poorly in school, or want to avoid censure and punishment. In both these cases, the cause of the symptom is external and can be eliminated by a change in the external conditions of life. In other children the cause of the same symptom lies in the inner life. They fall under the influence of an unconscious impulse and usually try to find an object of love in the past. From the point of view of the description, it is true that they "run away", but metapsychologically their wandering is purposeful, even if the goal set by the "It" before them is nothing more than the embodiment of desires. In such cases, therapy requires an internal change through analytical interpretation and translation of the unconscious desire into a conscious one, and any external intervention will not be successful.
Although similar objections can be raised against the very common diagnosis of separation anxiety, there is little to be objected to its current use in many children's clinics, where a wide variety of conditions are also indicated without reservation. Although, from a metapsychological point of view, there is no similarity between the fear of separation in young children and the school fear of latent children or the nostalgia of children cut off from their families and living in a boarding school. In the first case, we are talking about a violation of a biologically justified need (unity with the mother), to which the child responds with fear and despair; in this case, nothing can help better than reuniting with the mother, or at least introducing a substitute persona. In the second case, the cause of fear lies in the emotional ambivalence of the child. In the presence of parents, love and hate balance each other, in their absence, the fear is intensified that the hostile forces of the death desire of the parents can really harm them, and the child seeks to save them from himself, clings to the parents. In this case, the symptom may recede only before an analytical understanding of the emotional conflict, and reunion with the parents or unhindered cohabitation with them will be only superficial reassurance.
For analytical thinking and therapeutic action, a description of the symptomatology that manifests itself in this and similar cases is clearly not enough.
Differences in diagnostic terminology between children and adults
On the one hand, the diagnostic designations we use relating to various mental disorders in adult life have nothing to do with the numerous types and varieties of developmental disorders, and on the other hand, they do not relate to the difference between genetically determined symptoms and those caused by conflict. However, in the field of child psychopathology, such immediate differences play a paramount role. Thus, regardless of the stage of development at which they appear, it is impossible to consider as completely normal or abnormal such phenomena as lying or cheating, aggression or the desire for destruction, perverted activities, etc.
Lie
The question may be how to determine the moment after which it can be said with certainty that the child is "lying", that is, the falsification of the truth takes on the character of a symptom in him and comes into conflict with what others expect from the child. Of course, the need for truth, as we understand it, appears only after he has passed through a number of preliminary stages of development and is not present in a child from his very birth. There is nothing unnatural in the fact that a small child prefers what causes pleasant sensations, neglecting everything unpleasant and refusing to perceive irritants imposed on him that cause discomfort and fear. So, in this case, he behaves in exactly the same way as older children or adults when deceiving. But it is necessary for the child analyst (or diagnostician) to understand the difference between the primitive attitude towards truth at an early age, due to the dominance of the pleasure principle and the primary process over the child, and the later symptoms of lying. The analyst is justified in using the term "false" only when the reality principle and rational thought have reached a certain maturity, and the child, despite this, continues to falsify the truth.
In some children, the process of maturation of these "I" functions is delayed, and therefore, even at an older age, they continue to lie. Other "I" develop according to their age, but due to some failures and disappointments, they retreat to the previous primitive stages of development. This refers to liars-dreamers who try to protect themselves from real troubles with the help of infantile methods of fulfilling desires. At the opposite end of the line are children whose self-functions are themselves normal, but who have other than genetic reasons for avoiding the truth. In this case, the motives can be fear of adults, of censure and punishment, as well as greed, megalomania, etc. It is quite obvious that it makes sense to limit the use of the term "lie" to these last examples of "dissocial" lies.
In children's analytical practice, this phenomenon is most often encountered not in its pure form, but in a mixed form, consisting of renunciations, lies-fantasies and dissocial lies. Thus, the diagnostician has the opportunity to distinguish between individual constituent elements and determine the contribution to symptom formation, corresponding both to the processes of maturation and development, and to experiences.
Theft
As with lying, certain genetic developmental stages must be passed through before a given term can acquire diagnostic meaning.
The desire of children to appropriate for themselves everything that their desire is directed to is usually attributed to the "oral greed" of this period. But on closer examination, this behavior can be explained in two ways: it also corresponds to the pleasure principle, as a result of which the child, without thinking, appropriates everything that gives pleasure, and just as automatically provides the outside world with everything that causes trouble. It also corresponds to the age-specific inability to distinguish between self and object. As we know, an infant or small child treats the mother's body as if it were his own, plays with her fingers and hair in no other way than in autoerotica, or provides her with parts of her own body for play. The fact that small children can alternately bring the spoon to their mouth and to their mother's mouth is often misinterpreted as spontaneous early generosity, when in fact it is a consequence of the lack of boundaries of the "I" and nothing else. It is this confusion between the Self and the object world, which leads to a willingness to give, that turns each baby into a storm for someone else's property, despite all his innocence.
At first, in the understanding of the child, there is no concept of "mine" and "yours", which in later life is the basis of honesty. It develops very slowly and in stages, with a gradual increase in the independence of the "I". First of all, the child begins to own his own body ("I" - the body), then the parents, then - the transitional objects that are still filled with a mixture of narcissistic and object libido. Along with a sense of ownership in the child, there is also a tendency to protect his property with all his might from any outside influence. Children understand what it means to "lose" their own much earlier than they acquire the ability to reckon with someone else's property. For him to realize this, it is necessary to understand that the people around him protect their property no less than he does his own. And such an understanding can arise only on the condition of further expansion and deepening of relations with the outside world.
But, on the other hand, the development of the concepts "mine" and "yours" is not enough to have a decisive influence on the behavior of the child; this is opposed by powerful desires for appropriation of property. He is tempted to steal: oral greed, analogenic tendencies to have, hold, collect and accumulate, need for phallic symbols. The foundations of honesty are laid with the help of educational influences and the following requirements of the "Super-I", which are in constant and difficult opposition from the "I".
Whether or not a child can be diagnosed diagnostically and socially with the word "thief", indicating that he is "cheating", depends in the end on many conditions. Such a separate action can be provoked by a delay in the child's "I" on the way to achieving its independence, insufficiently formed object relations between the outside world and the "I", too infantile "Super-I". Because of such reasons, undeveloped and mentally retarded children cheat. If development proceeds normally, then such actions may be due to temporary regressions. In such cases, cheating is a temporary phenomenon and disappears with further development. Prolonged regressions in each of these relationships lead to cheating as a compromise formation in the form of a neurotic symptom. If the child cheats because his "I" is not able to dominate the normal, age-appropriate desires for appropriation, then such actions indicate insufficient adaptation to the moral requirements of the outside world and are a "dissocial" symptom.
In practice, as in the case of lies, etiological mixed formations are more common than the pure forms described above; we are usually dealing with the combined effects of developmental delays, regressions, and defects in the ego and superego combined. The end result is that all cheating returns to the causal unity of "mine" and "yours," self and object, as evidenced by the fact that all dissocial children first of all steal from their mother.
Criteria for assessing the severity of the disease
There is no doubt as to whether mental disorders occurring in childhood should be taken lightly or seriously. In adult life, in such cases, we proceed primarily from three criteria: 1) the picture of the symptom; 2) the forces of subjective suffering; 3) the degree of violations of vital functions. None of these points of view can be acceptable for children's life for obvious reasons.
1. As we already know, the symptoms in the years of development do not mean the same thing as later, when we “orient ourselves in making a diagnosis” by them (3. Freud, 1916-1917). Far from always (as happens later) childhood delays, symptoms and fears are the result of pathological influences. Often these are simply concomitant phenomena of normal developmental processes. Regardless of the amount of excessive demands that a certain phase of development places on the child, symptom-like phenomena can still occur, which, in a reasonable environment, disappear as soon as adaptation to a new stage occurs or its peak is passed. No matter how much we examine these phenomena, even such momentary disturbances are not easy to understand: they correspond to warnings about the vulnerability of the child. Often they disappear only externally, that is, they can reappear in the form of new disorders at the next stage of development, leaving behind scars that can serve as starting points for later symptomatic formation. But it still remains true that in a child's life, sometimes even obviously serious symptoms can disappear. Often, as soon as the parents come to the clinic, phobic avoidances, obsessive neurotic caution, sleep and eating disorders are rejected by the child simply because they are more afraid of diagnostic tests than their underlying fantasies. That is why the symptomatology changes or disappears soon after the start or during treatment. But in the end, symptomatic improvement means something even less for a child than for adults.
2. The same is true of subjective suffering. Adults decide on treatment if the mental suffering from the disease becomes unbearable. This cannot be said about children, since the factor of suffering in them in itself says little about the severity of a mental disorder or the presence of it. Children are less affected than adults by their symptoms, with the exception of states of fear, which are difficult for the child to bear. So, for example, phobic and obsessive neurotic measures that serve to avoid fear and displeasure are quite desirable for the child, and the corresponding restrictions on normal life interfere more with the adult environment than with the patient himself. Malnutrition and refusal of food, sleep disturbances, rabies attacks, etc. are justified from the position of the child and only in the eyes of the mother are undesirable phenomena. The child suffers from them only as long as the world around him prevents him from manifesting them in their entirety, and therefore sees the source of suffering in the intervention of adults, and not in the symptom itself. Even such embarrassing symptoms as bedwetting and fecal incontinence are sometimes considered insignificant by the child himself. Neurotic delays often lead to the withdrawal of the entire libido from fearful activities and thus to a restriction of the interests of the "I", which hides the loss of activity and desire for profit. Children with pronounced disabilities - autistic, psychotic or mentally retarded - cause great suffering to parents, as they practically do not feel their disturbed state.
Other grounds also make it impossible to determine the severity of a mental disorder. Children suffer much less from their psychopathology than from genetically determined circumstances, such as refusals, demands and difficulties of adaptation, which are caused by dependence on the objective world and the immaturity of their mental apparatus. The sources of fear and trouble in early childhood are the inability to satisfy one's own bodily needs and instinctive desires, unwillingness to be separated, inevitable disappointments in unrealistic expectations; in the next (oedipal) phase, it is jealousy, rivalry and fear of castration. Even the most normal children cannot be "happy" for a long time, and therefore they often have tears, anger and rage. The better the child develops, the more affectively he responds to the manifestations of everyday life. We also cannot expect that children, like adults, will naturally master their emotions, succumb to their influence, be aware of them and come to terms with circumstances. On the contrary, when we observe such compliance, we begin to suspect that something is wrong with the child, and we assume either organic damage, or a delay in the development of the "I", or an excessive passivity in instinctive life. Small children who leave their parents without protest, most likely due to internal or external reasons, are not sufficiently connected with them libidiously. Children for whom the loss of love is not a hindrance may be in a state of autistic development. If there is no sense of shame, then the "Super-I" does not develop: the forced price that each individual must pay for the higher development of his own personality is painful internal conflicts.
We must admit that the feeling of subjective suffering, however paradoxical it may sound, is present in every normal child, and in itself is not the basis for pathological development.
3. Also deceptive is the third factor, which is decisive for adults, in violation of achievements in children's practice. It has already been noted above that achievements in childhood are not constant, but change as a result of temporary regressions from stage to stage, from genetic direction to genetic direction, day by day, hour by hour. There are no firm criteria for judging when fluctuations between progress and regress can be considered phenomena of normal life. Even when the deterioration in function lasts for a very long time and the external environment becomes disturbed, it is diagnostically risky to characterize a child as "delayed" or "retarded" on such grounds.
We also do not know which of the children's achievements has the right to be called "vital." Despite the fact that games, learning, free fantasy activity, the warmth of objective relationships, the ability to adapt are very important for a child, they cannot even be compared in significance with such fundamental concepts as “ability to love” and “working capacity”. Returning to my earlier hypothesis (1945), I will repeat the statement that only the ability to develop normally, to go through the stages outlined according to the plan, to form all aspects of the personality and to fulfill the requirements of the outside world in an appropriate way deserves the definition of "vital" for a child's life. As long as these processes proceed relatively unhindered, we need not worry about the symptoms that arise. The need for treatment arises in a child only when this development begins to be inhibited.
Developmental processes as diagnostic criteria
At the present stage, diagnostic categories based on points of view other than genetic and psychological ones are clearly not enough to understand childhood disorders. Only when the diagnostician is freed from them, he will be able to abstract from symptomatology and begin to study what genetic levels his patient has reached regarding the "It", "I" and "Super-I", how far the structuring of his personality has advanced, i.e. the process isolation of these internal instances from each other; whether psychic phenomena are still under the dominant influence of the primary process or are already at the stage of the secondary process and the reality principle; whether in general the development of the child corresponds to his age, "ripens earlier" or "lags behind", and if so, in what respect; how much the pathology has affected or threatens to affect developmental processes; whether regression is present in the process of development, and if so, when, to what extent and up to what points of fixation.
Only such an examination makes it possible to assess the influence of important factors on the psychopathology of childhood, to link with each other normal developmental processes, deviations from them and mental health disorders.
Mismatches in the development of "It" and "I"
We may reasonably expect that pathological consequences are felt when different parts of the personality develop at different speeds. The most famous clinical example of this kind is the etiology of obsessive neurosis, where the "I" and "Super-I" in their formation outstrip the progress in instinctive life. For this reason, high moral and aesthetic qualities coincide with relatively primitive instinctive urges and fantasies. This causes conflicts, prompting the "I" to obsessive and also conflicting actions. According to 3. Freud: “I don’t know how risky it will look if ... I suggest that the temporary advance in the development of the “I” in relation to the development of the libido should cause a predisposition to obsessive neurosis” (1913). Later regression can also lead to such a result, as will be shown below.
Not less often, and perhaps even more often, the reverse process occurs today - a slowdown in the development of the instance of "I" with normal or premature instinctive development. The object relations, as well as the functions of the "Superego", are too underdeveloped in such "autistic" and borderline children to be able to control the primary and aggressive impulses. As a result, at the anal-sadistic stage there is no ability to neutralize libido and aggression, to create reaction formations and sublimations important for the character; at the phallic stage there are no contributions from the ego to the organization of oedipal object relations; in puberty, the "I" comes to sexual maturity without the ability to form emotional formations that preceded it at the genital stage.
Based on this, we can conclude (Michaels, 1955) that the premature development of the "I" leads to internal conflicts and, as a result of them, to neuroses; premature instinctive development leads to defective and instinctive formation of character.
Mismatches between genetic lines
As shown above, mismatches between genetic lines are within the normal range and become the starting point for violations only when they exceed the expected results.
If this happens, both parents and teachers feel equally helpless. Such children turn into unbearable family members, interfere with others in the classroom, in children's games they constantly look for quarrels, are undesirable in any society, cause outrage everywhere, and at the same time, as a rule, they are unhappy and dissatisfied with themselves.
They also do not fit into any of the usual diagnostic categories of clinical investigation, and it is only when viewed from the point of view of genetic lines that one can understand their abnormality.
It also became clear to us that the achieved stages on various lines of development are in no way interconnected with each other. High mental development can be combined not only with poor results in the intellectual field, but also with the lowest steps on the way to emotional maturity, bodily independence and social relations with older comrades. Such discrepancies lead to artificially rationalized instinctive behavior, to excessive fantasies, failures in the education of neatness, in other words, to a mixed symptomatology, difficult to distinguish in its etiology. Usually such cases are qualified in descriptive diagnoses as "prepsychotic" or "borderline".
A mismatch is also found between the line from play to work, on which the child's development is retarded, and the line towards emotional maturity, social adjustment, and bodily independence, on which advancement is fully in line with age. Such children enter clinical research because of academic failures that cannot be explained either by their mental development or by their school behavior, which remains quite adequate for a certain time. In such cases, the researcher's attention should be concentrated precisely on the area where there are no expected correspondences between "It" and "I" on a specific line of development - on the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle, on insufficient mastery and modification of pregenital aspirations, on a belated displacement of pleasure. from the successful solution of problems to whether there is regression in all or only certain areas, etc.
Such cases in the descriptive diagnosis are referred to either as "intellectual disorders", which is fundamentally wrong, or, responding only to the external side of the phenomenon, as "insufficient concentration."
Pathogenic (permanent) regressions and their consequences
As noted above, regressions are harmless and even desirable as long as they are transitory (the level of development reached before them can be spontaneously re-achieved). They become pathogenic if the damage caused by them in itself causes a neoplasm inside the personality, which means that their consequences are long enough for this in time.
In any part of the mental apparatus, regressions of both types may appear.
Indirectly, the state of instinctive derivatives worsens if the regression begins in the "I" or "Super-I", lowering the achievements of both structures to a lower level. Such injuries in the "I" and "Super-I" have negative consequences for the mastery of instincts, violate the protective ability and cause breakthroughs from the side of the "It" into the organization of the "I", which lead to instinctiveness, emotional outbursts and irrational behavior, change beyond recognition picture of the child's character. Usually, research reveals that the reasons for such a fall in personality are experiences that the “I” could not overcome (fear of separation, painful rejections from the object of love, disappointments in the object, leading to the breakdown of identifications (Jacobson, 1946), etc. .), and therefore they found embodiment in fantasy.
The second possibility is that the regression begins on the part of the id, and the instances of the 'I' confront the immediate primitive instinctive derivatives with which they are forced to re-encounter in some way.
Such a clash may consist in the fact that instinctive regression itself causes regressions of the "I" and "Super-I", that is, the "I" begins to reduce its requirements in order to maintain agreement with instinct. In this case, the internal balance is preserved, and the consequences of instinctive regression in relation to the "I" are justified. But for such a neoplasm one has to pay with a decrease in the direction of infantilism, dissociality and instinctiveness of the personality as a whole. The depth of the pathological disturbance depends on how strong the return movements are in instinct and in the "I", to what point of fixation the latter reach, which of the achievements of the "I" are preserved at the same time, and at what genetic level such an internal upheaval again comes into balance.
The confrontation between the "I" and the degraded instinct can also take reverse forms, which are better known to us from analysis. If the "I" and "Super-I" reaches a high development in children ahead of time, then the so-called secondary autonomy of the achievements of the "I" (Hartmann, 1950) is formed - such a degree of independence from instinctive life that gives them the opportunity to tear away from themselves instinctive regressions as hostile selves. Such children, instead of following the resurfaced pregenital and aggressive impulses and admitting their corresponding fantasies into consciousness, develop fear, strengthen instinctive defenses and, if this fails, take refuge in a compromise between instinct and ego. In such cases, we observe internal conflicts leading to symptom formation, from which hysterical fear, phobias, nightmares, obsessive symptoms, ceremonials, delays, and other characteristic infantile neuroses arise.
In clinical work with boys who have degraded from the phallic (oedipal) to the anal-sadistic stage due to the fear of castration, we find striking examples of the difference between the justified and hostile to the ego consequences of instinctive regression.
Boys with Type 1 Deviations, who have their "I" and "Super-Ego" in reverse motion, become less neat and more aggressive than before, or return to more dependence on their mothers (lose independence), become passive and lose masculinity. . In other words, they again develop tendencies and properties that are characteristic of the pregenital sexuality and aggressiveness of the point of fixation in question, without internal contradiction.
In children with deviations of the second kind, when the formed "I" is quite enough to protect with the help of fear and guilt from the consequences of instinctive regression, the specific pathological effect depends on which instinctive element against which the protest of their "I" is most manifested. In those cases where manifestations of anality, sadism and passivity are equally energetically reflected by the instances of the "I", symptomatology is most widespread. When condemnation of the "I" is directed only against slovenliness, there is excessive neatness, an obsessive desire to wash, etc. When manifestations of aggression and sadism are primarily reflected, own achievements are suppressed as a result and an inability to compete appears. When passive-feminist aspirations are most feared, there is an increased fear of castration or uncompensated aggressive masculinity. In all cases the consequences - symptoms or characters - are neurotic.
It is worth noting that, from analytic experience with adults, it is known that in neuroses, in the end, the "I" is also subject to various regressions. Renunciation, magical thinking, passivity and other obsessive-neurotic protective forms reduce the function of the "I" especially to a low level. However, this kind of regression of the "I" is the effect of the crash, not its cause; in this case, the decline is related only to the achievements of the "I", and the requirements of the "Super-I" remain without violations. Rather, on the contrary, the neurotic "I" does everything possible to fulfill the requirements of the "Super-I".
Conflicts and anxiety during diagnosis
On the way from the causal unity of the personality to its composition from the instances of "It", "I", "Super-I" and the structure of the personality, each individual passes through a series of phases in the course of normal development. First of all, the previously undifferentiated mental mass is subdivided into "It" and "I", that is, into two areas of action, which have different goals, intentions and methods of functioning. The first division is followed by the second stage in the "I", i.e., the division of this instance into the "I" itself and into the "Super-I" and the ideal "I" standing above it, which perform a critical and guiding function in relation to the "I". ".
In research, with the help of phenomena that manifest themselves in two ways, namely, by a special type of conflict and the fears associated with them, it is possible to establish how far the child has gone ahead or, on the contrary, has lagged behind along this path.
In childhood, we distinguish three types of conflict: external, deeply conscious and internal.
The external conflicts that take place between the whole personality of the child and the object world arise every time the surrounding world interferes and interferes with the child's impulses, postponing, limiting or forbidding their implementation. Until the child masters his instinctive impulses, that is, until his "I" coincides with the "It" and barriers have not yet been established between them, he is not able to overcome such influences of the surrounding world. External conflicts are the hallmark of childhood, the period of immaturity; we are justified in characterizing an individual as "infantile" if they remain or are regressively reborn at a later time. There are different types of fears associated with this form of conflict and proving its existence, which differ depending on the age and level of development of the child; common to them is that their sources are located in the outside world. Their stage-by-stage sequence in time is approximately as follows: fear of death with the loss of maternal care (fear of separation, fear of losing an object during the period of the biological unity of mother and child), fear of losing love (after establishing a constant love relationship to the object), fear of criticism and punishment (during the anal-sadistic phase, in which the child projects his own aggression onto the parents, from which the fear of them increases), fear of castration (during the phallic-oedipal phase).
The second type of conflict is deeply conscious. They appear after the child, through identification with the parents, turns their demands into his own, and his "Super-I" already perceives parental authority to a greater extent. Conflicts that arise in matters of the fulfillment of desires or refusals differ little from conflicts of the previous type. However, collisions and disagreements in this case no longer occur externally between the child and the object, but in his inner life between mental instances, where the “I” falls to resolve the dispute between instinctive desire and the demand of the “Super-I” in the form of a feeling of guilt. Until the feeling of guilt disappears, the investigating analyst has no doubt that the child has reached the "Superego" by creating steps in the "I".
The third type of conflict is internal conflict. Basically, they differ in that the external world does not play any role for them - neither direct, as in external conflicts, nor indirect, as in conscious ones, - role. Internal conflicts arise because of the genetically determined relationship between the "It" and "I" and differences in their organization. Instinctive derivatives and affects of the opposite kind, such as love and hate, activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity, coexist without enmity with each other as long as the "It" and the primary process own the mental apparatus. They become intolerable to each other and come into conflict as soon as the "I" matures and tries by means of a synthetic function to include in its organization the resisting contents. Even where the content of the "It" does not resist qualitatively, but only increases quantitatively, this is perceived by the "I" as a threat and leads to an internal conflict. This leads to the emergence of fears of a special kind, threatening the mental balance of the individual in a special way. But, unlike fear of the outside world or feelings of guilt, they are born in the depths and usually betray their presence not during a diagnostic examination, but only during an analytical treatment.
The above division of conflicts and fears into external, conscious and internal significantly helps the diagnostician in classifying and assessing their strength of conflicts caused by childhood disorders. This also explains why, in some cases, changes in the external conditions of life are sufficient for recovery (cases of the first kind, when conflicts are pathogenically influenced by the outside world), why cases of the second kind that require analytical help, with the cause of the disease consisting in conscious internal conflicts, without much difficulty are subject to change, and why in cases of the third kind, when we are dealing with internal instinctive conflicts, particularly complex actions and very lengthy analytical efforts are required (according to Freud, 1937 - "endless" analyzes).
General characteristics and their significance for diagnoses and prognosis
In order to meet expectations, the analyst must not only determine the existing childhood disorders and reconstruct the picture of their course in the past, but also predict, to the maximum extent possible, the prospects for treatment, which means the restoration and maintenance of mental health. Such a look into the future is impossible without the described details of the developmental processes, as well as without determining the personal properties that have a decisive influence on the maintenance or violation of mental balance, the source of which should be sought either in the innate constitution or in the earliest experiences of the individual. These properties are a hallmark of the "I" of the individual, since the "I" plays the role of an intermediary between the external world and the personality, its internal instances. Such of them as the setting of the "I" for displeasure and deprivation, the ability to sublimate, the setting for fear, the correctness of the development process and other progressive tendencies are of the greatest importance.
Overcoming displeasure (capacity for frustration) and tendency to sublimate
The extent to which the child's "I" is able to endure deprivation, that is, to overcome the displeasure caused by the circumstances, largely determines the child's chances of remaining (or becoming) mentally healthy. Perhaps in no one individual differences are more pronounced than in the smallest. Some children cannot bear any delay, any restriction in the satisfaction of instinctive desire, and respond with all manifestations of anger, rage, displeasure and impatience, substitute satisfactions are rejected by them as insufficient. After that, nothing but the fulfillment of the original desire can satisfy them. Usually such resistances to submission to often inevitable necessity begin already in infancy and manifest themselves first in the area of oral desires, and then spread to other areas and at a later time. But there are children who, unlike the first, are much easier to satisfy. They endure the same instinctive limitations without such disturbance, more willingly accept substitute satisfactions that reduce desires, and usually retain these early acquired attitudes for later years.
Diagnosticians have no doubts that the internal balance in children of the first type is much more endangered than in the second. Forced to keep a huge amount of displeasure under control, the childish "I." if necessary, he begins to use the most primitive auxiliary means and methods of defense, such as renunciation or projection, as well as such primitive methods of withdrawal as outbursts of anger, rage and other affects. From these adjuvants, the further path leads to pathological compromise formations in the form of neurotic, dissocial and perverted symptoms.
Children of the second type have much more opportunities to neutralize and transfer their instinctive energy to satisfactions that are limited and quite achievable. This ability to sublimate is an invaluable aid in the struggle to maintain or restore mental health.
Overcoming feelings of anxiety
Analytical knowledge proves that fearless children do not exist, and various forms of fear are present as normal accompanying phenomena at various genetic levels. (For example, the stage of biological unity of mother and child corresponds to the fear of separation, the constant object - the fear of deprivation of love, the oedipal complex - the fear of castration, the formation of the "Super-I" - the feeling of guilt.) and the intensity of fear, but the ability to overcome it, on which mental balance ultimately depends and which is present in different individuals in different volumes.
Children who, at every manifestation of fear, use transferences, are in particular danger of neurosis.
Their “I” is forced to displace and renounce all external and internal dangers (all possible sources of fear) or to project all internal dangers onto the outside world, from which they, returning, cause even greater fear, or else to phobically avoid any threats of fear and all kinds of fear. danger. The desire to avoid fear at any cost becomes an attitude that takes over at the beginning of childhood, and later the adult life of the individual and eventually leads to neurosis due to the excessive use of defense mechanisms.
The prospects for an individual's mental health are much better when the "I" does not avoid fear, but actively fights it, finding protection in understanding, logical thinking, active changes in the external world and aggressive opposition. Such an "I" is able to overcome a large amount of fear and do without excessive protective, compromise and symptomatic formations. (The active overcoming of fear should not be confused with the overcompensation of children, since in the first case the "I" protects itself directly from the imminent danger, and in the second - from its phobic avoidance.)
O. Isakover, explaining the example of active overcoming of fear by the most timid child, says: "The soldier is also scared, but this is not important for him."
Correlation between trends towards progress and regression
Despite the fact that throughout childhood there are forward and return aspirations in the mental apparatus, this does not mean at all that their relationship with each other is the same for all individuals. We know that for some children, everything new causes joy: they rejoice at a new dish, increased mobility and independence, movements that take them away from their mother to new faces and playmates, etc. Nothing is more important to them than becoming " big", to be able to imitate adults, and everything that even approximately corresponds to this desire compensates for all the difficulties and obstacles encountered on the way. In contrast, in other children, each new movement means, first of all, the rejection of the old sources of pleasure and therefore causes fear. Such children are hardly weaned, often perceiving such events as shock. They are afraid of parting with their mother and their familiar environment, first they are afraid of strangers, then responsibility, etc., in other words, they do not want to grow up.
It is easiest to make a clinical conclusion about which of these types a certain individual belongs to when observing the overcoming of life circumstances that require great courage from a child, such as a serious illness of the body, the birth of a new child in the family, etc. Children who have a desire to progress is stronger than regressive tendencies, often a long time of illness is used for the maturation of the "I", they feel like an "elder" brother or "elder" sister in relation to a newborn. If the tendency to regress is stronger, then during the illness the child becomes even more "infantile" than before, and the newborn baby begins to envy, because he wants to return to the state of the baby.
These differences matter for forecasting. The pleasure that the child of the first type experiences in successful advances, in turn, contributes to maturation, development and adaptation. In children of the second type, at every stage, there is a constant danger of stopping development and creating points of fixation, their balance is easily disturbed, and the tendency to return very easily turns into a starting point for the emergence of fear, defense and neurotic destruction.
The picture of development from the point of view of metapsychology
Each example of the psychoanalytic study of the child provides a multitude of facts about the body and mind, all aspects and layers of the personality, facts relating to the past or present, the external or internal world of the child, factors of harmful and beneficial influence, successes and failures, fantasies and fears, protective processes, symptoms, etc. Everything that the subject discovers deserves attention, even if confirmation of the information received is possible only on condition of further work. However, no single fact in itself can be considered without connection with the rest of the material. As analysts, we are convinced that the fate of human development is determined not only by heredity, but also by inherited qualities in interaction with experienced events, that organic disorders (physical defects, blindness, etc.) lead to a variety of mental consequences, depending on the environmental influence to which child, and from the mental aids that are at his disposal to overcome his own difficulties. Whether fears (see above) should be regarded as pathogenic depends, rather, not on their type and strength, but on the form and way in which the child processes them. Attacks of rage and outpourings of feelings must be regarded differently, based on whether they arise spontaneously on the path of development or are obtained by imitation and identification with the objective world. Traumatic influences on a child cannot be read from the revealed life history, since they do not depend on the objective importance of the event, but on its subjective influence on each individual child. Courage and cowardice, greed and generosity, rationality and recklessness, depending on the life environment, chronological age, phase of development and genesis, acquire different meanings. Separate areas of clinical material and the connections with the integral personality extracted from them are identical only in name. In fact, they are as little suitable for use in individual diagnosis as they are for comparison with supposedly identical personality elements in other individuals.
The task of the investigating analyst is to organize an organic connection within the existing material, that is, to bring it dynamically, energetically, economically and structurally to a metapsychological point of view. As a result, the picture of the child's condition corresponds to the synthesis or splitting of the diagnosis into its analytical components.
Such genetic pictures can be obtained at various points in time - during a diagnostic study, during an analytical treatment, at the end of a treatment. Depending on this, they serve various purposes - making a general diagnosis (the main goal), confirming it or criticizing it based on the material revealed during the analysis, evaluating the therapeutic effectiveness of analytical methods in terms of the improvement obtained in the treatment.
In order to get a "metapsychological picture of development" it is first necessary to ascertain the external facts about the symptoms, the patient's descriptions, and the family history. This is the first attempt to assess the supposed significance of environmental influences. The description then proceeds to the inner life of the child, ordered according to the structure of his personality, the dynamic correlation of forces between instances, the correlation of forces between the id and the ego, adaptation to the external world, and genetic hypotheses arising from the emerging material. The resulting schematic representation looks something like this:
Approximate plan of the metapsychological picture of development
I. Reasons for the study (developmental disorders, behavior problems, delays, anxieties, symptoms, etc.).
II. Description of the child (appearance, manners, behavior).
III. Family background and childhood history.
VI. Presumably significant environmental influences, both positive and negative.
V. Data on the development process.
A. Development of instincts:
1. Libido. Need to research:
a) development of libido:
whether the child has reached an age-appropriate phase (oral, anal-sadistic, phallic, latency, prepuberty), in particular, whether the transition from the anal phase to phallic sexuality has successfully occurred;
whether there is a dominant position of the achieved phase of development;
whether the child is at the time of the study at the highest stage of development achieved, or whether there is a regression to early positions;
b) distribution of libido:
whether there has been a distribution of libidinal fillings between the child himself and the object world;
is narcissistic filling enough (primary and secondary narcissism, filling of the body "I",
"I" and "Super-I") to ensure their own feelings; how much it depends on object relations;
c) object libido:
whether the stage corresponding to chronological age has been reached in the stage-by-stage sequence of object relations (narcissistic, according to the type of adjunction and support, constancy of the object, pre-oedipal, goal-limited, puberty-conditioned);
whether the child is retained at this stage, or regressions to earlier stages are observed;
whether the form of the object relation corresponds to the phase of libidinal development reached or regressively obtained.
2. Aggression. Needs to be explored; what forms of manifestation of aggression does the child operate with:
a) a quantitative indicator, i.e., is it present or absent in the clinical picture;
b) an indicator of the type and form, corresponding to the phase development on the part of the libido;
c) focus on the outside world or on oneself.
B. Development of "I" and "Super-I". Need to research:
a) the psychic apparatuses at the disposal of the "I" are working or broken;
b) how good are the functions of the "I" (memory, reality check, synthetic function, secondary process); if there are violations, then which ones are genetically or neurotically determined; formed simultaneously or not; what is the coefficient of intellectual development;
c) how developed the defense of the "I" is: directed against a certain instinctive derivative (it is necessary to indicate) or against instinctive activity and instinctive satisfaction in general;
whether it corresponds to the chronological age (too primitive or, conversely, the existing defense mechanisms have matured too early);
protective activity is divided evenly into a large number of mechanisms or is limited to a small number of them;
effective or ineffective protective activity, primarily against fear; maintains or recreates the balance between instances; there is a possibility of internal mobility, or it is suppressed, etc.;
is it dependent or independent of the objective world, and to what extent (the formation of the "Super-I", awareness, external conflicts);
d) how secondarily the functions of the "I" are damaged by the protective activity of the "I" (what are the losses in the ability to achieve success associated with maintaining instinctive defense and mastering the instincts).
VI. Genetic data on fixation and regression points.
According to our point of view, the return to genetically determined fixation points is the basis of all infantile neuroses and many infantile psychoses. Therefore, one of the most important tasks of the diagnostician is to detect them in the prehistory of the child with the help of the following manifested phenomena:
a) certain properties of behavior, the instinctive background of which is known to the analyst; they are an external manifestation of processes occurring in the depths of the mental apparatus. The clearest example of this kind is the emerging picture of an obsessive neurotic character, in which properties such as neatness, love of order, frugality, punctuality, skepticism, indecision, etc., indicate a conflict of the anal-sadistic phase, and thus give out a fixation point. at this point. Other pictures of characters or ways of behaving similarly give out points of fixation in other areas or on other steps. (The child's pronounced concern for the life and health of his parents, brothers and sisters speaks of special conflicts associated with an infantile death wish; fear of taking medication, certain nutritional difficulties, etc. indicate an ongoing defensive struggle with oral fantasies; such a property "I ", as shyness, indicates the rejected exhibitionism in "It"; homesickness indicates the presence of a long-standing ambivalent conflict, etc.);
b) children's fantasies, which, under favorable conditions, are sometimes discovered in a clinical study, but more often become available to a diagnostician through testing. (It often happens that as difficult as it is to access fantasy life in the first study, so rich is the material of conscious and unconscious fantasy in analytic processing, when the patient's pathogenic background is fully elucidated.);
c) symptoms, for which a connection between the unconscious background and the manifest form of manifestations is typical, which even allows, as in the case of obsessive neurosis, to draw conclusions about repressed processes from the picture of symptoms. However, one should not exaggerate the number of such symptoms, since many of them, such as lying, cheating, enuresis, etc., are not a source of information during a diagnostic study, because they arise on very different instinctive backgrounds.
VII. Dynamic and structural data on conflicts.
The normal development of the child is influenced by conflicts occurring between the external and internal world, on the one hand, and between internal instances, on the other, just like his pathology. The diagnostician needs to understand these counteractions and structure dynamic processes into a scheme:
a) as external conflicts between the child's personality as a whole and the object world (accompanying fear of the object world);
b) as deeply conscious conflicts between the "It" and the instances of the "I", which absorb (deeply realize) the requirements of the environment (an accompanying feeling of guilt);
c) as deep internal conflicts between contradictory and inconsistent instinctive urges (unresolved ambivalence love-hate, activity-passivity, masculinity-femininity, etc.).
From the form of the conflict that determines the life of each particular child, we can conclude:
1) about the maturity of the structure of his personality (the degree of independence from the objective world);
2) the severity of violations in the personality structure;
3) about methods of influence that can lead to improvement or cure.
VIII. General properties and positions.
To make a prediction about whether a particular child has the possibility of spontaneous recovery from a disorder or the prospect of success in treatment, it is necessary to pay attention to the following personality traits and behaviors:
a) the position of the child in relation to refusals. If he tolerates rejection worse than he should have expected at his age, then fear is stronger than his "I" and the child finds a way out in the sequences of regression, defense and symptom formation leading to illness. If refusals are better tolerated, it is easier for the individual to maintain his inner balance or restore it after a violation;
b) the ability of the child to sublimate instinctive urges. There are strong individual differences in this area. In cases where it is possible to use goal-limited and neutralized substitute satisfactions, they compensate the child for the inevitable disappointments in instinctive life and reduce the possibility of pathological destruction. An important task of treatment is the release of the pinched sublimating ability;
c) the child's attitude to fear. It is necessary to distinguish between the tendency to avoid fear and to actively overcome it. The first rather leads to pathology, and the second is a sign of a healthy, well-organized and active "I";
d) the relationship between progress and regression in the developmental processes of the child. If the forward drive is stronger than the backward trend, the prospect of maintaining health or self-healing is better than otherwise: strong developmental spurts help the child fight his symptoms. When regressive tendencies take precedence and the child clings to archaic sources of pleasure, resistance to treatment also increases. The balance of power between these two tendencies in the individual child manifests itself as a conflict between the desire to become "big" and the unwillingness to give up infantile positions and satisfactions.
For a final generalization of the diagnostic systems used so far, it is not enough. A special scheme is needed, in which, first of all, the relation of various disturbances to development and the degree of their deviation from the normal process are assessed. To do this, the diagnostician must select one of the following positions:
1) except for some difficulties in satisfying bodily needs, in relation to the world around and in the daily behavior of the child, the processes of his development themselves are not damaged, which means that the violation remains within the normal range;
2) the violations found in the clinical picture of symptom formation correspond in their scale to the effort aimed at overcoming specific genetic difficulties, which means that with further advancement to the next steps of the line of development, they will be eliminated spontaneously;
3) there are instinctive regressions to previously acquired points of fixation, their prolonged exposure creates internal conflicts that lead to infantile neuroses and character disorders;
4) the ongoing instinctive regressions lead to regressions of the "I" and "Super-I", to infantilism, etc.;
5) there are damages to existing inclinations (through organic violations) or a constitution acquired in the first year of life (through deprivation, refusals, bodily illness, etc.), which harm the development process, prevent the formation and separation of internal instances from each other, leading to defective, developmentally delayed, and even atypical clinical pictures;
6) some inexplicable processes of organic, toxic or mental origin have a destructive effect on already existing personal acquisitions, which is expressed in loss of speech, inhibition of instincts, impaired sense of reality, etc., thus inhibiting the entire development process, causing infantile psychoses , autism and similar pathologies.
Preface. Formation and development of child psychoanalysis
The emergence of psychoanalysis was associated with the study and treatment of neurotic diseases of adults. However, the position put forward by Z. Freud (1856-1939) that the origins of neurotic disorders are rooted in childhood and are associated with the characteristics of the child's psychosexual development necessarily led to the study of childhood neuroses. It is no coincidence that the founder of psychoanalysis paid close attention to the problem of the Oedipus complex associated with infantile sexuality and which, in his opinion, is the “core of neuroses”. It is no coincidence that the treatment of adult neurotics involved the identification by means of psychoanalysis of the patients' memories of various situations, events, and experiences that took place in their early childhood and related to the first years of their life.
Z. Freud worked mainly with adult patients. Nevertheless, he sometimes had to turn to childhood cases. A good example in this regard is his publication "An Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy" (1909) , which describes the classic case of "little Hans". True, the treatment of a five-year-old boy was carried out by his father, and Z. Freud only supervised this treatment and only once took part in a conversation with the child. However, his published work contributed to attracting the attention of psychoanalysts to the analysis of childhood neuroses. So, the Hungarian psychoanalyst S. Ferenczi (1873-1933) in his work “The Little Cockerel” described the case of the strange behavior of a little boy, Arpad, who showed an increased interest in chickens, was afraid of a rooster and expressed excessive love and hatred for birds.
"Analysis of the Phobia of a Five-Year-Old Boy" by Z. Freud and "The Little Cockerel" by S. Ferenczi served more as a visual demonstration of the confirmation of psychoanalytic ideas than as a guide to the implementation of the psychoanalysis of childhood neuroses. Neither work contained recommendations on how and in what way psychoanalysis could be used in the process of specific therapeutic work with children. On the contrary, they expressed such judgments that testified to the technical difficulties of psychoanalysis in the treatment of children and doubts about the possibility of its direct application to childhood neuroses.
Z. Freud emphasized that it was thanks to the father of “little Hans” that it was possible to induce the child to certain confessions and that only the combination of parental and medical authority in one person, as well as the coincidence of tender feelings and scientific interests, made it possible to use a method that “in such cases in general would hardly be applicable." S. Ferenczi noted that in the case of Arpad, “a direct psychoanalytic examination turned out to be impossible,” and he had to limit himself to asking the lady interested in this case to take notes, write down sayings and record the child’s strange actions.
Nevertheless, Z. Freud believed that in the future, children's psychoanalytic sessions will become more important than was the case at the initial stage of the development of psychoanalysis. In "The problem of amateurish analysis" (1926) he wrote about the value of children's psychoanalytic sessions for the development of theory and about the practical interest associated with the discovery that a large number of children in their development pass through one of the neurotic phases. At the same time, he emphasized that in the interests of the child, "analytical influence must be combined with educational activities" and that this technique "is still waiting to be developed."
Based on these ideas, subsequent psychoanalysts began a practical analysis of childhood neuroses, which was reflected, in particular, in the therapeutic activities of A. Freud (1895-1982), M. Klein (1882-1960), D. Winnicott (1896-1971 ) and other analysts. Publications A. Freud "Introduction to the technique of child psychoanalysis" (1927) , "Childhood in health and disease" (1965) , works by M. Klein "Psychoanalysis of children" (1932) , "Psychoanalytic play technique: its history and significance" (1955) , book by D. Winnicott “The Piggle: A Report on the Psychoanalytic Treatment of a Little Girl” (1977) had a significant impact on the formation and development of child psychoanalysis.
Anna Freud, the daughter of the founder of psychoanalysis, was one of the first to contribute to the formation and development of child psychoanalysis. Being the youngest of six children of Z. Freud, she not only stayed with him all her life, acting as a personal secretary and caring for her father, who had been suffering from cancer for sixteen years, but, having become a psychoanalyst, she actively became involved in professional activities, associated with the International Psychoanalytic Movement.
A. Freud did not have a medical education. After graduating from the Lyceum and receiving a pedagogical education in 1914, she worked as a teacher for five years. Encountering no objections from her father, the young teacher had the opportunity to attend his lectures and attend some meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Having shown an interest in psychoanalytic ideas, in the years 1918-1921 she underwent a personal analysis with her father. Since 1918, she began to take part in the International Psychoanalytic Congresses. Having carried out an independent psychoanalytic study of a fifteen-year-old girl and delivered a report entitled “The Fantasy of Beating in Sleep and Reality”, in 1922 A. Freud became a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
In 1920, Z. Freud presented his daughter with a ring similar to the one worn by male analysts who were especially close to him and who were part of the “secret committee”. In 1923, A. Freud opened her own psychoanalytic practice, and in 1924 she became a member of the "secret committee", replacing the closest associate of the founder of psychoanalysis O. Rank (1884-1939), who, putting forward his own ideas about the trauma of birth and not meeting support among Z. Freud's inner circle, resigned from this committee. In 1924, she became head of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where she began lecturing on child psychoanalysis. In the same year, she was again analyzed by her father, in 1931 she became secretary of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.
In the summer of 1938 A. Freud left Austria with her father and emigrated to England. After the death of Z. Freud, she contributed to the publication of his collected works. During the Second World War, A. Freud provided assistance to children affected by the bombing of London, opened an orphanage-nursery, and carried out therapeutic and research activities. From 1944 to 1949 she was General Secretary of the International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1947, she organized training courses for specialists in the field of child psychoanalysis in Hampstead, in 1952 she headed the Hampstead Clinic for Child Therapy, which in 1984 was renamed the Anna Freud Center.
A. Freud repeatedly traveled to the United States with lectures, took an active part in the work of International Psychoanalytic Congresses. She was an honorary doctor of Sheffilsky (England), Vienna (Austria), Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, Philadelphia (USA) universities. In 1973 she was elected honorary president of the International Psychoanalytic Association. She died in October 1982. At the age of 86 years.
A. Freud is the author of numerous articles and a number of books, including "Introduction to the technique of child psychoanalysis" (1927) , "Introduction to psychoanalysis for educators" (1930) , « I and protection mechanisms" (1936) , "Norm and pathology of childhood" (1965) . Her ideological heritage is reflected in the collected works, published in ten volumes.
In her research and therapeutic activities, A. Freud proceeded from the fact that child psychoanalysis requires special techniques, since, unlike an adult, a child is an immature, dependent being, the decision for analysis never comes from him, he does not feel any disturbance and most often he has no consciousness that he is ill. Considering these features, child psychoanalysis presupposes, first of all, a more or less long preparatory period, during which the child is sort of "trained" for analysis (consciousness of the disease, trust, consent to treatment).
According to A. Freud, an analyst working with children must adhere to the following rules: he must not remain impersonal in relation to a small patient; instead of interpreting the patient's free associations and actions, the analyst should direct his attention to where "neurotic reactions play out", that is, to the child's home environment; the analyst must take into account the fact that the outside world exerts a stronger influence "on the mechanism of infantile neurosis and on the course of analysis" than in the case of an adult patient; when working with a child, the analyst must be able to take the place of his I-ideal, and he should not begin his therapeutic activity until he is sure that he "finally mastered this mental instance of the child"; the analyst must have educational authority, that is, analyze and educate, allow and forbid, "break and re-bind."
Outlining her views on the specifics of child psychoanalysis, A. Freud opposed the position of M. Klein, according to which attempts were made to interpret the behavior of children from the point of view of a psychoanalytic approach to adults, taking into account sexual symbolism in its direct semantic meaning. Like the founder of psychoanalysis, she was critical of the consideration of the play activity of children, refracted through the prism of a symbolic reflection of real sexual relations between parents, which was typical for M. Klein.
Unlike A. Freud, who believed that the analysis of a child is appropriate only in the case of infantile neurosis, M. Klein adhered to the point of view according to which psychoanalysis is also acceptable for the development of normal children. Using psychoanalytic research and treatment methods, she developed a technique for child psychoanalysis based on play and early object relations. The free play of the child was given the same importance as the free association of the adult patient. Accordingly, symbolic meanings were seen behind the child's play actions, coinciding in psychoanalytic interpretation or, in any case, not much different from analytic work with adults. The actions of the child associated with the game were deciphered and interpreted in terms of the manifestation of his sexual and aggressive desires: the collision of two toys with each other was considered as an expression of observation of intimate relations between parents; tipping over a toy - as aggressive actions directed against one of the parents. The game analytical technique does not require a preparatory stage for analysis and makes it possible to better understand the object relations between the child and parents, primarily children's experiences associated with the mother. According to M. Klein, child psychoanalysis should be based on the idea that satisfaction and frustration, libidinal and destructive impulses are formed at the earliest stages of a child’s development, during the first three to four months of his life, when he has a perception "good" and "bad" object ("good" and "bad" mother's breast). In the early stages of a child's development, what may be called "infantile neurosis" is manifested, characterized by depressive anxiety. The latter, according to M. Klein, "plays a vital role in the early development of the child, and the norm is the completion of infantile neuroses somewhere around the middle of the first year of life."
In the second half of the 1920s and early 1940s, there were ideological clashes between A. Freud and M. Klein, due to their different views on child psychoanalysis. These clashes were especially acute in England, where M. Klein moved in 1926, and A. Freud - in 1938.
Echoes of these discussions have survived to this day among psychoanalysts specializing in the field of psychoanalysis of childhood neurotic diseases. In any case, there is no consensus among modern psychoanalysts as to the extent to which children's play should be trusted in the process of analyzing a child: does his play reflect real life situations that testify to internal conflicts, or does it show resistance to the expression of conflicts; whether the child's play is a kind of transference or a favorite means of expression; whether he finds in it a means of "escape to illness" or whether the child's play itself has a healing power.
Currently, some psychoanalysts adhere to the views of A. Freud, others share the ideas of M. Klein, others use everything valuable that was in the teachings of these two representatives of child psychoanalysis. This anthology contains materials written by A. Freud, and it reflects, respectively, one of the positions associated with understanding the specifics of child psychoanalysis and its techniques. In order to get a more complete picture of the possible approaches to the consideration of the mental development of the child, the occurrence of mental disorders in children and methods of their treatment, the reader can refer to the works published in Russian, listed in the list of references. However, it seems to me that acquaintance with child psychoanalysis should begin with reading the relevant works of A. Freud. That is why the reader offered to the reader includes the research of this author as a necessary prerequisite for further mastery of psychoanalytic knowledge in the field of therapy, upbringing and education of children.
Valery Leybin,
full member of the Academy of Pedagogical and Social Sciences,
Chief Researcher
Institute for System Research RAS
Section I
Psychoanalysis of early childhood
Amnesia of early childhood events and the Oedipus complex
We all know very well that teachers treat psychoanalysis with a certain amount of skepticism and mistrust. But since you, teachers working in Children's Day Centers, decided to listen to a short course of my lectures anyway, you seem to have somehow come to the conclusion that a closer acquaintance with the new discipline can be of some help in your hard work. After listening to these four lectures, you will be able to assess whether you were wrong in your expectations and whether I managed to justify at least part of your expectations.
In a certain sense, I have nothing absolutely new for you. I would not have achieved my goal if I tried to tell you about the behavior of schoolchildren or children attending Day Centers, since you are in a better position in this regard. A huge amount of material passes through your hands every day, demonstrating the whole spectrum of phenomena: from children who are mentally and physically retarded, intimidated, stubborn, deceitful, spoiled by ill-treatment, to cruel, aggressive and prone to crime. I'd rather shy away from trying to read the entire list, as you'll still find a lot of gaps in it.
Nevertheless, even a good acquaintance with the whole variety of situations can prevent the comprehension of the true meaning of these phenomena. You, as well as school teachers and kindergarten teachers, must constantly act. Life in the classroom requires constant intervention on your part: you must make comments, maintain discipline and order in the classroom, make sure that the children do not sit idle, give them advice and guidance. Your administration would be extremely unhappy if it suddenly occurred to you to switch to the position of a passive observer. It is so arranged that by virtue of your professional activity you become acquainted with countless visible manifestations of the behavior of children, but you can neither cover the whole spectrum of these phenomena with your eyes, nor trace the origins of the children's behavior to which you are forced to respond.
Perhaps you cannot properly evaluate and classify the material that you have, not so much because of the lack of unhindered observation, but because such a classification requires special knowledge. Imagine for a moment that someone here is particularly interested in finding out why some children in a certain group suffer from visual impairments or rickets. He knows that these children live in squalid, damp houses, but only a physician can clearly explain how dampness affects the physical condition of the child. Another may have focused his attention on the dangers to which, because of their innate qualities, the children of alcoholic parents are exposed; in this case, it is necessary to turn to the study of heredity. Anyone who is interested in the relationship between such phenomena as unemployment, lack of housing and child neglect should take up the study of sociology. In the same way, a teacher who is interested in the psychological determinants of all these phenomena, who wants to understand the difference between them and trace their gradual development with concrete examples, may turn to psychoanalysis for information.
It seems to me that this enrichment of knowledge can provide you with significant support in your practical activities. There are two reasons for this. The day centers are the newest educational institution in Vienna. It is intended for children who, for one reason or another, are left without parental supervision after school. The idea of creating such centers is a preventive measure, an attempt to prevent the negative consequences resulting from the decline in care for children. They owe their existence to the belief that the development of defiant and antisocial behavior in the early stages can be relatively easily influenced in the favorable atmosphere of such centers, reminiscent of a school or home environment. Later, when teenagers who have grown up without parental supervision and who have committed crimes find themselves in a correctional institution, it is much more difficult, and sometimes simply impossible, to do this.
However, at this time, attendance at Day Centers cannot be mandatory. While school attendance is mandatory, it is up to the parents to entrust their child to the care of the Center's staff. For this reason, Day Centers must constantly prove that their existence is not useless, gaining credibility in the eyes of every child and parent with their successful work, just as, before the decree on compulsory vaccination against smallpox, it was necessary to convince parents again and again of the need such vaccinations.
But Day Center workers point to another difficulty inherent in their position. In most cases, they have to deal with children who have already passed through the hands of various educators. They note that these children, at least initially, react inadequately to themselves and their actions. They come with preconceived notions and often express their distrust, anxiety or disdain towards the teacher by their behavior. They developed this attitude as a result of previous communication with adults. In addition, the life of a child in the Day Center is nothing more than an addition to his school life, and the Centers generally master more liberal, humane and modern ways of education than those that prevail in most schools. Thus, the school, by requiring a certain standard of behavior from the child and impressing him with such a standard, often creates obstacles for the Centers in achieving the goal.
So the position of the employees of the Day Centers is far from enviable. They are constantly faced with difficult tasks that require independent decision and intervention; and that's not to mention the fact that they are not the main and most important adults in a child's life.
School teachers may say that we are wrong in considering their situation as the most favorable. They also claim that more often than not, they get the baby too late; it is very difficult, for example, in the first grade of elementary school to instill in a child a correct and serious attitude towards studies and teachers, if before he was familiar only with the carefree atmosphere of a kindergarten. They bring with them to school a model of behavior acquired in kindergarten, and an attitude that is not acceptable in school conditions.
In accordance with the foregoing, kindergarten workers are dealing with a group that has not yet been spoiled by upbringing, and, consequently, are in a more advantageous position. But even from them, to our amazement, we hear complaints that their three- to six-year-old pupils are already mature personalities. Each child is endowed with character traits peculiar only to him and reacts to the actions of educators in his own way. With each child, the educator associates certain expectations, specific hopes and fears, each of them has his own addictions, each in his own way expresses envy and tenderness, demands love and rejects it. And there can be no question of the influence of the personality of the educator on a submissive, not yet formed being. The educator deals with small personalities, complex and difficult to influence.
Therefore, teachers and educators - whether in schools, day centers or kindergartens - always find themselves in the same difficult position. Obviously, the formation of personality is completed earlier than we imagined it. In order to reveal the origin of those features of the child's character that cause so much trouble for the teacher, the researcher must turn to the period preceding his admission to educational institutions, to the first adults in the child's life, that is, to the period up to six years and to his parents.
Perhaps you have a feeling that this way the task is simplified. Instead of observing day by day the behavior of older children in schools and day centers, we will try to collect information about their impressions and memories of their early years.
At first glance, this is not at all difficult. You have always strived to ensure that relations with the children entrusted to you were sincere and open. Now this will be very useful. By answering your questions, the child will be ready to tell you everything.
I advise each of you to make such an attempt, but I warn you that you will get meager results. Children don't talk about their past, but they will gladly tell you about the events of the last few days or weeks, about the weekend they spent, about their last birthday, maybe even about last year's Christmas. But here their memories are interrupted, or, in any case, the children lose the ability to talk about them.
You can say that our belief that the child is able to remember his past is unfounded. It should be borne in mind that children cannot distinguish important events from insignificant ones. Therefore, you think it would be wiser and more productive to ask our questions not to a child, but to an adult who is interested in exploring the early experience of his childhood.
Of course, I recommend that you use this second method as well, but I know that you will be surprised to find that a friend who sincerely wants to help you has little to say. His more or less conscious memories, with a few gaps, will go back to perhaps the fifth or sixth year of life. He will describe his school years, perhaps even the house where he lived in the third, fourth and fifth years of life, the names of brothers and sisters and dates; he may even mention such a special event as moving from one house to another, or some unusual occasion. The list ends here before you find what you are looking for, namely signs of how his five years of development led to the formation of personality traits.
Of course, this is a suitable occasion for new disappointment. The events we want to hear about, which play such an important role in shaping the character of the individual, concern the most intimate experiences in his life. This is the experience that everyone keeps as the most intimate and, not allowing anyone but himself to access it, shyly hides even from his closest friends. Given this circumstance, you should seek information from the only person who is ready to give it out. In other words, each researcher must study himself. Here we are ourselves involved, and we must rely on the ability of a normal adult to remember the past, on our interest in this information and the desire to overcome all barriers that prevent a person from betraying his secrets to others.
However, even if we approach this matter with all interest and attention and be extremely frank, the results will still be meager. We will not be able to shed light on the early years of our lives and collect an unbroken chain of memories of that period. We can associate events with certain periods of time, which for different individuals can be quite different. For some, this is the fifth year of life, for some it is the fourth, for others it is the third. However, up to this point in the consciousness of each of us there is a big gap, darkness, against which only some random and incoherent fragments stand out, which, upon closer examination, are devoid of meaning and meaning.
For example, a young man does not remember anything from the first four years of his childhood, except for a short episode on the ship, where the captain in a beautiful uniform holds out his hands to him to lift him over the parapet. A survey of other people showed that in the same period of time he experienced serious upheavals and severe blows of fate. Or again, in the memory of a girl whose early childhood was rich in emotional experiences, among the confusion of events, only one clear memory remained: while walking in a baby carriage, she turns back and looks at the nanny pushing the carriage!
You will, of course, agree that here we are confronted with a highly contradictory set of facts. On the one hand, from our observations of young children and the stories of relatives about our childhood, we know that the behavior of the child at this stage of development is meaningful and active; he expresses his attitude to what is happening, in many respects he manifests himself as a rational being. On the other hand, this period has been erased from his memory or, at best, left extremely meager memories of himself. According to the testimonies of school teachers and kindergarten teachers, after these early childhood years, a person enters life as a fully formed personality. But nevertheless, memory works as if during this period, when the child is most receptive and sensitive, when the complex development of his personality takes place, nothing worth remembering happened.
So far, academic psychology has fallen into this trap. As material for their research, scientists took only that part of the mental life of the individual, which is known to him, which inevitably led to an underestimation of the significance of the first years of life, which remained unknown to him.
The first attempt to resolve this contradiction was made by psychoanalysis. By examining the nature of the erroneous actions that a person commits in his daily life, forgetting and losing things or putting them in the wrong place, reading or hearing the wrong word, psychoanalysis has proved that such errors are not accidental. Previously, such cases were explained, without much thought, as the result of inattention, fatigue, or simply an accident. Psychoanalytic research has shown that, as a rule, we do not forget anything, except that, for one reason or another, we would not like to remember, although this reason is usually not known to us.
Similarly, when exploring gaps in childhood memories, psychoanalysis resorts to unconventional ways of explaining. He argues that such a striking phenomenon would not have taken place without good reason. It is this darkness that envelops the first years of life, and the obstacles that arise in the way of anyone who makes any attempt to dispel it, led psychoanalysts to think that something important is hidden here. In the same way, a burglar who stumbles upon a particularly ingenious device of a lock concludes that the effort he will make to break it will be richly rewarded; people wouldn't go to such trouble to lock up something useless!
But at the moment it is not my plan to explain how psychoanalysis accomplished this goal of restoring childhood memories. The description of the method of psychoanalysis itself will take more time than we have at our disposal. We will leave its more detailed consideration and investigation to another course of lectures. Now we are mainly interested in the content of the first five years of life, insofar as psychoanalysis has succeeded in restoring it. I will only remind you that this restoration was carried out by interpreting dreams and explaining the origin of errors committed both by healthy people and by patients suffering from neuroses.
The psychoanalytic reconstruction of childhood memories refers to the earliest period of infancy, to the period when the child possesses only hereditary qualities inherent in him from birth - in other words, to the state in which we vainly hoped to find him at the time of entering an educational institution. What we know about this stage of development is not impressive. Newborn children are in many ways similar to young animals, but in some respects they are in a less advantageous position than young animals. The latter depend on their mothers only for a short period of time, at most a few weeks. After that, they turn into independent individuals, able to do without outside help. With children, things are different.
The child, for at least a year, is so dependent on the mother that it would die the moment the mother ceased to care for him. But even after a year of infancy, independence is still far away. The child is not able to get food and livelihood, to protect himself from danger. As you know, it takes fifteen years, or even more, to completely free yourself from adult guardianship and become independent.
The fate of a child is inevitably determined by its long-term dependence on an adult, which also distinguishes people from individuals of the animal world. The mother plays during the first year of life the most important role in the fate of the child, if only because her tender care is his only protection, this feeling remains for life. The child feels safe as long as he knows that the mother is nearby, and the child shows his helplessness by anxiety or indignation when the mother leaves him. Without his mother, he could not satisfy his hunger; her presence becomes vital to him.
First lecture on psychoanalysis for educators (1930). The text is given according to the publication: Freud A. Theory and practice of child psychoanalysis. T. I. M., 1999. S. 8–22.
The German Hort here translates to "Children's Day Centre". Its statute reads: “The centers are modeled after kindergartens, but are intended primarily for children aged 6 to 14. While kindergartens accept children only up to 6 years old, that is, preschool age, Hort centers are visited by those children whose parents go to work all day and who would be forced to spend their free time outside of school. Here, in the Hort centers, they prepare lessons, participate in collective games, go for walks.”
Anna Freud - the daughter of Sigmund Freud - continued and developed the classical theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Having received a pedagogical education, she worked as a teacher in a school for the children of her father's patients and from 1923 began her own psychoanalytic practice. A. Freud is the author of many works on the patterns of child development, on the difficulties that one has to face in his upbringing and education; about the nature and causes of violations of normal development and ways of their compensation.
In "The Norm and Pathology of Child Development" (1965), A. Freud indicated the origins of psychoanalytic interest in children. She wrote that after the publication of her father's book "Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality" (1905), many analysts began to observe their children and find confirmation of all the features of child development noted by Z. Freud: childhood sexuality, Oedipus and castration complexes. In this direction, in the 20-30s, the pedagogical faculty of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute trained kindergarten teachers and teachers. At the same time, well-known scientists - psychoanalysts (A. Eichorn, S. Bernfeld, etc.) monitored street children and young offenders. During and after the Second World War, these studies continued in specialized institutions, where the focus was on observations of infants and young children deprived of parents. A great contribution to the development of the psychoanalytic study of childhood was made by R. Spitz, J. Bowlby, M. Ribble, and others. Theoretical ideas were developed by E. Kriz and X. Hartman.
Following the tradition of classical psychoanalysis, A. Freud divides the personality into its stable components: the unconscious or "It", "I", "Super-I". The instinctive part, in turn, is divided into sexual and aggressive components (the psychoanalytic law of bipolarity). The development of the sexual instinct is determined, as in classical psychoanalysis, by the sequence of libidinal phases (oral, anal-sadistic, phallic, latent, prepubertal, pubertal). The corresponding phases in the development of aggressiveness are manifested in such behaviors as biting, spitting, clinging (oral aggressiveness); destruction and cruelty (manifestation of anal sadism); lust for power, boasting, arrogance (at the phallic stage); dissocial beginnings (in pre-puberty and puberty). For the development of the "I" instance, A. Freud also outlines an approximate chronology of the development of protective mechanisms: repressions, reactive formations, projections and transfers, sublimation, splitting, regressions, etc. Analyzing the development of the "Super-I", A. Freud describes identification with parents and internalization of parental authority. Each phase of a child's development, according to A. Freud, is the result of resolving the conflict between internal instinctive drives and the restrictive requirements of the external social environment. A. Freud believes that, given the phases, it is possible to build lines of development for an infinite number of areas of children's life. The recognized merit of A. Freud is her description of the line of development of feeding from the infant stage to reasonable eating habits of adults; lines of development of neatness from the initial educational program of an adult to the automatic mastery of the functions of selection; lines of development of physical independence, attitudes towards elders, etc. Special attention in psychoanalysis is paid to the line of development from infantile dependence to adult sexual life.
From the point of view of A. Freud, not only the identification of the level of development achieved along the corresponding line, but also the relationship between all lines, makes it possible to make a diagnosis and give recommendations for solving practical issues of child education. At the same time, she emphasized, the discrepancy, disharmony between the various lines should not be considered as a pathological phenomenon, since the discrepancies in the rate of development observed in people from a very early age can only be variations within the normal range. Steps from immaturity to maturity, and not chronological age, are considered by her as indicators of development. If growth occurs by progressive advancement to a higher level, then normal child development, according to the views of A. Freud, proceeds in jumps, not gradually step by step, but forward and back again with progressive and regressive processes in their constant alternation. Children in the course of their development take, as it were, two steps forward and one step back.
Unlike classical psychoanalysis, which primarily studies mental phenomena hidden from consciousness, A. Freud is one of the first in the children's psychoanalytic tradition to extend the main provisions of Z. Freud to the sphere of consciousness, studying the instance of the "I" of the individual. A. Freud considers child development as a process of gradual socialization of the child, subject to the law of transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle.
The newborn, in her opinion, knows only one law, namely, the principle of pleasure, to which all its manifestations are blindly subordinated. However, in order to fulfill such bodily needs of the child as hunger, sleep, temperature regulation, the infant is completely left to the adult who cares for him. And if the search for pleasure is the "internal principle" of the child, then the satisfaction of desires depends on the external world.
The mother fulfills or rejects the desires of the child and through this role becomes not only the first object of love, but also the first legislator for the child. According to A. Freud, the fact that the mood of the mother has a decisive influence on the child belongs to the earliest achievements of psychoanalysis, that is, the fundamental conclusions of studies of adult patients. Observations of children again confirm that the individual likes and dislikes of the mother have a significant influence on the development of the child. "The fastest developing thing is what the mother likes the most and what she most animatedly welcomes; the development process slows down where she remains indifferent or hides her approval," notes A. Freud.
Despite the helplessness, the child very early manages to learn to show certain attitudes towards the mother. Already at this early age one can distinguish between obedient, "good", easily controlled children, and intolerant, self-willed, "heavy" children who violently protest against every restriction demanded of them.
The more independent a child becomes in relation to food, sleep, etc., A. Freud believes, the more bodily needs recede into the background, giving way to new instinctive desires. The child strives for their satisfaction with the same zeal, as before he sought to saturate with a feeling of hunger. And again he is faced with the restrictions that the outside world imposes on him. The child naturally seeks to fulfill his instinctive goals without delay, without considering external circumstances, but this can become dangerous for his life, so the adult, whether he likes it or not, is forced to limit the child. As a result of this discrepancy between internal and external, the desire for pleasure and reality, all children of this age, in the words of A. Freud, are "entangled" in the constant complexities of the external world and, naturally, are disobedient, impolite and stubborn.
According to A. Freud, the chances of a child to remain mentally healthy largely depend on how much his "I" is able to endure deprivation, that is, to overcome displeasure. For some children, any delay or any restriction on the satisfaction of desires is completely unbearable. They respond with reactions of anger, rage, impatience; nothing can satisfy them, any substitutions are rejected by them as insufficient. In other children, the same restrictions do not cause such resentment. It is interesting that such attitudes, arising very early, persist for many years. A. Freud characterizes a child as immature as long as instinctive desires and their fulfillment are divided between him and his environment in such a way that desires remain on the side of the child, and the decision to satisfy or refuse them is on the side of the outside world. From this moral dependence, which is quite normal for childhood, a long and difficult path of development begins to a normal adult state, when a mature person, becoming a "judge in his own business", is able to control his intentions, subject them to rational analysis and independently decide whether something is necessary. or other urge to reject, delay, or turn into action. Such moral independence is the result of numerous internal clashes.
In early childhood, the pleasure principle dominates without internal resistance. In older children, he still owns such aspects of the psyche as the unconscious and, in part, the conscious life of fantasies, dreams, etc. Anyone who is under the rule of the pleasure principle is guided in his actions solely by his desire to satisfy desires. Only the principle of reality creates, according to A. Freud, space for delay, delay and consideration of the social environment and its requirements. On this basis, it can be assumed that the pleasure principle and desocial or asocial behavior are intertwined as closely as the reality principle and socialization that has taken place. But all this is not as simple as it seems at first glance.
A. Eichhorn was the first to notice that homeless children and young criminals can achieve a high degree of development of the reality principle without using it for socialization. The transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle is only a preliminary condition for the socialization of the individual. Progress towards the reality principle does not in itself give any assurance that the individual will follow social demands.
According to A. Freud, almost all the normal elements of a child's life, especially such as greed, self-interest, jealousy, the desire for death, push the child in the direction of desociality. Socialization is protection from them. Some instinctive desires are forced out of consciousness, others turn into their opposite (reactionary formations), are directed to other goals (sublimation), are shifted from one's own person to another (projection), etc. From the point of view of A. Freud, there is no internal contradiction between developmental processes and protective processes. The real contradictions lie deeper - they are between the desires of the individual and his position in society, therefore a smooth flow of the process of socialization is impossible. The organization of the defensive process is an important and necessary component of the development of the "I".
The advancement of the child from the pleasure principle to the reality principle cannot take place before the various functions of the ego have reached certain stages of development. Only after the memory begins to function can the actions of the child be carried out on the basis of experience and foresight. Without the control of reality, there is no distinction between inside and outside, fantasy and reality. Only the acquisition of speech makes a child a member of human society. Logic, reasonable thinking contribute to the understanding of the relationship between cause and effect, and adaptation to the requirements of the surrounding world ceases to be a simple submission - it becomes conscious and adequate.
The formation of the principle of reality, on the one hand, and thought processes, on the other, opens the way for new mechanisms of socialization - such as imitation, identification, introjection, which contribute to the formation of the instance of "Super-I". The formation of an effective "Super-I" means for the child a decisive progress in socialization. The child is now able not only to obey the moral requirements of his social environment, but also "he himself takes part in them and can feel himself a representative of them." However, this internal authority is still very weak and needs support and support from an authoritative person (parents, teacher) for many years and can easily collapse due to strong feelings and disappointment in it.
Imitation, identification, introjection are necessary preconditions for subsequent entry into the social community of adults. Next, new steps "outward" must be taken: from the family to the school, from the school to social life. And each of these steps is accompanied by a renunciation of personal advantages, of an "individually attentive" attitude towards oneself. So, within a school class, there is the same order for all students, although they differ from each other as individuals. In public life, all people are equal before the law. "Laws are rigid and impersonal, and their violation leads to legal sanctions, regardless of what kind of sacrifice for the individual means their application, facilitates or complicates this sacrifice of his character and intellectual level," emphasizes A. Freud. However, the normal person is not required to know all social regulations, accept them and make his own; With the exception of the fundamental rules of morality, he is expected to recognize the necessity of right and law and be ready in principle to obey them. Compared to the norm, a criminal is like a child who ignores the authority of his parents. There are also people whose moral requirements for themselves are stricter and higher than what the world around expects from them. Their ideals come from identification not with real parents, but with an idealized image of the parent. As A. Freud notes, such people behave self-confidently and are morally superior to their neighbors.
According to the deep conviction of A. Freud, which she repeatedly declares, inharmonious personal development is based on many reasons. These are uneven progress along the lines of development, and unevenly lasting regressions, and features of the isolation of internal instances from each other, and the formation of links between them, and much more. “Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that individual differences between people are so great, deviations from the straight line of development go so far, and the definitions of a strict norm are so unsatisfactory. The constant mutual influences of progress and regress bring with them countless variations within the framework of normal development,” emphasized A. Freud.
Once, when asked what a normal person should be able to do well, Z. Freud answered: "Love and work." Later, as if arguing with her father, A. Freud tried to answer the question of what childhood achievement deserves the title of vital. She wrote: “Games, learning, the free activity of fantasy, the warmth of object relations, are all important for the child. However, they cannot be compared in importance with such fundamental concepts as “ability to love” and “work”. I return to an earlier hypothesis ( 1945) when I affirm that only one capacity in a child's life deserves this position, namely, the ability to develop normally, to pass through the stages prescribed according to the plan, to form all aspects of the personality and to fulfill in an appropriate way the requirements of the outside world.
