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Childhood and Society

Books by Erik H. Erikson

CHILDHOOD AND SOCILTY
YOUNG MAN LUTHER

ERIK H. ERIKSON

Childhood

AND

Society

W • W • NORTON COMPANY • INC • New York

COPYRIGHT 1950 BY
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNTIED STATES OF AMERICA
FOR THE PUBLISHERS BY THE VAIL-BALLOU PRESS, INC.

TO OUR

children's children

Contents

Foreword i i

PART ONE: Childhood and the Modalities of Social Life 17

CHAPTER I. Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 19

1. A Neurological Crisis in a Small Boy: Sam 21

2. A Combat Crisis in a Marine 34

CHAPTER II, The Theory of Infatitile Sexuality 44

1. Two Clinical Episodes 44

2. Libido and Aggression 54

3. Zones, Modes, and Modalities 67

a. Mouth and Senses 67

b. Eliminative Organs and Musculature 76

c. Locomotion and the Genitals 81

d. Prcgenitality and Genitality 87

PART two: Childhood in Two American Indian Tribes 93

INTRODUCTION TO PART TWO 95

CHAPTER HI. Hufiters Across the Prairie 98

1. The Historical Background 98

2. Jim 104

3. An Interracial Seminar 108

4. Sioux Child Training 117

a. Getting and Taking 117

7

8

Contents

b. Holding on and Letting Go 123

c. “Making” and Making 125

5. The Supernatural 131

6. Summary 137

CHAPTER IV. Fishermen Along a Sahnon River 141

1. The World of the Yurok 14*

2. Yurok Child Psychiatry 146

3. Yurok Child Training 150

4. Comparative Summary 155

PART three: The Growth of the Ego 161

INTRODUCTION TO PART THREE 1 63

CHAPTER V. Early Ego Failure: Jean 169

CHAPTER VI. Toys and Reasons 182

1. Play, Work, and Growth 182

2. Play and Cure 195

3. The Beginnings of Identity 207

a. Play and Milieu 207

b. Son of a Bombardier 210

c. Black Identity 213

CHAPTER vn. Eight Stages of Man 219

1. Trust vs. Basic Mistrust 219

2. Autonomy vs. Shame and Doubt 222

3. Initiative vs. Guilt 224

4. Industry vs. Inferiority 226

5. Identity vs. Role Diffusion 227

6. Intimacy vs. Isolation 229

7. Generativity vs. Stagnation 231

8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair 231

PART four: Youth and the Evolution of Identity 235

INTRODUCTION TO PART FOUR 237

CHAPTER VIII. Reflections on the American Identity 244

1. Polarities 244

2. “Mom” 247

3. John Henry 257

4. Adolescent, Boss, and Machine 265

CHAPTER IX. The Legend of Hitlers Childhood 284

I. Germany 286

Contents

9

2. Father 288

3. Mother 296

4. Adolescent 298

5. Lebensraum, Soldier, Jew 302

6. A Note on Jewry 311

CHAPTER X. The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 316

1. The Land and the Mir 318

2. The Mothers 323

3. Senile Despot and Cursed Breed 326

4. The Exploited 336

a. Saint and Beggar 336

b. The Stranger 339

c. Fatherless Gang and Legless Child 342

d. The Swaddled Baby 344

5. The Protestant 349

CHAPTER XI. Conclusion: The Fear of Anxiety 359

APPENDS 381

IKOEX 389

Foreword

A FOREWORD enables an author to put his afterthoughts first.
Looking back on what he has written, he can try to tell the reader
what lies before him.

First: this book originated in the practice of psychoanalysis.
Its main chapters are based on specimen situations which called
for interpretation and correction: anxiety in young children,
apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, arro¬
gance in young Nazis. In these, as in all situations, the psycho¬
analytic method detects conflict; for this method was first focused
on mental disturbance. Through the work of Freud, neurotic
conflict has become the most comprehensively studied aspect of
human behavior. However, this book avoids the easy conclusion
that our relatively advanced knowledge of neurosis permits us to
view mass phenomena—culture, religion, revolution—as analogies
of neuroses in order to make them amenable to our concepts.
We will pursue a different path.

Psychoanalysis today is implementing the study of the ego, the
core of the individual. It is shifting its emphasis from the con¬
centrated study of the conditions which blunt and distort the
individual ego to the study of the ego’s roots in social organiza¬
tion. This we try to understand not in order to offer a rash cure to

11

12

Foreword

a rashly diagnosed society, but in order first to complete the blue¬
print of our method. In this sense, this is a psychoanalytic book on
the relation of the ego to society.

This is a book on childhood. One may scan work after work on
history, society, and morality and find little reference to the fact
that ail people start as children and that all peoples begin in their
nurseries. It is human to have a long childhood; it is civilized to
have an ever longer childhood. Long childhood makes a technical
and mental virtuoso out of man, but it also leaves a lifelong resi¬
due of emotional immaturity in him. While tribes and nations, in
many intuitive ways, use child training to the end of gaining their
particular form of mature human identity, their unique version of
integrity, they are, and remain, beset by the irrational fears wliich
stem from the very state of childhood which they exploited in
their specific way.

What can a clinician know about this? I think that the psycho¬
analytic method is essentially a historical method. Even where it
focuses on medical data, it interprets them as a function of past
experience. To say that psychoanalysis studies the conflict be¬
tween the mature and the infantile, the up-to-date and the archaic
layers in the mind, means that psychoanalysis studies psycho¬
logical evolution through the analysis of the individual. At the
same time it throws light on the fact that the history of humanity
is a gigantic metabolism of individual life cycles.

1 would like to say, then, that this is a book on historical proc¬
esses. Yet the psychoanalyst is an odd, maybe a new kind of
historian: in committing himself to influencing what he observes,
he becomes part of the historical process which he studies. As a
therapist, he must be aware of his own reaction to the observed:
his “equations” as an observer become his very instruments of
observation. Therefore, neither terminological alignment with
the more objective sciences nor dignified detachment from the
clamoring of the day can and should keep the psychoanalytic
method from being what H. S. Sullivan called “participant,” and
systematically so.

In this sense, this is and must be a subjective book, a conceptual

Foreword

13

itinerary. There is no attempt at being representative in quota¬
tions or systematic in references. On the whole, little is gained
from an effort to reinforce vague meanings with quotations of
vaguely similar meaning from other contexts. Clearly limiting my
objectives and waiving all priorities, I shall try this once to quote
at least myself correctly.

This approach calls for a short statement of my training and of
my over-all intellectual indebtedness.

I came to psychology from art, which may explain, if not
Justify, the fact that at times the reader will find me painting
contexts and backgrounds where he would rather have me point
to facts and concepts. I have had to make a virtue out of a consti¬
tutional necessity by basing what I have to say on representative
description rather than on theoretical argument.

I first came face to face with children in a small American school
in Vienna which was conducted by Dorothy Burlingham and
Peter Bios. 1 began my clinical career as what is commonly called
a child analyst, which does not mean that I psychoanalyzed while
still a child but that I first psychoanalyzed children. In this 1 was
guided by Anna Freud and the late August Aichhorn. I gradu¬
ated from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute.

Henry A. Murray and his co-workers at the Harvard Psy¬
chological Clinic patiently introduced me to personality theory.
Over the years in this country I had the privilege of long talks
and short field trips with anthropologists, primarily Gregory
Bateson, Ruth Benedict, Alfred Kroeber, Martin Loeb, Margaret
Mead, and Scudder Mekeel. My very special debt to the late
Scudder Mekeel will be dealt with in detail in Chapter 3. It
would be impossible to itemize my over-all indebtedness to
Margaret Mead.

My comparative views on childhood developed through re¬
search to which I was first encouraged by Lawrence K. Frank. A
grant from the Josiah Macy, Jr., Foundation enabled me to join in
a study of incipient infantile neuroses at Yale (Department of Psy¬
chiatry, School of Medicine and Institute of Human Relations);

Foreword

H

and a grant from the General Education Board permitted me to
participate for a time in Jean Walker Macfarlane’s long-range
study of representative California children (Institute of Child
Welfare, University of California, Berkeley).

My wife, Joan Erikson, has edited this book.

In the completion of tlie manuscript 1 was counseled by Helen
Meiklejohn, and also by Gregory Bateson, Wilma Lloyd, Gard¬
ner and Lois Murphy, Laurence Sears, and Don MacKinnon. I
am grateful to them.

In the text a number of fictitious names appear: Sam, Ann, and
Peter; the Marine, Jim the Sioux, and Fanny the shaman; Jean,
Mary, and others. They were the patients and subjects who un¬
knowingly provided me with “specimens” of lucid behavior
which over the years stood out in my memory and gained in
scope and significance. I hope that my reports convey my ap¬
preciation of their partnership in this work of clarification.

I owe certain data reported in this book to my work on
the following staffs and with the following individuals: Har¬
vard Medical School, Department of Neuropsychiatry—Frank
Fremont-Smith, M.D.; Yale School of Medicine, Department of
Psychiatry—Felice Begg-Emery, M.D.; Menninger Foundation,
Southard School—Mary Leitch, M.D.; Children’s Hospital of
the East Bay, Child Development Center—Wilma Lloyd; Mount
Zion Hospital, Veterans’ Rehabilitation Clinic—Emanuel Wind-
holz, M.D.; Child Guidance Clinics, San Francisco Public Schools.

Parts of the book are based on previously published studies, in
particular “Configurations in Play; Clinical Observations,” Psy¬
choanalytic Qmrterly; “Problems of Infancy and Early Child¬
hood,” Cyclopaedia of Medicine, Etc., Second Revised Edition,
Davis and Company; Studies in the Interpretation of Play: /. Clini¬
cal Observation of Play Disruption in Young Children, Genetic
Psychology Monographs; “Observations on Sioux Education,”
Journal of Psychology; “Hitler’s Imagery and German Youth,”
Psychiatry; Observations on the Yurok: Childhood and World
Image, University of California Publications in American Archae-

Foreword

*5

ology and Ethnology; “Childhood and Tradition in Two Amer¬
ican Indian Tribes,” in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, I,
International Universities Press (revised and reprinted in Per¬
sonality, edited by Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray,
Alfred A. Knopf); “Ego Development and Historical Change,”
in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, II, International Uni¬
versities Press.

Orinda, California

Erik Homburger Erikson

Childhood and the
Modahties of Social Life

CHAPTER

1

Relevance and Relativity in the
Case History

In every field there are a few very simple questions which are
highly embarrassing because the debate which forever arises
around them leads only to perpetual failure and seems to make
ardent fools of the most expert. In psychopathology such ques¬
tions have always concerned the location and the cause of a
neurotic disturbance. Does it have a visible onset? Docs it reside
in the body or in the mind, in the individual or in his society?

For centuries this qulfiy centered around the ecclesiastical ar¬
gument over the origin of lunaJfy: was it an indwelling devil or
an acute inflammation of the brain? Such simple contraposition
now seems long outdated. In recent years we have come to the
conclusion that a neurosis is psycho- and somatic, psycho- and
social, and mterpersonaL

More often than not, however, discussion will reveal that these
new definitions too are only different ways of combining such
separate concepts as psyche and soma, individual and group. We
now say “and” instead of “either-or,” but we retain at least the
semantic assumption that the mind is a “thing” separate from the
body, and a society a “thing” outside of the individuaL

I^chopathology is the child of medicine which had its illus-
crioos origin in the quest for the location and causation of dis-

*9

20

Childhood and Society

case. Our institutions of learning arc committed to this quest,
which gives to those who suffer, as well as to those who adminis¬
ter, the magic reassurance emanating from scientific tradition
and prestige. It is reassuring to think of a neurosis as a disease,
because it does feel like an a ffli ction. It is, in fact, often accom¬
panied by circumscribed somatic suffering: and we have well-
defined approaches to disease, both on the individual and on the
epidemiological level. These approaches have resulted in a sharp
decline of many illnesses, and in a decrease of mortality in
others.

Yet something strange is happening. As we try to think of
neuroses as diseases, we gradually come to reconsider the whole
problem of disease. Instead of arriving at a better definition of
neurosis, we find that some widespread diseases, such as afflic¬
tions of the heart and stomach, seem to acquire new meaning by
being considered equivalent to neurotic symptoms, or at any rate
to symptoms of a central disturbance rather than of a peripheral
happ)ening in isolated afflicted parts.

Here the newest meaning of the “clinical” approach becomes
strangely similar to its oldest meaning. “Qinical” once designated
the function of a priest at the sickbed when the somatic strug¬
gle seemed to be coming to an end, and when the soul needed
guidance for a lonely meeting with its Maker. There was, in
fact, a time in medieval history when a doctor was obliged to
call a priest if he proved unable to cure his patient within a cer¬
tain number of days. The assumption was that in such cases the
sickness was what we today might call spirituo-somatic. The
word “clinical” has long since shed this clerical garb. But it is
regaining some of its old connotation, for we learn that a neu¬
rotic person, no matter where and how and why he feels sick,
is crippled at the core, no matter what you call that ordered or
ordering core. He may not become exposed to the final loneliness
of death, but he experiences that numbing loneliness, that isolation
and disorganization of experience, which we call neurotic anxiety.

However much the psychotherapist may wish to seek prestige,
solidity, and comfort in biological and physical analogies, he

21

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History

deals, above all, with human anxiety. About this he can say
little that will not tell all. Therefore, before enlarging upon
wider applications, he may well state explicitly where he stands
in his clinical teaching.

This book consequently begins with a specimen of pathology
—namely, the sudden onset of a violent somatic disturbance in
a child. Our searchlight does not attempt to isolate and hold in
focus any one aspect or mechanism of this case; rather it de¬
liberately plays at random around the multiple factors involved,
to see whether we can circumscribe the area of disturbance.

i. A NEUROLOGICAL CRISIS IN A SMALL BOY: SAM

Early one morning, in a town in northern California, the
mother of a small boy of three was awakened by strange noises
emanating from his room. She hurried to his bed and saw him in
a terrifying attack of some kind. To her it looked just like the
heart attack from which his grandmother had died five days
earlier. She called a doctor, who said that Sam’s attack was epi¬
leptic. He administered sedatives and had the boy taken to a
hospital in a near-by metropolis. The hos^tal staff were not
willing to commit themselves to a diagnosis because of the
patient’s youth and the drugged state in which he had been
brought in. Discharged after a few days, the boy seemed per¬
fectly well; his neurological reflexes were all in order.

One month later, however, little Sam found a dead mole in
the back yard and became morbidly agitatfed over it. His mother
tried to answer his very shre>dvd questions as to what death was
all about. He reluctandy went to sleep after having declared
that his mother apparently did not know either. 4n the night he
cried out, vomited, and began to twitch around the eyes and
the mouth.) This time the doctor arrived early enough tx) ob¬
serve the symptoms which culminated in a severe convu^ibn
over the whole right side of his body. The hjispital concurred
in diagnosing the fiction as idiopathic epilepsy, possibly due to
a brain lesion in the left hemisphere.

When, two months later, a third attack occurred after the

22

Childhood and Society

boy had accidentally crushed a butterfly in his hand, the hospital
added an amendment to its diagnosis: “precipitating factor:
psychic stimulus.” In other words, because of some cerebral
pathology this boy probably had a lower threshold for con-
VTilsive explosion; but it was a psychic stimulus, the idea of death,
which precipitated him over his threshold. Otherwise neither his
birth history, nor the course of his infancy, nor his neurological
condition between attacks showed specific pathology. His gen¬
eral health was excellent. He was well nourished, and his brain
waves at the time only indicated that epilepsy “could not be
excluded.”

What was the “psychic stimulus”? Obviously it had to do
with death: dead mole, dead butterfly—and then we remember
his mother’s remark that in his first attack he had looked just like
his dying grandmother.

Here are the facts surrounding the grandmother’s death:

Some months before, the father’s mother had arrived for her
first visit to the family’s new home in X. There was an under¬
current of excitement which disturbed the mother more deeply
than she then knew. The visit had the connotation of an ex¬
amination to hen had she done well by her husband and by her
child? Also there was anxiety over the grandmother’s health.
The little boy, who at that time enjoyed teasing people, was
warned that the grandmother’s heart was not too strong. He
promised to spare her, and at first everything went wclL Never¬
theless, the mother seldom left the two alone together, especially
since the enforced restraint seemed to be hard on the vigordxJs
little boy. He looked, the mother thought, increasingly pde' and
tense. When the mother slipped avray for a while one day, leav¬
ing the child in her mother-in-law’s care, she returned to find the
old woman on the floor in a heart attack As the grandmother
later reported, the child had climbed on a chair and had fallen.
There was every reason to suspect that he had teased her and
had deliberately done something which she had warned him
against. The grandmother was ill for months, failed to recover,
and finally died a few days before the child’s first attack.

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 13*

The conclusion was obvious that what the doctors had called
the “psychic stimulus” in this case had to do with his grand¬
mother’s death. In fact, the mother now remembered what at
the time had seemed irrelevant to her—^namely, that Sam, on
going to bed the night before the attack, had piled up his pillows
the way his grandmother had done to avoid congestion and that
he had gone to sleep in an almost sitting position—as had the
grandmother.

Strangely enough, the mother insisted that the boy did not
know of his grandmother’s death. On the morning after it oc¬
curred she had told him that the grandmother had gone on a
long trip north to Seattle. He had cried and said, “Why didn’t
she say good-by to me?” He was told that there had not been
time Then, when a mysterious, large box had been carried out
of the house, the mother had told him that his grandmother’s
books were in it. But Sam had not seen the grandmother cither
bring or use such a lot of books, and he could not quite see the
reason for all the tears shed over a box of books by the hastily
congregated relatives. I doubted, of course, that the boy had
really believed the story; and indeed, the mother had puzzled
over a number of remarks made by the little teaser. Once when
she had wanted him to find something which he did nor want to
look for, he had said mockingly, “It has gone on a lo-ong trip, all
the way to See-attlc.” In the play group which he later joined
as part of the treatment plan, the otherwise vigorous boy would,
in dreamy concentration, build innumerable variations of ob¬
long boxes, the openings of which he would carefully barricade.
His questions at the time justified the suspicion that he was ex¬
perimenting with the idea of how it was to be locked up in an
oblong box. But he refused to listen to his mother’s belated ex¬
planation, now offered almost pleadingly, that the grandmother
had, m fact, died. “You’re lying,” he said. “She’s in Seattle. I’m
going to see her again."

From the little that has been said about the boy so far, it must be
clear that he was a rather self-willed, vigorous, and precociously
intelligent little fellow, not easily fooled. His ambirious parents

;24 Childhood and Society

had big plans for their only son: with his brains he might go
cast to college and medical school, or maybe to law school They
fostered in him a vigorous expression of his intellectual precocity
and curiosity. He had always been willful and from his first
days unable to accept a “no” or a “maybe” for an answer. As
soon as he could reach, he hit—a tendency which was not con¬
sidered unsound in the neighborhood in which he had been born
and raised: a neighborhood mixed in population, a neighborhood
in which he must have received at an early age the impression
that it was good to learn to hit first, just in case. But now they
lived, the only Jewish family, in a small but prosperous town.
They had to tell their little boy not to hit the children, not to
ask the ladies too many questions, and—^for heaven’s sake and
also for the sake of business—to treat the Gentiles gently. In
his earlier milieu, the ideal image held out for a little boy had
been that of a tough guy (on the street) and a smart boy (at
home). The problem now was to become quickly what the Gen¬
tiles of the middle class would call “a nice little boy, in spite of
his being Jewish.” Sam had /done a remarkably intelligent job
in adjusting his aggressivene^ and becoming a witty little teaser.

Here the “psychic stimulus” gains in dimensions. In the first
place, this had always been an irritable and an aggressive child.
Attempts on the part of others to restrain him made him angry;
his own attempts at restraining himself resulted in unbearable
tension. We might call this his constitutional intolerance, “con¬
stitutional” meaning merely that we cannot trace it to anything
earlier; he just always had been that way. 1 must add, however,
that his anger never lasted long and that he was not only a very
affectionate, but also an outstandingly expressive and exuberant
child, traits which helped him adopt the role of one who com¬
mits good-natured mischief. About the time of his grandmother’s
arriv^ however, something, it now appeared, had robbed him
of his hmnor. He had hit a child, hard. A little blood had trickled,
ostracism had threatened. He, the vigorous extrovert, had been
forced to stay at home with his grandmother, whom he was
not allowed to tease.

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 25

Was his aggressiveness part of an cpfleptic constitution? I
do not know. There was nothing feverish or hectic about his
vigor. It is true that his first three major attacks were all con¬
nected with ideas of death and two later ones with the de¬
partures of his first and second therapists, respectively. It is
also true that his much more frequent minor attacks—which
consisted of staring and gagging, and a split second of uncon¬
sciousness from wliich he would often return with the worried
words, “What happened?”—often occurred immediately after
sodden aggressive acts or words on his part. He might throw a
stone at a stranger, or he might say, “God is a skunk,” or, “The
whole world is full of skunks,” or (to his mother), “You arc
a stepmother.” Were these outbursts of primitive aggression for
which he was then forced to atone in an attack? Or were they
desperate attempts at discharging with energetic action a fore¬
boding of an impending attack?

I witnessed, and in fact provoked, one of his minor spells when
I took over his treatment about two years after the onset of the
illness. We had played dominoes, and in order to test his threshold
I had made him lose consistently, which was by no means easy.
He grew very pale and all his sparkle dimmed out. Suddenly
he stood up, took a rubber doll, and hit me in the face, hard.
Then his glance turned into an aimless stare, he gagged as if
about to vomit, and swooned slightly. (Doming to, he said in a
hoarse and urgent voice, “Let’s go on,” and gathered together
his dominoes, which had tumbled over. As he rearranged them
hurriedly, he built an oblong, rectangular configuration: a mini¬
ature edition of the big boxes he had liked to build previously in
the nursery school The dominoes all faced inward. Now fully
conscious, he noticed what he had done and smiled very faintly.

I said, “If you wanted to see the dots on your blocks, you
would have to be inside that little box, like a dead person in a
coffin.”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“This must mean that you are afraid you may have to die
because you hit me.”

26 Childhood and Society

Breathlessly, “Must D”

“Of course not. But you must have thought that you did make
your grandmother die and therefore had to die yourself. That’s
why you built those big boxes in your school, just as you built
this little one today. In fact, you must have thought you were
going to die every time you had one of those attacks.”

“Yes,” he said, somewhat sheepishly, because he had actually
never admitted to me that he had seen his grandmother’s coffin,
and that he knew she was dead.

Here one might think we have the story. In the meantime,
however, I had worked with the mother also and had learned
of her part in it—an essential portion of the whole account. She
had obviously been very tense in those days; and we may be
sure that whatever deep “psychic stimulus” may be present in
the life of a young child, it is identical with his mother’s most
neurotic conflict. Indeed, the mother now succeeded in remem¬
bering, only against severe emotional resistance, an incident
when, in the middle of her busiest preparations for the mother-
in-law’s arrival, Sam had thrown a doll into her face. Whether
he had done this “deliberately” or not, he had aimed only too
well; he had loosened one of her front teeth. A front tooth is
a precious possession in many ways. His mother had hit him
right back, harder and with more anger than she had ever done
before. She had not exacted a tooth for a tooth, but she had
shown a rage which neither she nor he had known was in her.

Or had he known it before she did? This is a crucial point.
For I believe that this boy’s low tolerance for aggression was
further lowered by the over-all connotation of violence in his
family. Above and beyond individual conflict, the whole milieu
of these children of erstwhile fugitives from ghettos and pogroms
is pervaded by the problem of the Jew’s special fate in the face
of anger and violence. It had all started so significantly wirh a
God who was mighty, wrathful, and vindictive, but also sadly
agitated, attitudes which he had bequeathed to the successive
patriarchs all the way from Moses down to this boy’s grand¬
parents. And it all had ended with the chosen but dispersed jew-

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 27

ish people’s unarmed helplessness against the surrounding world
of sdways potentially violent Gentiles. This family had dared the
Jewish fate, by isolating itself in a Gentile town; but they were
carrying their fate with them as an inner reality, in the midst of
these Gentiles who did not actively deny them their new, if
somewhat shaky, security.

Here it is important to add that our patient had been caught
in this, his parents’ conflict with their ancestors and with their
neighbors, at the worst possible time for him. For he was going
through a maturational stage characterized by a developmental
intolerance of restraint. I refer to the rapid increase in locomotor
vigor, in mental curiosity, and in a sadistic kind of infantile male¬
ness which usually appears at the age of three or four, manifest¬
ing itself according to differences in custom and individual
temperament. There is no doubt that our patient had been pre¬
cocious in this as in other respects. At that stage any child is
apt to show increased intolerance of being restrained from mov¬
ing willfully and from asking persistently. A vigorous increase
in initiative both in deed and in fantasy makes the growing child
of this stage especially vulnerable to the talion principle—and
he had come uncomfortably close to the tooth-for-a-tooth
penalty. At this stage a little boy likes to pretend that he is a
giant because he is afraid of giants, for he knows all too well
that his feet are much too small for the boots he wears in his
fantasies. In addition, precocity always implies relative isola¬
tion and disquieting imbalance. His tolerance, then, for his
parents’ anxieties was specifically low at the time when the grand¬
mother’s arrival added latent ancestral conflicts to the social and
economic problems of the day.

This, then, is our first “specimen” of a human crisis. But be¬
fore further dissecting the specimen, let me say a word
about the therapeutic procedure. An attempt was made to
synchronize the pediatric with the psychoanalytic work. Dosages
of sedatives were gradually decreased as psychoanalytic obser¬
vation began to discern, and insight to steady, the weak spots in
the child’s emotional threshold. The stimuli specific for these

28 Childhood and Society

weak areas were discussed not only with the child but also with
his father and mother so that they too, could review their roles
in the disturbance and could gain some insight before their pre¬
cocious child could overtake them in his understanding of him¬
self and of them.

One afternoon soon after the episode in which I was struck
in the face, our litde patient came upon his mother, who lay
resting on a couch. He put his hand on her chest and said, “Only
a very bad boy would like to jump on his mommy and step on
her; only a very bad boy would want to do that. Isn’t that so.
Mommy?” The mother laughed and said, “I bet you would like
to do it now. I think quite a good little boy might think that he
wanted to do such a thing, but he would know that he did not
really want to do it”—or something liltc that: such things are
hard to say, and wording is not too important. What counts is
their spirit, and the implication that there arc two different
ways of wanting a thing, which can be separated by self-
observation and communicated to others. “Yes,” he said, “but I
won’t do it.” Then he added, “Mr. E. always asks me why I
throw things. He spoils everything.” He added quickly, “There
won’t be any scene tonight. Mommy.”

Thus the boy learned to share his self-observation with the
very mother against whom his rages were apt to be directed,
and to make her an ally of his insight. To establish this was of
utmost importance, for it made it possible for the boy to warn
his mother and himself whenever he felt the approach of that
peculiar cosmic wrath or when he perceived the (often very
slight) somatic indications of an attack. She would immediately
get in touch with the pediatrician, who was fully informed and
most co-operative. He would then prescribe some preventive
measure. In this way minor seizures were reduced to rare and
fleeting occurrences which the boy gradually learned to handle
with a minimum of commotion. Major attacks did not recur.

The reader, at this point, may rightfully protest that such at¬
tacks in a small child might have stopped anyway, without any
such complicated procedures. This is possible. No claim is ad-

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 29

vanced here of a cure of epilepsy by psychoanalysis. We claim
less—and, in a way, aspire to more.

We have investigated the “psychic stimulus” which at a par¬
ticular period in the patient’s life cycle helped to make mani¬
fest a latent potentiality for epileptic attaclcs. Our form of in¬
vestigation gains in knowledge as it gives insight to the patient,
and it corrects him as it becomes a part of his life. Whatever his
age, we apply ourselves to his capacity to examine himself,
to understand, and to plan. In doing so, we may effect a cure
or accelerate a spontaneous cure—no mean contribution when
one considers the damage done by the mere habitualness and
repetitiveness of such severe neurological storms. But in claim¬
ing less than the cure of the epilepsy, we would in principle
like to believe that with therapeutic investigations into a seg¬
ment of one child’s history we help a whole family to accept a
crisis in their midst as a crisis in the family history. For a psycho¬
somatic crisis is an emotional crisis to the extent to which the
sick individual is responding specifically to the latent crises in
the significant people around him.

This, to be sure, has nothing to do with giving or accepting
blaTne for the disturbance. In fact, the mother’s very self-blame,
that she may have caused damage to the child’s brain with that
one hard slap, constituted much of the “psychic stimulus” we
were looking for: for it increased and reinforced that general
fear of violence which characterized the family’s history. Most
of all, the mother’s fear that she may have harmed him was a
counteq>art and thus an emotional reinforcement of what we
finally concluded was the really dominant pathogenic “psychic
stimulus” which Sam’s doctors wanted os to find—^namely, the
boy’s fear that bis mother too, might die because of his attack
on her tooth and because of his more general sadistic deeds and
wishes.

No, blame does not help. As long as there is a sense of blame,
there are also irrational attempts at restitution for the damage
done—and such guilty restitution often results only in more
damage. What we would hope that the patient and his family

30 Childhood and Society

might derive from our study of their history is deeper humility
before the processes which govern us, and the ability to live with
greater simplicity and honesty.

The nature of our case suggests that we begin with the
processes inherent in the organism. We shall in these pages re¬
fer to the organism as a process rather than as a thing, for we are
concerned with tlie homeostatic quality of the living organism
rather than with pathological items which might be demonstra¬
ble by section or dissection. Our patient suffered a somatic dis¬
turbance of a kind and an intensity which suggest the possibility
of a somatic brain irritation of anatomic, toxic, or other origin.
Such damage was not demonstrated, but we must ask what bur¬
den its presence would place on the life of this child. Even if
the damage were demonstrable, it would, of course, constitute
only a potential, albeit necessary, condition to convulsion. It
could not be considered the cause of the convulsion, for we must
assume that quite a number of individuals live with similar cere¬
bral pathology without ever having a convulsion. The brain
damage, then, would merely facilitate the discharge of tension,
from whatever source, in convulsive storms. At the same time,
it would be an ever present reminder of an inner danger point,
of a low tolerance for tension. Such an inner danger can be
said to decrease the child’s threshold for outer dangers, es¬
pecially as perceived in the irritabilities and anxieties of his
parents, whose protection is needed so sorely, precisely because
of the inner danger. Whether the brain lesion thus would cause
the boy’s temperament to be more impatient and more irritahlc,
or whether lus irritability (which he shared with other rela¬
tives and to which he was exposed in other relatives) would
make his brain lesion more significant than it would in a boy
of a different kind among different people—this is one of the
many good questions for which there is no answer.

All we can say, then, is that at the time of the crisis Sam’s
“constitution” as well as his temperament and his stage of de¬
velopment had specific trends in common; they all converged

Relevance and Relativity in the Gise History 31

on the intolerance of restrictions in locomotor freedom and ag¬
gressive expression.

But then, Sam’s needs for muscular and mental activity were
not solely of a physiological nature. They constituted an impor¬
tant part of his personality development. They belonged to his
defensive equipment. In dangerous situations Sam used what we
call the “coimterphobic” defense mechanism: when he was up¬
set, he attacked, and when faced with knowledge which others
might choose to avoid as upsetting, he asked questions with anx¬
ious persistence. These defenses, in turn, were well suited to the
sanctions of his early milieu, which thought him cutest when
he was toughest and smartest. With a shift in focus, then, many
of the items originally listed as parts of his physiological and
mental make-up prove to belong to a second process of organ¬
ization, which we shall call the organization of experience in
the individual ego. As will be discussed in detail, this central
process guards the coherence and the individuality of experi¬
ence by gearing the individual for shocks threatening from sud¬
den discontinuities in the organism as well as in the milieu; by
enabling it to anticipate inner as well as outer dangers; and by
integrating endowment and social opportunities. It thus assures
to the individual a sense of coherent individuation and identity:
of being one’s self, of being all right, and of being on the way to
becoming what other people, at their kindest, take one to be.
It is clear that our little boy tried to become an intelligent teaser
and questioner, a role wliich he had first found to be successful
in the face of danger and which he now found provoked it. We
have described how this role (which prepared him well for the
adult role of a Jewish intellectual) became thoroughly devalu¬
ated by developments in neighborhood and home. Such devalua¬
tion puts the defensive system out of conunission: where the
“counterphobic” cannot attack, he feels open to attack and ex¬
pects and even provokes it. In Sam’s case, the “attack” came from
a somatic source.

“Roles,” however, grow out of the third principle of organiza¬
tion, the social. The human being, at all times, from the first

32 Childhood and Society

kick in utero to the last breath, is organized into groupings of
geographic and historical coherence: family, class, community,
nation. A human being, thus, is at all times an organism, an ego,
and a member of a society and is involved in all three processes
of organization. His body is exposed to pain and tension; his
ego, to anxiety; and as a member of a society, he is susceptible to
the panic emanating from his group.

Here we come to our first clinical postulates. That there is
no anxiety without somatic tension seems immediately obvious;
but we must also learn that there is no individual anxiety which
does not reflect a latent concern common to the immediate and
extended group. An individual feels isolated and barred from
the sources of collective strength when he (even though only
secretly) takes on a role considered especially evil in his group,
be it that of a drunkard or a killer, a sissy or a sucker, or what¬
ever colloquial designation of inferiority may be used in his
group. In Sam’s case, the grandmother’s death had only con¬
firmed what the Gentile children (or rather, their parents) had
indicated, namely that he was an overwhelmingly bad boy. Be¬
hind all of this, of course, there was the fact that he was differ¬
ent, that he was a Jew, a matter by no means solely or even
primarily brought to his attention by the neighbors: for his own
parents had persistently indicated that as a little Jew one has
to be especially good in order not to be especially bad. Here our
investigation, in order to do jastice to all the relevant facts, would
have to lead back into history at large; it could do nothing less
than trace the fate of this family back from Main Street to a
ghetto in a far eastern province of Russia and to all the brutal
events of the great Diaspora.

We are speaking of three processes, the somatic process, the
ego process, and the societal process. In the history of science
these three processes have belonged to three different scientific
disciplines—^biology, psychology, and the sodal sciences—each
of which studied what it could isolate, count, and dissect: single
organisms, individual minds, and sodal aggregates. The knowl¬
edge thus derived is knowledge of facts and figures, of locadoa

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 33

and causation; and it has resulted in argument over an item’s
allocation to one process or another. Our thinking is dominated
by this trichotomy because only through the inventive method¬
ologies of these disciplines do we have knowledge at all Un¬
fortunately, however, this knowledge is tied to the conditions
under which it was secured; the organism undergoing dissec¬
tion or examination; the mind surrendered to experiment or
interrogation; social aggregates spread out on statistical tables.
In all of these cases, then, a scientific discipline prejudiced the
matter under observation by actively dissolving its total living
situation in order to be able to make an isolated section of it
amenable to a set of instruments or concepts.

Our clinical problem, and our bias, are different. We study
individual human crises by becoming therapeutically involved
in them. In doing so, we find that the three processes mentioned
are three aspects of one process—^i.c., human life, both words
being equally emphasized. Somatic tension, individual anxiety,
and group panic, then, are only different ways in which human
anxiety presents itself to different methods of investigation.
Clinical training should include all three methods, an ideal to
which the studies in this book arc gropingly dedicated. As we
review each relevant item in a given case, we cannot escape the
conviction that the meaning of an item which may be “located”
in one of the three processes is co-determined by its meaning
in the other two. An item in one process gains relevance by
giving significance to and receiving significance from items in the
others. Gradually, I hope, we may find better words for this
relativity in burrum existence —as we shall tentatively call what
wc wish to demonstrate.

Of the catastrophe described in our first specimen, then, we
know no “cause,” Instead wc find a convergence in all tliree
processes of specific intolerances which make the catastrophe
retrospectively intelligible, retrospectively probable. The plausi¬
bility thus gained does not permit us to go back and undo causes.
It only permits us to understand a continuum, of which the catas¬
trophe was one aspect, an aspect which now throws its shadow

34 Childhood and Society

back into the very items which seem to have caused it. The ca¬
tastrophe has occurred, and we must now introduce ourselves
as a curing agent, into the post-catastrophic situation. We will
never know what this life was like before it was disrupted, and
in fact we will never know what this life was like before we
became involved in it. These are the conditions under which
we do therapeutic research.

For comparison and confirmation we now turn to another
crisis, this time in an adult. The presenting symptom is, again,
somatic; it consists of a severe chronic headache, which, how¬
ever, owes its onset to one of the exigencies of social life, namely,
combat in war.

1. A COMBAT CRISIS IN A MARINE

A young teacher in his early thirties was discharged from
the armed forces as a “psychoneurotic casualty.” His symptoms,
primarily an incapacitating headache, followed him into his first
peacetime job. In a veteran’s clinic he was asked how it had all
started. He reported:

A group of marines, just ashore, lay in the pitch darkness of
a Pacific beachhead witliin close range of enemy fire. They once
had been, and they stiQ acted like, a group of tough and boister¬
ous men who are sure that they can “take anything.” They had
always felt that they could count on the “brass” to relieve them
after the initial assault and to let mere infantry do the holding
of the positions taken. Somehow it had always contradicted the
essential spirit of their corps to have “to take it lying down.”
Yet it had happened. And when it happened, it exposed them not
only to damnable sniping from nowhere, but alro to a strange
mixture of disgust, rage, and fear—down in their stomachs.

Here they were again. The “supporting” fire from the Navy
had nor been much of a support. Something seemed to be wrong
again. What if it were true that the “brass” considered them ex¬
pendable?

Among these men lay our patient. The last thought which at
that time would have occurred to him was that he could ever

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 35

become a patient himself. He was, in fact, a medical soldier. Un¬
armed, according to convention, he seemed unsusceptible to
the slowly rising wave of rage and panic among the men. It was
as if it could not get at him. Somehow, he felt in the right place
as a medical corps man. The griping of the men only made him
feel that they were like children- He had always liked work¬
ing with children, and he had always been considered to be es¬
pecially good with tough kids. But he was not a tough kid him¬
self. In fact, at the beginning of the war he had chosen the
medical corps because he could not bring himself to cany a gun.
He had no hate whatsoever for anyone. (As he now reiterated
this exalted sentiment, it became apparent that he must have been
too good to be true, at any rate for the Marine Corps, for he
never drank or smoked—and he never swore!) It was good now
to show that he could take it and more, that he could help these
boys to take it too, and could be of help when their aggressive mis¬
sion ended. He kept close to his medical officer, a man like him¬
self, a man whom he could look up to and admire.

Our medical soldier never quite remembered what happened
during the remainder of the night. There were only isolated
memories, more dreamlike than real. He claims that the medical
corps men were ordered to unload ammunition instead of setting
up a hospital; that the medical officer, somehow, became very
angry and abusive; and that some time during the night somebody
pressed a sub-machine gun into his hands. Here his memory be¬
comes a blank.

The following morning the patient (for now he was a patient)
found himself in the finally improvised hospital. Overnight he
had developed a severe intesdnal fever. He spent the day in the
twilight of sedatives. At nightfall the enemy attacked from the
air. All the able-bodied men found shelter or helped the sick to
find one. He was immobilized, unable to move, and, much worse,
unable to help. Here for the first time he felt fear, as so many
courageous men did at the moment when they found themselves
on their backs, inactivated.

The next dav he was evacuated When not under fire he felt

36 Childhood and Society

calmer—or so he thought, until the first meal was served on board
The metallic noise of the mess utensils went through his head like
a salvo of shots. It was as if he had no defense whatsoever against
these noises, which were so unbearable that he crawled under a
cover while the others ate.

From then on his life was made miserable by raging headaches.
When temporarily free of headaches, he was jumpy, apprehen¬
sive of possible metallic noises, and furious when they occurred.
His fever (or rather, whatever had caused it) was cured; but his
headaches and his Jumpiness made it necessary for him to be re¬
turned to the States and to be discharged.

Where was the seat of his neurosis? For a “war neurosis” it was,
if we accept his doctors’ diagnosis. From the physiological view¬
point the fever and the toxic state had justified his first headache,
but only the first one.

Here we must ask something seemingly far removed from head¬
aches: why was this man such a good man? For even now, though
practically surrounded with annoying postwar circumstances, he
seemed unable to verbalize and give vent to anger. In fact, he
thought that his medical officer’s swearing anger that night had,
by disillusioning him, exposed him to anxiety. Why was he so
good and so shocked by anger?

I asked him to try to overcome his aversion to anger and to list
for me the things that had irritated him, however slightly, during
the days preceding the interview. He mentioned the vibration of
busses; high-pitched voices, such as the children’s at work; the
squeaking of tires; the memory of foxholes with ants and lizards;
the bad food in the Navy; the last bomb which had exploded
pretty close; distrustful people; thieving people; high-hat, con¬
ceited people of “whatever race, color, or religion”; the memory
of his mother. It is significant that the patient’s associations had
led from metallic noises and odier war memories proper to
thievery and distrust—and to his mother.

He had not seen his mother, it appeared, since he was fourteen
years old. His family had then been on an economic and moral
decline. He had left home abruptly when his mother, in a drunken

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 37

ragfc, had pointed a gun at him. He had grabbed the gun, broken
it, and thrown it out of the window. Then he had left for good.
He had secured the secret help of a fatherly man—^in fact, his
principal In exchange for protection, he had promised never to
drink, to swear, or to indulge himself sexually—and then, never
to touch a gun. He had become a good student and a teacher and
an exceptionally even-tempered man, at least on the surface, until
that night on the Pacific beachhead, when amidst the growing
anger and panic of the men, his fatherly officer had exploded with
a few violent oaths, and when immediately afterward somebody
had pressed a sub-machine gun into his hands.

There have been many war neuroses of this kind. Their victims
were in a constant state of potential panic. They felt attacked or
endangered by sudden or loud noises as well as by symptoms that
flashed through their bodies: palpitations, ^waves of fever heat,
headaches. They were just as helpless, however, in the face of
their emotions: childlike anger and anxiety without reason were
provoked by anything too sudden or too intense, a perception or a
feeling, a thought, or a memory. What was sick in these men,
then, was their screening system, that ability not to pay attention
to a thousand stimuli which we perceive at any given moment but
which we are able to ignore for the sake of whatever we are con¬
centrating on. Worse, these men were unable to sleep deeply and
to dream well Through long nights they would hang between the
Scylla of annoying noises and the Charybdis of the anxiety dreams
which would startle them out of finally achieved moments of deep
sleep. In the daytime they would find themselves unable to remem¬
ber certain things; they would lose their way or suddenly detect,
in conversation, that they had unwittingly misrepresented things.
They could not rely on the characteristic processes of the func¬
tioning ego by which time and space are organized and truth is
tested.

What had happened? Were these the symptoms of physically
shaken, somatically damaged nerves? In some cases, undoubtedly
the condition started with such damage, or at least with momen¬
tary traumatization. More often, however, several factors com-

38 Childhood and Society

bined to cause a real crisis and to make it a lasting one. The case
presented included all of riiese factors: the lowering of group
morale and the gradual growth of imperceptible group panic be¬
cause of doubt in the leadership; immobilization under enemy fire
that could not be located and returned; the inducement to “giving
up” in a hospital bed; and finally, immediate evacuation and a
lasting conflict between two inner voices, one of which said, “Let
them take you home, don’t be a sucker,” and the other, “Don’t let
the others down; if they can take it, you can.”

What impressed me most was the loss in these men of a sense
of identity. They knew who they were; they had a personal iden¬
tity. But it was as if, subjectively, their lives no longer hung to¬
gether—and never would again. There was a central disturbance
of what I then started to call ego identity. At this point it is enough
to say that this sense of identity provides the ability to experience
one’s self as something that has continuity and sameness, and to act
accordingly. In many cases there was at the decisive time in the
history of the breakdown a seemingly innocent item such as the
g^n in our medical soldier’s unwilhng hands: a symbol of evil,
which endangered the principles by which the individual had at¬
tempted to safeguard personal integrity and social status in his life
at home. Likewise, the anxiety often broke out with the sudden
thought, I should now be at home, painting the roof, or paying
that bill, or seeing this boss or calling on that girl; and the despair¬
ing feeling that all of this which should have been would never be.
This, in turn, seemed to be intrinsically interwoven with an aspect
of life in this country which will be fully discussed later—^namely,
the fact that many of our young men keep their life plans and
their identities tentative on the principle suggested by the early
course of American history—^that a man must have and must pre¬
serve and defend the freedom of the next step and the right to
make a choice and grasp opportunities. To be sure, Americans too
settle down and, in fact, can be sedentary with a vengeance. But
sitting with conviction presupposes also the assurance that they
could move if they chose to, move geographically or socially or

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 39

both. It is the free choice that counts and the conviction that no¬
body can either “fence you in” or “push you around.” Thus con¬
trasting symbols become all-important, symbols of possession, of
status, and of sameness, and symbols of choice, change, and ag¬
gression. Depending on the immediate situation, these symbols
can become good or evil. In our marine, the gun had become the
symbol of his family’s downfall and represented all the angry and
ugly things which he had chosen not to do.

Thus again, three contemporaneous processes, instead of sup¬
porting one another, seem to have mutually aggravated their
respective dangers: (i) The group. These men wanted to have
the situation well in hand as a group, with a defined identity
among the armed forces of this country. Mistrust in leadership,
instead, caused grumbling panic. Our man countered this panic,
of which he could not possibly be free, by the defensive position so
often taken in his life, that he was the well-composed, tolerant
leader of children. (2) The patient’s organism. This struggled
to maintain homeostasis under the impact of both the (subliminal)
panic and symptoms of an acute infection, but was sabotaged by
the severe fever. Against this the man held out to the breaking
point because of that other “conviction” that he could “take any¬
thing.” (3) The patient’s ego. Already overtaxed by the group
panic and the increasing fever, to neither of which he was at first
willing to give in, the patient’s ego balance was upset by the fact
that the very superiors on whom he had relied ordered him (or so
he thought) to break a symbolic vow on which his self-esteem was
so precariously based. No doubt then, this occurrence opened
the floodgate of infantile urges which he had so rigidly held in
abeyance. For in all of his rigidity only part of his personality had
genuinely matured, while another part had been supported by the
very props which now collapsed. Under such conditions he was
unable to endure inactivity under air bombardment and some¬
thing in him gave in only too easily to the offer of evacuation.
Here the situation changed, introducing new complications. For
once evacuated, many men felt, as it were, unconsciomly obli-

40 Childhood and Society

gated to continue to suffer and to suffer somatically, in order to
justify the evacuation, not to speak of the later discharge, which
some men could never have forgiven themselves on the grounds
of a “mere neurosis.” After the first World War, much emphasis
was put on a compensation neurosis—^neuroses unconsciously
prolonged so as to secure continued financial help. The second
World War experience has indicated insight into an overcompen¬
sation neurosis—Le., the unconscious wish to continue to suffer
in order to overcompensatc for the weakness of having let others
down; for many of these escapists were more loyal than they
knew. Our conscientious man, too, repeatedly felt “shot through
the head” by excruciating pain whenever he definitely was better,
or rather whenever he became aware of having felt weU for some
time without noticing it.

We could say with reasonable assurance that this man would
not have broken down in this particular way had it not been for
the conditions of war and combat—just as most doctors would be
reasonably certain that young Sam could not have had convul¬
sions of such severity without some “somatic compliance.” In
either case, however, the psychological and therapeutic problem
is to understand how the combined circxunstances weakened a
central defense and what specific meaning the consequent break¬
down represents.

The combined circumstances which we recognize are an ag¬
gregate of simultaneous changes in the organism (exhatistion and
fever), in the ego (breakdown of ego identity), and in the milieu
(group panic). These changes aggravate one another if traumatic
suddenness in one set of changes makes impossible demands on the
balancing power of the other two, or if a convergence of main
themes gives all changes a high mutual specificity. We saw such
a convergence in Sam’s case, where a hostility problem came to a
critical focus all at once in his milieu, in his maturational stage, in
his somatic condition, and in his ego defenses. Sam’s and the
marine’s cases both showed another dangerous trend—namely,
ubiquity of change, a condition existing when too many props
arc endangered in all three spheres at one and the same time.

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 41

We have presented two human crises in order to illustrate an
over-all clinical viewpoint. The laws and mechanisms involved
will be discussed in the bulk of this book. The cases presented are
not typical: in the daily run of the clinical mill, few cases demon¬
strate such dramatic and clear-cut “beginnings.” Nor did these
beginnings really mark the onset of the disturbance which over¬
came these patients. They only marked moments of concentrated
and representative happening. But we did not stray too far from
clinical, and indeed, historical habit when, for purposes of demon¬
stration, we chose cases which highlight in an unusually dramatic
way the principles governing the usual.

These principles can be expressed in a didactic formula. The
relevance of a given item in a case history is derived from the
relevance of other items to which it contributes relevance and
from which, by the very fact of this contribution, it derives addi¬
tional meaning. To understand a given case of psychopathology
you proceed to study whatever set of observable changes seem
most accessible either because they dominate the symptom pre¬
sented or because you have learned a methodological approach to
this particular set of items, be they the somatic changes, the per¬
sonality transformations, or the social upheavals involved. Where-
cver you begin, you will have to begin again twice over. If you
begin with the organism, it will be necessary to see what meanings
these changes have in the other processes and how aggravating
these meanings, in turn, are for the organism’s attempt at restora¬
tion. To really understand this it will be necessary, without fear
of undue duplication, to take a fresh look at the data and begin,
say, with variations in the ego process, relating each item to the
developmental stage and the state of the organism, as well as to the
history of the patient’s social associations. This, in turn, necessi¬
tates a third form of reconstruction—^namely, that of the patient’s
family history and of those changes in his social life which receive
meaning from and give meaning to his bodily changes as well as to
his ego development. In other words, being unable to arrive at any
simple sequence and causal chain with a clear location and a cir¬
cumscribed beginning, only triple bookkeeping (or, if you wish.

43 CMdhood and Society

a systematic going around in circles) can gradually clarify the rele¬
vances and the relativities of all the known data. The fact that this
may nor lead to a clear beginning and may not end with either a
clear pathogenic reconstruction nor a well-founded prognostic
fonnulation is unfortunate for the appearance of our files, but it
may be just as well for our therapeutic endeavor; for we must be
prepared not only to understand but also to influence all three
processes at the same time. This means that in our best clinical
work, or in the best moments of our clinical work, the relativities
involved, explicit as we may have been able to make them at vari¬
ous stages of our discussion, again become preconscious determi¬
nants of the developing therapeutic situation; we must act upon
them and add ourselves to them.

To demonstrate the therapeutic aspect of our work is not the
purpose of this book. Only in the conclusion shall we return to the
problem of psychotherapy as a specific form of human relation¬
ship. Our formula for clinical thinking has been presented here
mainly as a rationale for the organization of this book. For, being
a clinician’s book, it follows our formula of clinical thinking.

In the remainder of Part I, I will discuss the biological basis of
psychoanalytic theory, Freud’s timetable of libido development,
and relate it to what we now know about the ego and are begin¬
ning to learn about society. Part 11 deals with a societal dilemma—
namely, the education of American Indian children—especially
as it concerns the timetable of early childhood and its significance
for the development of basic social modalities.

Part III will concern itself with the laws of the ego as revealed
in ego pathology and in the normal activities of childhood play. It
will arrive at a timetable of ego stages, which mediate between
physical stages and social institutions.

Part IV approaches the last phase of childhood, adolescence,
from the point of view of the social upheavals of our time. We
will present the psychiatric facts and myths prevalent in this coun¬
try and then discuss outstanding biographied legends in Germany
and Russia. Such insight into the mythology of mass communica-

Relevance and Relativity in the Case History 43

non will illustrate the way in which it is now up to man to con¬
tinue the exploitation of childhood as an arsenal of irrational fears,
or to lift childhood to a position of partnership in a more reason¬
able order of things.

CHAPTER

2

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality

1. TWO CLINICAL EPISODES

As AN introduction to a review of Freud’s theories concerning the
infantile organism as a powerhouse of sexual and aggressive ener¬
gies, let me now present observations on two children who seemed
strangely deadlocked in combat with their own bowels. As we try
to understand the social implications of the eliminative and other
body apertures, it will be necessary to reserve judgment regard¬
ing the children studied and the symptoms observed. The symp¬
toms seem odd; the children are not. For good physiological
reasons the bowels are farthest away from the zone which is our
prime interpersonal mediator, namely the face. Well-trained
adults dismiss the bowels, if they function well, as the non-social
backside of things. Yet for this very reason bowel dysfunction
lends itself to confused reflection and to secret response. In adults
this problem is hidden behind somatic complaints; in children it
appears in what seem to be merely willful habits.

Ann, a girl of four, enters my study, half gently pulled, half
firmly pushed by her worried mother. While she docs not resist
or object, her face is pale and sullen, her eyes have a blank and in¬
ward look, and she sucks vigorously on her thumb,

I have been informed of Ann’s trouble. She seems to have lost
her balance; in one way she is much too babyish, in another much

44

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 45

too serious, too unchildlike. Wlicn she does express exuberance, it
is of an explosive kind which soon turns to silliness. But her most
annoying habit is that of holding on to her bowel movements
when requested to relinquish them, and then of stubbornly de¬
positing them in her bed during the night, or rather in the early
morning just before her sleepy mother can catch her. Reprimands
are borne silently and in reverie behind which lurks obvious de¬
spair. This despair seems recently to have increased following an
accident in which she was knocked down by an automobile. The
damage to her body is only superficial, but she has withdrawn
even further from the reach of parental communication and con¬
trol.

On arrival the child lets go of the mother’s hand and walks into
my room with the automatic obedience of a prisoner who no
longer has a will of his own. In my playroom she stands in a cor¬
ner, sucking tensely on her thumb and paying only a very re¬
served kind of attention to me.

In Chapter 6 I shall go into the dynamics of such an encounter
between child and psychotherapist and indicate in detail what I
think is going on in the child’s mind and what I know is going on
in mine during these first moments of mutual sizing up. I shall then
discuss the role of play observation in our work. Here I am merely
interested in recording a clinical specimen as a springboard for
theoretical discussion.

The child indicates clearly that 1 will not get anything out of
her. To her growing surprise and relief, however, I do nor ask
her any questions; I do not even tell her that 1 am her friend and
that she should tnist me. Instead I start to build a simple block
house on the floor. There is a living room; a kitchen; a bedroom
with a little girl in a bed and a woman standing dose by her; a
bathroom with the door open; and a garage with a man standing
next to a car. This arrangement suggests, of course, the regular
morning hour when the mother tries to pick the little girl up “on
time,” while the father gets ready to leave the house.

Our patient, increasingly fasdnated with this wordless state¬
ment of a problem, suddenly goes into action. She relinquishes her

46 Childhood and Society

thumb to make space for a broad and toothy grin. Her face flushes
and she runs over to the toy scene. With a mighty kick she dis¬
poses of the woman doll; she bangs the bathroom door shut, and
she hurries to the toy shelf to get three shiny cars, which she puts
into the garage beside the man. She has answered my “question”:
she, indeed, does not wish the toy girl to give to her mother what
is her mother’s, and she is eager to give to her father more than he
could ask for.

I am still reacting to the power of her aggressive exuberance
when she, in turn, seems suddenly overpowered by an entirely
different set of emotions. She bursts into tears and into a desperate
whimper, “Where is my mummy?” In panicky haste she takes a
handful of pencils from my desk and runs out into the waiting
room. Pressing the pencils into her mother’s hand, she sits down
close to her. The thumb goes back into the mouth, the child’s
face becomes uncommunicative, and I can sec the game is over.
The mother wants to give the pencils back to me, but I indicate
that I do not need them today. Mother and child leave.

They have hardly reached home when the little girl asks her
mother whether she may see me again that same day. Tomorrow
is not early enough. She insists with signs of despair that the
mother call me immediately for an appointment the same day so
that she may return the pencils. I must assure the child over the
phone that I appreciate her intentions but that she is quite wel¬
come to keep the pencils until the next day.

The next day, at the appointed time, Ann sits beside her mother
in the waiting room. In the one hand she holds the pencils, unable
to give them to me. In the other she clutches a small object. She
shows no inclination to come with me. It suddenly becomes quite
noticeable that she has soiled herself. As she is picked up to be
taken to the bathroom, the pencils fall to the floor and with them
the object from the other hand. It is a tiny toy dog, one of whose
legs has been broken off.

I must add here the information that at this time a neighbor’s
dog plays a role in the child’s life. That dog soils too; but he b
beaten for it, and the child b not. And that dog, too, has recently

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 47

been knocked down by a car; but he has lost a leg. Her friend in
the animal world, then, is much like herself, only more so; and he
is much worse off. Does she expect to be punished likewise? Or
has this child’s despair of human relations reached a point where
she might willingly change places with the little annual and get
the punishment over with?

I shall not go further here into the relativities and relevances
which led up to the described situation; nor shall 1 describe how
the deadlock was finally resolved in work with parents and child.
I appreciate and share the regret of many a reader that we are not
able here to pursue the therapeutic process and, in fact, this
child’s later (and better) life. Instead I must ask the reader to
accept this story as a “specimen” and to analyze it with me.

The little girl had not come of her own free will. She had
merely let herself be brought by the very mother against whom,
as everything indicated, her sullenness was directed. Once in my
room, my quiet play apparently had made her forget for a mo¬
ment that her mother was outside. What she would not have been
able to say in words in many hours she could express in a few
minutes of non-verbal communication: she “hated” her mother
and she “loved” her father. Having expressed this, however, she
must have experienced what Adam did when he heard God’s
voice: “Adam, where art thou?” She was compelled to atone for
her deed, for she loved her mother too and needed her. In her very
panic, however, she did compulsively what ambivalent people al¬
ways do: in turning to make amends to one person they “inad¬
vertently” do harm to another. And as they make amen^ to the
second person, they manage to do (or think) damage to the first,
or a third.

The next day her eagerness to conciliate me is paralyzed. I think
I had become the tempter who makes children confess in un¬
guarded moments what nobody should know or say. Children
always have such a reaction after an initial admission of secret
thoughts. What if I told her mother? What if her mother re¬
fused to bring her back to me so she could modify and qualify her
unguarded acts?

48 Childhood and Society

The result of all these doubts was a transfer of the symptom of
soiling to my office.

Soiling represents a sphincter conflict, an anal and urethral
problem. This aspect of the matter we shall call the zonal aspect,
because it concerns a body zone. On closer review, however, it
becomes clear that this child’s behavior, even where it is not anal
in a zonal sense, has the quality of a sphincter problem. One may
almost say that the whole little girl has become a multiple sphinc¬
ter. In her facial expression, as well as in her emotional communi¬
cation, she closes up most of the time, to open up rarely and spas¬
modically. As we offer her a toy situation so that she may reveal
and commit herself in its “unreality,” she performs two acts; she
closes, in vigorous defiance, the bathroom door of the toy house,
and she gives in manic glee three shiny cars to the father doll.
More and more deeply involved in the opposition of the simple
modalities of taking and giving, she gives to the mother what she
took from me and then wants desperately to return to me what
she has given to her mother. Back again, her tense little hands hold
pencils and toy tight, yet drop them abruptly, as equally sud¬
denly the sphincters proper release their contents.

Obviously then, this little girl, unable to master the problem of
how to give without taking (maybe how to love her father with¬
out robbing her mother) falls back on an automatic alternation of
retentive and eliminative acts. This alternation of holding on and
letting go, of withholding and giving, of opening up and closing
up, we shall call the mode aspect of the matter. The anal-urethral
sphincters, then, are the anatomic models for the retentive and
eliminative modes, which, in turn, can characterize a great variety
of behaviors, all of which, according to a now widespread clinical
habit (and I mean bad habit) would be referred to as “anal.”

A similar relationship between a zone and a mode can be seen
in this child’s moments of most pronounced babyishness. When
dominated by the organ mode “incorporation,” she becomes all
mouth and thumb, as if a milk of consolation were flowing through
this contact of her very own body parts. But upon uncoiling
from this withdrawal into herself, the young lady can become

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 49

quite animated indeed, kicking the doll and grasping the cars with
a flushed face and a throaty laugh. From the retentive-elimina¬
tive position then, an avenue of regression seems to lead further
inward (socially) and backward (developmentally), while a
progressive and aggressive avenue leads outward and forward,
apparently toward the father.

So much, for the moment, about the little girl. A child’s loves
and hates cannot be evaluated without an inquiry into the loves
and hates of those around her. Her parents lived in troubled
times. We shall not discuss them here. But we shall in due time
establish the proper connection between children’s bowels and
social life.

In order to demonstrate further the systematic relationship
between zones and modes, I shall describe a second episode, con¬
cerning a little boy.

I had been told that Peter was retaining his bowel movements,
first for a few days at a time, but more recently up to a week.
I was urged to hurry when, in addition to a week’s supply of fecal
matter, Peter had incorporated and retained a large enema in
his small, four-year-old body. He looked miserable, and when
he thought nobody watched him he leaned his bloated abdomen
against a wall for support.

His pediatrician had come to the conclusion that this feat could
not have been accomplished without energetic support from
the emotional side, although he suspected what was later re¬
vealed by X-ray, namely that the boy indeed had by then an
enlarged colon. While a tendency toward colonic expansion may
initially have contributed to the creation of the symptom, the
child was now undoubtedly paralyzed by a conflict which he
was unable to verbalize. The local physiological condition w'as
to be taken care of later by diet and exercise. First it seemed
necessary to understand the conflict and to establish communica¬
tion with the boy as quickly as possible so that his co-operation
might be obtained.

It has been my custom before deciding to take on a family

50 Childhood and Society

problem to have a meal with the family in their home. I was in¬
troduced to my prospective little patient as an acquaintance of
the parents who wanted to come and meet the whole family. The
little boy was one of those children who make me question the
wisdom of any effort at disguise. “Aren’t dreams wonderful?” he
said to me in the tone of a hostess as we sat down to lunch. He
then improvised a series of playful statements which, as will be
clear presently, gave away his dominant and disturbing fantasy.
It is characteristic of the ambivalent aspect of such sphincter
problems that the patients surrender almost obsessively the very
secret which is so strenuously retained in their bowels. I shall
list here some of Peter’s dreamy statements and my silent reflec¬
tions upon them which emerged during and after luncheon.

“I wish I had a little elephant right here in my house. But then
it would grow and grow and burst the house.”—^The boy is eat¬
ing at the moment. This means his intestinal bulk is growing to
the bursting point.

“Look at that bee—it wants to get at the sugar in my stomach.”
—“Sugar” sounds euphemistic, but it does transmit the thought
that he has something valuable in his stomach and that somebody
wants to get at it.

“I had a bad dream. Some monkeys climbed up and down the
house and tried to get in to get me.”—^The bees wanted to get
at the sugar in his stomach; now the monkeys want to get at him in
his house. Increasing food in his stomach—^growing baby ele¬
phant in the house—bees after sugar in his stomach—^monkeys
after him in the house.

After lunch coffee was served in the garden. Peter sat dovra
underneath a garden table, pulled the chairs in toward himself
as if barricading himself, and said, “Now I am in my tent and
the bees can t get at me.”—^Again he is inside an enclosure, endan¬
gered by intrusive animals.

He then showed me his room. I admired his books and said,
“Show me the picture you like best in the book you like best.”
Without hesitation he produced an illustration showing a gin¬
gerbread man floating in water toward the open mouth of a

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 51

swimming wolf. Excitedly he said, “The wolf is going to eat the
gingerbread man, but it won’t hurt the gingerbread man because
[loudly] he's not alive, and food can’t feel it when you eat it!”
I thoroughly agreed with him, reflecting in the meantime that
the boy’s playful sayings converged on the idea that whatever
he had accumulated in his stomach was alive and in danger of
either “bursting” him or of being hurt. To test this impression
I asked him to show me the picture he liked next best in any of the
other books. He immediately went after a book called “The Lit¬
tle Engine That Could” and looked for a page which showed a
smoke-pufling train going into a tunnel, while on the next page
it comes out of it—its funnel not smoking. “You see,” he said,
“the train went into the tunnel and in the dark tunnel it went
dead !"—Something alive went into a dark passage and came out
dead. I no longer doubted that this little boy had a fantasy that
he was filled with something precious and alive; that if he kept
it, it would burst him and that if he released it, it might come out
hurt or dead. In other words, he was pregnant.

The patient needed immediate help, by interpretation. I want
to make it clear that I do not approve of imposing sexual en¬
lightenment on unsuspecting children before a reliable relation¬
ship has been established. Here, however, I felt experimental
action was called for. I came back to his love for little elephants
and suggested that we draw elephants. After we had reached
a certain proficiency in drawing all the outer appointments and
appendages of an elephant lady and of a couple of elephant babies,
I asked whether he knew where the elephant babies came from.
Tensely he said he did not, although I had the impression that
he merely wanted to lead me on. So I drew as well as I could a
cross section of the elephant lady and of her inner compart¬
ments, making it quite clear that there were two exits, one for
the bowels and one for the babies. “This,” I said, “some children
do not know. They think that the bowel movements and the
babies come out of the same opening in animals and in women.”
Before I could expand on the dangers which one could infer from
such misunderstood conditions, he very excitedly told me that

5z Childhood and Society

when his mother had carried him she had had to wear a belt
which kept him from falling out of her when she sat on the
toilet; and that he had proved too big for her opening so she
had to have a cut made in her stomach to let him out. I had not
known that he had been bom by cesarean section, but I drew him
a diagram of a woman, setting him straight on what he remem¬
bered of his mother’s explanations. I added that it seemed to me
that he thought he was pregnant; that while this was impossible
in reality it was important to understand the reason for his fan¬
tasy; that, as he might have heard, I made it my business to un¬
derstand children’s thoughts and that, if he wished, I would come
back the next day to continue our conversation. He did wish;
and he had a superhuman bowel movement after I left.

There was no doubt, then, that once having bloated his ab¬
domen with retained fecal matter this boy thought he might be
pregnant and was afraid to let go lest he hurt himself or “the
baby.” But what had made him retain in the first place? What
had caused in him an emotional conflict at this time which found
its expression in a retention and pregnancy fantasy?

The boy’s father gave me one key to the immediate “cause”
of the deadlock. “You know,” he said, “that boy begins to look
just like Myrtle.” “Who is Myrtle?” “She was his nurse for two
years; she left three months ago.” “Shortly before his symptoms
became so much worse?” “Yes.”

Peter, then, has lost an important person in his life: his nurse.
A soft-spoken Oriental girl with a gentle touch, she had been
his main comfort for years because his parents were out often,
both pursuing professional careers. In recent months he had
taken to attacking the nurse in a roughhousing way, and the
girl had seemed to accept and quietly enjoy his decidedly “male”
approach. In the nurse’s homeland such behavior is not only not
unusual, it is the rule. But there it makes sense, as part of the whole
culture. Peter s mother, so she admitted, could not quite suppress
a feeling that there was something essentially wrong about the
boy s sudden maleness and about the way it was permitted to
manifest itself. She became alerted to the problem of having her

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 53

boy brought up by a stranger, and she decided to take over her¬
self.

Thus it was during a period of budding, provoked, and dis¬
approved masculinity that the nurse left. Whether she left or
was sent away hardly mattered to the child. What mattered was
that he lived in a social class which provides paid mother sub¬
stitutes from a different race or class. Seen from the children’s
point of view this poses a number of problems. If you like your
ersatz mother, your mother will leave you more often and with
a better conscience. If you mildly dislike her, your mother will
leave you with mild regret. If you dislike her very much and
can provoke convincing incidents, your mother will send her
away—only to hire somebody like her or worse. And if you
happen to like her very much in your own way or in her own
way, your mother will surely send her away sooner or later.

In Peter’s case, insult was added to injury by a letter from the
nurse, who had heard of his condition and who was now try¬
ing her best to explain to him why she had left. She had originally
told him that she was leaving in order to marry and have a baby of
her own. This had been bad enough in view of the boy’s feel¬
ings for her. Now she informed him that she had taken another
job instead. “You see,” she explained, “I always move on to an¬
other family when the child in my care becomes too big. I like
best to tend babies.” It was then that something happened to
the boy. He had tried to be a big boy. His father had been of
little help because he was frequently absent, preoccupied with
a business which was too complicated to explain to his son. His
mother had indicated that male behavior in the form provoked
or condoned by the nurse was unacceptable behavior. The nurse
liked babies better.

So he “regressed.” He became babyish and dependent, and in
desperation, lest he lose more, he held on. This he had done be¬
fore. Long ago, as a baby, he had demonstrated his first stub¬
bornness by holding food in his mouth. Later, put on the toilet
and told not to get up until he had finished, he did not finish and
he did not get up until his mother gave up. Now he held on to

54 Childhood and Society

his bowels—^and to much more, for he also became tight-lipped,
expressionless, and rigid. All of this, of course, was one symptom
with a variety of related meanings. The simplest meaning was:
I am holding on to what I have got and I am not going to move,
either forward or backward. But as we saw from his play, the
object of his holding on could be interpreted in a variety of
ways. Apparently at first, still believing the nurse to be preg¬
nant, he tried to hold on to her by becoming the nurse and by
pretending that he was pregnant too. His general regression, at
the same time, demonstrated that he too, was a baby and thtis
as small as any child the nurse might have turned to. Freud called
this the over determination of the meaning of a symptom. The
overdetermining items, however, are always systematically re¬
lated: the boy identifies with both part?ieri of a lost relation¬
ship; he is the nurse who is now with child and he is the baby
he once was. Identifications which result from losses are like
that. We become the lost person and we become again the per¬
son we were when the relationship was at its prime. This makes
for much seemingly contradictory symptomatology.

Our boy, however, concerned himself with the fantasy of
being pregnant. Once it looked as if he did indeed have the
equivalent of a baby in him, he remembered what his mother
had said about birth and about dangers to mother and child. He
could not let go.

The interpretation of this fear to him resulted in a dramatic
improvement which released the immediate discomfort and dan¬
ger and brought out the boy’s inhibited autonomy and boyish
initiative. But only a combination of dietetic and gymnastic work
with many interviews with mother and child could finally over¬
come a number of milder setbacks.

1. UBIDO AND AGGRESSION

We are now acquainted with two pathological episodes, one
in the life of a girl and one in that of a boy. TTiese incidents were
chosen because of their clear and observable structures. Bur what
kinds of laws can account for such happenings?

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 55

Freud and the early psychoanalysts first pointed to the psy¬
chologically uncharted regions of the body’s orifices as zones of
vital importance for emotional health and illness. To be sure,
their theories were based on the observation of adult patients,
and it may be worth while to indicate briefly in what way an
adult patient observed in psychoanalysis may offer an analogy to
what we have seen in our child patients.

An adult’s neurotic “anality” may, for example, express itself
in a ritualistic overconcem with his bowel functions, under the
guise of meticulous hygiene, or a general need for absolute order,
cleanliness, and punctuality. In other words, he would seem to be
anti-anal rather than anal; he would be averse to either prolonged
retention or careless elimination. But his very anti-anal avoid¬
ances would make him at the end spend more thought and en¬
ergy on anal matters than, say, an ordinary person with a mild
tendency toward the enjoyment or repudiation of bowel satis¬
factions. Such a patient’s conflict over the modes of retention
and elimination might express themselves in a general over¬
restraint, now firmly entrenched in his character. He would
not be able to let go: he would allot his time, his money, and his
affection (in whatever order) only under carefully ritualized
conditions and at appointed times. Psychoanalysis, however,
would reveal that, more or less consciously, he entertains pecul¬
iarly messy fantasies and violently hostile wishes of total elimina¬
tion against selected individuals, especially those close to him who
by necessity are forced to make demand on his inner treasures.
In other words, he would reveal himself as highly ambivalent
in his loves, and often as quite unaware of the fact that the many
arbitrary rights and wrongs which guard his personal restraints
constitute at the same time autocratic attempts at controlling
others. While his deeds of passive and retentive hostility often
remain unrecognizable to him and to his intended victims, he
would be constantly compelled to undo, to make amends, to
atone for something done in fact or fantasy. But like our little
girl after she had tried to balance her withholdings and givings, he
would only find himself in ever deeper conflicts. And like her.

56 Childhood and Society

the adult compulsive would, deep down, have a stubborn wish
for punishment because to his conscience—and he has a pecul¬
iarly severe conscience—^it seems easier to be punished than to
harbor secret hate and go free. It seems easier because his ego¬
centric hate has made him mistrust the redeeming features of
mutuality.

In the reconstructed early history of such cases Freud regu¬
larly found crises of the kind demonstrated in statu nascendi
by our child patients. We owe to him the first consistent theory
which took systematic account of dte tragedies and comedies
which center in the apertures of the body. He created this theory
by cutting through the hypocrisy and artificial forgetfulness of
his time which kept all of man’s “lower” functions in the realms
of shame, of questionable wit, and of morbid imagination. He
was forced to conclude that the nature of these tragedies and
comedies was sexual, and as such he determined to describe them.
For he found that neurotics and perverts are not only infantile
in their attitudes toward their fellow men, but also regularly im¬
paired in their genital sexuabty and given to overt or covert grati¬
fications and comforts from other than genital body zones. More¬
over, their sexual impairment and their social infantibty are all
systematically related to their early childhood and particularly
to clashes between the impulses of their infantile bodies and the
inexorable training method of their parents. He concluded that
during successive stages of childhood certain zones of pleasure
gratification were endowed with libido, an energy which be¬
fore Freud had received official and scientific recognition as
sexml only when it became genital at the conclusion of child¬
hood. Mature genital sexuality, he concluded, is the end product
of an infantile sexual development, which he consequently called
pregenitality. Thus, the kind of compulsive nctirotic whom we
have just described was to Freud an individual fixated on or par¬
tially regressed to a stage of infantile sexuality called the anal-
sadistic stage.^

^Sigmund Freud, "Three Contributions to the Theo^ of Sex," in The Basie
Writings of Sigmund Freud, The Modem Library, New York, 1938.

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 57

Similarly, other emotional afflictions prove to be fixations or
regressions to other infantile zones and stages.

Addicts, for example, depend, as the baby once did, on the in¬
corporation by mouth or skin of substances which make them feel
both physically satiated and emotionally restored. But they are
not aware that they yearn to be babies again. Only as they whine
and boast and challenge arc their disappointed and babyish souls
revealed.

Manic-depressive patients, on the other hand, feel hopelessly
empty, without substance; or full of something bad and hostile
that needs to be destroyed; or again, so permeated with sudden
goodness that their sense of power and exuberance knows no
bounds and accepts no limitations. Yet they do not know either
the source or the nature of all these inner goodnesses and bad¬
nesses.

Hysterics, if they are women, act as if strangely victimized,
attacked and revolted by things and yet fascinated by them:
while gcnitally frigid, they arc preoccupied with events which,
on analysis, dramatize the woman’s inceptive role. They are un¬
consciously obsessed with their sexual role, although (or be¬
cause) it became unacceptable far back in childhood.

All these tormented people, then, whether addicted, depressed,
or inhibited, have somehow failed to integrate one or another of
the infantile stages, and they defend themselves against these
infantile patterns—stubbornly, wastefuUy, unsuccessfully.

On the other hand, for each omission by repression there is a
corresponding commission by perversion. There are those adults
who, far from disguising the original infantile pattern, receive the
most complete sexual gratification they are capable of from stimu¬
lation received or given by the mouth. There are those who pre¬
fer the anus to other orifices which lend themselves to inter¬
course. And there are perverts who above all want to gaze at
genitals or display their own; and those who want to use them,
impulsively and promiscuously, for the mere sadistic “making”
of other human beings.

Having at last understood the systematic relationship between

58 Childhood and Society

sexual acts unconsciously desired by neurotics and acts overtly
committed by perverts, Freud proceeded to erect the edifice of
his libido theory. Libido, then, is that sexual energy with which
zones other than the genital are endowed in childhood and which
enhances with specific pleasures such vital functions as the intake
of food, the reg^adon of the bowels, and the modon of the
limbs. Only after a certain schedule of such pregenital uses of
libido is successfully resolved docs the child’s sexuality graduate
to a short-lived infantile genitality, which must immediately be¬
come more or less “latent,” tranrformed, and deflected. For the
genital machinery is sdll immature; and the first objects of im¬
mature sexual desire arc forever barred by universal incest taboos.

As to the remnants of pregenital desires, all cultures permit
to a degree some kinds of non-genital sexual play which should
be called perversion only if they attempt to displace and crowd
out the dominance of genuine genitality. A significant amount
of the pregenital libido, however, is sublimated —i.e., is diverted
from sexual to non-sexual aims. Thus a measure of the child’s
curiosity concerning the “doings” in the mother’s body may
be added to his eagerness to understand the workings of machines
and of test tubes; or he may eagerly absorb the “milk of wisdom”
where he once desired more tangible fluids from more sensuous
containers; or he may collect all kinds of things in all kinds of
boxes instead of overloading his colon. In pregenital trends which
arc repressed, instead of outgrown, sublimated, or admitted to
sex play, Freud saw the most important source of neurotic ten¬
sion.

Most successful sublimations are, of course, part and parcel
of cultural trends and become unrecognizable as sexual deriva¬
tives. Only where the preoccupation appears to be too strenu¬
ous, too bizarre, too monomanic, can its “sexual” origin be rec¬
ognized in adults; but at that point the sublimation is on the
verge of breaking up—and it was probably faulty at the begin¬
ning. It is here that Freud, the physician, became a critic of his
Victorian age. Society, so he concluded, is too blindly auto¬
cratic in demanding impossible feats of sublimation from her

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 59

children. True, some sexual energy can and must be sublimated;
society depends on it. Therefore, by all means, render unto
society that which is society’s; but first render unto the child
that libidinal vitality which makes worth-while sublimations
possible.

Only those who specialize in the extreme intricacies of mental
disturbances and of ordinary mental quirks can fully appreciate
what clear and unifying light was thrown into these dark recesses
by the theory of a libido, of a mobile sexual energy which con¬
tributes to the “highest” as well as to the “lowest” forms of hu¬
man endeavor—and often to both at the same time.

However, far-reaching theoretical and terminological prob¬
lems remain to be solved. In determining to focus on truly
relevant matters in psychology Freud found that the rediscovery
of sexuality was the most important job to be done. Here a his¬
torical hiatus had to be bridged with a terminology which
strangely mingled ancient wisdom and modem thinking. Take
the term “hysteria.” The Greeks had assumed (or at any rate
had expressed their assumptions in a form which seemed to say)
that hysteria in women was caused by a tearing loose of the
uterus from its mooring: it wandered about the body, pinching
here and blocking there. To Freud, of course, it was a genital
idea, not a genital organ, which had become dissociated from
its goal, causing blocking in the libidinal supply to the genitals
(frigidity). The libidinal supply could be converted and dis¬
placed along the pathway of some symbolic association with in¬
fantile zones and modes. A retching throat, then, may express
defensive ejection above, replacing repressed genital hunger be¬
low. To express the fact that libidinization withdrawn from the
genitals thus manifests itself elsewhere, Freud used the thermo¬
dynamic language of his day, the language of the preservation
and transformation of energy. The result was that much that
was meant to be a working hypothesis appeared to be making
concrete claims which neither observation nor experiment could
even attempt to substantiate.

Great innovators always speak in the analogies and parables

6o Childhood and Society

of their day. Freud, too, had to have the courage to accept and
to work with what he himself called his “mythology.” True in¬
sight survives its first formulation.

It seems to me that Freud has done with the libido something
analogous to the creative work of George Stewart. In his book
Storm Stewart makes a major cataclysm of nature the central
character of his story.* He delineates the life cycle and the in¬
dividuality of a natural event. It is as if the world and its peo¬
ple existed for the glory of that storm—which proves to be a
powerful way of enriching our perspective on the oversize hap¬
penings around and within. Early psychoanalysis similarly de¬
scribes human motivation as if libido were the prime substance,
individual egos being mere defensive buffers and vulnerable lay¬
ers between this substance and a vague surroundmg “outer
world” of arbitrary and hostile social conventions.

But the doctor here goes beyond the author. The doctor learns
to investigate and to master clinically the storms which he has
first identified and circumscribed. By delineating the life of the
libido, Freud expanded our theoretical acumen as well as our
therapeutic effectiveness over all those impairments of individ¬
ual and group life which stem from the meaningless mismanage¬
ment of sensuality. It was clear to him, and it becomes clearer to
us—^who deal with new areas of the mind (ego), with differ¬
ent kinds of patients (children, psychotics), with new applica¬
tions of psychoanalysis (society)—that we must search for the
proper place of the libido theory in the totality of human life.
While we must continue to study the life cycles of individuals
by delineating the possible vicissitudes of their libido, we must
become sensitive to the danger of forcing living persons into the
role of marionettes of a mythical Eros—^to the gain of neither
therapy nor theory.

Freud the investigator, in turn, went beyond Freud the doc¬
tor. He did more than explain and cure pathology. Being at
heart and by training a physiologist, Freud showed that sexuality

^George R. Stewart, Storm, Random House, New York, 1941*

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 6i

develops in stages, a growth which he firmly linked with all
epigenetic development.

For when Freud first studied the matter of sex he found that
sexology, popular as well as scientific, seemed to assume sex to
be a new entity which at puberty springs into being as the re¬
sult of newly initiated physiological changes. Sexology then
stood where embryology stood in medieval times, when the
concept of the homunculus, a minute but complete, preformed
man waiting in the man’s semen to be delivered into a woman’s
uterus, there to expand and from there to jump into life, was
generally accepted. Embryology now understands epigenetic
development, the step-by-step growth of the fetal organs. I think
that the Freudian laws of psychosexual growth in infancy can
best be understood through an analogy with physiological de¬
velopment in utero.

In this sequence of development each organ has its time of
origin. This time factor is as important as the place of origin.
If the eye, for example, does not arise at the appointed time, “it
will never be able to express itself fully, since the moment for the
rapid outgrowth of some other part will have arrived, and this will
tend to dominate the less active region and suppress the belated
tendency for eye expression.” •

After the organ h^ begun to arise at the right time, still an¬
other time factor determines the most critical stage of its de¬
velopment: “A given organ must be interrupted during the early
stage of its development in order to be completely suppressed or
grossly modified. . . . After an organ has arisen successfully
from the ‘Anlage,’ it may be lamed or runted, but its nature and
actual existence can no longer be destroyed by interrupting the
growth.” *

The org^ which misses its time of ascendancy is not only
doomed as an entity, it endangers at the same time the whole
hierarchy of organs. “Not only docs the arrest of a rapidly bud-

•C H. Stockard, Tbc Physical Basis oj PersoTiolity, W. W. Nortem k Inc,
New York, 1931.

^Ibid

62

Childhood and Society

ding part, therefore, tend to suppress its development ten»-
porarily, but the premature loss of supremacy to some other
organ renders it impossible for the suppressed part to come again
into dominance so that it is permanently modified . . ‘ The

result of normal development is proper relationship of size and
function among the body organs: the liver adjusted in size to
the stomach and intestine, the heart and lungs properly balanced,
and the capacity of the vascular system accurately proportioned
to the body as a whole. Through developmental arrest one or
more organs may become disproportiondly small: this upsets
functional harmony and produces a defective person.

If “proper rate” and “normal sequence” are disturbed, the
outcome may be a ^^monstnan in excessti' or a ^^monstntm in
defectu”: “The fact that the normal individual stands between
these two arbitrary classes of abnormalities has no significance
other than that the abnormal deviations are simple modifications
of the normal condition resulting from unusual reductions in
the rate of development diu'ing certain critical stages.” •

The most criti<^ time in terms of possible organic monstrosi¬
ties are the months before birth. Once bom, the body has “suc¬
cessfully arisen from its ‘Anlage,’ ” or can soon be diagnosed as
being too defective for integrated maturation. Still a “precere¬
brate” bundle fit only for a slow increase of limited kinds and
intensities of stimulation, the infant has now left the chemical
exchange of the womb for maternal care within the training sys¬
tem of his society. How the maturing organism continues to un¬
fold by developing not new organs, but a prescribed sequence
of locomotor, sensory, and social capacities is described in the
literature of child development. Psychoanalysis has added to
this an understanding of more idiosyncratic individual “habits.”
Whether they are the child’s official habits for which tests have
been found because they are obvious steps to certain skills, or
his unofficial ways which become the open delight or secret con¬
cern of mothers, it is first of all important to realize that in the
sequence of these habits the healthy child, if halfway properly

*fbid.

•ibid.

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 63

guided, merely obeys and on the whole can be trusted to obey
inner laws of development, namely those laws which in his pre¬
natal period had formed one organ after another and which now
create a succession of potentialities for significant interaction
with those around him. While such interaction varies widely
from culture to culture, in ways to be indicated presently, proper
rate and proper sequence remain critical factors in these succes¬
sive manifestations.

From the point of view of the individual child’s “libido
economy,” then, we would say that in our two patients the rate
and the sequence of budding impulses had been disturbed; they
were stuck on the theme of anal retention and elimination like
a phonograph record with a faulty groove. They repeatedly
regressed to babyish themes and repeatedly failed in their at¬
tempts to advance to tlie next theme, the management of their
love for significant jieople of the opposite sex. Ann’s love for
her father was suggested by the great release of manic joy when
she gave three shiny cars to the toy father; while in Peter’s case
his phallic behavior toward the nurse had immediately preceded
the pathogenic events. TTic libido theory would suggest that
the rectal expulsion in the one case and the colonic accumula¬
tion in the other had at one time given these children sexual
pleasure which they were now trying to regain—only that their
by now faulty brake system made them regress further and faster
than anticipated. Yet, no longer being innocent infants enjoy¬
ing as yet untrained bowels, these children apparently indulged
in fantasies of expelling hated persons (remember how Ann
kicked the mother doll) and retaining loved ones; while the
effect of what they did, in all its terrifying consequences, con¬
stituted a sadistic triumph over the parent who wished to con¬
trol them. There is no doubt that there was triumph as well as
fear in the eyes of that little girl when she sat in her mess in the
early morning and watched her mother come in; and there was
a quiet satisfaction in the boy’s remote face even when he was
manifestly bloated and uncomfortable. But the poor mothers

64 Childhood and Society

knew from short and intensely painful experiment that to react
to the child’s tyranny with angry methods would only make
things worse. For say what you wish, these children loved and
wanted to be loved and they would have preferred the joy of
accomplishment to the triumph of hateful failure.

Here one could say that these children are at the mercy of
that second primal substance the existence of which followed the
concept of the libido in the psychoanalytic system—^namely, an
instinct of destruction, of death. I shall not be able to discuss
this problem here, because it is essentially a philosophical one,
based on Freud’s original commitment to a mythology of pri¬
meval instincts. In order to determine more concretely what
kinds of forces are operative in a given clinical situation, it may
be more profitable to ask what it is that we are called upon to
accomplish. Maybe by clarifying our function in the situation
we can come to grips with the forces which we are trying to un¬
derstand. I would say it is our task to re-establish a mutuality of
functioning between the child patient and his parents so that
instead of a number of fruitless, painful, and destructive attempts
at controlling one another, a mutual regulation is established
which restores self-control in both child and parent.

The prescription betrays the diagnosis. In growing up to¬
gether, the family in question have lost a certain mutual regula¬
tion as a group. As a consequence each family member has some¬
how lost the self-control appropriate to his age and status in the
family. Instead of controlling himself and of serving the mutual
regulation of the group, each member has searched for and found
substitute controls, areas of autonomy which exclude the others:
the parents in hectic work and social life, the children in the only
area of seemingly absolute autonomy that is theirs, their bodies.
Autoerotism is an important weapon in this guerrilla warfare in
that it gives the child seeming independence from the lost mu¬
tuality with others. Such self-absorbed autonomy, however, dis¬
sembles the true condition. For in seemingly enjoying the pleas-
■res of his body zones, the child is using organ modes in hostile
fantasies of controlling others by total usurpation, whether with a

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 65

sadistic or a masochistic emphasis. Only this twist, this being
turned against the self or against others, causes the organ to be¬
come a vehicle of aggression in the more usual, the more hostile
sense. Before this happens, organ modes are naive—^i.e., pre-
hostile—patterns of going at things, modes of approach, modes
of seeking relationships: this is what ad-gression means before
it becomes aggression.

Parents who are faced with the development of a number of
children must constantly live up to a challenge. They must de¬
velop with them. We distort the situation if we abstract it in such
a way that we consider the parent as “having” such and such a
personality when the child is bom and then, remaining static, im¬
pinging upon a poor little thing. For this weak and changing little
being moves the whole family along. Babies control and bring
up their families as much as they are controlled by them; in fact,
we may say that the family brings up a baby by being brought up
by him. Whatever reaction patterns are given biologically and
whatever schedule is predetermined developmentally must be
considered to be a series of potentialities for chemging patterns of
mutual regulation.

It will seem to some that I am abandoning this point of view
as I now proceed to review the whole field of what Freud called
pregenital stages and erotogenic zones in childhood and attempt
to build a bridge from clinical experience to observations on
societies. For I will again speak of biologically given potentialities
which develop with the child’s organism. I do not think that
psychoanalysis can remain a workable system of inquiry without
its basic biological formulations, much as they may need recon¬
sideration.

For semantic and conceptual reasons, then, the next section will
be the most difficult one—for the reader and for myself. I have
indicated where we stand on this side of the shore, the clinical
one; now a bridge must be begun, the contemplated end of which
on the other shore cannot be visible to the reader as yet.

To make the job easier for myself 1 shall, as I go along, recon¬
struct the final version of a chart of pregenitality which I first

66 Childhood and Society

presented over a decade ago. Perhaps this will make it easier foi
the reader, too. Charts, to paraphrase Lincoln, are the kind of
thing which help the kind of people who are helped by that kind
of thing. To give the reader the fullest opportunity to be his own
kind, 1 shall try to write this chapter in such a way that what is
understandable at all can be understood with or without the chart.
By “understood” I mean that the reader will be able to check his
knowledge and vocabulary against my way of phrasing the prob¬
lem. This chapter is the book’s skeleton, not its meat. Meat is more
entertaining in a number of ways; but to understand the wisdom
of things, we must first study their bones, dry and hard as they
may seem.

What kind of events do we wish to chart? How “normative” (in
the statistical sense) are these events, how indicative and predictive
are our charts?

Let us consider a little boy’s normative behavior before a mir¬
ror as studied by Gesell.'' The examiner, intent on studying the
child’s “perceptual, prehensory, and adaptive behavior” at age
56 weeks, raises (“with a moderately decisive maneuver”) a cur¬
tain from a full-length mirror before which the child has been
placed. It is noted that the naked little boy alternately regards his
own image and that of the examiner, as he leans forward, slaps the
mirror, assiunes a kneeling posture, moves to and from the mirror,
“contacts mirror with mouth,” withdraws, etc. Let os assume that
sometime during this procedure his penis becomes erect. This
sexual behavior, while by no means abnormal, has nothing to do
with the sequence to be photographed as normative. Such be¬
havior was not mvited to the test; it has, as it were, crashed a good,
clean party. It seems out of place for cultural reasons because up
to the time when zoologists entered the field of human sexuality,
we did not experiment with sexuality. It seems out of place for
systematic reasons because such sexual behavior happens, but not
on schedule. In a given situation it may happen; it may not: it is
not “normative.” However, if it does happen and this at an in-

^Amold G«sell, An Allot of Infottt Behavior, VoL I, Yale University Press,
New Hav^ 1934.

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 67

opportune moment—^Lc., when somebody in the vicinity (mother,
attendant) thinks it should not happen—then it may, or may not,
elicit from that somebody a drastic reaction which might consist
merely in a rare and bewildering change of voice or a general
diffused attitude. This may or may not happen in relation to a
person or at a time of the life cycle that would give the event de¬
cisive importance for the child’s relation to himself, to sex, to the
world. If it does, it may take a psychoanalyst many months of re¬
construction in which no normative charts will be of help. For
this item of behavior concerns an area of the body richly en¬
dowed with nerve endings and elaborately supplied with con¬
notations by the reactions of the enviromnent. What we must
try to chart, then, is the approximate sequence of stages when the
nervous excitability as well as the co-ordination of the organs in
question and the selective reactivity of significant people in the
environment are apt to produce decisive encounters.

j. ZONES, MODES, AND MODALITIES

A. MOtrrH AND SENSES

The first such encounter occurs when the newborn, now de¬
prived of his symbiosis with the mother’s body, is put to the
breast. His inborn and more or less co-ordinated ability to take in
by mouth meets the breast’s and the mother’s and the society’s
more or less co-ordinated ability and intention to feed him and to
welcome him. At this point he lives through and loves with his
mouth; and the mother lives through and loves with her breasts.
For her this is a late and complicated accomplishment, highly
dependent on the love she can be sure of from others, on the self¬
esteem that accompanies the act of nursing—and on the response
of the newborn. To him the oral zone, however, is only the focus
of a first and general mode of approach, namely incorporation.
He is now dependent on the delivery of “materia” of all kinds
directly to the receptive doors of his organism. For a few weeks at
least, he can only react if and when material is brought into his
field. As he is willing and able to suck on appropriate objects and
to swallow whatever appropriate fluids they emit, he is soon also

68 Childhood and Society

willing and able to “take in” with his eyes what enters his Tisoal
field. (As if nearly ready also to hold on to things, he opens and
closes his fist when properly stimulated.) His tactile senses too
seem to take in what feels good. But all of these readinesses are
most vulnerable. In order to assure that his first experience may
not only keep him alive but also help co-ordinate his sensitive
breathing and metabolic and circulatory rhythms, deliveries to
his senses most have the proper intensity and occur at the
right time; otherwise his willingness to accept changes abruptly
into diffuse defense. While it is quite clear, then, what must hap¬
pen to keep the baby alive (the minimum supply necessary) and
what must not happen, lest he die or be severely stunted (the
maximum frustration tolerable) there is increasing leeway in
regard to what may happen; and different cultures make ex¬
tensive use of their prerogative to decide what they consider
workable and insist on calling necessary. Some people think that
a baby, lest he scratch his own eyes out, must necessarily be
swaddled completely for the better part of the day throughout
the greater part of the first year; but also that he should be rocked
or fed whenever he whimpers. Others think that he should feel
the freedom of his kicking limbs as early as possible, but should
“of course” be forced to wait for his meals until he, literally,
gets blue in the face. All of this depends on the culture’s gen¬
eral aim and system. As will be pointed out in the next chapter,
there seems to be an intrinsic wisdom, or at any rate an uncon¬
scious planfulness, in the seemingly arbitrary varieties of cultural
conditioning: in fact, homogeneous cultures provide certain
balances in later life for the very desires, fears, and rages which
they provoked in childhood. What then, is “good for the child,”
what may happen to him, depends on what he is supposed to be¬
come, and where.

But while the mode of incorporation dominates this stage, it
is well to get acquainted with the fact that the funaioning of
any orificial body zone requires the presence of all modes as
auxiliary modes. Thus, there is in the first incorporative stage a
clamping down with jaws and gums (second incorporative

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 69

mode); there is spitting up and out (eliminative mode); and
there is a closing up of the lips (retentive mode). In vigorous
babies a general intrusive tendency of the whole head and neck
can be noticed, a tendency to fasten itself upon the nipple and, as
it were, into the breast (oral-intrusive). Any one of the auxiliary
modes may be especially pronoimced in some children and
hardly noticeable in others; and then again such modes may
grow into near dominance by a lack or loss of inner control and
a lack or loss of mutual regulation with the sources of food and
oral pleasure.

This interplay of one zone with all the modes is represented
diagrammatically in the first line of the chart (Fig. i).

12 3 4 5

Each big circle represents the whole organism. Within it we
(fiiferendate three zones; (a) ‘^oral-sensory,” which includes the
facial apertures and the upper nutrition^ organs; (b) “anal,”
the cxcremental organs; (c) the genitalia. (The emphasis here is
on neurological coherence rather than on anatomic vicinity: the
urethral zone, for example, is part of the anal and part of the
genital zone, depending on the innervations mobilized.)

Each small circle represents an organ mode:

1 = incorporative i

2 = incorporative 2

3 = retentive

4 = eliminative

5 = intrusive

In the first oral stage (I), the first incorporative mode domi¬
nates the oral zone. However, we prefer to call this stage the

7© Childhood and Society

oral-respiratory-sensory stage because the first incorporarive
mode at the time dominates the behavior of all these zones, in¬
cluding the whole skin surface, which is to be understood as a
sense organ; the sense organs and the skin too are receptive and
increasingly hungry for proper stimulation- This generalization
of the incorporative mode from its focus in the oral zone to all
the sensitive zones of the body surface is represented by the out¬
lining of the large drclc in I i.

The other circles (z, 3, 4, 5) represent the auxiliary modes:
second oral-incorporative ( = biting), oral-retentive, oral-climi-
native, and oral-intrusive. These modes become variably impor¬
tant according to individual temperament. But they remain sub¬
ordinated to the first incorporative mode unless the mutual regu¬
lation of the zone with the providing mother is disturbed either
by a loss of inner control in the baby or by unfunctional behavior
on the part of the mother.

An example of a lack of inner control would be pyloric spasm,
which thruks food out again shortly after intake. In such cases
the oral-eliminative mode takes its place beside the supposedly
dominant incorporative mode: they are regularly experienced
together, a fact which in severe cases and under improper man¬
agement may determine an individual's basic orientation once
and for aU. The consequence may be an early overdevelopment
of the retentive mode, an oral closing up which becomes a gen¬
eralized mistrust of whatever comes in because it is apt not to
stay.

The loss of mutual regulation with the maternal source of
supply is exemplified by a mother’s habitual withdrawal of the
nipple because she has been nipped or because she fears she will
be. In such cases the oral machinery, instead of relaxedly in¬
dulging in sucking, may prematurely develop a biting reflex;
the baby may try to hang on ‘'by the skin of his teeth” before
he has any teeth. Our clinical material often suggests that such
a situation is the model for one of the most radical disturbances
of interpersonal relations. One hopes to get, the source is with¬
drawn, whereupon one tries reflexively to hold on and to take;

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 71

but the more one holds on, the more determinedly does the
source remove itself.

As the child’s radius of awareness, co-ordination, and respon¬
siveness expands, he meets the educative patterns of his culture,
and thus leams the basic modalities of human existence, each in
personally and culturally significant ways. These basic modalities
arc admirably expressed in “basic” English, which is so precise
when it comes to the definition of interpersonal patterns. To our
great relief, therefore, we can at this point take recourse to
some of the simplest Ekiglish words instead of inventing new
Latin combinations.

To get (when it does not mean “to fetch**) means to receive
and to accept what is given. This is the first social modality
learned in life; and it sounds simpler than it is. For the groping
and unstable newborn organism leams this modality only as it
leams to regulate its organ systems in accordance with the way
in which the maternal environment organizes its methods of child
care.

It is clear, then, that the optimum total situation implied in
the baby’s readiness to get what is given is his mutual regula¬
tion with a mother who will permit him to develop and co¬
ordinate his means of getting as she develops and co-ordinates
her means of giving. There is a high premium of libidinal pleas¬
ure on this co-ordination—a libidinal pleasure which one feels
is only insufficiently formulated by the term “oraL” The mouth
and the nipple seem to be the mere centers of a general aura of
warmth and mutuality which arc enjoyed and responded to
with relaxation not only by these focal organs, but by both
total organisms. The mutuality of relaxation thus developed is
of prime importance for the first experience of friendly other¬
ness. One may say (somewhat mystically, to be sure) that in
thus getting what is given, and in learning to get somebody to do
for him what he wishes to have done, the baby also develops the
necessary ego groundwork to get to be the giver. Where this
fails, the situation falls apart into a variety of attempts at con¬
trolling by duress or fantasy rather than by reciprocity. The

72 Childhood and Society

baby will try to get by random activity what he cannot get by
central suction; he will exhaust himself or he will find his thumb
and damn the world. The mother too may try to force matters
by urging the nipple into the baby’s mouth, by nervously chang¬
ing hours and formulas, or by being unable to relax during tlie
initially painful procedure of suckling.

There are, of course, methods of alleviating such a situation,
of maintaining reciprocity by giving to the baby what he can get
through good artificial nipples and of making up for what is missed
orally through the satiation of other than oral receptors; his pleas¬
ure in being held, warmed, smiled at, talked to, rocked, etc. We
cannot afford to relax our remedial inventiveness. However, it
seems (here as elsewhere) that if we expend a fraction of our
curative energy on preventive action, we may abet the cure and
make it simpler.

Now to the second stage, during which the ability to make a
more active and directed approach by incorporation, and the
pleasure derived from it, grow and ripen. The teeth develop, and
with them the pleasure in biting on hard things, in biting through
things, and in biting pieces o]f things. With a little configura¬
tional play we can see that the biting mode serves to subsume a
variety of other activities (as did the first incorporative mode).
The eyes, first part of a passive system of accepting impressions
as they come along, have now learned to focus, to isolate, to
“grasp” objects from the vaguer background, and to follow
them. The organs of hearing have similarly learned to discern
significant sounds, to localize them, and to guide an appropriate
change in position (lifting and turning the head, lifting and turn¬
ing the upper body). The arms have learned to reach out and
the hands to grasp more purposefully.

With all of t^ a number of interpersonal patterns are es¬
tablished which center in the social modality of taking and hold¬
ing on to things—things which are more or less freely offered
and given, and things which have more or less of a tendency to
slip away. As the baby learns to change positions, to roll over,

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 73

and very gradually to sit op, he must perfect the mechanisms of
grasping, investigating, and appropriating all that is within his
reach.

We now add stage II to our chart (Figure 2).

12 3 4 5

In stage II, mode 2 (incorporation by biting) dominates the
oral zone. Thus, progress from stage I to stage II (and later to
further stages) is represented as a diagonal progression down¬
ward and to the right. Progress here means that the child’s libido
moves on in order now to endow with power a second organ
mode which in turn will lead to the integration of a new social
modality: taking. A new stage does not mean the initiation of a
new zone or mode, but the readiness to experience both more
exclusively, to master them more co-ordinately, and to integrate
their socid meaning with a certain finality.

But what if this progress is impeded, accelerated, or arrested?
Then a deviation must be charted either horizontally or ver¬
tically. The horizontal deviation (I i to I 2) corresponds to a
precocious progression to the mode of the following stage: the
baby’s mouth, instead of sucking relaxedly, clamps down. The
vertical deviation (I i to II i) represents a clinging to a mode
which has proved satisfactory. The horizontal deviation leads to
a zone fixation, Le., the individual holds on to oral pleasures of
various mode characteristics. The vertical fixation is a mode

74 Childhood and Society

fixation—Lc^ the individual is apt to overdevelop mode I in a
variety of zones: he always wants to get whether by mouth and
senses, or by other apertures, receptors, or behaviors. This kind
of fixation will later be carried over to other zones.

At this stage, however, not even the kindest environment can
save the baby from a traumatic change—one of the severest be¬
cause the baby is so young and the difficulties encountered arc
so diffuse. I refer to the general development of impulses and
mechanisms of active prehension, the eruption of the teeth and
the proximity of this process to that of weaning and to the in¬
creasing separation from the mother, who may go back to work,
or be pregnant again, or both.

For it is here that “good” and “evil” enter the baby’s world,
unless his faith in himself and others has already been shaken in
the first stage by unduly provoked or prolonged paroxysms of
rage and exhaustion. It is, of course, impossible to know what the
infant feels, as his teeth “bore from within”—^in the very oral
cavity which until then was the main scat of pleasure, and a seat
mainly of pleasime; and what kind of masochistic dilemma re¬
sults from the fact that the tension and pain caused by the teeth,
these inner saboteurs, can be alleviated only by biting harder.
This, in turn, adds a social dilemma to a physical one. For where
breast feeding lasts into the biting stage (and, all in all, this has
been the rule on earth) it is now necessary to learn how to con¬
tinue sucking without biting, so that the mother may not with¬
draw the nipple in pain or anger. Our clinical work indicates
that this point in the individual’s early history is the origin of
an evil dividedness, where anger against the gnawing teeth, and
anger against the withdrawing mother, and anger with one’s
impotent anger all lead to a forceful experience of sadistic and
masochistic confusion leaving the general impression that once
upon a time one destroyed one’s unity with a maternal matrix.
This earliest catastrophe in the individual’s relation to himself
and to the world is probably the ontogenetic contribution to
the biblical saga of paradise, where the first people on earth
forfeited forever the right to pluck without effort what had been

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 75

put at their disposal; they bit into the forbidden apple, and made
God angry. Wc must understand that the touchiness as well as
the universality of this subject makes it seem the more imjxjr-
tant that the early unity should have been a deep and satisfac¬
tory one and that a baby should be subjected to the unavoidable
evil gently and reassuringly.

In regard to the first ord stage, we spoke of a mutual regula¬
tion of the baby’s pattern of accepting things and the mother’s
(the culture’s) way of giving them. There are stages, however,
which are marked by such unavoidable development of rage and
anger that mutual regulation by complementary behavior can¬
not be the pattern for meeting them. Tlie rages of teething, the
tantrums of muscular and anal impotence, the failures of falling,
etc.—all are situations in which the intensity of the impulse
leads to its own defeat. Parents and cultures use just these in¬
fantile encounters with inner gremlins for the reinforcement of
their outer demands. But parents and cultures must also meet
these stages by seeing to it that as little as possible of the original
reciprocity is lost in the process of moving from phase to phase.
Weaning, therefore, should not mean sudden loss of the breast
and loss of the mother’s reassuring presence too, unless, of course,
the cultural situation is a homogeneous one and other women
can be depended on to sound and feel pretty much like the
mother. A drastic loss of accustomed mother love without proper
substitution at this time can lead (under otherwise aggravating
conditions) to acute infantile depression or to a mild but chronic
state of mourning which may give a depressive undertone to
the whole remainder of life.* But even under the most favorable
circumstances, this stage leaves a residue of a primary sense of
evil and doom and of a universal nostalgia for a lost paradise.

The oral stages then, form in the infant the springs of the
basic sense of trust and the basic sense of evil which remain the
source of primal anxiety and of primal hope throughout life.

•Rene Spitz has called this “anaclitic Childy Vols. I~IV, International Uni-

depression.’’ See his contributions to vcrsitics Press, New York, 1945 49.

The Fsychoanalytic Study of the

76 Childhood and Society

These will be discussed later as the first nuclear conflict in the
developing personality.

B. ELIMINATIVE ORGANS AND MUSCULATURE

When discussing self-preservation Freud suggests that at the
beginning of life the libido associates itself with the need for
keeping alive by sucking drinkables and biting edibles. Not that
the mere intake of food would take care of the libidinal need.
Levy, in his famous experiments wdth puppies and chicks, has
shown that in these groups of young there is an independent quan¬
tity of need for sucking and pecking beyond the mere intake
of food. In humans, who live more by training and less by
instinct, one suspects greater cultural variability as to the in¬
born and provoked quantities of a need. What we are discussing
here are potential patterns which cannot be ignored or reduced
below a certain minimum without risking deficiencies but which,
on the other hand, must be provoked in specific ways by en¬
vironmental procedures in order to be promoted to full de¬
velopment. Yet it is clear that oral erotism and the development
of the social modalities of “getting” and “taking” are based on
the need to breathe, to drink, to eat, and to grow by absorpH
tion.

What would be the self-preservative function of anal erotism?
First of aU, the whole procedure of evacuating the bowels and
the bladder as completely as possible is made pleasurable by a
feeling of 'well-being which says, “Well done.” This feeling,
at the beginning of life, must make up for quite frequent discom¬
fort and tensions suffered as the bowels learn to do their daily
work. Two developments gradually give these anal experiences
the necessary volume: the arrival of better-formed stool and the
general development of the muscle system which adds the di¬
mension of voluntary release, of dropping and throwing away,
to that of grasping appropriation. These two developments to¬
gether suggest a greater ability to alternate wdthholding and
expelling at will. As far as anality proper is concerned, at this
point everything depends on whether the cultural environment

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 77

wants to make something of it. There arc cultures (as we shall
see) where the parents ignore anal behavior and leave it to older
children to lead the toddler out to the bushes, so that his wish
to comply in this matter gradually coincides with his tvish to
imitate the bigger ones. Our Western civilization, however, has
chosen to take the matter more seriously, how seriously being
dependent upon the spread of middle-class mores and of the ideal
image of a mechanized body. For it is assumed that early and
rigorous training not only keeps the home atmosphere nicer but
is absolutely necessary for the development of orderliness and
punctuality. Whether this is so or not we shall discuss later. There
is no doubt, however, that the neurotics of our time include the
compulsive type, who has more mechanical orderliness, punc¬
tuality, and thrift, and this in matters of affection as well as
feces, than is good for him and, in the long run, for his society.
Bowel and bladder training has become the most obviously dis¬
turbing item of child training in wide circles of our society.

What then, makes the anal problem potentially so difficult?

The anal zone lends itself more than any other to the dis¬
play of stubborn adherence to contradictory impulses because,
for one thing, it is the modal zone for two conflicting modes of
approach, which must become alternating, namely retention and
el^ination. Furthermore, the sphincters are only part of the
muscle system with its general duality of rigidity and relaxa¬
tion, of flexion and extension. The development of the muscle
system gives the child a much greater power over the environ¬
ment in the ability to reach out and hold on, to throw and to
push away, to appropriate things and to keep them at a dis¬
tance. This whole stage, then, which the Germans called the
stage of stubbornness, becomes a battle for autonomy. For as
he gets ready to stand more firmly on his feet the infant deline¬
ates his world as “I” and “you,” “me” and “mine.” Every
mother knows how astonishingly pliable a child may be at this
stage, if and when he has made the decision that he •wants to do
what he is supposed to do. It is hard, however, to find the proper
formula for making him want to do just that. Every mother

78 Childhood and Society

knows how lovingly a child at this stage will snuggle up and
how ruthlessly he \^1 suddenly try to push the adult away. At
the same time the child is apt both to hoard things and to discard
them, to cling to possessions and to throw them out of the win¬
dow. All of these seemingly contradictory tendencies, then, wc
include under the formula of the retentive-eliminative modes.

As to new social modalities developed at this time, the em¬
phasis is on the simple antithesis of letting go and holding on,
the nature, ratio, and sequence of which is of decisive importance
both for the development of the individual personality and for
that of collective attitudes.

The matter of mutual regulation now faces its severest test.
If outer control by too rigid or too early training insists on rob¬
bing the child of his attempt gradually to control his bowels and
other ambivalent functions by his free choice and will, he will
again be faced with a double rebellion and a double defeat.
Powerless in his own body (and often fearing his feces as if they
were hostile monsters inhabiting his insides) and powerless out¬
side, he will again be forced to seek satisfaction and control
either by regression or by false progression. In other words, he
will return to an earlier, oral control—Le., by sucking his thumb
and becoming whiny and demanding; or he will become hostile
and intrusive, using his feces as ammunition and pretending an
autonomy, an ability to do without anybody to lean on, which
he has by no means really gained. (In our two “specimens” we
have seen regressions to t^ position.)

Adding the anal-urethral-muscular stage to our chart, wc ar¬
rive at the formulation shown in Figure 3.

The diagonal has extended to the establishment of the reten¬
tive (3) and eliminative (4) modes in the anal-urethral zone
(bottoms of circles) in the new stage III. The outlining of the
circle itself again indicates a generalization of these modes over
the whole of the developing muscular system, which, before
serving more intricate and varied ends, must have gained some
form of self-control in the matter of dual expression, such as
letting go and holding on. Where such control is disturbed by

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 79

12 3 4 5

Figure 3

maldevelopments in the anal-urethral sphere, lasting emphases
on retention and/or elimination are established which may lead
to a variety of disturbances in the zone itself (spastic rectum or
colon), in the muscle system (general flabbiness or rigidity),
in obsessional fantasy (paranoid fear of inimical substances
within one’s body), and in the social spheres (attempts at con¬
trolling the environment by compulsive systematization).

At this point it is possible to illustrate the clinical use of the as
yet unfinished chart. We indicated that our anal-retentive boy
patient, in early infancy, went through a period of retaining food
in his mouth and of closing up in general. Such a “deviant” de¬
velopment, which could, of course, pass without the serious
turn which it took in this case, can be entered in the chart by
outlining II 3. This boy then, while giving up the attempt at
holding on to his mother (II i) attempted to control the situa¬
tion by retention, a mode fixation which predestined him for
a difficult period in stage 111, when he was supposed to learn
“to let go.” The real crisis, however, occurred when he was
about to abandon this stage: he regressed and held on for dear
life.

8o

Childhood and Society

Other escape routes at the disposal of chfldren are indicated
in the chart. Modes III 2 and III i (anal-urethral-incorporativc)
are concretely known to pediatricians who have to free children
from objects which they have stuck up the anus. In the urethral
counterpart to this habit straws and little sticks are introduced
into the urethra. Such concrete mode expressions exist, but are
rare. More common are fantasies of a kind which may prepare
for future perversions. Any anal fixation on one of these modes
is especially apt to prepare for a homosexual attitude with the
implied idea of gaining love and control forever through anal
incorporation- With girls matters are somewhat different, ow¬
ing to the fact that a girl’s “graspiness” does not need to re¬
main fixated in the mouth or perverted in the anus: it can nor¬
mally shift to the vagina and pass for genital behavior. We shall
come back to this point when discussing genitality.

The other possible “sideward” escape is an undue emphasis
on mode III 5—^i.c., the use of feces as ammunition to be shot at
people. This may take the form of aggressive evacuation or
deposition of fecal matter. Much more common, of course, is the
expression of this tendency in the hurling of profanities refer¬
ring to fecal matter —2 magic way of attacking your enemy,
and easy if you can get away with it.

What enduring qualities are rooted in this muscular and anal
stage? From the sense of inner goodness emanates autonomy
and pride; from the sense of badness, doubt and shame. To de¬
velop autonomy a firmly developed and convincingly continued
state of early trust is necessary. The infant must come to feel
that his basic faith in himself and in the world (which is the
lasting treasure saved from the conflicts of the oral stage) will
not be jeopardized by this sudden violent wish to have a choice,
to appropriate demandingly and to eliminate stubbornly. Firm¬
ness must protect him against the potential anarchy of his as
yet untrained judgment, his inability to hold on and to let go
with discrimination. His environment most back him up in his
wish to “stand on his own feet” lest he be overcome by that
sense of having exposed himself prematurely and foolishly which

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 8i

we call shame, or that secondary mistrust, that looking back
which we call doubt.

Autonomy versus sharne and doubt, therefore, is the second
nuclear conflict, the resolving of which is one of the ego’s basic
tasks.

C. LOCOMOTION AND THE GENITALS

I have mentioned no ages so far. We arc now approaching
the end of the third year, when walking is getting to be a thing
of ease, of vigor. The books teU us that a child “can walk” much
before this: but from the point of ego progress—^Le., of a sense
of coherence and security—he cannot walk as long as he is only
able to accomplish the feat, more or less well, with more or
fewer props, for short spans of time. The ego has incorporated
walking and running mto the sphere of mastery when gravity
is felt to be within, when the child can forget that he is doing
the walking and instead can find out what he can do ivith it.
Only then do his legs become an unconscious part of him in¬
stead of being an external ambulatory appendix.

To look back; the first way station was prone relaxation. The
trust based on the experience that the basic mechanisms of breath¬
ing, digesting, sleeping, etc., have a consistent and familiar rela¬
tion to the foods and comforts offered, gives zest to the develop¬
ing ability to raise oneself to a sitting and then standing posi¬
tion. The second way station (accomplished only toward the
end of the second year) is that of being able to sit not only
securely but, as it were, untiringly, a feat which permits the
muscle system gradually to be used for finer discrimination and
for more autonomous ways of selecting and discarding, of pil¬
ing things up—and of throwing them away with a bang.

The third way station finds the child able to move independ¬
ently and vigorously. He not only is ready to visualize his sex
role, but also begins either to comprehend his role in economy
or, at any rate, to understand what roles are worth imitating.
More immediately, he can now associate with his age mates and,
under the guidance of older children or special women guard-

82

Childhood and Society

ians, gradually enter into the infantile politics of nursery sdiool,
street comer, and barnyard. His learning now is intrusive; it
leads away from him along aggressive associations and combina¬
tions into ever new facts and activities; and he becomes acutely
aware of differences between the sexes. This, then, sets the stage
for infantile genitality and for the first elaboration of the in¬
trusive and inclusive modes.

Infantile genitality, of course, is destined to remain mdi-
mentary, a mere promise of things to come. If not specifically
provoked into precocious manifestation by special frustrations
or special customs (such as organized sex play), it is apt to lead
to no more than a series of fascinating experiences which are
frightening and pointless enough to be repressed during the
stage which Freud called the “latency” period—Lc», the long
delay of physical sexual maturation.

The sexual orientation of the boy at this stage is phallic. While
erections undoubtedly occur earlier (either reflexively or in
clear sexual response to things and people that make the child feel
intensively) there now develops a focused interest in the genitalia
of both sexes, together with an urge to perform sex acts. Ob¬
servations of primitive societies show acts of intercourse between
children of three or four—acts which, to judge from the attend¬
ant laughter, are primarily playful imitation. Such open and
playful acts probably help to ease a development that is poten¬
tially dangerous: namely, the exclusive direction of early sexual
impulses toward the parents, especially where there is a com¬
plete taboo on the communication of such desire. For the in¬
creased locomotor mastery and the pride of being big now and
almost as good as Father and Mother receives its severest set¬
back in the clear fact that in the genital sphere one is vastly in¬
ferior; and furthermore that not even in the distant future is
one ever going to be the father in sexual relationship to the
mother or the mother in sexual relationship to the father. The
very deep consequences of this insight make up what Freud has
called the oedipus complex.

This term, of course, has complicated matters in that it com-

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 83

pares what is to be inferred in childhood with what is to be in¬
ferred from the story of King Oedipus. The name thus establishes
an analogy between two unknowns. The idea is that Oedipus,
who inadvertently killed his father and married his mother, be¬
came a mythical hero and on the stage is viewed with intense
pity and terror because to possess one’s mother is a universal wish,
universally tabooed.

Psychoanalysis verifies in daily work die simple conclusion that
boys attach their first genital affection to the maternal adults
who have otherwise given comfort to their bodies and that they
develop their first sexual rivalry against the persons who are the
genital owners of those maternal persons. To conclude, as Dide¬
rot did, that if the little boy had the power of a man, he would
rape his mother and murder his father is meaningless. For if he
had such power he would not be a child and would not need to
stay with his parents—^in which case he might simply prefer
other sex objects. As it is, infantile genitality attaches itself to
the protectors and ideals of childhood and siiffers intense com¬
plications therefrom.

The intrusive mode dominating much of the behavior of this
stage characterizes a variety of configurationally “similar” ac¬
tivities and fantasies. These include the intrusion into other
bodies by physical attack: the intrusion into other people’s ears
and minds by aggressive talking; the intrusion into space by
vigorous locomotion; the intrusion into die unknown by con¬
suming curiosity. In general it seems clear that to children of
this age, adult sex acts seem to be dangerous acts of mutual ag¬
gression. Even where there is group sex play, the child seems to
interpret the sex acts of his elders as intrusive on the part of
the male and incorporative in a spidery way on the part of the
female; and this especially where darkness surrounds adult sex
life, where sounds accompanying it are interpreted as expres¬
sions of pain, where menstrual blood is observed surreptitiously,
and where a (not infrequent) hostile aftermath is perceived in
the insufficiently satisfied parents.

Girls have a difficult time here because they most learn that

84 Childhood and Society

although their loctnnotor, mental, and sodal intrusiveness is
equally increased and as adequate as that of the boys, they lack
one hem: the penis. While the boy has this visible erectable
and comprehensible organ to attach dreams of adult bigness to,
the girl’s clitoris cannot sustain dreams of sexual equality. She
does not even have breasts as analogously tangible tokens of her
future; her maternal instincts arc relegated to play fantasy or
baby tending. Wniere the necessities of economic life and the
simplicity of its social plan make the female role and its specific
powers and rewards comprehensible, it is, of course, more easily
integrated. Otherwise the girl is apt to develop, together Avith
the basic modes of feminine inception and maternal inclusion,
either a teasing, demanding, grasping attitude which at its height
becomes what is called bitchiness, or a clinging and overly de¬
pendent childishness.

The chart can now be completed. In both Figure 4 (male)
and Figure 5 (female) we add line IV, the locomotor and in¬
fantile genital stage, during which the mode of intrusion (5) is

I

0

3

0(2)

0

n

0

0(2)

0

m

Q

(a) Q)

0

TV

F

[0

L

3

00

0

0

m

m

M

(3

Figure 4

n

ni

Q

OQ

Ksa

H

w

f

m

K

Bi

M

1^

m

m

m

Figure 5

suggested in ambulatory exuberance, in aggressive mentality,
and in sexual fantasies and activities. Both sexes partake of the
general development of ambulatory and intrusive patterns, al¬
though in the girl patterns of demanding inception (i, 2) de¬
velop in a ratio determined by previous experience, temperament,
and cultural emphasis.

Figure 5 shows the girl’s psychosexual progress at stage IV
as a reversion to incorporative modes, originally developed on
oral and sensory lines. This, 1 think, is not an accidental result
of our method of charting. For the girl at this stage matches
the boy’s potentially more vigorous muscular life •with the po¬
tentiality of richer sensory discrimination. She also is apt to be¬
come again more dependent and more demanding and, in fact,
is permitted to do so, except where the culture chooses to cul¬
tivate the auxiliary mode of intrusive and strongly locomotor
behavior (IV 5). We shall return later to the general exploit-
ability which has been women’s fate due to this closeness of her

96 QukSiood and Sodety

genital modes (inception, indosion) to those of oraGty (incor¬
poration).

In line V (Figure 4 and Figure 5) the rudimentary “genital
stage” is antidjiated. The additional little cirde in both the male
and the female interior designates two new modes, female genera¬
tive (V F) and male generative (V M), and conveys the fact that
female inclusion as well as male intrusion here begins to be
oriented toward a dimly divined inner potentiality—namely, the
coming together of ovum and sperm in an act of procreation.

The ambulatory and infantile genital stage adds to the inven¬
tory of basic social modalities in both sexes that of “making” in
the sense of “being on the make.” There is no simpler, stronger
word to match the social modalities previously enumerated. The
word suggests head-on attack, enjoyment of competition, insist¬
ence on goal, pleasure of conquest. In the boy, the emphasis re¬
mains on “mddng” by phallic-intrusive modes: in the girl it
sooner or later changes to making by teasing and provoking
or by milder forms of “snaring”—^i.e., by making herself attrac¬
tive and endearing. The child thus develops the prerequisites for
initiative, Lc., for the selection of goals and perseverance in ap¬
proaching them.

At once, however, this general readiness for initiative meets
its arch-enemy in the necessity of delaying and displacing its
sexual core: for this sexual core is both biologically incomplete
and culturally opposed by incest taboos. The “oedipus” wishes
(so simply and so trustingly expressed in the boy’s assurance
that he will marry his mother and make her proud of him and
in the girl’s that she will many her father and take much better
care of him) lead to secret fantasies of vague murder and rape.
The consequence is a deep sense of guilt—a strange sense, for it
forever seems to imply that the individual has committed a crime
which, after all, was not only not committed, but would have
been biologically quite impossible. This secret guilt, however,
helps to drive the whole weight of initiative toward desirable
ideals and immediate practical goals. At no time is the individual
more ready to learn quickly and avidly and to become big in

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 87

the sense of sharing obligation and jjerformance rather than
power; in the sense of making things, not of “making” people.
At this stage the child learns to combine with other children for
the purpose of constructing and planning instead of trying to
boss and coerce them; and he is able and willing to profit fully
by the association with teachers and ideal prototypes.

This, however, presupposes that a lasting solution is being
found for the third nuclear conflict, to be discussed in the chapter
on the ego—namely, the conflict between initiative and guilt.

D. PREGENITALITY AND GENITALITY

A system must have its utopia. For psychoanalysis the utopia
is “genitality.” This was first conceived of as the integration of
the pregenital stages to a point of perfection which, later on
(after puberty), would insure three difficult reconciliations; (i)
the reconciliation of genital orgasm and cxtragcnital sexual needs;
(2) the reconciliation of love and sexuality; (3) the reconcilia¬
tion of sexual, procreative, and work-productive patterns.

It is a fact that all neurotics, on close study, prove to be handi¬
capped in their sexual cycles: their intimacy is disturbed as they
approach potential partners, as they initiate or execute or finish
the sexual act, or as they turn away from the respective “parts”
and from the partner. In this the traces of pregenitality are most
obvious although rarely conscious. Neurotic people, deep down,
would rather incorporate or retain, eliminate or intrude, than
enjoy the mutuality of genital patterns. Many others would
rather be or make dependent, destroy or be destroyed, than love
maturely, and this often without being overtly neurotic in any
classifiable, diagnosable, and curable sense. Undoubtedly rich
sex play serves best to take care of pregenital leftovers. But the
relationship of sex and play, of play and work, and of work and
sex, calls for a later, more comprehensive discussion.

At this point, then, the chart can be used to demonstrate the
way in which pregenital deviation disturbs genitality. In Figure
4 the mode of feminine procreation (V F) and modes V i and V
2 are not to be taken too litcrallv. The rudiments of a wish to

88 Childhood and Society

give birth arc utilized in identification with and support of the
female; or they are absorbed in creativity. As for receptive tend¬
encies, the male organ has no mor{)hological similarity to the
mouth, although there are rudiments of a feminine organ around
and behind the base of the penis which is erotized in passive-
rccepdve individuals. Otherwise, mouth and anus must take over
the sexual remnants of the man’s incorporative wishes. Mode V
I, if dominant or as dominant as V 5, would signify an emphasis
on genital receptivity, a wish to get rather than to give. A
dominance of V 2 would represent the male “bitch”—for ex¬
ample, the homosexual who seeks intercourse with men in order
(more or less consciously) to snare their power. Mode V 3 would
mean a retentive quality, V 4 an eliminative quality in the man’s
genital behavior; forms of inhibited and incomplete ejaculation
and of premature and “flowing” ejaculation belong here. V 5 has
been described as the phallic-aggressive attitude. These devia¬
tions, then, can be traced backward along the vertical paths of
mode fixation to other zones from which they originated and to
which they are apt to regress. In mature male sexuality, of course,
all of these modes must be integrated and must accept the domi¬
nance of the male procreative mode (V M).

The last line of Figure 5 has a double application: to sex life
and to childbearing (and child care). V F has been formulated
as the dominant final position. V i and V 2 have been dealt with
as the most common deviation; relative frigidity in conjunction
cither with receptive passivity or with sexual avarice—at its worst
an inability to give genitally and thus to acknowledge the male’s
performance, which is nevertheless demanded, teased, and pro¬
voked. V 3 is the inability to relax enough to let the male enter,
to make him feel at home, or to let him go. V 4, eliminative
genitality, is expressed in frequent orgastic spasms which do not
add up to one adequate experience. V 5 is the unreconstructed
phallic position as expressed in exclusively clitoral erotism, and
in all forms of intrusive coercion. V M, in a woman, is that abil¬
ity to partake in and to identify with the male’s procreative role,

The Theory of Infantile Sexuality 89

which makes woman an understanding companion and a firm
guide of sons. Furthermore, creativity in both sexes calls for a
certain ratio of V M and V F.

For both the male and female charts the rule holds that all
deviations, if subordinated to the dominant mode, are as normal
as they are frequent. Where they replace the normal dominant
mode, they lead to imbalances in the total libidinal household
which cannot exist for long without decisively distorting the
individual’s social modalities. This, in turn, cannot happen too
frequently without distorting the social life of a group unless
the group, for a while, can manage the matter by establishing
organized subgroups of deviants.

But does pregenitality exist only for genitality? It seems not.
In fact, the very essence of pregenitality seems to be the absorp¬
tion of libidinal interests in the early encounter of the maturing
organism with a particular style of child care and in the trans¬
formation of its inborn forms of approach (aggression) into the
social modalities of the culture.

To begin once more with what may appear to be a biological
beginning: When we say that animals have “instincts,” we mean
that at least the lower forms have relatively inborn, relatively
early, ready-to-use ways of interacting with a segment of nature
as part of which they have survived. These patterns vary widely
from species to species, but within one species they are highly in¬
flexible; animals can learn little. Here we think of the swallows
from England who were imported to New Zealand by homesidc
ex-Elnglishmcn. When winter came they all flew south and never
returned, for their instincts pointed southward, not warmward.
Let us remember that our domesticated animals and our pets,
whom we so easily think of as the measure of the animal world,
are highly selected and bred creatures who learn to serve our prac¬
tical and emotional needs as they are taken care of by us. What
they learn from us does not improve their chances of surviving in
any segment of nature or in any co-operation with their own

90 Qiildhood and Society

kind. In this context we do not ask what an individual animal
can leam, but what a species can teach its young from generation
to generation.

In the higher forms of animals we observe a division of instinct
(a term here used in analogy to “division of labor”). Here it is
the mutual regulation of instinctive contact seeking in the young
and of instinctive contact giving in the parent which completes
adaptive functioning in the young. It has been observed, for ex¬
ample, that certain mammals can leam to defecate only by having
the rectum licked by the mother animal.

We could assume that human childhood and human child
training arc merely the highest form of such instinctive reciproc¬
ity. However, the drives man is bom with arc not instincts; nor
are his mother’s complementary drives instinctive in namre.
Neither carry in themselves the patterns of completion, of self-
preservation, of interaction with any segment of nature; tradition
and conscience must organize them.

As an animal, man is nothing. It is meaningless to speak of a
human child as if it were an animal in the process of domestica¬
tion; or of his instincts as set patterns encroached upon or molded
by the autocratic environment. Man’s “inborn instincts” arc
drive fragments to be assembled, given meaning, and organized
during a prolonged childhood by methods of child training and
schooling which vary from culture to culture and arc determined
by tradition. In this lies his chance as an organism, as a member
of a society, as an individual. In this also lies his limitation. For
while the animal survives where his segment of nature remains
predictable enough to fit his inborn patterns of instinctive re¬
sponse or where these responses contain the elements for necessary
mutation, man survives only where traditional child training pro¬
vides him with a conscience which will guide him without crush¬
ing him and which is firm and flexible enough to fit the vicissi¬
tudes of his historical era. To accomplish this, child training
utilizes the vague instinctual (sexual and aggressive) forces which
energize instinctive patterns and which in man, just because of

The Theoiy of Infantile Sexualky^ 91

his minimal mstinctive equipment, are highly mobile and ex¬
traordinarily plastic.*

Here we merely wish to gain an initial understanding of the
timetable and the systematic relationship of the organ modes of
pregenitality which establish the basic orientation that an organ¬
ism or its parts can have to another organism and its parts and to
the world of things. A being with organs can take tWigs or an¬
other being into itself; it can retain them or let them out; or it can
enter them. Beings with organs can also perform such modal acts
with another being’s parts. The human child during its long
childhood learns these modes of physical approach and with them
the modalities of social life. He learns to exist in space and time as
he learns to be an organism in the space-time of his culture. Every
part function thus learned is based on some integration of all die
organ modes with one another and with the world image of their
culture,

If we take intellectual functioning as an example of a part func¬
tion, we find that it is dominated and can be distorted by organ
modes. We perceive an item of information; as we incorporate it,
we apprehend that part of it which seems worth appropriating;
by digesting it we try to comprehend it in our own way, assimilat¬
ing it to other items of information; we retain parts of it and elimi¬
nate others; and we transmit it to another person in whom the ap¬
propriate digestion or insemination repeats itself. And just as the
modes of adult genitality may bear the more or less distorting im¬
print of early organ-mode experiences, so a man’s intellectuality
may be—^for better or worse—diaracterized by the under- or
overdevelopment of one or the other of die basic modes. Some
grasp at knowledge as avidly as the cartoonist’s goat who was
asked whether she had eaten a good book lately; others take their
knowledge into a comer and chew on it as on a bone; again,
others transform themselves into storehouses of information with

•For revisions and clarifications of the Study of the Child, Vols. I-IV, Inter-
psychoanalytic theory of instincts sec national Universities Press, New York,
the work of H. Hartman, E. Kris, and 1945-49).

R. Locwcnstcin {The Frycboofudytic

91 Chfldhood and Society

no hope of ever digesting it all; some prefer to exude and spread
information which is neither digested nor digestible; and intellec¬
tual rapists insist on making their points by piercing the defenses
of unrecepdve listeners.

But these are caricatures, illustrating merely diat not only
genital intercourse but also every other kind of intercourse de¬
velops on a proper (or improper) ratio of the organ modes of pre-
genitality, and that every form of intercourse can be character¬
ized by a relative mutuality of modes of approach or by one-sided
forms of aggression. To establish a partit^ar ratio, the societal
process requisitions early sexual energy as well as early modes of
approach. It completes by traditional child training the fragmen¬
tary drives with which the human child is bom. In other words,
where instina fragments in the young non-human mammal are
assembled (relatively) more completely in a (relatively) shorter
time by the instinctive care afforded by the parent animals, the
human child’s much more fragmentary patterns depend on the
process of tradition which guides and gives meaning to parental
responses. The outcome of this more variable completion of
drive patterns by tradition—glorious as it is in its co-operative
achievements and in its inventive specializations and refinements
—forever ties the individual to the traditions and to the institu¬
tions of his childhood milieu, and exposes it to the—not always
logical and just—autocracy of his inner governor, his conscience.

PART TWO

Childliood in Two American
Indian Tribes

Introduction to Part Two

In now turning from children and padents to Indians, we follow
a traditional course of modem inquiry which seeks, in fields pe¬
ripheral to our complicated adult world, some simplified demon¬
stration of the laws man lives by. The study of the stereotypy of
mental dysfunction is one such field: crystals, Freud said, disclose
their invisible structure when and where they are broken. In the
field of cliildhood we seek to find regularities through the study
of the step-by-step development of something out of nothing, or
at least of something more complex out of something more simple.
Finally we turn to cultural primitiveness as the apparent infancy
of humanity where people seem, to us, to be at one moment as
naive as children, at another as possessed as lunatics. Compara¬
tive research in these three fields has demonstrated many arresting
analogies. But the consequent attempt at exploiting a seeming
parallelism between the total human conditions of being a savage
and those of being a child or a symptom-ridden adult has proved
to be misleading. We know now that primitives have their own
adult normality, that they have their own brands of neurosis and
psychosis and, most important, that they too have their own
varieties of childhood.

Up to recent decades child training has been an anthropological
no man’s land. Even anthropologists living for years among ab¬
original tribes failed to sec that these tribes trained their children
in some systematic way. Rather, the experts tacitly assumed with

95

96 Childhood and Society

the general public that savages had no child training at all and
that primitives grew up “like hctle animals”—an idea which in the
overtrained members of our culture arouses either angry con¬
tempt or romantic elation.

The discovery of primitive child-training systems makes it clear
that primitive societies are neither infantile stages of mankind nor
arrested deviations from the proud progressive norms which we
represent: they are a complete form of mature human living, often
of a homogeneity and simple integrity which we at times might
well envy. Let us rediscover the characteristics of some of these
forms of living by studying specimens taken from American In¬
dian life.

The people collectively called American Indians constitute to¬
day a very diverse American minority. As stable societies they
are extinct. True, remnants of their tuneless cultxires can be
found: in ancient relics, high up on mesas only a few miles off our
busy highways, and in a few immensely dignified but culturally
mummified individuals. Even where isolated ancient Indian ways
arc tolerantly encouraged by government agencies, or exploited
by commerce for the sake of the tourist trade, these ways arc no
longer a part of a self-supporting societal existence.

One may ask, then, why I prefer to use American Indian tribes
as an illustration for what I have to say: why not use material col¬
lected by another worker in areas which are still truly primitive?
My answer is: Because this book deals not only with facts but also
with the subjective or, if you wish, clinical experience of search¬
ing out these facts; and I owe two of my most instructive experi¬
ences to anthropologists who suggested that I come with them
and see their favorite tribes among the American Indians. It was
the late H. Scudder Mekeel who introduced me to the field by
taking me to a Sioux Indian reservation in South Dakota; and it
was Alfred Kroeber who subsequently helped me to make the
image of the Sioux (all too easily considered “the” Indian) soundly
comparative. He took me to his Yurok, a fishing and acom-
gathering tribe on the Pacific coast.

This exposure to anthropology—^and it was not more than t

Introduction to Part Two

97

time-exposure—became rewarding for the following reasons.
My guides had put personal notes and other material at my dis¬
posal before we left for our trips. The tribes in question having
been their first and their lasting loves in field work, the two men
could by way of personal communication articulate spontaneously
much more than had been ready for professional transmission or
publication at the time of their original studies.^ They had their
trusted and trusting informants among the oldest members of the
tribe, who alone would remember the folkways of ancient child
training. Above all, both men had had some psychoanalytic train¬
ing which they were eager to integrate with their anthropological
work. If 1 , in a measure, served as an integrator, it was because as
a psychoanalyst of children I was close to formulating what has
been outlined in the preceding chapter. Feeling that together we
might be able to formulate a few pertinent points in the recent
history of the American aboriginals, each of these men took me to
his favorite and best-trained informants in the field and urged
them to talk to me as they would have talked to him, had he
known earlier what to ask regarding a number of items signifi¬
cant for childhood and society.

^A. L. Kroebcr, ‘The Yurok,” in American Commumtj in the Light of
Handbook of the Indians of California^ Its Past, Dissenation for the degree of
Bureau of American Ethnology, Bui- Doctor of Philosophy, Yale Univer-
iecia 78,1925. H. S. Mekeel, A Modem sky, 193a.

CHAPTER

3

Hunters Across the Prairie

I. THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

At the time of our trip to South Dakota, Scudder MekccI was
field representative of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. Our
investigation had the immediate and most urgent purpose of try¬
ing to find out whence came the tragic apathy with which Sioux
Indian children quietly accepted and then quietly discarded many
of the values taught them in the immensely thoughtful and costly
experiment of federal Indian education. What was wrong with
these children was obvious enough: there were two rights for
them, one white and one Indian. But only by investigating this
discrepancy did we find the remnants of what was once right
for children on the prairie.

To be true to the clinical nature of our investigation, I must
introduce the material on ancient child training to be presented
here with a great deal of circumstantial description. In order to
arrive at a clearing where we may see the matter of infancy and
society in better light, I must take the reader through the thorny
underbrush of contemporary race relations.

The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation lies along the Nebraska
state line in the southwest comer of South Dakota. It shares the
fate of the rolling high plains:

The slow hot wind of summer and its withering
or »gam the crimp of the driving white blizzard

Hunters Across the Prairie

99

and neither of them to be stopped
neither saying anything else than:

“I’m not arguing. I’m telling you.” *■

Here 8,000 members of the Oglala subtribe of the Sioux, or Da¬
kota, live on land allotted to them by the government. When the
Indians settled on this reservation, they turned their political and
economic independence over to the United States government on
condition that the government keep all whites from hunting and
settling in their territory.

Only the most stubborn of romantics will expect to find on a
reservation of today anytliing resembling the image of the old
Dakotas who were once the embodiment of the “real Indian”—a
warring and hunting man, endowed with fortitude, cunning, and
cruelty. His image until recently adorned the American nickel,
a strange tribute to a strange relationship, for this defeated prede¬
cessor thus occupies a place reserved for monarchs and presidents.
But his historical reality stems from the far past.

Life was good on the high plains of the Dakotas before the white
man came. . . . Buffalo moved in dark masses on the grasslands; the
Black Hills and Rockies were populous with deer, beaver, bear and
other game. . . . Starvation was usually far from their tepees.*

Organized in a flexible system of “bands,” the Dakota once
followed the buffalo over the vast plains in long queues on horses
and with travois. Periodically they gathered in well-organized
camps of light tepees. Whatever they did together—camping, big
buffalo hunting, and dancing—^was strictly regulated. But con¬
stantly small groups, colorful and noisy, followed the impulse to
radiate from the main body, to hunt small game, to steal horses,
and to surprise enemies. The cruelty of the Sioux was proverbial
among the early settlers. It extended unsparingly to themselves
when in solitary self-torture they sought a guiding vision from
the Great Spirit.

But this once proud people has been beset by an apocalyptic

^Ctrl Sandburg, The People, Yes, Har- *P. 1 . WclImaiL, Death on the Prairie^
court Brace, New York, 1936, Macmillan, New York, 1934.

lOO

Childhood and Society

sequence of catastrophes, as if nature and history had united for a
total war on their too manly offspring. It must be remembered
that it had been only a few centuries before the whites settled
among them that the Sioux had come to the high plains from the
upper Missouri and Mississippi and had organized their lives
aroimd the hunt of the buffalo. The relative youth of this adjust¬
ment may well be the explanation of the fact that, as Wissler put
it, “When the buffalo died, the Sioux died, ethnically and spiritu¬
ally. The buffalo’s body had provided not only food and material
for clothing, covering and shelter, but such utilities as bags and
boats, strings for bows and for sewing, cups and spoons. Medicine
and ornaments were made of buffalo parts; his droppings, sun-
dried, served as fuel in winter. Societies and seasons, ceremonies
and dances, mythology and children’s play extolled his name and
image,” •

First, then, the buffalo vanished. The whites, eager for trade
routes to the greener pastures of the West, upset the hunting
grounds and playfully, stupidly, slaughtered buffalo by the
hundred thousands. In search for gold they stampeded into the
Black Hills, the Sioux’ holy moimtains, game reservoir, and
winter refuge. The Sioux tried to discuss this violation of their
early treaties with United States generals, warrior to warrior, but
found that the frontier knew neither federal nor Indian law.

The ensuing wild and sporadic warfare did not come to a defi¬
nite end until 1890, when the Seventh Cavalry revenged the death
—many years earlier—of their highly exhibitionistic comrade.
General Custer. In the massacre at Wounded Knee, hundreds of
Sioux, oumumbered four to one, were killed by well-armed sol¬
diers, although the majority had already surrendered. “The bodies
of some of the women and children were found two or three miles
away where they had been pursued and killed.” * Postcards pic¬
turing these bodies could still be bought in 1937 in Pine Ridge’s
only drugstore and soda fountain.

During this historical period of a search for a new economy,

•C Wjsslcr, •Depression uid Revolt,* ^Wellman, op. ck.

Natural History, 1938, VoL 41, Na x.

Hunters Across the Prairie

lOl

the Sioux encountered in successive waves many kinds of new
Americans who typified the white man’s restless search for space,
power, and new ethnic identity. The roaming trappers and fur
traders seemed acceptable enough to the nomadic Sioux. They
shared the Indians’ determination to keep the game intact; they
brought knives and guns, beads and kettles; and they married
Indian women and became devoted to them. Some American
generals too, were entirely acceptable, and in fact were almost
deified for the very reason that they had fought well. Even th«
Negro cavalry fitted into Sioux values, because of their impres¬
sive charges on horseback, they were given the precious name of
“Black Buffaloes.” Neither did the consecrated belief in man
demonstrated by the Quakers and early missionaries fail to im¬
press the dignified and religious leaders of the Sioux. But as they
looked for fitting images to connect the past with the future, the
Sioux found least acceptable the class of white man who was
destined to teach them the blessings of civilization—namely, the
government employee.

ITie young and seething American democracy lost the peace
with the Indian when it failed to arrive at a clear design of either
conquering or colonizing, converting or liberating, and instead
left the making of history to an arbitrary succession of representa¬
tives who had one or another of these objectives in mind—thus
demonstrating an inconsistency which the Indians interpreted as
insecurity and bad conscience. Red tape is no substitute for policy;
and nowhere is the discrepancy between democratic ideology and
practice more obvious than in the hierarchy of a centralized
bureaucracy. For this the older Indian who had been reared in the
spirit of a hunter democracy, leveling every potential dictator
and every potential capitalist, had a good, not to say malicious,
eye. It is hard to imagine the exposed and yet responsible role in
which the agents of the government found themselves in the early
days. Yet some managed well by sheer humanity.

But then followed the guerrilla war over the children which
makes the beginning of federal education, as remembered by the
older Sioux, anything but appealing. In some places “children

102

Childhood and Society

were virtually kidnaped to force them into government schools,
their hair was cut and their Indian clothes thrown away. They
were forbidden to speak in their own language. Life in the school
was under military ^cipline and rules were enforced by corporal
punishment. Those who persisted in clinging to their old ways
and those who ran away and were recaptured were thrown into
jail. Parents who objected were also jailed. Where possible, chil¬
dren were kept in school year after year to avoid the influence of
their families.” ‘ This general attitude was not completely aban¬
doned until 192a

During ail this time, only one white type stirred the Indian’s
imagination to the point of influencing his dress, his bearing, his
customs, and his children’s play: the cowboy. From 1900 to 1917,
the Sioux made a determined attempt to develop and to enjoy a
cattle economy. But Washington, aware of the higher power
both of the erosion of the soil and of Midwestern cattle interests,
was forced to decree that the Sioux could not be cowboys on the
land allotted to them. The loss of their herds, which had rapidly
increased, and the later land boom which made petty capitalist
spendthrifts out of the unprepared Sioux, were modem catastro¬
phes which, psychologically, equaled the loss of the buffalo. No
wonder, then, that some missionaries convinced the aquiline¬
nosed Sioux that they were the lost tribe of Israel—and under
God’s lasting curse.

There followed the most recent period, when the Sioux were
supposed to turn into farmers on allotted land which was al¬
ready eroded and just about to become subject to the great
drought. Even today only a fraction of this land is suitable for
wheat, com, and grain crops.

It is understandable, then, that the Sioux have consistently
and fruitlessly blamed the United States government for the
breaches of promise and for the administrative mistakes of for¬
mer regimes. As for the whites, instances of error and faithlessness
have never been denied even by those who unwittingly or help-

•G. MacGregor, Warriort without Weapons, University of Chicago Piesi, 1946.

Hunters Across die Prairie 103

Icssly perpetrated them. There are accounts of American generals
reporting to the government and of Indian commissioners report¬
ing to Congress wliich speak of the deep shame felt by these men
as they listened to the dignified reproaches of the old Indians. In
fact, the conscience of the American people was at times so readily
awakened that sentimentalists and politicians could exploit it for
purposes entirely detrimental to a realistic approach to Indian
problems.

The government has withdrawn the soldier and has created an
imposing and humane organization for the American Indian. The
administrator has been superseded by the teacher, the physician,
and the social anthropologist. But the years of disappointment
and dependence have left the Plains Indians unable to trust where
they can hardly afford to distrust. Where once the Indian was a
man wronged, he is now comparable to what in psychiatry is
called a “compensation neurotic”; he receives all hjs sense of
security and identity out of the status of one to whom something
is owed. Yet it must be suspected that even if the millions of
buffaloes and the gold taken from the Black Hills could be re¬
turned, the Sioux would not be able to forget the habits of de¬
pendence or manage to create a community adapted to the
present-day world, which, after aU, dictates to the conquerors as
well as to the conquered.

No wonder, then, that the visitor on the reservation after a
short while feels as if he were a part of a slow-motion picture, as
if a historical burden arrested the life around him. True, the town
of Pine Ridge looks much like a rural county seat anywhere in a
poorer section of the Middle West. The government buildings
and schools are clean, roomy, and weU appointed. The teachers
and employees, Indian and white, are well shaven and friendly.
But the longer one stays on the reservation, the wider one roams
and the closer one looks, the more it becomes apparent that the
Indians themselves own little and maintain it badly. Seemingly
calm, usually friendly, but generally slow and apathetic, the In¬
dians show surprising signs of undernourishment and disease.
Only at an occasional ritual dance and at the drunken brawls in

104 Childhood and Society

bootleg cafes off the reservation can some of the immense energy
be seen which is smoldering beneath the idle surface. At the time
of our visit to Pine Ridge, the Indian problem seemed to be caught
somewhere between the majestic turn of the wet and dry cycles,
the divine wastefulness of the democratic process and the cheer¬
ful ruthlessness of the free-enterprise system: and we know that
for those who are caught unprepared in these wheels, the mills of
proletarization grind fast and fine. Here the Indian problem loses
its ancient patina and joins the problems of colored minorities,
rural and urban, which are waiting for busy democratic processes
to find time for them.

a. JIM

One day at the trader’s, Mekcel and I had met Jim, a lean and
sincere young Sioux, obviously one of the more assimilated high
school graduates and therefore, as we had learned to expect,
troubled in mind. Jim had left the reservation years before to
marry a girl belonging to another closely related Plains Indian
tribe and to live among her people. After a conversation during
which it was explained to him what my vocation was, he said
that he was not satisfied with the way things were going with
the education of his children, and that he wished we had come to
his reservation instead of to Pine Ridge so that his wife and he
could talk things over with me. We promised to make an early
excursion to his town.

When we neared the simple, clean homestead, the little sons
were playing the small Indian boy’s favorite game, roping a tree
stump, while a little girl was lazily sitting on her father’s knees,
playing with his patient hands. Jim’s wife was working m the
house. We had brought some additional supplies, knowing that
with Indians nothing can be settled in a few hours; our conversa¬
tion would have to proceed in the slow, thoughtful, shy man¬
ner of the hosts. Jim’s wife had asked some women relatives to
attend our session. From time to time she went to the door to look
out over the prairie which rolled away on every side, merging in
the distance with the white processions of slow-moving clouds.

Hunters Across the Prairie 105

As we sat and said little, I had time to consider what Jim’s place
among the living generations of his people might be.

The few long-haired old men among the present inhabitants of
these reservations remember the days when their fathers were the
masters of the prairie who met the representatives of the United
States government as equals. Once the actual fighting had ceased,
these Indians had learned to know the older generation of Ameri¬
cans whose God was a not-too-distant relative of the Indian’s
Great Spirit and whose ideas of an aggressive but dignified and
charitable human life were not so very different from the brave
and generous characteristics of the Indian’s “good man.”

The second generation of Indians knew hunting and fur trad¬
ing only from hearsay. They had begun to consider a parasitic life
based on government rations their inalienable right by treaty, and
thus a “natural” way of life.

Jim obviously belonged to the third generation, who have had
the full benefit of government boarding-school education and
who believe that they, with their superior education, are better
equipped for dealing with the white man. They cannot point to
any basic accomplishment, however, beyond a certain superficial
adaptation, for the majority of them have as little concept of the
future as they are beginning to have of the past. TTiis youngest
generation, then, finds itself between the impressive dignity of its
grandparents, who honestly refuse to believe that the white man
is here to stay, and the white man himself, who feels that the In¬
dian persists in being a rather impractical relic of a dead past.

After a period of pensive waiting, Jim’s wife announced that
her women relatives were coming. It was some minutes before wc
also were able to see the two figures approaching in the distance.

When they finally arrived, there was a round of bashful, yet
amused, greetings, and we sat down in a circle under the shade of
pine boughs. By chance I was sitting on the highest fruit crate
(chairs are scarce on the prairie). Saying jokingly that it was un¬
comfortable to be elevated like a preacher, I turned the box so
that it would be lower. But it was weaker in this position and I
had to turn it back again. Jim then sUentiy turned his seat so that

io 6 Childhood and Society

he was sitting as high as I was. I remember this as but one incident
typical of a quiet tact which Indians arc apt to show.

While Jim looked plainly worried, his \i^e had the expression of
one who is preparing for a very serious conversation about which
she has already made op her mind.

Mekeel and I had decided that in our conversation we would not
aim directly at Jim’s domestic difficulties, whatever they might
be, but would ask the group for comments on what we had heard
at Pine Ridge about the various phases of child life on the Plains.
So we talked about the customs concerning childbirth and child
rearing, securing fragmentary accounts of what was once done
and of present changes. The women showed a humorous frank¬
ness throughout, though their bashful smiles indicated that they
would not have dared to bring up certain subjects in the presence
of men had Mekeel not been able to throw details into the conver¬
sation which surprised them and set their memories and critical
powers to work. They had obviously never thought that such de¬
tails could be of any interest to white people or had anything to
do with the world reflected in the English language.

Jim did not add much to this conversation, which lasted for
several hours. When the middle of the first decade of life was
being considered, the contrast between his grim silence and the
women’s amused acceptance of the various ways in which chil¬
dren anticipate the activities of adulthood became more marked.

Finally it was time for lunch, and the women went into the
house to prepare it. It was now Jim’s turn, and he went right to his
problem. His children used sexual words in their play, and he
could not tolerate it. His wife laughed about them and at him,
claiming that all children use these words and that it did not
make any difference. He was sensitive to the white men’s insinua¬
tions that Indians were obscene and had undesirable sexual habits.
We agreed that white men did secretly accuse Indians of being
sexually indulgent, but then all peoples do accuse their neighbors
of the perversions which they themselves are most ashamed of;
in fact, they like to give foreign names to their own perversions.
But Jim did not wish to make this matter relative. He held that in

Hunters Across the Prairie 107

reality the Sioux were “strong” men who mastered their sexual
urges and did not allow their children to use obscene language;
and that there was no reason why his children should do what
Sioux children were not allowed to do. He thus demonstrated that
he had always held with the belief that the Sioux were essentially
“stronger” than his wife’s very closely related tribe and that,
in fact, he held against his wife’s tribe the identical prejudices
which the whites held against his tribe, the Sioux. Such reflection
of the prejudices of the dominant group in the mutual discrimina¬
tion of subgroups is, of course, universal. Thus it happens that
Sioux with considerable admixture of white blood call their full-
blooded fellows “niggers” and are, in turn, called “white trash.”

As patients do in therapeutic interviews, Jim then contradicted
himself so openly that it amounted to a confession. He related
that on his last visit to his childhood home in Pine Ridge, he had
been disturbed by the language which his relatives’ children were
using. Such a state of affairs could not have existed when he was
a child, he said. We asked him who would have been the person
to suppress it. “My father,” he answered.

Further questioning revealed that Jim’s father had spent most
of his childhood in foreign countries. As Jim enlarged on this it
became more and more obvious that foreign conditioning had
induced his father, after returning to his own people, to hold up
standards for his children which were different from those of the
other Sioux children. In so doing he had buflt a wall between his
children and those of his tribesmen: the wall which now isolated
Jim from his children—and from himself. Unhappy as he had
become in consequence of this inner blocking, Jim found himself
helplessly creating conflicts in his own family by insisting that his
warm-hearted wife interfere, by the use of outright parental pro¬
hibition, with habits which the Sioux as well as her own tribe let
pass as a matter to be taken care of eventually by shaming or, if
necessary, by the grandparents’ calm admonishment.

We tried to explain to Jim the power of ambivalence conflicts.
He must have secretly rebelled against his father’s wish to es¬
trange him from his playmates. He had suppressed open rebellion

io8 CMdhood and Society

wily at the price of doing to his children now what his father had
done to him. But because he had never really made his father’s
foreign cause his own, his actions only caused anger in his wife,
vexation in his children, and paralyzing doubt in hhnself.

He thought about this for a few minutes and then said, “I guess
you have told me something”—high and wordy praise from an
Indian. Lunch was prepared. The rebellious wife and her women
auxiliaries waited ceremoniously outside the door until the master
of the house and his guests had finished.

Such, then, were the intimate conversations with heavy-
hearted Indians in their homes on the high prairie. These conver¬
sations were one of the main sources of our material concerning
Sioux childhood as it once was. It is obvious that in this field there
are no facts free of the most far-reaching connotation. Jim’s
desperate attempt at regaining a sense of rightness by means in¬
imical to himself and those close to him may give us a first glimpse
into a strange mechanism—namely, the compulsive identification
of the man whose tribal integrity has been destroyed, with the
very destroyer himself. People’s feelings have, it seems, always
been aware of what we have learned to conceptualize only re¬
cently—that small differences in child training are of lasting and
almost fatal significance in differentiating a people’s image of
the world, their sense of decency, and their sense of identity.

j, AN INTERRACIAL SEMINAR

Our second major source of material was a small seminar in
which Mekeel and I were joined by educators and social workers
of both white and Indian origin, and in which we discussed the
various opinions voiced by the teachers in the Indian Service. Here
it was necessary to realize first the fact that the same childhood
data which in neurotic conflicts are subject to repression and fal¬
sification, in biracial dispute underlie a nearly impenetrable mu¬
tual defensiveness. Every group, of whatever nature, seems to
demand sacrifices of its children which they later can bear only
in the firm belief or in the determined pretense that they were
based on unquestionable absolutes of conduct: to question one of

Hunters Across the Prairie 109

diese implicit absolutes means to endanger alL Thus it comes
about that peaceful neighbors, in the defense of some little item
of child training, will rear up on their hind legs like angry bears
who have come to believe that their cubs are in mortal danger.

On the surface, the complaints brought to our seminar had a
professional and reasonable ring. Truancy was the most outstand¬
ing complaint: when in doubt Indian children simply ran home.
The second complaint was stealing, or at any rate gross disregard
of property rights as we understand them. This was followed by
apathy, which included everything from lack of ambition and in¬
terest to a kind of bland passive resistance in the face of a question
or of a request. Finally, there was too much sexual activity, a
term used for a variety of suggestive situations ranging from ex¬
cursions into the dark after dances to the mere huddling together
of homesick girls in boarding-school beds.

The least frequent complaint was impertinence, and yet one
felt that the very absence of overt resistance was feared by the
teachers as if it were the Indians’ secret weapon. The discussion
was pervaded by the mystified complaint that no matter what you
do to these children, they do not talk back. They are stoical and
non-committal. They make yon feel that maybe they understand,
until they suddenly prove to have acted otherwise. You “cannot
get at them.”

The deep and often unconscious fury which this fact had
graduaUy aroused in the most well-meaning and best-disciplined
educators really came to expression only in “personal” opinions
which teachers here and there added to their official opinions.
One time-bitten old educator’s ire was aroused by the quiet
reference made by some teachers of Indian origin to the Indians’
love of children- He exclaimed that Indians did not know what it
meant to love a child. Challenged, he based his opinion on the ob¬
servation of the simple fact that Indian parents who had not seen
their children for as long as three years neither kissed them nor
cried when they finally came to call for them. He was unable to
accept the suggestion, corroborated by the oldest observers, that
such reserve governed, from the earliest times, the meeting be-

I lO

Childhood and Society-

tween Indian relatives, especially in the presence of non-relatives.
For him such book knowledge was contradicted by two decades
of personal and indignant observation. Indian parents, he insisted,
felt less for their children than animals do for their young.

Granted that cultural disintegration and inability to care for
children economically or spiritually may bring with it apathy in
personal relations, it was, of course, appalling to be confronted
with such a radical misunderstanding which could by no means
be considered a relic of a less understanding period. Colonel
Wheeler, who knew the Sioux as conqueror, not as educator,
did “not believe that any race of people exists on earth who
are more fond of their families than are the American Indians.”
Who was right? Had the conquering general turned too senti¬
mental or the worn-out educator too cynical?

We discussed a number of opinions which had been thus volun¬
teered. “Enuresis is really the worst difficulty,” a male teacher,
part Indian, said, adding, “but we Indians could not discuss en¬
uresis in a group including women.” He felt that the lack of
proper toilet training was the cause of most of the trouble in Indian
education. A white employee volunteered to point to another
problem as being “really the worst.” Quoting confidential remarks
of medical authorities in the Indian Service, he said, “Indian
parents not only let their children masturbate, they teach them to
masturbate.” He thought this was the cause of all trouble, but was
unwilling to discuss the subject in the presence of Indians. As far as
facts could be determined, neither enuresis nor masturbation was
more frequent in Indian schools than in boarding schools or foster
homes anywhere. Masturbation was, actually, a mere assumption,
nobody having remembered seeing any but small children touch
themselves. It was interesting, then, to note that the “real,” the
most indignant, and the most unofficial complaints concerned
areas of early conditioning discussed in the section on pregeni-
tality.

Tlie whites, activists in educational matters, proved to consider
every omission in child training, such as the complete lack of at¬
tention paid by Indian parents to anal, urethral, and genital mat-

Hunters Across the Prairie

III

ters in small children, a most flagrant commission with most
definite malicious intent. The Indians, on the other hand, being
permissive toward smaller children and only verbally cruel to¬
ward older ones, considered the white man’s active approach to
matters of child care a destructive and most deliberate attempt to
discourage children. Whites, they thought, want to estrange their
children from this world so as to make them pass through to the
next world with the utmost dispatch. “They teach their children
to cry!” was the indignant remark of an Indian woman when
confronted with the sanitary separation of mother and child in
the government hospital, and especially with the edict of govern¬
ment mu^es and doctors that it was good for babies to cry until
blue in the face. Older Indian women expecting the birth of a
grandchild would quietly wail hke the Jews before their sacred
Wall, becrying the destruction of their nation. But even educated
Indians could not suppress the feeling that all the expensive care
given their children was essentially a diabolic system of national
castration. Beyond that there was on the Indian side the strange
assumption that the whites wanted to destroy their own chDdren
too. Since the earliest contacts between the two races the Indians
have considered most repugnant the white habit of slapping or
beating children into compliance. Indians would only scare the
child by saying the owl might come and get him—or the white
man. What conflicts they were thus causing and perpetuating in
their children, the Indians, in turn, could not see.

The unofficial complaints, then, assume (with our most ad¬
vanced theoretical assumptions) that even seemingly arbitrary
items of child training have a definite function, although in secret
complaints this insight is used for the most part as a vehicle of
mutual prejudice and as a cover-up for individual motivations
and unconscious intentions. Here is truly a field for “group
therapy” of a kind which would not aim at psychiatric improve¬
ment for the individual participant but at an improvement of the
cultural relations of those assembled.

Of items significant in cultural prejudice, I shall briefly illustrate
three: respect for property, cleanliness, efficiency.

II2

Chfldhood and Society

One day a schoolteacher brought with him a fist of his pupils.
There was nothing very remarkable about any of these children
except, perhaps, the poetic flavor of their names (equivalents:
Star-Ojmes-Out, Chase-in-the-Morning, Afraid-of-Horses).
They were all well-behaved, yielding to the white teacher that
which is the teacher’s and to the Indian home that which belongs
to the home. “They have two sets of truths,” the teacher ex¬
plained, putting it more politely than did some of his colleagues,
who are convinced that Indians are “bom liars.” He was satisfied,
on the whole, with their scholastic achievements. The only prob¬
lem he wished to discuss was one presented by a certain little boy
who lived a relatively isolated existence among the other children
as if he were, somehow, an outcast.

We inquired into the status of the boy’s family among the In¬
dians and the whites. Both groups characterized the father of
the boy with the same three fateful words, “He has money.” The
father’s regular visits to the bank in the nearest town gave him, it
appeared, that “foreign smell” which an ant acquires when cross¬
ing over the territory of another “tribe,” so that it is killed on
return. Here the traitor apparently becomes dead socially, after he
and his family, once and for all, have acquired the evil identity of
“he-who-keeps-his-moncy-to-himself.” This offends one of the
oldest principles of Sioux economy—generosity.

The idea of storage over a prolonged period of time is foreign. If a
man has enough to keep starvation at least around the comer, has
sufficient time for meditation, and something to give away now and
then, he is relatively content. . . . When a man’s food is low, or all
gone, he may hitch up his team and take his family for a visit. Food
is shared equally until none is left. The most despised man is he who is
rich but does not give out his riches to those about him. He it is who
is really “poor.” •

In the Sioux system, the crowning expression of the prin¬
ciple of leveling wealth was the “give-away,” the ofiFering of all

•H. S. Meked, The Economy of t Nos. 1-7, Yale University Press, New
Modem Teton-Dakota Community, Haven, 1936.

Yale Publications in Anthropology,

Hunters Across the Prairie 113

the host’s possessions to his guests at a feast in honor of a friend
or relative. To perceive by contrast the ideal antithesis to the
evil image of the miser, one must sec, even today, an Indian child
on some ceremonial occasion give away what meager pennies or
possessions his parents have saved for just such an occasion. He
radiates what we shall later formulate as a sense of ideal identity:
“TTic way you see me now is the way I really am, and it is the way
of my forefathers.”

The economic principle of the give-away and the high prestige
of generosity was, of course, once allied with necessity. Nomads
need a safe minimum of household property which they can
carry with them. People who live by hunting depend on the
generosity of the luckiest and most able hunters. But necessities
change more rapidly than true virtues, and it is one of the most
paradoxical problems of human evolution that virtues which were
originally designed to safeguard an individual’s or a group’s self-
preservation become rigid under the pressure of anachronistic
fears of extinction and thus can render a people unable to adapt to
changed necessities. In fact, such relics of old virtues become
stubborn and yet elusive obstacles to re-education. For, once de¬
prived of their over-all economic meaning and universal observ¬
ance, they fall apart. They combine with other character traits, of
wliich some individuals have more, others less, and fuse with sur¬
rounding group traits, such as poor-white prodigality and care¬
lessness. In the end the administrator and teacher cannot possibly
know when they are dealing with an old virtue, when with a new
vice. Take the relief checks and the supplies of food and ma¬
chinery due individual families on the basis of old treaties and
officially distributed according to need and desert: one could al¬
ways Imow when a man had received such “gifts,” for all over
the prairie little wagons would bring his temporarily less lucky
relatives toward their rightful participation in a feast of primitive
communism. Thus, after all the decades of educational efforts
toward Indian participation in our monetary civilization, the
ancient attitudes prevaiL

The first insight which emerged from the discussion of these

114 Childhood and Society

items was that nothing is more fruitless in the relationships be¬
tween individuals or groups than to attempt to question the ideals
of the adversary by demonstrating that, according to the logic of
one’s own conscience, he is inconsistent in his preaching. For
every conscience, whether in an individual or a group, has
not only specific contents but also its own peculiar logic which
safeguards its coherence.

“They are without initiative,” the exasjierated white teachers
would say; and indeed the wish of an Indian boy to e.xcel and to
compete, while fully developed under certain circumstances, may
disappear completely under others. The members of a running
team, for example, may hesitate at the start of a race. “Why
should we run?” they say. “It is already certain who is going to
win.” In the back of their minds there may be the reflection that
he who wins will not have too good a time afterwards. For the
story of the little Boy-Whose-Father-Has-Money has its paral¬
lels in the fate of all those Indian boys and girls who show signs of
actually accepting the demands of their educators and of finding
delight and satisfaction in excelling in school activities. They are
drawn back to the average level by the intangible ridicule of the
other children.

Mekeel illustrated the Indian girl’s special problems by point¬
ing to a particularly tragic detail. The first impression the little
Indian girl must get on entering a white school is that she is
“dirty.” Some teachers confess that they cannot possibly hide
their disgust at the Indian child’s home smell. The movable tepee,
of course, was freer of accumulated smell than the frame houses
are now. During school time the child is taught cleanliness, per¬
sonal hygiene, and the standardized vanity of cosmetics. WTiile
having by no means fully assimilated other aspects of white female
freedom of motion and of ambition which are presented to her
with historically disastrous abruptness, the adolescent girl returns
home prettily dressed and clean. But the day soon comes when
she is called a “dirty girl” by mothers and grandmothers. For a
clean girl in the Indian sense is one who has learned to practice

Hunters Across the Prairie

”5

certain avoidances during menstruation; for example, she is not
supposed to handle certain foods, which arc said to spoil under
her touch. Most girls are unable to accept again the status of a
leper while menstruating. Yet they are by no means comfortably
emancipated. They are almost never given the opportunity, nor
are they indeed prepared or willing, to live the life of an Amer¬
ican woman; but they are only rarely able to be happy again in
the spatial restrictions, the unliygienic intimacies, and the poverty
of their surroundings.

Ideologies cannot be weakened by the evidence of discrepancies
nor reconciled by arguments. In spite of the ideological chasm
demonstrated in these examples, many Indian parents were re¬
ported to make honest and successful attempts to induce obedience
to the white teacher in their children. However, the children
seemed to accept this pressure as a form of compliance not backed
up by a sense of deeper obligation. They often responded to it with
unbelievable stoicism. This, it seemed to us, was the most astonish¬
ing single fact to be investigated: that Indian children could live
for years without open rebellion or any signs of inner conflict be¬
tween two standards which were incomparably further apart
than arc those of any two generations or two classes in our cul¬
ture. We found among the Sioux little evidence of individual con¬
flicts, inner tensions, or of what we call neuroses—anything which
would have permitted us to apply our knowledge of mental hy¬
giene, such as it was, to a solution of the Indian problem. What wc
found was cultural pathology, sometimes in the form of alcoholic
delinquency or of mild thievery, but for the most part in the form
of a general apathy and an intangible passive resistance against
any further and more final impact of white standards on the In¬
dian conscience. Only in a few “white man’s Indians,” usually suc¬
cessfully employed by the government, did wc find neurotic
tension, expressed in compulsions, overconscientiousness, and
general rigidity. The average Indian child, however, did not seem
to have what wc call a “bad conscience” when, in passive defiance
of the white teacher, he retreated into himself; nor was he met by

ii6 Childhood and Society

unsympathetic relatives when he chose to become truant. On the
whole, then, no true iimer conflict reflected the conflict of the two
worlds in both of which the individual child existed.

But the tonus and tempo of life seemed to recover some of its
old vitality only in those rare but vivid moments when his elders
extolled the old life; when the larger family or the remnant of the
old band |)acked their horse carts and converged somewhere on
the prairie for a ceremony or a festival to exchange gifts and
memories, to gossip and to calumniate, to joke and—now on
rarer occasions—^to dance the old dances. For it was then that his
parents and especially his grandparents came closest to a sense of
identity which again connected them with the boundless past
wherein there had been no one but the Indian, the game, and the
enemy. The space in which the Indian could feel at home was still
without borders and allowed for voluntary gatherings and, at the
same time, for sudden expansion and dispersion. He had been glad
to accept centrifugal items of white culture such as the horse
and the gun and, later, motor cars and the dream of trailers.
Otherwise there could be only passive resistance to the senseless
present and dreams of restoration: when the future would lead
back into the past, time would again become ahistoric, space un¬
limited, activity boundlessly centrifugal, and the buffalo supply
inexhaustible. The Sioux tribe as a whole is still waiting for the
Supreme G)urt to give the Black Hills back to them and to re¬
store the lost buffalo.

Their federal educators, on the other hand, continued to
preach a life plan with centripetal and localized goals: homestead,
fireplace, bank account—all of which receive their meaning from
a space-time in which the past is overcome and in which the full
measure of fulfillment in the present is sacrificed to an ever higher
standard of living in the ever distant future. The road to this fu¬
ture is not outer restoration but inner reform and economic
“betterment.”

Thus we learned that geographic-historic perspectives and
economic goals and means contain all that a group has learned
from its history, and therefore characterize concepts of reality

Hunters Across the Prairie 117

and ideals of conduct which cannot be questioned or partially ex¬
changed without a threat to existence itself. Items of child train¬
ing, as we shall now demonstrate, are part and parcel of such
concepts of reality. They persist when possible in their original
form, but if necessary in distorted facsimiles as stubborn indica¬
tions that the new way of life imposed by the conquerors has
not yet been able to awaken images of a new cultural identity.

4. SIOUX CHILD TRAINING

A. GETTING AND TAKING

The Dakota women who gave us information on the old
methods of child training were at first reticent. To begin with,
they were Indians. Then also, Mekeel, whom they had known
as anthropologist and friend, was now a government man. And
then, it was not quite decent to talk to men about things con¬
cerning the human body. Especially the subject of the unavoid¬
able beginning, namely pregnancy, always caused some giggling.
Although vomiting and other physiological disorders of preg¬
nancy are said to be a rare occurrence among them, Indian
women seem conscious of a radical change of character during
this time which in retrospect appears embarrassing. It is said that
only when pregnant do the usually gentle Indian women abuse
their husbands and even, upon occasion, strike their children.
Thus different cultural systems have different outlets for the
expression of the deep ambivalence which pervades the woman
who, much as she may have welcomed the first signs of preg¬
nancy and much as she may be looking forward to the completed
baby, finds herself inhabited for nine long months by a small
and unknown, but utterly dictatorial, being.

Customs in regard to delivery have, of course, changed com¬
pletely. White women usually speak with scorn about the “un¬
hygienic” custom of the older Indian woman, who made her¬
self a bed of sand in or near her home on which she lay or knelt
to have her baby, pressing her feet against two pegs driven into
the ground and graspbg two other pegs with her hands. How¬
ever, this bed, called “a pile of dirt” by the whites, seems to

ii8 Childhood and Society

have been an important feature of the specific Plains hygiene
system, according to which every bodily waste is given over to
sand, wind, and sun. The manifestations of this system must have
puzzled white people: menstrual pads and even placentas were
hung in trees; the bodies of the dead were placed on high scaf¬
folds; and defecation took place in specified dry places. On the
other hand, it is hard for the Indians to see the hygienic superi¬
ority of the outhouse, which, though admittedly more modest,
prevents sun and wind, but not flies, from reaching the bodily
waste.

White and Indian women regularly remark that “no moan-
ing or groaning” was heard from Indian women of the older
generation during childbirth. There are stories which tell of
Indian women who followed their people a few hours after be¬
ing left behind to give birth to a baby. It seems that the old
wandering life, which necessitated adapting to the change of
seasons and to the sudden movement of buffalo and enemy, often
left little or no time for aftercare and recuperation. Older
women see in the changes which modem hygiene and hospitals
are bringing about in the younger generation’s custom of child¬
bearing not only a danger to the tradition of fortitude, but also
an injustice to the baby, who thus learns to cry “like a white
baby.”

The colostrum (the first watery secretion from the milk
glands) was generally considered to be poison for the baby;
thus the breast was not offered to him until there seemed to be
a good stream of perfect milk. The Indian women maintained
that it was not right to let a baby do all the initial work only to
be rewarded witli a thin, watery substance. The implication was
clean how could he trust a world which greeted him thus? In¬
stead, as a welcome from the whole community, the baby’s first
meal was prepared by relatives and friends. They gathered the
best berries and herbs the prairie affords and put their juice into
a buffalo bladder, which was fashioned to serve as a breastfike
nursing bottle. A woman who was considered by all to be a “good
woman” stimulated the baby’s mouth with her finger and then

Hunters Across the Prairie

119

fed him the juice. In the meantime, the watery milk was sucked
out of the breast and the breast stimulated to do efficient work
by certain older women who had been commanded in their
dreams to perform this office.

Once the Indian baby began to enjoy the mother’s breast he
was nursed whenever he whimpered, day or night, and he also
was allowed to play freely with the breast. A small child was not
supposed to cry in helpless frustration, although later to cry in
rage could “make him strong.” It is generally assumed that In¬
dian mothers return to their old “spoiling” customs as soon as
they can be sure they will not be bothered by the health
authorities.

In the old order the baby’s nursing was so important that, in
principle at least, not even the father’s sexual privileges were al¬
lowed to interfere with the mother’s hbidinal concentration on
the nursing. A baby’s diarrhea was said to be the result of a
watery condition of the mother’s milk brought about by inter¬
course with the father. The husband was urged to keep away
from the wife for the nursing period, which, it is said, lasted
from three to five years.

It is said that the oldest boy was nursed longest and that the
average nursing period was three years. Today it is much shorter,
although instances of prolonged nursing persist, to the dismay
of those whose job it b to foster health and morals. One teacher
told us that an Indian mother quite recently had come to school
during recess to nurse her eight-year-old boy, who had a bad
cold. She nursed him with the same worried devotion with which
we ply our sniffling children with vitamins.

Among the old Sioux there was no systematic weaning at alL
Some mothers, of course, had to stop nursing for reasons be¬
yond their control. Otherwise the children weaned the mother
by gradually getting interested in other foods. Before finally
abandoning the breast altogether, however, the infant may have
fed himself for many months on other food, allowing time for his
mother to give birth to the next child and to restore her milk sup-

120

Childhood and Society

In this connection I remember an amusing scene. An Indian
child of about three was sitting on his mother’s lap eating dry
crackers. He frequently became thirsty. With a dictatorial ges¬
ture and an experienced motion he reached into his mother’s
blouse (which, as of old, had openings on the sides from the
armpits down), in an attempt to reach a breast. Because of our
presence she prevented him bashfully, but by no means indig¬
nantly, with the cautious movement of a big animal pushing aside
a little one. But he clearly indicated that he was in the habit of
getting a sip now and then while eating. The attitude of the
two was more telling than statistical data in indicating when
such little fellows, once they can pursue other adventures, defi¬
nitely stop reaching into their mother’s blouse—or, for that mat¬
ter, into the blouse of any woman who happens to have milk.
For such milk, where it exceeds the immediate needs of her suck¬
ling baby, is communal property.

This paradise of the practically unlimited privilege of the
mother’s breast also had a forbidden fruit. To be permitted to
suckle, the infant had to learn not to bite the breast. Sioux grand¬
mothers recount what trouble tliey had with their indulged
babies when they began to use nipples for the first vigorous
biting. They tell with amusement how they would “thump”
the baby’s head and how he would fly into a wild rage. It is at
this point that Sioux mothers used to say what our mothers say
so much earlier in their babies’ lives: let him cry, it will make
him strong. Good future hunters, especially, could be recognized
by the strength of their infantile fury.

The Sioux baby, when thus filled with rage, was strapped up
to his neck in the cradleboard. He could not express his rage by
the usual violent motion of the limbs. I do not mean to imply
that the cradleboard or tight swaddling clothes are cruel restric¬
tions. On the contrary, at first they are undoubtedly comforta¬
bly firm and womblike things to be wrapped and rocked in
and a handy bundle for the mother to carry around while work¬
ing. But I do wish to suggest that the particular construction of
the board, its customary placement in the household, and the

Hunters Across the Prairie

I2I

duration of its use, arc variable elements used by different
cultures as amplifiers of the basic experiences and the principal
traits which they develop in their young.

We have mentioned generosity as an outstanding virtue re¬
quired in Sioux life. It is not difficult to find its source. The com¬
panion virtue of generosity was fortitude, in Indians a quality
both more ferocious and more stoical than mere bravery. It
included an easily aroused quantity of quickly available hunt¬
ing and fighting spirit, the inclination to do sadistic harm to the
enemy, and the ability to stand extreme hardship and pain under
torture and self-torture.

A first impression, then, suggests that the cultural demand for
generosity received its early foundation from the privilege of
enjoying the nourishment and the reassurance emanating from
unlimited breast feeding; while the necessity of suppressing the
biting rage contributed to the tribe’s always ready ferocity in
that this rage was stored up, channelized, and diverted toward
prey and enemy.

We are not saying here that their treatment in babyhood
causes a group of adults to have certain traits—as if you turned
a few knobs in your child-training system and you fabricated this
or that kind of tribal or national character. In fact, we arc not
discussing traits in the sense of irreversible aspects of character.
We arc speaking of goals and values and of the energy put at
their disposal by child-training systems. Such values persist be¬
cause public opinion continues to consider them “natural” and
does not admit of alternatives. They persist because they have
become an essential part of an individual’s sense of identity, which
he must preserve as a core of sanity and efficiency. But values do
not persist unless they work, economically, psychologically,
and spiritually; and I argue that to this end they must continue
to be anchored, generation after generation, in early child train¬
ing; while child training, to remain consistent, must be embedded
in a system of continued economic and cultural synthesis. For
it is the synthesis operating within a culture which increasingly
tends to bring into close-knit thematic relationship and mutud

122 Childhood and Society

amplification such matters as climate and anatomy, economy
and psychology, society and child training.

How can we show tliis? Our proof must lie in the coherent
meaning which we may be able to give to seemingly irrational
data within one culture and to analogous problems in compa¬
rable cultures. We shall therefore, indicate in what way various
items of our material on Sioux culture seem to derive meaning
from our assumptions, and then proceed from this hunter tribe
to a comparison with a tribe of fishermen.

As we watched Sioux children sitting in the dark corners of
their tents, walking along the trails, or gathered in great num¬
bers around the Fourth of July dance, we noticed that they
often had their fingers in their moutlis. Constantly and every¬
where we saw children (and adults, usually women) playing
with their teetli, clicking or hitting something against them,
snapping chewing gum or indulging in some play which involves
teeth and finger nails on one or both hands. This seldom seemed
combined with thumb-sucking. The lips, even if both hands
were as far inside the mouth as is at all possible, did not partici¬
pate. Questioning brought the astonished answer: yes, of course,
they had always done this, didn’t everybody.? This phenomenon
was important to us, because we suspected these habits to be
the heir of the biting wishes which were so ruthlessly interrupted
in early childhood—just as we assume that the thumb-sucking
and other sucking habits in our children (and adults) compen¬
sate for sucking pleasures which have been frustrated or made
uncertain by inconsistent handling.

This led to an interesting further question: Why were women
more apt to display this habit than the equally frustrated men?
We found a twofold answer to this: women, in the olden days,
used and abused their teeth to chew leather and flatten the porcu¬
pine quills which they needed for their embroidery. They thus
could apply the teething urges to a toothy activity of high prac¬
ticality. And indeed, I saw a very aged woman sitting in her tent,
dreamily pulling a strip of moving picture film between hei
few remaining teeth, just as she may have flattened the porcu-

Hunters Across the Prairie

123

pine quills long ago. It seems then, that tooth habits persisted
in children and women because for them they were considered
“normal,” even when no longer specifically useful As for older
boys and men, we could at first only give the rather unspecific
answer that their original biting and grasping wishes were di¬
rected to other manifestations, which probably originally con¬
sisted in the pursuits of hunting, encircling, catching, killing,
and stealing, and in activities characterized by extreme cruelty
to others—^and to themselves. To make this connection more
specific we must give an outline of what happened to the Sioux
child after infancy.

B. HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO

Generosity in the Sioux child’s later life was sustained not
by prohibition, but by the example set by his elders in the atti¬
tude which they took toward property in general and his prop¬
erty in particular. Sioux parents were ready at any time to let
go of utensils and treasures, if a visitor so much as admired tiiem,
although there were, of course, conventions curbing a visitor’s
expression of enthusiasm. It was very bad form to point out
objects obviously constituting a minimum of equipment. The
expectation, however, that an adult should and would dispose
of his surplus caused much consternation in the early days, when
the “Indian giver” offered to a white friend not what the friend
needed, but what the Indian could spare, only to walk off with
what he decided the white man could spare. But all of this con¬
cerned only the parents’ property. A parent with a claim to good
character and integrity would not touch a child’s possessions,
because the value of possessions lay in the owner’s right to let
go of them when be was moved to do so—^i.e., when it added
prestige to himself and to the person in whose name he might
decide to give it away. Thus a child’s property was sacrosanct
until the child had enough of a will of his own to decide on its
disposition.

Generosity, we are interested to note, was not inculcated by
calling stinginess bad and “money” dirty but by calling the give-

124 Childhood and Society

away good. Property as such, with the exception of the afore¬
mentioned minimum equipment for hunting, sewing, and cook¬
ing, had no inherent goodness. The traders never tire of repeating
stories of Indian parents who come to town to buy long-needed
supplies with long-expected money, only to smilingly grant their
children their every whim, including their wish to take new
gadgets apart, and then to return home without supplies.

In the chapter on pregenitality we enlarged upon the clinical
impression that there is an intrinsic relatioaship between the
holding on to and letting go of property and the infantile dis¬
position of excrement as the body’s property.

In regard to bowel and bladder training, it seems that the
Sioux child was allowed to reach by himself a gradual compli¬
ance with whatever rules of modesty or cleanliness existed. Al¬
though the trader complained that even five-year-olds would
in no way control their excretory needs while at the store with
their shopping parents, teachers say that as soon as the very
young Indian child knows what is expected of him—and, most
important, sees the older children comply—^accidents of soiling
or wetting at day school are extremely rare. The complaint that
they, like children of other cultures, wet their beds in boarding
schools is another matter. For some reason enuresis seems to be
the “normal” symptom of the homesick, the billeted child. There¬
fore, one may say that these children, far from not having learned
any control, seem able to adapt to two standards without
compulsive tendencies to retention or elimination. The bowels
become regulated because of the example set by other children,
rather than by measures reflecting the vagaries of the parent-
child relationship. Thus the small child, as soon as he can walk,
is taken by the hand by older children and is led to places desig¬
nated by convention for purposes of defecation. It is probably
in this connection that the small child first learns to be guided
by that coercion to imitate and by that avoidance of “shaming”
which characterizes so much of primitive morality. For these
apparently “unprincipled savages” often prove to be timidly
concerned about gossip which indicates that they have not done

Hunters Across the Prairie 125

the proper thing or have done a thing improperly. The Sioux
child undoubtedly becomes aware of the changing wave lengths
of didactic gossip before he quite understands its detailed con¬
tents, until gradually, inexorably, this gossip includes him, en¬
couraging his autonomous pride in being somebody who is looked
upon with approval; making him mortally afraid of standing
exposed and isolated; and diverting whatever rebellion may have
been thus aroused in him by permitting him to participate in gos¬
sip against others.

In general, it can be said that the Sioux attitude toward feces
docs not contradict that concerning property. In regard to both,
the emphasis is on free release rather than on rigid retention,
and in both, the final regulation is postponed to a stage of ego
development when the child can come to an autonomous decision
which will give him immediate tangible status in the community
of his peers.

c. “making” and making

In Sioux childhood, the first strict taboos expressed verbally
and made inescapable by a tight net of ridiculing gossip did not
concern the body and its modes, but rather the relatives and
patterns of social intercourse. When a certain stage, soon after
the fifth year, was reached, brother and sister had to Icam
neither to look at nor to address one another directly. The girl
would be urged to confine herself to female play and to stay
near the mother and tepee, while the boy was encouraged to
join the older boys, first in games and then in the practice of
hunting.

First a word about play. I had been most curious to sec the
Indian children’s toys and to observe their games. When for
the first time I approached the Indian camp near the agency,
proceeding carefully and as if uninterested, so that at least a few
of the children might not be disturbed in their play, the little girls
ran into the tents to sit beside their mothers with their knees
covered and their eyes lowered. It took me some time to real¬
ize that they were not really afraid but just acting “proper.”

126 Childhood and Society

(The test: they were immediately ready to play peek-a-boo from
behind their mothers’ backs,) One of them, however, who was
about six years old, sat behind a large tree and obviously was
too intent on solitary play to notice me or to comply with the
rules of feminine shyness. As I eagerly stalked this child of the
wilderness, I found her bent over a toy typewriter. And her
lips as well as her fingernails were painted red.

Even the youngest of the girls are thus influenced in their
play by the radical change taking place in their older sisters,
the pupils of the boarding school. This became obvious when
the women of the camp made small tepees, wagons, and dolls
for me in order to demonstrate what they played with as chil¬
dren. These toys were clearly intended to lead little girls along
the path to Indian motherhood. One little girl, playing with one
of these old-fashioned toy wagons, however, unhesitatingly put
two doll women in the front seat, threw the babies in the rear
compartment, and had the ladies “drive to the movies in
Chadron.” However, all of this is still feminine play: a girl would
be ridiculed mercilessly should she try to indulge in a “boyish”
gfame, or dare to become a tomboy.

The aspirations developed in the boys’ play and games have
changed less than those of the girls, although cowboy activities
have largely displaced those of the buffalo hunter. Thus while I
was observing the little dolls “going off to town,” a tree stump
near which I was sitting was roped by the girl’s little brother
with gleeful satisfaction. Psychologically, such a game is ob¬
viously still considered serious training by the older children
and adults, although it is “useless” in reality. Upon one occa¬
sion I laughed, as I thought, Avith and not at a little boy who told
his mother and me that he could catch a wild rabbit on foot and
with his bare hands. I was made to feel that I had made a social
blunder. Such daydreams are not “play.” They are the prepara¬
tions for skills which, in turn, assure the development of the
hunter or cowboy identity.

In this respect one very old custom is of special interest,

Hunters Across die Prairie 127

namely, the play with “bone horses,” small bones three or four
inches long which the boys gather at places where catde (for¬
merly buffalo) have been killed. According to their shape, they
are called horses, cows, or buUs, and are cither fingered con¬
tinuously in the boys’ pockets or are used by them when play¬
ing together at games of horse racing and buffalo hunting. These
bones arc for the Sioux boys what small toy cars are in the lives
of our boys. The phallic shape of these bones suggests that they
may be the medium which allows little boys in the phallic and
locomotor stage, while fingering “horses,” “buffaloes,” “cows,”
and “bulls,” to cultivate competitive and aggressive daydreams
common to all males of the tribe. It fell to the older brothers,
at this stage, to introduce the small boy to the ethos of the hunter
and to make loyalty between brothers the cement of Dakota
society. Because of their exclusive association with the boasting
older boys, the smaller ones must have become aware early
enough of the fact that direct phallic aggressiveness remained
equated with the ferocity of the hunter. It was considered en¬
tirely proper for a boy to rape any girl whom he caught out¬
side the areas defined for decent girls: she was his legitimate
prey, and he could boast of the deed.

Today the Sioux boy will catch a glimpse of the life for which
his play rituals still prepare him only by observing and (if he can)
joining in the dances of his elders. These dances have often been
described as “wild” by whites who obviously felt in them a two¬
fold danger growing out of the gradually rising group spirit and
the “animalistic” rhythm. However, when we observed older
Sioux dancers in one of the isolated dance houses, they seemed,
as the hours of the night passed, to express with their glowing
faces a deepening concentration on a rhythm which possessed
their bodies with increasing exactness. Lawfulness kept step with
wildness. In comparison, it was almost embarrassing to observe
the late arrival of a group of young men, who obviously had
learned to dance jazz also. Their dance was completely “out of
joint,” and their gaze wandered around in a conceited way, which

iz8 Childhood and Society

by comparison made the spiritual concentration of their ddea
only the more impressive. Old Indians tried to hide pitying smiles
behind their hands at this display.

Thus on occasion the dances and ceremonies still proclaim the
existence of the man with the “strong heart” who has learned
to use the tools of his material culture to expand his hunting
powers beyond his body’s limitations. Mastering the horse, he
has gained a swiftness of which his legs were incapable in order
to approach animal and enemy with paralyzing suddenness. With
bow and arrow and tomahawk, he has extended the skill and
strength of his arm. The breath of the sacred pipe has won him
the good will of men; the voice of the love flute, the woman’s
favor. Charms have brought him all kinds of luck with a power
stronger than naked breath, word, or wish. But the Great Spirit,
he has learned, must be approached only with the searching con¬
centration of the man who, naked, alone, and unarmed, goes into
the wilderness to fast and to pray.

Every educational device was used to develop in the boy a
maximum of self-confidence, first by maternal generosity and
assurance, then by fraternal training. He was to become a hunter
after game, woman, and spirit. The emancipation of the boy from
his mother, and the diffusion of any regressive fixation on her,
was accomplished by an extreme emphasis on his right to au¬
tonomy and on his duty of initiative. Given boundless trust, and
gradually learning (through the impact of shaming rather than
through that of inner inhibition) to treat his mother with reti¬
cence and extreme respect, the boy apparently directed all sense
of frustration and rage into the chase after game, enemy, and
loose women—and against himself, in his search for spiritual
power. Of such deeds he was permitted to boast openly, loudly,
and publicly, obliging his father to display pride in his superior
offspring. It is only too obvious that such a sweeping initial in¬
vitation to be male and master would necessitate the establish¬
ment of balancing safeguards in the girls. While the arrangement
of these safeguards is ingenious, one cannot help feeling that the
woman was exploited for the sake of the hunter’s unbroken

Hunters Across the Prairie 129

“spirit”; and, indeed, it is said that suicides were not uncommon
among Sioux women, although unknown among men.

The Sioux girl was educated to be a hunter’s helper and a
future hunter’s mother. She was taught to sew, to cook and con¬
serve food, and to put up tents. At the same time she was sub¬
jected to a rigorous training toward bashfulness and outright
fear of men. She was trained to walk with measured steps, never
to cross certain boundaries set around the camp, and—with ap¬
proaching maturity—to sleep at night with her tliighs tied to¬
gether to prevent rape.

Site knew that if a man could claim to have touched a woman’s
vulva, he was considered to have triumphed over her virginity.
This victory by mere touch was analogous to his right to “count
coup”—Le., to claim a new feather in his bonnet when he had
succeeded in touching a dangerous enemy in battle. How similar
these two victories are could still be seen in the gossip column
of an Indian Reservation school paper put out by the children:
it specified the number of times certain boys had “counted coup”
against certain girls—i.e., had kissed them. In the old days, how¬
ever, any public bragging on the part of the boys was insulting
to the girl concerned. The girl learned that she might be called
on during the Virgin Feast to defend her claim to virginity
against any accusation. The ceremony of this feast consisted of
symbolic acts apparently compelling the admission of the truth.
Any man who, under these ceremonial conditions, would and
could claim that he had so much as touched a girl’s genitals could
have that girl removed from the elite group.

It would be wrong to assume, however, that such ritual war¬
fare precluded affectionate love between the sexes. In reality the
seemingly paradoxical result of such education was a doubly deep
affection in individuals who were ready to sacrifice prestige
points for love; in the boy, whose tenderness tamed his pride to
the extent that he would court a girl by calling her with the love
flute and by enveloping her and himself in the courting blanket
in order to ask her to marry him—and in the girl, who responded
without suspecting him of other than honorable intentions and

130 Childhood and Society

without making use of the hunting knife which she carried with
her always, just in case.

The girl, then, was educated to serve the hunter and to be on
her guard against him—but also to become a mother who would
surely not destroy in her boys the characteristics necessary to
a hunter. By means of ridiculing gossip—“people who did such
and such an unheard-of thing”—^she would, as she had seen her
mother do, gradually teach her children the hierarchy of major
and minor avoidances and duties in the relations between man
and man, between woman and woman, and especially between
man and woman. Brother and sister, or parent-in-law and child-
in-law of the opposite sex, were not permitted to sit with one
another or to have face-to-face conversations. A brother-in-law
and sister-in-law, and a girl and her maternal uncle, were al¬
lowed to speak only in a joking tone to one another.

These prohibitions and regulations, however, were made part
of highly significant relationships. The little girl old enough to
avoid her brother knew that she would ultimately use her skill
in sewing and embroidery, on which she was to concentrate
henceforth, for the fabrication and ornamentation of beautiful
things for his future wife—and for his children, cradles and
layettes. “He has a good sister” would be high praise for the
warrior and hunter. The brother knew that he would give her
the best of all he would win by hunting or stealing. The fat¬
test prey would be offered his sister for butchering, and the
corpses of his worst enemies left to her for mutilation. Thus she
too would, via her brother’s fortitude and generosity, find an
opportunity to participate actively and aggressively in at least
some aspects of the high moments of hunt and war. Above all,
in the Sun Dance, she would, if proven virtuous, bathe the broth¬
er’s self-inflicted wounds, thus sharing the spiritual triumph of
his most sublime masochism. The first and basic avoidance—^that
between brother and sister—^thus became a model of aU respect
relationships and of helpfulness and generosity among all the
“brothers” and “sisters” of the extended kinship; while the
loyalty between brothers became the model of all comradeship.

Hunters Across the Prairie

I think it would be too simple to say that such avoidances
served to forestall “natural” incestuous tension. TTie extreme to
which some of these avoidances go, and the outright suggestions
that the joking between brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law should
be sexual, rather point to an ingenious provocation as well as
diversion of potential incestuous tension. Such tension was uti¬
lized within the universal task of creating a social atmosphere of
respect in the ingroup (to each according to his family status);
and of diverting safely to the prey, to the enemy, and to the out¬
cast all the need for manipulative control and general aggressive¬
ness provoked and frustrated at the biting stage. There was, then,
a highly standardized system of “proper” relationships which
asstired kindness, friendliness, and considerateness within the ex¬
tended family. All sense of belonging depended on the ability to
acquire a reputation as somebody who deserves praise for being
proper. But he who, after the gradual increase of the pressure
of shaming, should persist in improper behavior, would become
the victim of ruthlessly biting gossip and deadly calumniation:
as if, by refusing to help in the diversion of the concerted ag¬
gressiveness, he himself had become an enemy.

5. THE SUPERNATURAL

The paradise of orality and its loss during the rages of the
biting stage, as we suggested in the preceding chapter, may be
the individual origin of that deep sense of badness which religion
transforms into a conviction of primal sin on a universal scale.
Prayer and atonement, therefore, must renounce the all too
avaricious desire for “the world” and must demonstrate, in re¬
duced posture and in the inflection of urgent apf>eal, a return to
bodily smallness, to technical helplessness, and to voluntary suf¬
fering.

The religious ceremony of highest significance in the life of
the Dakota was the Sun Dance, which took place during two
four-day periods in summer, “when the buffalo were fat, the
wild berries ripe, the grass tall and green,” It started with ritual
feasting, the expression of gradtude to the Buffalo Spirit, and

132 Childhood and Society

the demonstrations of fellowship among fellow men. Fertility
lites followed, and acts of sexual license such as characterize
similar rites in many parts of the world. Then there were war and
hunting games wWch glorified competition among men. Men
boisterously recounted their feats in war; women and maidens
stepped forward to proclaim their chastity. Finally, the mutual
dependence of all the people would be glorified in give-aways
and in acts of fraternization.

The climax of the festival was reached with the consumma¬
tion of self-tortures in fulfillment of vows made at critical times
during the year. On the last day the “candidates of the fourth
dance” engaged in the highest form of self-torture by putting
through the muscles of their chest and back skewers which were
attached to the sun pole by long thongs. Gazing direedy into
the sun and slowly dancing backwards, the men could tear them¬
selves loose by ripping the flesh of their chests open. Thus they
became the year’s spiritual elite, who through their suffering
assured the continued benevolence of the sun and the Buffalo
Spirit, the providers of fecundity and fertility. This particular
feat of having one’s chest ripped open ad Tnajorem gloriam
constitutes, of course, only one variation of the countless ways
in which, all over the world, a sense of evil is atoned for and the
continued generosity of the universe assured, and this often after
an appropriately riotous farewell to all flesh (came vale). In
the particular regional variation here under discussion I find it
highly suggestive that there should be a relationship between
the earliest infantile trauma suffered (the ontogenetic yet culture¬
wide loss of paradise) and the crowning feature of religious
atonement. In this case, then, one could assume the ceremony
to be the climax to the vicissitudes of that deliberately cultivated
rage at the mother’s breast during a biting stage which inter¬
feres with the long sucking license. Here the faithful turn the
consequently awakened sadistic wish to inflict injury on the
mother’s breast against themselves by making their own chests
the particular focus of their self-torture. The ceremony, then,
would follow the old principle of “an eye for an eye”—only

Hunters Across the Prairie 133

that the baby, of course, would have been incapable of perpetrat¬
ing the destruction for which the man now voluntarily atones.
It is hard for our rational minds to comprehend—^unless we arc
schooled in the ways of irrationality—^that frustrated wishes, and
especially early, preverbal, and quite vague wishes, can leave a
residue of sin which goes deeper than any guilt over deeds actu¬
ally committed and remembered. In our world only the magic
sayings of Jesus convey a conviction of these dark matters. We
take His word for it, that a wish secretly harbored is as good—
or rather, as bad—as a deed committed; and that whatever or¬
gan offends us with its persistent desires should be radically ex¬
tirpated. It is, of course, not necessary that a whole tribe or
congregation should follow such a precept to the letter. Rather,
the culture must provide for a convention of magic belief and a
consistent system of ritual which will permit a few exceptional
individuals who feel their culture’s particular brand of inner
damnation especially deeply (or who are histrionic enough to
want to make a spectacle of themselves) to dramatize, for all to
see, the fact that there is a salvation. (In our times, logical doubt¬
ers among the dbbelievers often have to take refuge in disease
and seemingly accidental mutilation in order to express the un¬
conscious idea that they had wanted too much in this world—
and had gotten away with it.)

We begin at least to comprehend that homogeneous cultures
have a systematic way of giving rewards in the currency of
higher inspiration and exalted prestige for the very sacrifices
and frustrations which the child must endure in the process of
becoming good and strong. But how about those who feel that
they are “different,” and that the prestige possibilities offered do
not answer their personal needs.? How about those men who
do not care to be heroes and those women who do not easily
agree to be heroes’ mates and helpers?

In our own culture Freud has taught us to study the dreams
of neurotic individuals in order to determine what undone deed
they could not afford to leave undone, what thought unthought,
what memory unremembered in the course of their all too rigid

134 Childhood and Society

adaptation. Wc use such knowledge to teach the suffering indi¬
vidual to find a place in his cultural milieu or to criticize an edu¬
cational system for endangering too many individuals by de¬
manding excessive compliance—^and thus endangering itself.

The Sioux, like other primitives, used the dream for the guid¬
ance of the strong as well as for the prevention of anarchic
deviation. In fact, the Sioux would not wait for adult dreams
to take care of faulty developments; he would go out and seek
dreams, or rather visions, while there was still time to decide on
a life plan. Unarmed, and naked, except for loincloth and
moccasins, the adolescent Sioux would go out into the prairie,
exposing himself to sun, danger, and hunger, and tell the deity
of his essential humility and need of guidance. This would come,
on the fourth day, in the form of a vision which, as afterwards
interpreted by a special committee of dream experts, would en¬
courage him to do especially well the ordinary things such as
hunting, warring, or stealing horses; or to bring slight enriching
variations into the institutions of his tribe, inventing a song, a
dance, or a prayer; or to become something special such as a doc¬
tor or a priest; or finally, to turn to one of those few roles avail¬
able to confirmed deviants.

For example: A person who was convinced he saw the Thun¬
derbird reported this to his advisers, and from then on at all
public occasions was a He was obliged to behave as

absurdly and clownishly as possible until his advisers thought he
had cured himself of the curse. Wissler reports the following
instructive bey oka experience of an adolescent:

One time when I was about thirteen years old, in the spring of the
year, the sun was low and it threatened rain and thunder, while my
people were in a camp of four tepees. I had a dream that my father
and our fanuly were sitting together in a tepee when lighming struck
into their midst. All were stunned. I was the first to become conscious.
A neighbor was shouting out around the camp. I was doubled up
when first becoming conscious. It was time to take out the horses, so
I took them.

As I was coming to my full senses I began to realize what had oc-

Hunters Across the Prairie

*35

currcd and that I should go through the beyoka ceremony when
fully recovered. I heard a herald shouting this about, but am not sure
it was reaL I knew I was destined to go through the beyoka. I cried
some to myself. I told my fatlier I had seen the Thunder-Bird: “Well,
son,” he said, “you must go through with it.” I was told that I must
be a beyoka. If 1 did not go through with the ceremony, I would be
killed by lightning. After tliis I realized that I must formally tell in
the ceremony exactly what 1 experienced.'

As can be seen, it was important that the dreamer should suc¬
ceed in conveying to his listeners the feeling of an experience
which complied with a recognized form of manifest dream and
in which he was the overwhelmed recipient, in which case the
higlier powers were assumed to have given him a convincing
sign that they wished him to plan or change his life’s course in
a certain way.

The expiation could consi.st of anti-natural behavior during
a given period, or for life, depending on the interpretation of the
advisers. The absurd activities demanded of the unlucky dreamer
were either simply silly and absurd or terrifying. Sometimes he
was even condemned to kill somebody. His friends would urge
compliance, for defense against evil spirits was more important
than the preservation of individual life.

One conversant with the ego’s tricky methods of overcom¬
ing feelings of anxiety and guilt will not fail to recognize in
the hey oka's antics the activities of children playing the clown
or debasing and otherwise harming themselves when they are
frightened or pursued by a bad conscience. One method of avoid¬
ing offense to the gods is to humiliate oneself or put oneself in
the wrong light before the public. As everybody is induced to
permit himself to be fooled and to laugh, the spirits forget and
forgive and may even applaud. The clown with his proverbial
secret melancholy and the radio comedian who makes capital of
his own inferiorities seem to be professional elaborations in our

Wissler, Societies and Ceremonial Papers of the American Museum of
Associations in the Oglala Division of Natural History, VoL XI, Part i. New
tba Tetan-DakotOy Anthropological York, 1912.

136 Childhood and Society

culture of this defense mechanism. Among the Sioux too, the
much-despised hey oka could prove to be so artful in his antics
that he could finally become a headman.

Others might dream of the moon, a hermaphrodite buffalo, or
the double-woman and thus learn that they were not to follow
the life plan designed for their sex. Thus a girl may encounter the
double-woman who leads her to a lone tepee.

As the woman comes up to the door and looks in she beholds the
two deer-women sitting at the rear. By them she is directed to choose
which side she shall enter. Along the wall of one side is a row of skin-
dressing tools, on the other, a row of parfleche headdress bags. If
the former is chosen, they will say, “You have chosen wrong, but you
will become very rich.” If she chooses the other side, they will say,
“You are on the right track, all you shall have shall be an empty
bag.” •

Such a girl would have to leave the traditional road of Sioux
femininity and be active in her que.st after men. She would be
called nvitko (crazy) and be considered a whore. Yet she too
could gain fame in recognition of her artfulness, and achieve the
status of a hetaira,

A boy may see:

. . . the moon having two hands, one holds a bow and arrows, the
other the burden strap of a woman. The moon bids the dreamer take
his choice; when the man reaches to take the bow, the hands suddenly
cross and try to force the strap upon the man who struggles to waken
before he takes it, and he also tries to succeed in capturing the bow.
In either event he escapes the penalty of the dream. Should he fail
and become possessed of the strap he is doomed to be like a woman.®

If such a boy does not prefer to commit suicide he must give up
the career of warrior and hunter and become a berdache, a man-
woman who dresses like a woman and does woman’s work. The
berdaches were not necessarily homosexuals, though some arc
said to have been married to other men, some to have been visited

•Ibid.

rr. S. Lincoln, The Dream in Primitive Cultures, Cresset Press, London, 1935.

Hunters Across the Prairie 137

by warriors before war parties. Most berdaches, however, were
like eunuchs, simply considered not dangerous to women, and
therefore good companions and even teachers for them, because
they often excelled in the arts of coolcing and embroidery.

A homogeneous culture such as that of the Sioux, then, deals
with its deviants by giving them a secondary role, as clown,
prostitute, or artist, without, however, freeing them entirely from
the ridicule and horror which the vast majority must maintain in
order to suppress in themselves what the deviant represents.
However, the horror remains directed against the power of the
spirits which have intruded themselves upon the deviant indi¬
vidual’s dreams. It does not turn against the stricken individual
himself. In this way, primitive cultures accept the power of the
unconscious. If the deviant can only claim to have dreamed con¬
vincingly, his deviation is considered to be based on supernatu¬
ral visitation rather than on individual motivation. As psycho¬
pathologists, we must admire the way in which these “primitive”
systems managed to maintain elastic mastery in a matter where
more sophisticated systems have failed.

6, SUMMARY

The Sioux, under traumatic conditions, has lost the reality for
which the last historical form of his communal integrity was
fitted. Before the white man came, he was a fighting nomad and
a buffalo hunter. The buffalo disappeared, slaughtered by in¬
vaders. The Sioux then became a warrior on the defense, and was
defeated. He almost cheerfully learned to round up cattle in¬
stead of encircling buffalo: his cattle were taken from him. He
could become a sedentary farmer, only at the price of being a
sick man, on bad land.

TTius, step for step, the Sioux has been denied the bases for
a collective identity formation and with it that reservoir of col¬
lective integrity from which the individual must derive his stature
as a social being.

Fear of famine has led the Sioux to surrender communal func¬
tions to the feeding conqueror. Far from remaining a transi-

138 Childhood and Society

donal matter of treaty obligation, federal help has continued to be
necessary, and this more and more in the form of relief. At the
same time, the government has not succeeded in reconciling old
and new images, nor indeed in laying the nucleus for a conscience
new in both form and content. Child training, so we claim, re¬
mains the sensitive instrument of one cultural synthesis until a
new one proves convincing and inescapable.

The problem of Indian education is, in reality, one of culture
contact between a group of employees representative of the
middle-class values of a free-enterprise system on the one hand,
and on the other, the remnants of a tribe which, wherever it
leaves the shadow of government sustenance, must find itself
among the underprivileged of that system.

In fact, the ancient principles of child training still operating
in the remnants of the tribe undennine the establishment of a
white conscience. The developmental principle in this system
holds that a child should be permitted to be an individualist while
young. The parents do not show any hostility toward the body
as such nor do they, especially in boys, decry self-will. There-
is no condemnation of infantile habits while the child is develop¬
ing that system of communication between self and body and
self and kin on which the infantile ego is based. Only when strong
in body and sure in self is he asked to bow to a tradition of un¬
relenting shaming by public opinion which focuses on his ac¬
tual social behavior rather than on his bodily functions or his
fantasies. He is incorporated into an elastic tradition which in a
strictly institutionalized way takes care of his social needs, divert¬
ing dangerous instinctual tendencies toward outer enemies, and
always allowing him to project the source of possible guilt into
the supernatural. Wc have seen how stubborn this conscience
has remained even in the face of the glaring reality of historical
change.

In contrast, the dominating classes in Western civilization,
represented here in their bureaucracy, have been guided by the
conviction that a systematic regulation of functions and im¬
pulses in earliest childhood is the surest safeguard for later effec-

Hunters Across the Prairie 139

tive functioning in society. TTicy implant the ncver-silcnt metro¬
nome of routine into the impressionable baby and young child
to regulate his first experiences with his body and with his im¬
mediate physical surroundings. Only after such mechanical so¬
cialization is he encouraged to proceed to develop into a rugged
individualist. He pursues ambitious strivings, but compulsively
remains within standardized careers which, as the economy be¬
comes more and more complicated, tend to replace more general
responsibilities. Tlie specialization thus developed has led this
Western civilization to the mastery of machinery, but also to
an undercurrent of boundless discontent and of individual dis¬
orientation.

Naturally the rewards of one educational system mean little
to members of another system, while the costs are only too ob¬
vious to them. The undisturbed Sioux cannot understand how
anything except restoration is worth striving for, hLs racial as
well as his individual history having provided him with the
memory of abundance. The white man’s conscience, on the other
hand, asks for continuous reform of himself in the pursuit of
careers leading to ever higher standards. This reform demands
an increasingly internalized conscience, one that will act against
temptation automatically and unconsciously, without the pres¬
ence of critical observers. The Indian conscience, more preoc¬
cupied with the necessity of avoiding embarrassing situations
within a system of clearly defined honors and shames, is with¬
out orientation in conflicting situations which depend for their
solution on an “inner voice.”

The system underlying Sioux education is a primitive one—
Lc., it is based on the adaptation of a highly ethnocentric, rela¬
tively small group of people, who consider only themselves to
be relevant mankind, to one segment of nature. The primitive
cultural system exhausts itself:

In specializing the individual child for one main career, here
the buffalo hunter;

In perfecting a narrow range of the tool world which extends
the reach of the human body over the prey;

140 Childhood and Society

In the use of magic as the only means of coercing nature.

Such self-restriction makes for homogeneity. There is a strong
synthesis of geographic, economic, and anatomic patterns which
in Sioux life find their common denominator in centrifugality,
as expressed in a number of items discussed, such as:

The social organization in bands, which makes for easy dis¬
persion and migration;

The dispersion of tension in the extended family system;

Nomadic technology and the ready use of horse and gun;

The distribution of property by the give-away;

The diversion of aggression toward prey and outgroup.

Sioux child training forms a firm basis for this system of cen-
trifugality by establishing a lasting center of trust, namely the
nursing mother, and then by handling the matter of teething,
of infantile rage, and of muscular aggression in such a way that
the greatest possible degree of ferocity is provoked, channel¬
ized socially, and finally released against prey and enemy. We
believe that we arc dealing here, not with simple causality, but
with a mutual assimilation of somatic, mental, and social patterns
which amplify one another and make the cultimal design for
living economical and effective. Only such integration provides
a sense of being at home in this world. Transplanted into our sys¬
tem, however, the very expression of what was once considered
to be efficient and aristocratic behavior—such as the disregard
for property and the refusal to compete—only leads to an align¬
ment with the lowest strata of our society.^*

^^For a comparison of these impressions with the results of t later systematic
study, see the appendix.

CHAPTER

4

Fishermen Along a Salmon River

I. THE WORLD OF THE YUROK

For comparison and counterpoint, let us turn from the melan¬
choly “warriors without weapons” to a tribe of fishermen and
acorn gatherers on the Pacific coast: the Yurok.^

The Sioux and the Yurok seem to be diametrically opposite in
the basic configurations of existence. The Sioux roamed the plains
and cultivated spatial concepts of centrifugal mobility; their hori¬
zons were the roaming herds of buffalo and the shifting enemy
bands. The Yurok lived in a narrow, mountainous, densely
forested river valley and along the coast of its outlet into the
Pacific. Moreover, they limited themselves within the arbitrary
borders of a circumscribed world.* They considered a disk of
about 150 miles in diameter, cut in half by the course of their
Klamath River, to include all there was to this world. They ig¬
nored the rest and ostracized as “crazy” or “of ignoble birth”
anyone who showed a marked tendency to venture into territo¬
ries beyond. They prayed to their horizons, which they thought
contained the supernatural “homes” from which generous spirits
sent the stuff of life to them: the (actually non-existent) lake up¬
river whence the Klamath flows; the land across the ocean which

^A. L. Kroeber, “The Yurok," in Handbook of the Indians of Califorma. Bureau
of American Ethnology, Bulletin 78, 1925.

*T. T. Waterman, Yurok Geography, University of Califoniia Press, 192a

« 4 »

142 Chfldhood and Society

is the salmon’s home; the region of the sky which sends the deer,
and the place up the coast where the shell money comes from.
There was no centrifugal east and west, south and north. There
was an “upstream” and a “downstream,” a “toward the river,” and
an “away from the river,” and then, at the borders of the world
(Lc., where the next tribes live), an elliptical “in back and
around”: as centripetal a world as could be designed.

Within this restricted radius of existence, extreme localization
took place. An old Yurok asked me to drive him to his ancestors’
home. When we arrived, he proudly pointed to a hardly notice¬
able pit in the ground which, to judge from its appearance, may
or may not have been the site of a dugout and said: “This is where
I come from.” Such pits retain the family name forever. In fact,
Yurok localities exist by name only in so far as human history or
mythology has dignified them. These myths do not mention
mountain peaks or the gigantic redwoods which impress white
travelers so much; yet the Yurok will point to certain insignificant¬
looking rocks and trees as being the “origin” of the most far-
reaching events. The acquisition and retention of possessions is
and was what the Yurok thinks about, talks about, and prays for.
Every person, every relationship, and every act can be exactly
valued and becomes the object of pride or ceaseless bickering.
The Yurok had money before they ever saw a white man. They
used a currency of shells of different sizes which they carried in
oblong purses. These shells were traded from inland tribes; the
Yurok, of course, never “strayed” near the places on the northern
coast where they could have found these shells in inflationary
numbers.

This little, well-defined Yurok world, cut in two by the Klam¬
ath, has, as it were, its “mouth open” toward the ocean and the
yearly mysterious appearance of tremendous numbers of power¬
ful salmon which enter the estuary of the Klamath, climb its tur¬
bulent rapids, and disappear upriver, where they spawn and die.
Some months later their diminutive progeny descend the river
and disappear out in the ocean, in order that two years later, as

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 143

mature salmon, they may return to their birthplace to fulfill their
life cycles.

The Yurok speak of “clean” living, not of “strong” living, as
do the Sioux. Purity consists of continuous avoidance of impure
contacts and contaminations, and of constant purification from
possible contaminations. Having had intercourse with a woman,
or having slept in the same house with women, the fisherman must
pass the “test” of the sweat house. He enters through the normal¬
sized door; normal meaning an oval hole through which even a
fat person could enter. However, the man can leave the sweat
house only through a very small opening which will pennit only
a man moderate in his eating habits and supple with the perspira¬
tion caused by the sacred fire to slip through. He is required to
conclude the purification by swimming in the river. The con¬
scientious fisherman passes this test every morning.

This is only one example of a series of performances which ex¬
press a world image in which the various channels of nature and
anatomy must be kept apart. For that which flows in one channel
of life is said to abhor contaminating contact with the objects of
other channels. Salmon and the river dislike it if anything is eaten
on a boat. Urine must not enter the river. Deer will stay away
from the snare if deer meat has been brought in contact with
water. Salmon demands that women on their trip up or down
river keep special observances, for they may be menstruating.

Only once a year, during the salmon run, are these avoidances
set aside. At that time, following complicated ceremonies, a strong
dam is built which obstructs the ascent of the salmon and per¬
mits the Yurok to catch a rich winter supply. The dam building is
“the largest mechanical enterprise undertaken by the Yurok, or,
for that matter, by any California Indians, and the most com¬
munal attempt” (^oeber). After ten days of collective fishing,
orgies of ridicule and of sexual freedom take place along the sides
of the river, reminiscent of the ancient pagan spring ceremonials
in Europe, and of Sioux license before the Sun Dance.

The supreme ceremony of the fish dam is thus the counterpart

144 Childhood and Society

of the Sionx’s Sun Dance; it begins with a grandiose mass drama¬
tization of the creation of the world, and it contains pageants
which repeat the progress of Yurok ethos from centrifugal license
to the circumscribed centripetality which finally became its law
and its reassurance of continued supply from the Supernatural
Providers.

To these ceremonials we shall return when we can relate them
to Yurok babyhood. What has been said will be sufficient to indi¬
cate that in size and structure the Yurok world was very different
from—^if not in almost systematic opposition to—^that of the
Sioux.

And what different people they are, even today! After having
seen the apathetic erstwhile masters of the prairie, it was almost a
relief, albeit a relief paired with shock, on arrival at a then nearly
inaccessible all-Yurok village, to be treated as a member of an
unwelcome white minority and to be told to go and room with
the pigs—“they are the white man’s dog.”

There are several all-Yurok villages along the lower Klamath,
the largest representing a late integration, in the Gold Rush days,
of a number of very old villages. Situated on a sunny clearing, it is
accessible only by motorboat from the coast, or over foggy,
hazardous roads. When I undertook to spend a few weeks there
in order to collect and check my data concerning Yurok child¬
hood, I met immediately with the “resistive and suspicious tem¬
perament” which the Yurok as a group are supposed to have.
Luckily I had met and had worked with some Yurok individuals
living near the estuary of the Klamath; and Kroeber had prepared
me for what in reality are folkways of stinginess, suspicion, and
anger. I could therefore refrain from holding their behavior
against them—or, indeed, from being discouraged by it. So I
settled down in an abandoned camp by the river and waited to
find out what might in this case be specifically the matter. It ap¬
peared that, at the coast, I had visited and had eaten meals with
deadly enemies of an influential upriver family. The feud dated
back to the eighties of the last century. Furthermore, it seemed
that this isolated community was unable to accept my declara-

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 145

tion of scientific intention. Instead, they suspected me of being
an agent come to investigate such matters as the property feuds
brought about by the discussion of the Howard-Wheeler Act.
According to ancient maps, existing only in people’s minds, Yurok
territory is a jigsaw puzzle of community land, land with com¬
mon ownership, and individual family property. Opposition to
the Howard-Wheeler Act, which forbids the Indians to sell their
land except to one another, had taken the form of disputing what
the single Yurok could claim and sell if and when the act should be
repealed, and one of my suspected secret missions apparently was
that of trying under false pretenses to delineate property rights
which the officials had been unable to establish. In addition, the
fatal illness of a young Shaker and the visit of high Shaker clergy
from the north had precipitated religious issues. Noisy praying
and dancing filled the night air. Shakerism was opposed at the
time not only by the government doctor, with whom I had been
seen downriver, and by the few survivors of the ancient craft of
Yurok medicine, but also by a newly arrived missionary. He was
a Seventh-Day Adventist, the only other white man in the com¬
munity, who by greeting me kindly, although with undisguised
disapproval of the cigarette in my hand, compromised me further
in the eyes of the natives. It took days of solitary waiting before
I could discuss their suspicions with some of the Indians, and be¬
fore I found informants who further clarified the outlines of tra¬
ditional Yurok childhood. Once he knows you are a friend, how¬
ever, the individual Yurok loses his prescribed suspicion and be¬
comes a dignified informant.

The unsubdued and overtly cynical attitude of most Yurok
toward the white man must, I think, be attributed to the fact that
the inner distance between Yurok and whites is not as great as
that between whites and Sioux. There was much in the cen¬
tripetal A B C of Yurok life that did not have to be relearned
when the whites came. The Yurok lived in solid frame houses
which were half sunk in the ground. The present frame houses arc
next to pits in the ground which once contained the subterranean
dwellings of ancestors. Unlike the Sioux, who suddenly lost the

146 Childhood and Society

focus of his economic and spiritual life with the disappearance of
the buffalo, the Yurok still sees and catches, eats and talks salmon.
When the Yurok man today steers a raft of logs, or the Yurok
woman grows vegetables, their occupations are not far removed
from the original manufacture of dugouts (a one-time export in¬
dustry), the gathering of acorns, and the planting of tobacco.
Above all, the Yurok has been concerned all his life with pro{>-
erty. He knows how to discuss a matter in dollars and cents,
and he does so with deep ritual conviction. The Yurok need not
abandon this “primitive” tendency in the money-minded white
world. His grievances against the United States thus find other
than the inarticulate, smoldering expression of the prairie man’s
passive resistance.

On the Fourth of July, when “the mourners of the year” were
paid off, I was permitted to take part in this ceremony. On this
occasion I had the opportunity to sec many children assembled to
watch a night’s dance, the climax of which was not expected un¬
til dawn. They were vigorous and yet graceful, even-tempered,
and well-behaved throughout the long night.

». YUROK CHILD PSYCHIATRY

Fanny, one of Alfred Kroeber’s oldest informants, called her¬
self, and was called by others, a “doctor.” So far as she treated
somatic disorders or used the Yurok brand of physiological treat¬
ment, I could not claim to be her professional equal. However,
she also did psychotherapy with children, and in this field it was
possible to exchange notes. She laughed heartily about psycho¬
analysis, the main therapeutic principles of which, as will be
shown presently, can casUy be expressed in her terms. There was
a radiant friendliness and warmth in this very old woman. When
melancholy made her glance and her smile withdraw behind the
stone-carved pattern of her wrinkles, it was a dramatic melan¬
choly, a positive withdrawal, not the immovable sadness some¬
times seen in the faces of other Indian women.

As a matter of fact, Fanny was in an acute state of gloom when
we arrived. Some days before, on stepping out into her vegetable

Fishennen Along a Salmon River 147

garden and glancing over the scene, a hundred feet below, where
the Klamath enters the Pacific, she had seen a small whale enter
the river, play about a little, and disappear again. This shocked
her deeply. Had not the creator decreed that only salmon, stur¬
geon, and similar fish should cross the fresh-water barrier? This
breakdown of a barrier could only mean that the world disk was
slowly losing its horizontal position, that salt water was entering
the river, and that a flood was approaching comparable to the
one which once before had destroyed mankind. However, she
told only a few intimates about it, indicating that perhaps the
event could still become untrue if not talked about too much.

It was easy to converse with this old Indian woman because
usually she was merry and quite direct, except when questions
came up bordering on taboo subjects. During our first interviews
Kroeber had sat behind us, listening and now and again interrupt¬
ing. On the second day, I noticed that he was absent from the
room for some time, and I asked where he had gone. The old
woman laughed merrily and said, “He give you chance to ask
alone. You big man now.”

What are the causes of child neuroses (bad temper, lack of
appetite, nightmares, delinquency, etc.) in Yurok culture? If a
diild, after dark, sees one of the “wise people,” a race of small
beings which preceded the human race on earth, he develops a
neurosis, and if he is not cured he eventually dies.

The “wise people” are described as not taller than a small child.
They are always “in spirit,” because they do not know sexual
intercourse. They are adult at six months of age, and they are im¬
mortal They procreate orally, the female eating the male’s lice.
The orifice of birth is unclear; however, it is certain that the
“wise” female has not a “woman’s inside”—that is, vagina and
uterus, with the existence of which, as will be shown later, sin and
social disorder entered the world.

We observe that the “wise people” are akin to infants. They
are small, oral, and magic, and they do not know genitality, guilt,
and death. They are visible and dangerous only for children be¬
cause children are srill fixated on earlier stages and may regress

148 Childhood and Society

^en die stimulation of the daylight is waning—^then, becoming
dreamy, they may be attracted by the “wise people’s” childish¬
ness and by their intuitire and yet anarchic ways. For the “wise
people” are without social organization. They are creative, but
they know no gcnitality and, consequently, what it means to
be “clean.” Thus the “wise” men, I think, are the projection of
the pregenital state of childhood into phylogeny and prehistory.

If a child shows disturbances or complains of pain indicating
that he may have seen “wise people,” his grandmother goes out
in the garden or to the creek, or wherever she has been informed
that the child has played after dark, cries aloud, and speaks to the
spirits: “This is our child; do not harm it.” If this is of no avail, the
grandmother next door is asked to “sing her song” to the child.
Every grandmother has her own song. American Indian cultures
seem to have an amazing understanding of ambivalence, which
dictates that in certain crises near relatives are of no educational
or therapeutic use. If the neighbor grandmother does not avail,
Fanny is finally appealed to and a price is set for the cure.

Fanny says she often feels that a patient is coming:

Sometimes I can’t sleep; somebody is after me to go and doctor.
I not drink water, and sure somebody come, “Fanny, I come after
you, I give you ten dollars.” I say, “I go for fifteen dollars.” “All
right.”

The child is brought by his whole family and put on the floor
of Fanny’s living room. She smokes her pipe to “get into her
power.” Then, if necessary, the child is held down by mother
and father while Fanny sucks the first “pain” from above the
child’s navel These “pains,” the somatic “causes” of illness (al¬
though they, in turn, can be caused by bad wishes), arc visualized
as a kind of slimy, bloody materialization. To prepare herself for
this task Fanny must abstain from water for a given period. “As
she sucks, it is as if her chin were going through to your spine, but
it doesn’t hurt,” one informant reports. However, every “pain”
has a “mate”; a thread of slime leads Fanny to the place of the
“mate,” which is sucked out also.

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 149

We see that to the Yurok disease is bisexual. One sex is repre¬
sented as being near the center of the body, which is most suscep¬
tible to sorcery, while the other has wandered to the afflicted part,
like the uterus in the Greek theory of hysteria or the displaced
organ cathexis in the psychoanalytic system.

Having swallowed two or three “pains,” Fanny goes to a cor¬
ner and sits down with her face to the wall She puts four fingers,
omitting the thumb, into her throat and vomits slime into a
basket. Then, when she feels that the “pains” she has swallowed
are coming up, she holds her hands in front of her mouth, “like
two shells,” and with spitting noises, which I cannot characterize
phonetically, spits the child’s “pain” into her hands. Then she
dances, making the “pains” disappear. This she repeats until she
feels that all the “pains” have been taken out of the child.

Then comes the “interpretation.” She smokes again, dances
again, and goes into a trance. She sees a fire, a cloud, a mist, then
sits down, fills her pipe anew, takes a big mouthful of smoke, and
then has a more substantial vision, which makes her say to the as¬
sembled family something like this: “I see an old woman sitting in
the Bald Hills and wishing something bad to another woman.
That is why this child is sicL” She has hardly spoken when the
grandmother of the child rises and confesses that it was she who
on a certain day sat in the Bald Hills and tried to practice sorcery
upon another woman. Or Fanny says, “I see a man and a woman
doing business [having intercourse], although the man has
prayed for good luck and should not touch a woman.” At this, the
father or the uncle gets up and confesses to his guilt. Sometimes
Fanny has to accuse a dead person of sorcery or perversion, in
which event the son or the daughter of the deceased tearfully
confesses to his misdeeds.

It seems that Fanny has a certain inventory of sins (comparable
to the imagery of our psychopathological “schools”), which she
attaches, under ritualistic circumstances, to a certain disturbance.
She thus makes people confess tendencies which, in view of the
structure of the culture, can be predicted, and to confess which is
profitable for anybody’s inner peace. Having an exalted position

150 Childhood and Society

in a primitive commonity, Fanny is, of course, in possession of
enough gossip to know her patients’ weaknesses even before she
sees them and is experienced enough to read her patients’ faces
while she goes about her magic business. If she, then, connects a
feeling of guilt derived from secret aggression or perversion with
the child’s symptoms, she is on good psychopathological grounds,
and we are not surprised to hear that neurotic symptoms usually
disappear after Fanny has put her finger on the main source of
ambivalence in the family and has provoked a confession in
public.

3. YUROK CHILD TRAINING

Here are the data on childhood in the Yurok world.

The birth of a baby is safeguarded with oral prohibitions, in
addition to the genital ones observed by the Sioux. During the
birth, the mother must shut her mouth. Father and mother eat
neither deer meat nor salmon until the child’s navel is healed. Dis¬
regard of this taboo, so the Yurok believed, is the cause of con¬
vulsions in the child.

The newborn is not breast-fed for ten days, but is given a nut
soup from a tiny shell The breast feeding begins with Indian
generosity and frequency. However, unlike the Sioux, the Yurok
have a definite weaning time around the sixth month—that is,
around the teething period: a minimal breast-feeding period for
American Indians. Weaning is called “forgetting the mother”
and, if necessary, is enforced tovrard the end of the first year by
the mother’s going away for a few days. The first solid food is
salmon or deer meat well salted with seaweed. Salty foods are
the Yurok’s “sweets.” The attempt at accelerating autonomy by
early weaning seems to be part of a general tendency to encour¬
age the baby to leave the mother and her support as soon as this
is possible and bearable. It begins in utero. TTie pregnant woman
eats little, carries much wood, and preferably does work which
forces her to bend over forward, so that the fetus “will not rest
against her spine”—^Le., relax and redine. She rubs her abdomen
often, espedally when daylight is waning, in order to keep the

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 151

fetus awake, and to forestall an early tendency to regress to the
state of prehistory which, as we saw, is the origin of all neuroses.
Later, not only does early weaning further require him to release
his mother; the baby’s legs are left uncovered in the Yurok ver¬
sion of the cradleboard, and from the twentieth day on they are
massaged by the grandmother to encourage early creeping. The
parents’ co-operation in this matter is assured by the rule that
they may resume intercourse when the baby makes vigorotis
strides in creeping. The baby is kept from sleeping in the late
afternoon and early evening, lest dusk close his eyes forever. The
first postnatal crisis, therefore, has a different quality for the
Yurok child from the one experienced by the little Sioux. It is char¬
acterized by the close proximity in time of teething, enforced
weaning, encouraged creeping, and the mother’s early return to
old sex ways and new childbirths.

We have referred to the affinity between the Sioux baby’s oral
training and the characteristic traits of a hunter of the plains. The
Yurok child is exposed to early and, if necessary, abrupt wean¬
ing before or right after the development of the biting stage, and
this after being discouraged by a number of devices from feeling
too comfortable in, with, and around his mother. He is to be
trained to be a fisherman: one who has his nets ready for a prey
which (if he only behaves nicely and says “please” appropriately)
comes to him. This fervent attitude of wanting to say “please” to
the supernatural providers seems to be reinforced by a residue of
infantile nostalgia. The good Yurok is characterized by an ability
to cry while he prays in order to gain influence over the food¬
sending powers beyond the visible world. Tearful words, such as
“I see a salmon,” said with the conviction of self-induced hallu¬
cination, will, so he believes, draw a salmon toward him. But he
must pretend that he is not too eager, lest the supply elude him,
and he must convince himself that he means no red harm. Ac¬
cording to the Yurok, the salmon says: “I shall travel as far as
the river extends. I shall leave my scales on nets and they will
turn into salmon, but I, myself, shall go by and not be killed.”

This concentration tm the sources of food b not accomplbhed

j 52 Childhood and Society

without a second phase of oral training at the age when the child
“has sense”—Lc^ when he can repeat what he has been told. It is
claimed that once upon a time, a Yurok meal was a veritable cere¬
mony of self-restraint. The child was admonished never to grab
food in haste, never to take it without asldng for it, always to eat
slowly, and never to ask for a second helping—an oral puritanism
hardly equaled among other primitives. During meals, a strict
order of placement was maintained and the child was taught to
eat in prescribed ways; for example, to put only a little food on
the spoon, to take the spoon up to his mouth slowly, to put the
spoon down while chewing the food—and above all, to think of
becoming rich during the whole process. TTiere was supposed
to be silence during meals so that everybody could keep his
thoughts concentrated on money and salmon. Obviously this
ceremonial behavior was designed to further dramatize that
nostalgic need for intake which may have been evoked by the
early weaning from the breast, from contact with the mother,
and from all regressive attitudes. All “wishful thinking” was put
in the service of economic pursuits. A Yurok could make himself
see money hanging from trees and salmon swimming in the river
during the off season, and he believed that this self-induced hallu¬
cinatory thought would bring action from the Providers. Later,
the energy of genital daydreams is also harnessed to the same
economic endeavor. In the “sweat house” the older boy will learn
the dual feat of thinking of money and not thinking of women.

The fables told to children underline in an interesting way the
ugliness of lack of restraint. They isolate one outstanding item
in the physiognomy of animals and use it as an argument for
“clean behavior”;

The buzzard’s baldness is the result of his having impatiently
put his whole head into a dish of hot soup.

The greedy eel gambled his bones away.

The hood of the ever-scolding blue jay is her clitoris, which
she tore off and put on her head once when she was enviously
angry with her husband.

TTie bear was always hungry. He was married to the blue jay.

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 153

One day they made a fire and the bear sent the blue jay to get
some food. She brought back only one acorn. “Is that all?” the
bear said. The blue jay got angry and threw the acorn in the fire.
It popped all over the place, and there was acorn all over the
ground. The bear swallowed it all down and got awfully sick.
Some birds tried to sing for him, but it did not help. Nothing
helped. Finally the hummingbird said, “Lie down and open your
mouth,” and then the hummingbird zipped right through him.
This relieved lum. That’s why the bear has such a big anus and
can’t hold his feces.

This, then, leads us to the anal phase. The official behavior of
the Yurok shows all the traits which psychoanalysis, following
Freud and Abraham, has found to be of typical significance in
patients with “anal fixations”: compulsive ritualizatidn; pedantic
bickering; suspicious miserliness; retentive hoarding, etc. In Yurok
childhood, there seems to be no specific emphasis on feces or on
the anal zone, but there is a general avoidance of all contaminations
caused by the contact of antagonistic fluids and contents. The in¬
fant learns early that he may not urinate into the river or into any
subsidiary brook because the salmon that swims in the river would
not like to float in the body’s fluids. The idea, then, is not that
urine is “dirty,” but that fluids of different tube systems are an¬
tagonistic and mutually destructive. Compulsiveness in our so¬
ciety is often the expression of just such a general avoidance of
contaminations, focused by phobic mothers on the anal zone;
but in our culture it is reinforced by excessive demands for a
punctuality and orderliness which are absent from Yurok life.

The groundwork for the Yurok’s genital attitudes is laid in
the child’s earlier conditioning, which teaches him to subordinate
all instinctual drives to economic considerations. The girl knows
that virtue, or shall we say an unblemished name, will gain her a
husband who can pay well, and that her subsequent status, and
consequently her children’s and her children’s children’s status,
will depend on the amount her husband will offer to her father
when asking for her. The boy, on the other hand, wishes to
accumulate enough wealth to buy a worth-while wife and to

154 Childhood and Society

pay in fufl. If he were to make a worthy girl prematurely preg¬
nant—^i.e^ before he could pay her price in full—he would have
to go into debt. And among the Yurok, aU deviant behavior and
character disorders in adults are explained as a result of the de¬
linquent’s mother or grandmother or great-grandmother not
having been “paid for in full.” This, it seems, means that the
man in question was so eager to marry that he borrowed his
wife on a down payment without being able to pay the install¬
ments. He thus proved that in our terms his ego was too weak to
integrate sexual needs and economic virtues. Where sex docs
not interfere with wealth, however, it is viewed with leniency
and humor. The fact that sex contact necessitates purifica¬
tion seems to be considered a duty or a nuisance, but docs
not reflect on sex as such or on individual women. There
is no shame concerning the surface of the human body. If the
young girl between mcnarchc and marriage avoids bathing in
the nude before others, it is to avoid offending by giving evi¬
dence of menstruation. Otherwise, everybody is free to bathe
as he pleases in whatever company.

As we have seen, Sioux children learned to associate the
locomotor and genital modes with hunting. The Sioux, in his
official sexuality, was more phallic-sadistic in that he pursued
whatever roamed: game, enemy, woman. The Yurok in all of
this is more phobic and suspicious. He avoids being snared. For
it even happened to God: the creator of the Yurok world was
an extraordinarily lusty fellow who roamed around and en¬
dangered the world wiA his lawless behavior. His sons prevailed
upon him to leave this world. He promised to be a good god,
but as he ventured down the coast farther than any sensible and
well-bred person would do, he foimd the skate woman lying on
the beach, invitingly spreading her legs. (The skatefish, the
Yurok say, look like “a woman’s inside.”) He could not resist
her. But as soon as he had entered her, she held on to him with
her vagina, wrapped her legs around him, and abducted him.
This story serves to demonstrate where centrifugal, wander¬
ing, and lawless lust will lead. In the lawfully restricted Yurok

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 155

world which was established by the delinquent creator’s over-
conscientious sons, a sensible man avoids being “snared” by the
wrong woman or at the wrong time or place—“wrong” mean¬
ing any circumstances that would compromise his assets as an
economic being. To learn to avoid this means to become a “clean”
individual, an individual with “sense.”

4. COMPARATIVE SUMMARY

The worlds of the Sioux and the Yurok, then, are primitive
worlds according to the criteria employed earlier. They are
highly ethnocentric, only concerned with tribal self-regulation
in relation to a specific segment of nature, and with the develop>-
ment of sufficient tools and appropriate magic. We have found
the Yurok world to be oriented along cautiously centripetal
lines, whereas we found the Sioux to be vigorously centrifugal.

As a society the Yurok had almost no hierarchic organization.
All emphasis was on mutual vigilance in the daily observance
of minute differences of value. There was little “national” feel¬
ing, and, as I have neglected to point out, no taste for war what¬
soever. Just as the Yurok could believe that seeing salmon meant
making salmon come, he obviously also took it for granted that
he could keep war away by simply not seeing potential enemies.
Upriver Yurok are known to have ignored hostile tribes who
traversed their territory in order to fight downriver Yurok. War
was a matter of those concerned directly, not one of national
or tribal loyalty.

Thus they felt secure in a system of avoidances: avoidance of
being drawn into a fight, into a contamination, into a bad busi¬
ness deal. Their individual lives began with an early banishment
from the mother’s breast, and with subsequent instruction (for
boys) to avoid her, to keep out of her living quarters, and to
beware of snaring women in general Their mythology ban¬
ishes the creator from this world by having him snared and
abducted by a woman. While the fear of being caught thus
dominated their avoidances, they lived every moment for the
paq>ose of snatching an advantage from another human being.

156 Childhood and Society

In the Yurok world, the Klamath River may be likened to
a nutritional canal, and its estuary to a mouth and throat for¬
ever opened toward the horizon whence the salmon come. All
through the year the prayers of the Yurok world go out in that
direction, protesting humility and denying the wish to hurt.
Once a year the Yurok tearfully lure their god back into this
world just long enough to assure his good will and to snare his
salmon. As the Sioux world finds its highest expression in the
performances surrounding the Sun Dance, the Yurok world
dramatizes all it stands for during those exalted days when, with
utmost communal effort and organization, it builds the fish dam:
gradually closing, as if they were gigantic jaws, the two parts
extended from the shores of the river. The jaws close and the
prey is trapped. The creator once more rejuvenates the world by
grudgingly bequeathing it parts of himself, only to be banished
for another year. Again, as in the case of the Sioux, this cere¬
monial climax follows a cycle of rituals which deal with the
dependence of the people on supernatural providers. At the same
time, the ceremonial represents a grandiose collective play with
the themes of earliest danger in the individual life cycle: the in¬
dividual loss of the mother’s breast at the biting stage corre¬
sponds to the possible loss of salmon supply from across the
ocean. Here the conclusion is inevitable that the great themes
of fertility and fecundity find their symbolic expression in an
equation of the sacred salmon with the paternal phallus and the
maternal nipple: that which generates life and that which nur¬
tures it.

During the rejuvenation festivals the Yurok were not per¬
mitted to cry, for anyone who cried would not be alive in a
year. Instead, “the end of the dam building is a period of free¬
dom. Jokes, ridicule, and abuse run riot; sentiment forbids of¬
fense; and as night comes, lovers’ passions are inflamed”
(Kroeber). This one time, then, the Yurok behaved as licen¬
tiously as his creator, proud that by an ingenious mixture of
usurpation and atonement he had again accomplished the feat
of his world: to catch his salmon—and have it next year, too.

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 157

To be properly avoidant and yet properly avid, the individual
Yurok must be clean; Le., he must pray with humility, cry with
faith, and hallucinate with conviction, as far as the Supernatural
Providers are concerned; he must learn to make good nets, to
locate them well, and to collaborate in the fish dam, as his tech¬
nology requires; he must trade and haggle with stamina and
persistence when engaged in business with his fellow men; and
he must learn to master his body’s entrances, exits, and interior
tubeways in such a manner that nature’s fluid-ways and supply
routes (which are not accessible to scientific understanding and
technical influence) will find themselves magically coerced. In
the Yurok world, then, homogeneity rests on an integration of
economic ethics and magic morality with geographic and physio¬
logical configurations. We have outlined in what way this in¬
tegration is prepared in the training of the young organism.*

In trying to gain access to the meaning, or even the mere con¬
figurations, of Yurok behavior we have not been able to avoid
analogies with what is considered deviant or extreme behavior
in our culture. Within his everyday behavior the Yurok cries to
his gods “like a baby”; he hallucinates in his meditation “like a
psychotic”; he acts “like a phobic” when confronted with con¬
tamination; and he tries to act avoidant, suspicious, and stingy
“hke a compulsive neurotic.” Am I trying to say that the Yurok
is all of this or that he behaves “as if”?

The anthropologist who has hved long enough among a peo¬
ple can tell us what his informants care to enlarge upon, and
whether what the people are said to be doing actually corre¬
sponds to what can be observed in daily and yearly life. Ob¬
servations which would indicate whether or not traditional traits,
such as nostalgia or avarice or retentiveness, are also dominant
personal traits in typical individuals, are still rare. Take the
Yurok’s ability to pantomime a crying helpless being or a deeply
grrieved mourner. True, in characterizing the Yurok’s institu-

•For t more detaOed analysis of the fomia Publications in American Ar-
Yurok world sec E. H. Erikson, Ob- chaeology and Ethnology, VoL 35, No.
servatinns on the Yurok: Childhood 10, University of California Press, 1943,
Mnd World Imagey University of Cali-

158 Childhood and Society

tionalized daiming of recompense, Kroeber, during a few min¬
utes of one seminar evening, used the expressions “whining
around,” “fussing,” “bickering,” “crying out,” “self-pity,” “ex¬
cuses a child might give,” “claimants who make nuisances <rf
themselves,” etc. Does this mean that the Yurok anywhere within
his technology is more helpless, more paralyzed by sadness, than
are members of a tribe which does not develop these “traits”?
Certainly not; his institutionalized helplessness eo ipso is neither
a trait nor a neurotic symptom. It does not interfere with the
individual’s efficiency in meeting technological demands which
were adequate for the segment of nature within which the Yurok
lives. His crying is based on the learned and conditioned ability
to dramatize an infantile attitude which the culture chooses to
preserve and to put at the disposal of the individual, to be used
by him and his fellow men within the limited area of magic. Such
an institutionalized attitude neither spreads beyond its defined
area nor makes impossible the development to full potency of
its opposite. It is probable that the really successful Yurok was
the one who could cry most heartbreakingly or haggle most ef¬
fectively in some situations and be full of fortitude in others—
that is, the Yurok whose ego was strong enough to synthesize
orality and “sense.” In comparison, “oral” and anal types whom
we may be able to observe today in our culture are bewildered
people who find themselves victims of overdeveloped organ
modes without the corresponding homogeneous cultural reality.

As far as we know now, the Yurok does not seem to focus any
interest, pleasurable or phobic, on feces; and such reaction forma¬
tions as regularity or compulsive orderliness do not apparently
exceed what could be expected of people with craftsmanship of
Yurok leveL Yurok retentiveness seems alimentary rather than
anal. It is a tendency to acctimulate creatively for the sake of
making the most of the collected values which belong to the
whole social system, where they in turn give communal pleas¬
ure, prestige, and permanence. Anal character in our edture
often appears to be a result of the impact on a retentive child of
a certain type of maternal behavior in Western civilization.

Fishermen Along a Salmon River 159

namely, a narcissistic and phobic ovcrconccm with matters of
elimination. This attitude helps to overdevelop retentive and
eliminative potentialities and to fixate them in the anal zone. It
creates strong social ambivalence in the child, and it remains an
isolating factor in his social and sexual development.

The Yurok’s “pleasure of final evacuation and exhibition of
stored-up material” is most coaspicuous at dances, when, to¬
ward morning, the Yurok with a glowing face produces his
fabulous treasures of obsidian or of headwear ornamented with
woodpecker scalps. However, the institutionalized obstinacy
which made it possible for him to accumulate these treasures
seems counteracted by the highly social experience of seeing
his treasures enhance the prestige of the whole tribe.

If we know the official behavior required for successful par¬
ticipation in the traditional spectacle of a certain culture, we
stand only at the beginning of the inquiry into the “character”
of individuals: for to know how generous or how thrifty a peo¬
ple or an individual “is,” we must know not only what the
verbalized and the implied values of his culture arc, but also what
provisions arc made for an individual’s “getting away” with
transgressions. Each system, in its own way, tends to make
similar people out of all its members, but each in a specific way
also permits exemptions and deductions from the demands with
which it thus taxes the individuality of the individual ego. It
stands to reason that these exemptions are less logical and much
less obvious, even to the people themselves, than are the official
rules.

Let it be stated, then, that in describing conceptual and be¬
havioral configurations in the Yurok and in the Sioux world,
we have not attempted to establish their respective “basic char¬
acter structures.” Rather, we have concentrated on the con¬
figurations with which these two tribes try to synthesize their
concepts and their ideals in a coherent design for living. This
design makes them efficient in their primitive ways of tech¬
nology and magic and saves them from individual anxiety which
might lead to panic: the anxiety among the Plains hunters over

i6o Childhood and Society

anasculation and immobilization, among the Pacific fishermen
over being left without provisions. To accomplish this a primi¬
tive culture seems to do three things: it gives specific meanings
to early bodily and interpersonal experience so as to create the
righr combination of organ modes and the proper emphasis on
social modalities; k carefully and systematically channelizes
throughout the intricate pattern of its daily life the energies
thus provoked and deflected; and it gives consistent supernatural
meaning to the infantile anxieties which it has exploited by such
provocation.

In doing all this, a society cannot afford to be arbitrary and
anarchic. Even “primitive” societies must avoid doing just what
our analogistic thinking would have them do. They cannot
afford to create a community of wild eccentrics, of infantile
characters, or of neurotics. In order to create people who will
function effectively as the bulk of the people, as energetic lead¬
ers, or as useful deviants, even the most “savage” culture must
strive for what we vaguely call a “strong ego” in its majority or
at least in its dominant minority—i.e., an individual core firm
and flexible enough to reconcile the necessary contradictions in
any human organization, to integrate individual differences, and
above all to emerge from a long and unavoidably fearful infancy
with a sense of identity and an idea of integrity.

To understand this, we must now approach the whole matter
of childhood and society from another angle entirely. We must
temporarily take the individual ego as the apparent meastire of
all things, somatic and social, and this from its formless begin¬
ning to the formulated consciousness of its self.

Freud has said that the study of dreams is the royal road to
the adult’s unconscious. In analogy to this, the best lead to the
understanding of the infantile ego is the study of the child’s play
—“fantasies woven around real objects” (Waelder). Therefore,
let us now turn from the fateful make-believe of primitive magic
to the play of the children among us.

PART THREE

Introduction to Part Three

Wheh, at moments of slight and vagne inner disequilibrium,
we stop and ask ourselves what we have daydreamed about while
purstiing our rational occupations during the preceding hours,
we are in for a number of surprises. Assuming that our capacity
for self-perception outweighs that of self-deception, we wUl find
that our thoughts and feelings have described a constant (more
or less intense, more or less eccentric) seesaw toward and away
from a state of relative equilibrium. In one direction our thoughts
pursue a series of fantasies concerning things which we wish we
could do or wish we had done. Often, stepping out of the con¬
fines and possibilities of our circumscribed existence, we imagine
how it would have been or how it would be if and when we
might come to realize certain fantasies of omnipotent control
or of sovereign choice or of sexual license. The innocence of
such fancy comes to an end when in the pursuit of our day¬
dreams we calmly ignore or blithely manipulate, accidentally
damage, or consider as nonexistent some of the people dearest
to us.

The shift of the seesaw is a reduction which often follows with
irrational suddenness. Without becoming aware of a change in
mood, we find ourselves involved in thoughts of “oughtness”:
what we ought to have done instead of what we did do; what
we ought to be doing now in order to undo what we have done;

164 Childhood and Society

and what we ought to do in the future instead of what we
would wish we could do. Here again, our irrational worry over
“spilled milk,” our fear of having aroused actually quite disin¬
terested, and antagonized quite well-meaning, people, our fan-
tasied atonements and childish repetitions, may well surprise us.

The third position, the resting place between the extremes,
is harder to remember, although it is least offensive, for in this
third state we are least emotional, neither wishing that we could,
nor feeling that we ought, to do anything different from what
we should and would and could do. Here, where we are least
self-conscious, we are most ourselves. Only for many of os it
is hard to daydream for any length of rime without, sooner or
later, meeting our limits or transgressing somebody else’s—and
then we are off again, usurping, atoning.

With this simple method some of us may be able to observe
dimly what others reveal only in the disguise of dreams arising
from their deepest sleep. In either case, it is easy to say that we
do “not really mean” what is thus shown on the private screen
of our inner stage. Unfortunately for our self-esteem (but in
the end, we hope, for the good fortime of mankind), Freud’s
psychoanalytic method has shown that we are able to become
conscious of, to account for, and to neutralize by fantasy, play,
and dream, only a fraction of these ups and downs: the rest is
unconscious. Remaining unconscious, it finds its way into irra¬
tional personal action or into collective cycles of ustirparion
and atonement.

I shall not discuss now the systematic relationship between
individual and collective cycles of establishing peace of mind
and soul—here, above all, we must be on guard against playing
havoc with human reality by pursuing oversimplified analogies.
But I will explain in a few words how the psychoanalyst comes
to view collective behavior.

The practice of psychoanalytic observation fosters the habit
of searching out the points of greatest inner resistance and focus¬
ing on them. The clinical observer asks an adult patient to
verbalize freely, whereupon he watches the threshold of verbal-

Introduction to Part Three 165

ization not only for themes which cross easily in the form of
straight affect, clear memory, determined statement, but also
for themes which remain elusive. Such themes may alternately
appear half-remembered, dreamily disguised, bitterly repudi¬
ated, brazenly projected on others, half-heartedly joked about
and clumsily avoided, or followed by silent pauses. In other
words, he looks for disguises and omissions, and for changing
quantities and qualities of awareness as expressed in seemingly
willing verbalization.

In looking at cultures, then, the psychoanalytic observer
weighs themes which appear on a dynamic scale in a culture’s
collective behavion in one variation as historical memory and
in another as mythological theology; in one disguise re-enacted
in a heavy ritual, in another as a light game, in a third entirely
represented by strict avoidance. Whole complexes of such themes
may be recognizable in culture-pattern dreams or in indmdual
dreams, in humorous or hateful projections on the neighbor, on
the prehuman race, or on the animal world; they may be repre¬
sented in deviating behavior open only to the select or to the
damned or to both.

It is in this general way that we have arrived, in the case of
the Sioux and the Yurok, at a bridge between infantile themes
and themes of great communal and religious fervor. We have
pointed to the fact that a Sioux Indian—at the height of his re¬
ligious endeavors—drives little sticlts through his breast, ties the
sticks to a thong, the thong to a pole, and then, in a peculiar
trance, dances backwards until the thong tightens and the sticks
split his breast so that the gushing blood runs freely down his
body; and we have endeavored to find a self-punishing meaning
in his extreme behavior. We have, furthermore, insisted that in
so doing (ic., in inviting torture) he is turning against himself
the first provoked, then energetically frustrated, and then for¬
ever deflected infantile impulse to usurp his mother’s elusive
breast by grasping and biting. This ritual is symbolic of the con¬
flict between that wish part of himself which once became in¬
volved in an impossible combination of provocation and frustra-

166 Childhood and Society

tion, and made him forever wish with fear and hate—and that
part of him which forever feels dependent and in need of faith,
as assured by the love of the parents in this world and the parental
powers in the supernatural

The Yurok, once a year, having organized themselves for
the great engineering feat of bridging the river with a fish dam
that yields a winter’s food supply, indulge in promiscuous license
and throw atonement and purification to the winds—^whereupon
they reach a sobering stag^ of satiation and reinstate self-restraint
and communal measures of securing the divine right to pursue
and snare the sacred salmon.

In both cases we suspect that the individual cycle of usurpation
and atonement was provoked and exploited as a collective magic
means of coercing nature.

In psychoanalysis we think we have learned to understand
this cycle, because we observe it again and again in individual
histories. We have a name for the pressure of excessive wishes
(the “id”) and for the oppressive force of conscience (the
“superego”), and we have appropriate theories for the two ex¬
treme stages, when people or peoples arc dominated by one or
the other of these forces. But if we try to define the state of
relative equilibrium between the well-known extremes, if we
ask what characterizes an Indian when he docs no more than
just calmly be an Indian, bent on the daily chores of the year’s
cycle, our description of this positive state is expressed only in
negations. We look for small tokens of the fact that he continues
to betray in minute emotional and ideational changes that same
conflict which, as Freud puts it, is manifested in a change of
mood from a vague anxious depression through a certain in-
between stage to heightened well-being—and back. Because
psychoanalysis developed as psychopathology, it had at first
little to say about this “in-between stage,” except that neither a
manic nor a depressive trend is, at the time, clearly noticeable;
that the superego is temporarily non-belligerent, that the id has
agreed to an armistice, and that a momentary lull exists on the
battlefield of the ego.

Introduction to Part Three 167

Let us pause at this point to retrace the term “ego” to its
beginnings in psychoanalysis. The id Freud considered to be
the oldest province of the mind, both in individual terms—for he
held the young baby to be “all id”—and in phylogenetic terms,
for the id is the deposition in us of the whole of evolutionary his¬
tory. The id is everything that is left in our organization of the
responses of the amoeba and of the impulses of the ape, of the
blind spasms of our intra-uterine existence, and of the needs of
our postnatal days—everything which would make us “mere
creatures.” The name “id,” of course, designates the assumption
that the “ego” finds itself attached to this impersonal, this bestial
layer like the centaur to his equestrian underpinnings: only that
the ego considers such a combination a danger and an imposi¬
tion, whereas the centaur makes the most of it. The id, then, has
some of the pessimistic qualities of Schopenhauer’s “will,” the
sum of all desire which must be overcome before we can be quite
htiman.

The other inner institution recognized and designated by
Freud is the “superego,” a kind of automatic governor which
limits the expression of the id by opposing to it the demands of
conscience. Here, too, the emphasis was at first on the foreign
burden imposed on the ego by its superego. For this super¬
imposed, this superior ego was “the (internalized) sum of all
the restrictions to which the ego must bow.” But conscience,
too, contains traces of the cruel forces of suppression in human
history—^Le., the threat of mutilation or isolation. In moments
of self-reproach and depression, the superego uses against the
ego methods so archaic and so barbaric that they become analo¬
gous to those of the blindly impulsive id. So, too, in the cruel¬
ties of religious or political inquisition, it is hard to see where
mere sadistic perversion ends and an all too hearty form of piety
begins.

Between the id and the superego, then, the ego dvi^Ils. Con-
BStently balancing and warding off the extreme ways of the
other two, the ego keeps tuned to the reality of the historical
day, testing perceptions, selecting memories, governing action.

i68

Childhood and Society

and otherwise integrating the individuaTs capacities of orienta¬
tion and planning. To safeguard itself, the ego employs “de¬
fense mechanisms.” These, contrary to the more colloquial way
of speaking of an overtly “defensive” attitude, are unconscious
arrangements which permit the individual to postpone satisfac¬
tion, to find substitutions, and otherwise to arrive at compro¬
mises between id impulses and superego compulsions. Such com¬
promises we found in Sam’s “counter-phobic” defense, his pro¬
clivity to attack when he was frightened. We recognized in the
Marine’s all-around abstinence the defense mechanism of “self¬
restriction”; and we interpreted his exaggerated goodness as
“overcompensation” for all the rage that had accumulated in his
much-deprived childhood. Other defense mechanisms will be
described as further cases are referred to. However, in studying
this area we wish to extend our reach beyond the mere defensive
aspects of the ego which have been so conclusively formulated
in Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense:

The ego is victorious when its defensive measures . . . enable it to
restrict the development of anxiety and so to transform the instincts
that, even in difficult circumstances, some measure of gratilication is
secured, thereby establishing the most harmonious relations possible
between the id, the super-ego, and the forces of the outside world.*

As we proceed, we hope to develop criteria for the ego’s vic¬
tories from babyhood to maturity. Let us first, however, examine
a specimen of psychopathology, a description of difficult dr-
cumstances within the individual. We shall see a very young
ego struggle for coherence, and fail Turning to the play-acting
of normal childhood, we shall then observe children as they tem¬
porarily fail and then lastingly succeed in overcoming the worst
of their infantile anxiety.

^Anna Freud, The Ego end the Mcebantsmt of Defentt, The Hoganh Preai
and the Insdtate of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1937.

CHAPTER

5

Early Ego Failure: Jean

To COME face to face with a “schizophrenic” chQd is one of the
most awe-inspiring experiences a psychotherapist can have. It
is not the bizarreness of the child’s behavior which makes the
encounter so immediately challenging, but rather the very con¬
trast of that behavior with the appeal of some of these children.
Their facial features are often regular and pleasing, their eyes
are “soulful” and seem to express deep and desperate experi¬
ence, paired with a resignation which children should not have.
The total impression immediately convinces the observer, often
against the better knowledge of previous experience, that the
right person and the right therapeutic regime could bring the
duld back on the road to coherent progress. This conviction
has the more or less explicit corollary that the child has been in
the wrong hands and, in fact, that he has every reason to mis¬
trust his neglectful and rejecting parents. (We saw how far In¬
dians and whites would go in accusing one another of doing
deliberate harm to their cMdren: our occupational prejudice is
“the rejecting mother.”)

I first saw Jean when she was almost six years old. I did not
see her at her best. She had just made a train trip, and my house
was strange to her. What glimpses I could catch of her (for
she was frantically on the move through garden and house)
showed her to be of graceful build, but tense and abrupt in her

169

17© Childhood and Society

movements. She had beandful dark eyes which seemed like
peaceful islands within the anxious grimace of her face. She ran
through all the rooms of the house, uncovering all the beds she
could find, as if she were looking for something. The objects
of this search proved to be pillows, which she hugged and talked
to in a hoarse whisper and with a hollow laugh.

Yes, Jean was “schizophrenic." Her human relationship® were
centrifugal, away from pjeoplc. I had observed this strange phe¬
nomenon of a “centrifugal approach,” often interpreted as mere
lack of contact, years before in the behavior of another little
girl who was said to “notice nobody.” When that little girl came
down a flight of stairs toward me, her glance drifted in an absent
way over a series of objects, describing concentric circles around
my face. She focused on me negatively, as it were. This flight is
the common denominator for a variety of other symptoms, such
as the preoccupation with things far away and imagined; the in¬
ability to concentrate on any task at hand; violent objection to
all close contact with others unless they fit into some imaginary
scheme; and immediate diffused flight from verbal communica¬
tion, if it happens to become more or less established. Meaning
is quickly replaced by parrotlike repetition of stereotyped
phrases, accompanied by sounds of disgust and despair.

The observation that Jean, on her mad rush through my
house, again and again paused long enough to concentrate her
attention and to lavish her affection on bed pillows seemed im-
jertant to me, for the following reason. Her mother had told
me that Jean’s extreme disorientation had begun after the mother
had become bedridden with tuberculosis. She was permitted to
stay at home in her own room, but the child could spieak to her
only through the doorway of her bedroom, from the arms of a
good-natured but “tough” nurse. During this period the mother
had the impression that there were things which the child ur¬
gently wanted to tell her. The mother regretted at the time that,
shortly before her illness, she had let Jean’s original nurse, a gentle
Mexican girl, leave them. Hedwig, so the mother anxiously no¬
ticed from her bed, was always in a hurry, moved the baby about

Elarly Ego Failure: Jean 171

with great energy, and was very emphatic in her disapprovals
and warnings. Her favorite remark was, “Ah, baby, you stink!”
and her holy war was her effort to keep the creeping infant off
the floor so that she would not be contaminated by dirt. If the
child were slightly soiled, she scrubbed her “as if she were scrub¬
bing a deck.”

When after four months of separation Jean (now thirteen
months old) was permitted to re-enter the mother’s room, she
spoke only in a whisper. “She shrank back from the pattern of
the chintz on the armchair and cried. She tried to crawl off the
flowered rug and cried aU the time, looking very fearful. She
was terrified by a large, soft ball rolling on the floor and terri¬
fied of paper crackling.” These fears spread. First, she did not
dare to touch ashtrays and other dirty objects, then she avoided
touching or being touched by her elder brother and gradually
by most people around her. Although she learned to feed her¬
self and to walk at the normal time, she gradually became sad
and silent.

Maybe the child’s frantic affection for pillows had to do with
that period when she was prevented from approaching her
mother’s bed. Maybe, for some reason, she had not been able
to take the separation, had “adjusted” to it by a permanent pat¬
tern of fleeing from all human contact, and was now express¬
ing her affection for the bedridden mother in her love for
piUows.

The mother confirmed that the child had a fetish, a small pQ-
low or sheet which she would press over her face when going
to sleep. For her part, the mother seemed desirous of making
restitution to the child for what she felt she had denied her, not
only during those months of illness, but by what now seemed
like a general kind of neglect by default. This mother by no
means lacked affection for the diild, but she felt that she had
not given Jean the relaxed affection she needed most tohen she
needed it most.

Some such maternal estrangement may be found in every
history of infantile schizophrenia. What remains debatable is

17* Childhood and Society

whether the maternal behavior could possibly be a “cause" for
such a radical disturbance in a child’s functioning; or whether
such children, for some intrinsic and perhaps constitutional rea¬
sons, have needs or need stimulations which no mother would
understand without professional help—and professional people,
until very recently, were utterly unable to spot these children
when they were young enough to perhaps be saved with special
dosages of well-planned mother love. About this, later.

On the children’s part, early oral traumata are often suggested
in the history. Take, for example, Jean’s feeding history. The
mother tried to nurse her for one week but had to give up be¬
cause of a breast infection. The baby vomited, cried excessively,
seemed always hungry. When Jean was ten days old, she be¬
gan to suffer from thrush, which remained acute for three
weeks and persisted as a low-grade infection for the remainder of
her first year. Drinking was often painful. At one time during
the first half of the first year, an infected layer of skin was re¬
moved from the underside of her tongue. Early moving pictures
of the little girl show a heavy lower lip and a protruding, hyper¬
active tongue. No doubt the oral trauma had been severe. It
should be noted here that Jean’s fetish consisted of a sheet which
she made into a ball and pressed against her mouth with one
piece between her teeth. Besides these pillows, Jean loved only
instruments and machines: egg-beaters, vacuum cleaners, and
radiators. She smUed at them, whispered to them, and hugged
them, and was impelled by their very presence to a kind of ex¬
cited dancing—all this, while she remained completely unin¬
terested in people unless they invaded her preoccupations, or
unless she wished to invade theirs.

In the mother’s early notes there was another item which
seemed of great relevance to me. She showed me the statement
of a psychologist who, when testing the child at the age of four,
noted his impression that “the child had turned against speech."
For it seems important to understand that these children repudi¬
ate their own organs and functions as hostile and “outside.”
They have a defective screening system; their sensory contacts

Early Ego Failure: Jean 173

fa3 to master the overpowering impressions as well as the dis¬
turbing impulses which intrude themselves upon consciousness.
They therefore experience their own organs of contact and
communication as enemies, as potential intruders into a body ego
which has withdrawn “under the skin.” It is for this reason that
these children dose their eyes and hold their hands over their
ears, or hide their whole heads in blankets, in reaction to un¬
successful contacts. Thus, only a carefully dosed and extraor¬
dinarily consistent application of maternal encouragement could
enable the child’s ego to reconquer, as it were, its own organs,
and with them to perceive the social environment and to make
contact with it more trustingly.

When I saw Jean she had not lived with her parents for many
months. Most of the time she appeared not to care. Yet, on the
previous Christmas, after attending a party at her parents’ house,
the child threw all the presents which she had received from
her parents on the street outside her foster home, stamped on
them, and cried wildly. Maybe she did care. I proposed that
the family move together and that, for some extended time, the
mother should take over Jean’s care under my guidance to be
gfiven on regular trips to their home in a college town. This
family-treatntent plan, 1 felt, should precede any direct therapy
with the child.

When she found herself back within her family, with her
mother in constant attendance, Jean expressed appreciation by
a determined and goal-directed attempt to restore contact. But
these attempts were often too determined and too specific in their
goal. She became fascinated with parts of people. Her shocked
brothers found their penises grabbed—and politely withdrew
their sincere wish to co-operate in the treatment plan. Her father
found her an enthusiastic attendant at his showers, where she
waited for opportunities to grab his genitals. He could not hide,
first, his amused consternation, and then his somewhat nervous
annoyance. When he was dressed she concentrated on a bump
on his hand which she called a “lumpy,” and on his cigarettes,
which she would tear from his lips and throw out of the win-

174 Childhood and Society

dow. She knew where people are vulnerable; these children, so
vulnerable themselves, are masters at such diagnosis.

Luckily, Jean’s greatest “partialistic” interest was in her
mother’s breasts; luckily, because the mother could indulge this
interest for a period. The child would love to sit on the mother’s
lap and take sly pokes at breasts and nipples. Climbing on the
mother, she would say “gloimb you, gloimb you,” wliich ap¬
parently meant “climb on you.” The mother let her sit on her
for hours. The “gloimb you” gradually expanded into sing¬
songs such as this (I quote from the mother’s diary);

Gloimb you, gloimb you, not hurt a chest—not touch a didge—not
touch a ban—not tou^ a dage—^not touch a bandage—^throw away a
chest—hurt a chest.

This apparently meant that the child was preoccupied with
the idea that touching her mother’s chest-bandage (brassiere)
might hurt her. We even went so far as to surmise tiiat she com¬
municated an impression according to which she had hurt the
mother when she developed “chest trouble” and that she had
been banished from her mother’s room for this reason. For her
talk seemed to indicate that the “throwing away” she referred
to really meant that she would be thrown away. It must be un¬
derstood that the most difficult verbal (and maybe conceptual)
feat for these children, even where they have acquired extensive
vocabularies, is to differentiate between active and passive, and
between “I” and “you”: the basic grammar of two-ness. As the
game with the mother progressed, Jean could be heard whis¬
pering to herself “spank you” or “not pick you finger off.” She
apparently associated her attacks on penises with those on the
mother’s breasts, for she would continue, “Brother has a penis.
Be gentle. Don’t hurt. Don’t cut off your nailfingers. Bola. Jean
has a bola (vulva).” Gradually she became outspokenly self-
punitive and asked to be “thrown away.” In solitary games she
would go back to her old fears of dirt, and would act as if she
were brushing away a cobweb or throwing away something
disgusting.

Early Ego Failure: Jean 175

Let us pause here to note that Jean was already describing here
the basic cycle of an infantile schizophrenic conflict, which must
be analyzed as to content and as to the fate of its ego involve¬
ment. There seems to be little doubt that the child, given a
chance to communicate with the mother in her own way, re¬
ferred back to the time, five years earlier, when her mother was
ilL These children have an excellent memory—^in spots, in vul¬
nerable spots—but their memory does not seem to sustain a
continuous sense of identity. Their sayings, like dream images,
indicate what they want to talk about, but do not indicate what
causal connection is to be communicated. Interpretation must do
that. In talking about her mother’s illness, then, so we must infer,
Jean alluded to the possibility that she had hurt the mother’s
chest, that as token of her hurt condition the mother had worn
a “bandage,” and that for that reason the child had been thrown
away (not permitted to come and hog her mother). The con¬
fusion as to what was hiut, the child’s finger or the mother’s chest,
we may ascribe to semantic difficulties. Adults arc of little help
in those early stages when they say, “Don’t touch it, you will
hurt it,” and then switch to “Don’t touch it, or else you will hurt
your fingers.” Yet one might say that the confusion of adult
dicta here fits only too well that early ego stage when all pain
is experienced as “outside,” all pleasures as “inside,” no matter
where its actual source is. Jean may never have outgrown that
stage; and yet, there was also the early experience of being
abandoned by the mother to a nurse who was a “don’t touch”
zealot. In retesting the reality of the prohibition, of course, she
only had to do what she did to the men in the family. With her
mother she was more fortunate. But here an important item enters
—^namely, the immense self-punitive tendency in these driven
children. Their law is “all or none”; they take the dictum, “If
thine eye offend thee, pluck it out,” literally and quite seriously.
Thus it may happen that a little boy in a schizophrenic episode re¬
quests his horrified parents in all sincerity to cut off his penis be¬
cause it is no good-

Thc mother continued to explain patiently to Jean that the ill-

176 Chfldhood and Society

ness had not been her fault. She let Jean sleep with her, let her sit tm
her lap, and, in general, gave her the attention and consideration
for her thought processes and verbal ways usually awarded only
to an infant. Jean seemed to begin to believe her. After several
months she showed marked improvement. She became more
graceful in her movements; her vocabulary increased, or, as one
should say in such cases, became apparent, for it is usually there
before its presence is suspected. And she played “nurse and baby.”
She put a little black toy dog to bed and said, “Go to sleep, dog,
stay under covers; shut your eyes, have to spank you, dog.” Also
she began to build long block trains which were “going cast.”
During one of these games she looked her mother in the eyes with
one of her rare, completely contact-seeking glances and said,
“Not go on long ride on the train sometime.” “No,” said the
mother, “we arc going to stay together.”

Such improvements seemed most rewarding. They were usu¬
ally interrupted by crises which led to emergency calls. 1 would
visit the family and talk with everybody until I had ascertained
what was going on in all their lives. A whole scries of difficulties
arose in this one-patient sanitarium. One can live with schizo¬
phrenic thought only if one can make a profession out of under¬
standing it. The mother had accepted this task, which demands a
particular gift of empathy and at the same time the ability to keep
oneself intact. Otherwise one must refute such thinking in order
to be protected against it. In each member of the household, then,
a glance into Jean’s life, characterized as it was by the alternation
of naked impulsiveness and desperate self-negation, endangered
his own equilibrium and self-esteem. This had to be pointed out
repeatedly, because Jean would constantly change the direction
of her provocation. And she would withdraw repeatedly for no
apparent reason.

The following incident will serve to illustrate the impact of the
mother’s first attempts to make Jean sleep by herself. Suddenly
a pathological attachment to spoons developed, and it assumed
such proportions that it led to the first crisis of despair both in
Jean and in her parents. Jean would insistently repeat such sen-

Early Ego Failure: Jean 177

tences as “not sleep in the light in Jean’s room,” “light in the
spoon,” “incinerator in the sf>oon,” “blankets in the spoon,” etc.
During dinnertime she would often sit and merely look at the
“light in the spoon.” Unable to make herself understood, she
beg^ to withdraw and to stay in bed for hours and days. Yet she
refused to go to sleep at night. The parents put in an emergency
call and asked me to try to clear up the matter. When I asked
Jean to show me the light in the spoon, she showed me a plug
behind a bookcase. Some weeks ago she had broken off one piece
of this plug and had caused a short circuit. As 1 went with her to
her room to investigate the electrical appliances there I found that
she had a dim bulb in her room with a small spoonlike shade at¬
tached to it which was intended to keep the light from shining on
her bed. Was that the original “light in the spoon”? Jean indicated
it was. Now it became clear. On returning home, Jean had first
slept in the mother’s bed. Then the mother had slept with her in
her bed. TTien the mother had slept in her own bed and Jean in
hers, the door ajar and the hall light on. Finally the hall light had
been turned off and only the light from a small bulb (“the light in
the spoon”) left in Jean’s room. Apparently at night, then, Jean
would look at this light as her last consolation—the last “part” of
her mother—and endow it with the same partialistic affection
and fear which she had demonstrated in relation to her mother’s
breast, her father’s and her brothers’ penises, and all the fetishes
before. It was at that time that she touched a plug in the living
room with those problem fingers of hers, causing a short circuit
and making everything dark, including the “light in the spoon.”
Again she had brought on catastrophe: by touching something
she had caused a crisis which threatened to leave her alone in the
dark.

The circumstances having been explained all aroxmd, the spoon
fetish was abandoned, and the course of restoration resumed.
However, one could not fail to be impressed with the persistence
of the pathogenic pattern and the violence of its eruption, for
Jean was now a whole year older (nearly seven). Yet she seemed
to begin to feel that her fingers could do no irreparable harm and

178 Childhood and Society

that she could not only keep them but also use them for learning
and for making beautiful thmgs.

First, she became enchanted by the finger play which says that
“this little pig does this” and “that little pig does that.” She made
the little pigs do what she had been doing during the day, namely,
“go to market,” “go to ten-cent store,” “go to escalator,” or “cry
all the way home.” Thus, in referring to the coherent series of her
fingers she learned to integrate time and to establish a continuity
of the various selves which had done different things at different
times. But she could not say, “/ did this” and “/ did that.” Not that
I consider this a problem of mere mental capacity. The ego of
schizoid (as well as schizophrenic) people is dominated by the
necessity for repeating the testing and integrating experience be¬
cause of an inadequate sense of the trustworthiness of events
at the time when they happen. Jean, then, accomplished such re¬
integration, together with its communication, by the use of her
fingers, which, now permitted, could be readmitted to the body
ego. She learned the letters of the alphabet by drawing them with
her fingers, after studying them with the help of the Montessori
touch method. And she learned to play melodics by scratching a
xylophone with her nails. The mother reported:

Since the time when Jean began to show such a disturbing, because
apparently senseless, interest in the xylophone, I have noticed that
she is actually playing it with her fingernails. She does it so quietly
one cannot distinguish what she is doing. Tonight, however, I dis¬
covered that she could play “Water, Water Wild Flower" all the
way through. This song requires every note in the scale. I asked for
it to be repeated and watched her hand travel up and down the scale.
I was amazed and made a big fuss over her, saying it was wonderful
I said, “Let’s go downstairs to the others and play it for them.” She
came down willingly, even self-consciously, and very pleased. She
now played it aloud for them, and they were astounded. She then
played several other things: “Rain Is Falling Down," “ABODETG,”
etc. We all praised her and she ate it up. She did not want to go up¬
stairs but seemed to want to stay and play on for the audience, a new
delightful feeling.

Early Ego Failure: Jean 179

Thus Jean “sublimated ” and gained friends; but she also made
new enemies, in new ways. For she also used her fingers for pok-
ing people and came so near to hurting a visitor’s eyes that she had
to be energetically stopped. She especially liked to poke her
father, obviously as a sequence to her penis- and cigarette¬
grabbing activities. When, at this point, the father had to go on a
trip, she regressed to whining, resumed her sheet fetish (saying
“blanket is mended”), spoke only in a soft voice, and ate little,
even refusing ice cream. She had again made somebody go away
by touching him! She seemed particularly desperate because she
had, in fact, begun to respond to her father’s devoted efforts to
help her.

At the height of this crisis, Jean lay down beside her mother in
bed and with desperate crying repeated over and over, “No vulva
on Jean, no eggplant, take it off, take it off, no egg in the plant,
not plant the seed, cut off your finger, get some scissors, cut it off.”
This obviously represented the old deep self-punitive reaction.

Jean’s mother gave her appropriate explanations concerning
her father’s “disappearance.” She also told Jean that it was not
because she had touched herself that her “eggplant” had disap¬
peared; in fact, she still had it, way inside. Jean resumed her play
with her fingers. She had to work her way again through previous
stages of existence by chanting: “This little girl sleeps in the re¬
frigerator, this little girl sleeps in the vacuum cleaner,” etc. Gradu¬
ally her interest in animals and now also in other children reap¬
peared, and the fingers would represent “this little boy is jumping,
this little boy is running ... is walking ... is racing,” etc.
Her interest in fingers then spread to various forms of locomotion
both of children and of animals. She learned to read the names of
various domestic animals and, again using her fingers, also the
days of the week, and adding her toes, numbers up to twenty. At
the same time her play on the xylophone began to include more
difficult French folk songs, all of which she played with great
ease and abandon, knowing always exactly where to find the first
note. The pleasure of having the use of her fingers restored can
be seen from the mother’s report:

i8o Childhood and Society

Last Sunday Jean made a painting of a little girl in a yellow dress. At
night she went up to the picture on the wall silently and felt of the
paint. She paused long over the hands, each of which was bigger than
the whole girl, and very carefully done with five fingers each. Then
she said, “The hands are nice.” I agreed, repeating the words. Then
in a minute she said, “The hands are pretty.” Again I agreed appreci¬
atively. She retreated to the bed without taking her eyes off the pic¬
ture as she sat down on the bed, still studying it. Then she burst out
loudly, “The hands are lovely”

During all this time, Jean had, off and on, played the xylophone
and sung songs. Now the parents were fortunate enough to find a
piano teacher who based her methods on Jean’s auditory gift and
ingenuity in imitating. At my next visit, after being taken to my
room, I heard somebody practicing some phrases of Beethoven’s
first sonata, and innocently remarked on the strong and sensi¬
tive touch. I thought a gifted adult was playing. To find Jean at
the piano was one of the surprises which are so gripping in work
with these cases—and which often prove so misleading, because
again and again they make one believe in the child’s total progress
where one is justified in believing only in isolated advances of
individual faculties. This I say with feeling and conviction, for
Jean’s piano playing, whether it was Beethoven, Haydn, or boogie-
woogie, was truly astounding—until she turned against this gift,
just as she had “turned against speech,” in the words of the
first psychologist who had seen her.

This completes one episode in Jean’s improvement: her rela¬
tion to her hands. It also completes the specimen to be reported
here as an illustration of the essential ego weakness which causes
these children to be swayed at one time by a “drivenness” focused
on a part of another person; and at another by cruel self-punitive-
ness and paralyzing perfectionism. It is not that they fail to be able
to learn, to remember, and to excel—usually in some artistic en¬
deavor which reflects the sensory counterpart of their essentially
oral fixation. It is that they cannot integrate it all: their ego is im¬
potent.

You will want to know how Jean fared. As the child grew

Early Ego Failure: Jean i8i

more mature, the discrepancy between her age and her behavior
became so marked that associations with children anywhere near
her age level were impossible. Other difficulties arose which made
at least an interval in a special school mandatory. There she
quickly lost what she had gained in the years of her mother’s heroic
effort. Her treatment has since been resumed under the best resi¬
dential circumstances and under the guidance of one of the most
devoted and most imaginative child psychiatrists in tliis particular
field.

The role which “maternal rejection” or special circumstances
of abandonment play in cases such as Jean’s is still debatable. I
think one should consider that these children may very early and
subtly fail to return the mother’s glance, smile, and touch; an
initial reserve which makes the mother, in turn, unwittingly
withdraw. The truism that the original problem is to be found in
the mother-child relationship holds only in so far as one con¬
siders this relationship an emotional pooling which may multiply
well-being in both but which will endanger both partners when
the communication becomes jammed or weakened. In those cases
of infantile schizophrenia which I have seen, the primary de¬
ficiency in “sending power” was in the child; although, of course,
the child as a former part of the parent may well share with the
parent some frailty of contact and communication which may
appear in malignant form in the younger mind and organism,
while in the adult it may have found a compensatory expression
in superior intellectual or artistic equipment. It may well be that
in some cases this equipment can be used to develop in mothers
and nurses that surplus of curative and creative effort of which
Jean’s mother was capable, and which alone may be expected to
make up for a deficiency of such magnitude. But only a therapist
with faith as well as experience in the matter, and only a sturdy
and enlightened mother, should undertake to pioneer on this
frontier of human trust.

CHAPTER

6

Toys and Reasons

Paraphrasing Freud, wc have called play the royal road to the
understanding of the infantile ego’s efforts at synthesis. We have
observed an example of a failure of such synthesis. Wc shall now
tom to childhood situations which illustrate the capacity of the
ego to find recreation and self-cure in the activity of play; and
to therapeutic situations in which we were fortunate enough to
be able to help a child’s ego to help itself.

I. PLAY, WORK, AND GROWTH

Let us take as our text for the beginning of this more reassuring
chapter a play episode described by a rather well-known psy¬
chologist The occasion, while not pathological, is nevertheless a
tragic one: a boy named Tom Sawyer, by verdict of his aunt,
must whitewash a fence on an otherwise faultless spring morning.
His predicament is intensified by the appearance of an age mate
named Ben Rogers, who indulges in a game. It is Ben, the man of
leisure, whom we want to observe with the eyes of Tom, the
working man.

He took up his brush and went tranquilly to work. Ben Rogers
hove in sight presently—^die very boy, of all boys, whose ridicule he
had been dreading. Ben’s gait was the hop-skip-and-jump—proof
enough that his heart was light and his anticipations high. He was
eating an apple, and giving a long, melodious whoop, at intervals.

iSt

Toys and Reasons 183

followed by a deep-toned ding-dong-dong, ding-dong-dong, for he
was personating a steamboat. As be drew near, he slackened speed,
took the middle of the street, leaned far over to starboard and rounded
to ponderously and with laborious pomp and circumstance—for he
was personating the Big Missouri, and considered himself to be
drawing nine feet of water. He was boat and captain and engine-bells
combined, so he had to imagine himself standing on his own hurricane-
deck giving the orders and executing them:

. . . “Stop die stabboard! Ting-a-ling-ling! Stop the labboard!
Come ahead on the stabboard! Stop her! Let your outside turn over
slow! Ting-a-ling-ling! Chow-ow-ow! Get out that head-line! Lively
now! Come—out with your spring-line—^whadre you about there!
Take a turn round that stump with the bight of it! Stand by that
stage, now—^let her go! Done with the engines, sir! Ung-a-ling-ling!
Sb't! sb't! sfif" (trying the gauge-cocks).

Tom went on whitewashing—paid no attention to the steamboat.
Ben stared a moment, and then said:

“Hi-yi.' Yotire up a stump, ain’t you! . . . You got to work, hey?”

My clinical impression of Ben Rogers is a most favorable one,
and this on all three counts: organism, ego, and society. For he
takes care of the body by munching an apple; he simultaneously
enjoys imaginary control over a number of highly conflicting
items (being a steamboat and parts thereof, as well as being the
captain of said steamboat, and the crew obeying said captain);
while he loses not a moment in sizing op social reality when, on
navigating a comer, he sees Tom at work. By no means reacting
as a steamboat would, he knows immediately how to pretend
sympathy though he undoubtedly finds his freedom enhanced by
Tom’s predicament.

Flexible lad, we would say. However, Tom proves to be the
better psychologist: he is going to put him to work. Which shows
that psychology is at least the second-best thing, and under some
adverse circumstances may even prove superior to ordinary ad¬
justment.

In view of Ben’s final fate it seems almost rude to add interpreta¬
tion to defeat, and to ask what Ben’s play may mean. I presented
this question to a class of psychiatric social-work students. Most

184 Childhood and Society

of the answers were, of course, of the traumatic variety, for in
what other way could Ben become accessible to “case work”?
Ben must have been a fnistrated boy, the majority agreed, to take
the trouble to play so strenuously. The possible frustrations
ranged from oppression by a tyrannical father from whom he
escapes in fantasy by becoming a bossy captain, to a bedwetting
or toilet trauma of some kind which now made him want to be a
boat drawing nine feet of water. Some answers concerned the
more obvious circumstance that he wanted to be big, and this in
the form of a captain, the idol of his day.

My contribution to the discussion consisted of the considera¬
tion that Ben is a growing boy. To grow means to be divided
into different parts which move at different rates. A growing boy
has trouble in mastering his gangling body as well as his divided
mind. He wants to be good, if only out of expediency, and al¬
ways finds he has been bad. He wants to rebel, and finds that al¬
most against his will he has given in. As his time perspective per¬
mits a glimpse of approaching adulthood he finds himself acting
like a child. Tentatively, then, I would see as the “meaning” of
Ben’s play that it provides victory over his gangling body and
self by making a well-functioning whole out of brain (captain),
the nerves and muscles of will (signal system and engine), and
the whole bulk of the body (boat). It permits him to be an entity
within which he is his own boss, because he obeys himself. At the
same time, he chooses his metaphors from the tool world of the
young machine age, and anticipates the identity of the machine
god of his day: the captain of the Big Missouri.

I would look at a play act as, vaguely speaking, a function of
the ego, an attempt to bring into synchronization the bodily and
the social processes of which one is a part even while one is a self.
Ben’s fantasy could well contain a phallic and locomotor element:
a powerful boat in a mighty stream makes a good symbol A cap¬
tain certainly is a fitting father image, and, beyond that, an image
of well-delineated patriarchal power. Yet the emphasis, I think,
should be on the ego’s need to master the various areas of life, and
especially those in which the individual finds his self, his body.

Toys and Reasons 185

and his social role wanting and trailing. To hallucinate ego
mastery is the purpose of play—but play, as we shall see presently,
is the undisputed master of only a very slim margin of existence.
What is play—and what is it not.? Let us consult language, and
then return to children.

The sunlight playing on the waves qualifies for the attribute
“playful” because it faithfully remains within the rules of the
game. It does not really mingle and interfere with the chemical
world of the waves. It demands from them only that they be good
sports and agree to an intenningling of patterns. These patterns
change with effortless rapidity and with a repetitiveness which
promises pleasing phenomena within a predictable range without
ever creating the same configuration twice.

When man plays he must intermingle with the laws of things
and people in a similarly uninvolved and light fashion. He must
do something which he has chosen to do without being com¬
pelled by urgent interests or impelled by strong passion; he must
feel entertained and free of any fear or hope of serious conse¬
quences. He is on vacation from reality—or, as is most commonly
emphasized: he does not work. It is this opjX)sition to work which
gives play a number of connotations. One of these is “mere fun”
—^whether it is hard to do or not. As Mark Twain commented,
“constructing artificial flowers ... is work, while climbing the
Mont Blanc is only amusement.” In Puritan times and places,
however, mere fun always connoted sin; the Quakers warned that
you must “gather the flowers of pleasure in the fields of duty.”
Men of equally puritan mind could permit play only because they
believed that to find “relief from moral activity is in itself a moral
necessity.” Poets, however, place the emphasis elsewhere: “Man is
perfectly human only when he plays,” said Schiller. Thus play is
a borderline phenomenon to a number of human activities and,
in its own playful way, it tries to elude definition.

It is true that even the most strenuous and dangerous play is by
definition not work, i.e., does not produce commodities. Where it
does, it “goes professional” But this fact, from the start, makes
the comparison of adult and child’s play somewhat senseless; for

186 Childhood and Society

the adult is a commodity-producing and commodity-exchanging
animal, whereas the child is only preparing to become one. To the
working adult, play is re-creation. It permits a periodical stepping
out from those forms of defined limitation which are his reality.

Take gravity: to juggle, to Jump, or to climb adds unused
dimensions to the awareness of our body. Play here gives a sense
of divine leeway, of excess space.

Take time: in trifling, in dallying, we lazily thumb our noses at
this, our slave-driver. Where every minute counts, playfulness
vanishes. This puts competitive sports on the borderline of play:
they seem to make concessions to the pressure of space and dme,
only to defeat this very pressure by a fraction of a yard or of a
second.

Take fate and causality, which have determined who and what
we are, and where. In games of chance we re-establish equality
before fate, and secure a virgin chance to every player willing
to observe a few rules which, if compared with the rules of reality,
seem arbitrary and senseless. Yet they are magically convincing,
Uke the reality of a dream, and they demand absolute compliance.
Let a player forget that such play mtist remain his free choice,
let him become possessed by the demon of gambling, and playful¬
ness vanishes again. He is a gambler, not a player.

Take social reality, and our defined cubicles in it. In play-acting
we can be what in life we could not or would not be. But as the
play-actor begins to believe in his impersonation he comes closer
to a state of hysteria, if not worse; while if he tries, for purposes
of gain, to make others believe in his “role” he becomes an im¬
postor.

Take our bodily drives. The bulk of the nation’s advertising
effort exploits our wish to play with necessity, to make us believe,
for example, that to inhale and to eat are not pleasurable necessities,
but a fanciful game with ever new and sensuous nuances. Where
the need for these nuances becomes compulsive, it creates a general
state of mild addiction and gluttony, which ceases to transmit a
sense of abundance and, in fact, produces an undercurrent of
discontent.

Toys and Reasons 187

Last but not least, in love life we describe as sex play die ran¬
dom activities preceding the final act, which permit the partners
to choose body part, intensity, and tempo (“what, and with
which, and to whom,” as the limerick has it). Sex play ends when
the final act begins, narrowing choice and giving rein to “nature.”
Where one of the preparatory random acts becomes compelling
enough to completely replace the final act, playfulness vanishes
and perversion—or inhibition—^begins.

This list of playful situations in a variety of human endeavors
indicates the narrow area within which our ego can feel superior
to the confinement of space and time and to the definitiveness of
social reality—free from the compulsions of conscience and from
impulsions of irrationality. Only within these limitations, then,
can man feel at one with his ego; no wonder he feels “only human
when he plays.” But this presupposes one more most decisive con¬
dition: he must play rarely and work most of the time. He must
have a defined role in society. Playboys and gamblers arc both
envied and resented by the working man. We like to see them ex¬
posed or ridiculed, or we put them to worse than work by forcing
them to live in luxurious cages.

The playing child, then, poses a problem: whoever does not
work shall not play. Therefore, to be tolerant of the child’s play
the adult must invent theories which show cither that childhood
play is really work—or that it docs not count. The most popular
theory and the easiest on the observer is that the child is nobody
yet, and that the nonsense of his play reflects h. Scientists have
tried to find other explanation for the freaks of childish play by
considering them representative of the fact that childhood is
neither here nor there. According to Spencer, play uses up surplus
energy in the young of a number of mammalians who do not need
to feed or protect themselves because their parents do it for them.
However, Spencer noticed that wherever circumstances permit
play, tendencies arc “simulated” which are “unusually ready to
act, unusually ready to have their correlative feelings aroused.”
Early psychoanalysis added to this the “cathartic” theory, accord¬
ing to which play has a definite function in the growing being in

188 Childhood and Society

that it permits him to work off past emotions and to find imagi¬
nary relief for past frustrations.

In order to evaluate these theories, let us turn to the game of
another, a younger boy. He lived near another mighty river, the
Danube, and his play was recorded by another great psychologist,
Sigmund Freud, who wrote: ^

Without the intention of making a comprehensive study of these
phenomena, I availed myself of an opportunity which offered of
elucidating the first game invented by himself of a boy eighteen
months old. It was more than a casual observation, for I lived for some
weeks under the same roof as the child and his parents, and it was a
considerable time before the meaning of his puzzling and continually
repeated performance became clear to me.

The child was in no respect forward in his intellectual develop¬
ment; . . . but he made himself understood by his parents and the
maidservant, and had a good reputation for behaving “properly.^* He
did not disturb his parents at night; he scrupulously obeyed orders
about not touching various objects and not going into certain rooms;
and above all he never cried when his mother went out and left him
for hours together, although the tic to his mother was a very close
one: she had not only nourished him herself, but had cared for him
and brought him up without any outside help. Occasionally, however,
this well-behaved child evinced the troublesome habit of flinging
into the comer of the room or under the bed all the little things he
could lay his hands on, so that to gather up his toys was often no
light task. He accompanied this by an expression of interest and grati¬
fication, emitting a loud, long-drawn-out “O-o-o-oh” which in the
judgment of the mother (one that coincided with my own) was not
an interjection but meant ‘^go away" [fort], I saw at last that this
was a game, and that the child used aD his toys only to play “being
gone” [fort sein] with them. One day I made an observation that
confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of
string wound round it. It never occurred to him, for example, to drag
this after him on the floor and so play horse and cart with k, but he
kept throwing it with considerable skill, held by the string, over the
side of his litde draped cot, so that the reel disappeared into it, then

^Sigmund Fread, A General Selection^ edited by John Rickman, The Hogaxdi
Press and die Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, 1937.

Toys and Reasons 189

said his significant “O-o-o-oh” and drew the reel by the string out
of die cot again, greeting its reappearance with a joyful “Da” [there].
This was therefore the complete game, disappearance and return,
the first act being the only one generally observed by the onlookers,
and the one untiringly repeated by the child as a game for its own
sake, although the greater pleasure unquestionably attached to the
second act. . . . This interpretation was fully established by a fur-
dicr observation. One day when the mother had been out for some
hours she was greeted on her return by the information “Baby 0-0-0-
oh” which at first remained unintelligible. It soon proved that during
his long lonely hours he had found a method of bringing about his
own disappearance. He had discovered his reflection in the long
mirror which nearly reached to the ground and had then crouched
down in front of it, so that the reflection was “fort.”

To understand what Freud saw in this game we must note that
at the time he was interested in (and, in fact, writing about) the
strange phenomenon of the “repetition compulsion”—i.c., the
need to re-enact painful experiences in words or acts. We have all
experienced the occasional need of talking incessantly about a
painful event (an insult, a quarrel, or an operation) which one
might be expected to want to forget. We know of trauma¬
tized individuals who, instead of finding recovery in sleep, arc
repeatedly awakened by dreams in which they re-experience the
original trauma. We alro suspect that it is not so innocently acci¬
dental that some people make the same mistakes over and over
again; that they “coincidentally” and in utter blindness marry the
same kind of impossible partner from whom they have just been
divorced; or that a series of analogous accidents and mishaps al¬
ways must happen just to them. In all of these cases, so Freud con¬
cluded, the individual unconsciously arranges for variations of an
original theme which he has not learned either to overcome or to
live with: he tries to master a situation which in its original form
had been too much for him by meeting it repeatedly and of his
own accord.

As Freud was writing about this, he became aware of the soli¬
tary play described and of the fact that the frequency of the main

190 Childhood and Society

theme (something or somebody disappears and comes back) cor¬
responded to the intensity of the life experience reflected—
namely, the mother’s leaving in the morning and her return at
night.

This dramatization takes place in the play sphere. Utilizing his
mastery over objects, the child can arrange them in such a way
that they permit him to imagine that he is master of his life pre¬
dicament as welL For when the mother had left him, she had re¬
moved herself from the sphere of his cries and demands; and she
had come back only when it happened to suit her. In his game,
however, the little boy has the mother by a string. He makes her
go away, even throws her away, and then makes her come back at
his pleasure. He has, as Freud put it, turned passivity into activity;
he plays at doing something that was in reality done to him.

Freud mentions three items which may guide us in a further
social evaluation of this game. First, the child threw the object
away. Freud sees in this a possible expression of revenge—“If you
don’t want to stay with me, I don’t want you”—and thus an addi¬
tional gain in active mastery by an apparent growth of emotional
autonomy. In his second play act, however, the child goes fur¬
ther. He abandons the object altogether and, with the use of a
full-length mirror, plays “going away” from himself and return¬
ing to himself. He is now both the person who is being left and
the person who leaves. He has become master by incorporating
not only the person who, in life, is beyond his control, but the
whole situation, with both its partners.

This is as far as Freud goes with his interpretation. But we may
make a point of the fact that the child greets the returning mother
with the information that he has learned to “go away” from him¬
self. For the game alone, as reported by Freud, could be the begin¬
ning of an increasing tendency on the child’s part to take life ex¬
periences into a solitary comer and to rectify them in fantasy,
and only in fantasy. Let us assume that at the mother’s return the
child were to show complete indifference, extending his revenge
to the life situation and indicating that he, indeed, can now take
care of himself, that he does not need her. This often happens after

Toys and Reasons 191

the mother’s first excursions: she rushes back, eager to embrace her
child, only to be met by a bland face. She may then feel rejected
and turn against or away from the unloving child, who is thus
easily made to feel that the vengeance in the game of throwing
away and his subsequent boast has hit its mark too well, that he
has indeed made the mother go away, whereas he has only tried
to recover from being abandoned by her. Thus the basic problem
of being left and leaving would not be improved by its solu¬
tion in solitary play. Our little boy, however, told his mother
of his play, and we may assume that she, far from being offended,
demonstrated interest and maybe even pride in his ingenuity. He
was then better off all around. He had adjusted to a difficult situa¬
tion, he had learned to manipulate new objects, and he had re¬
ceived social recognition for his method.

But does the child’s play—so a frequent question goes—always
“mean” something personal and sinister? What if ten children, in
horse-and-buggy days, begin to play with reels on strings, pulling
them behind themselves and playing horsie? Must it mean any¬
thing to one of them over and beyond what it seems to mean to
all?

As we have said already, children, if traumatized, choose for
their dramatizations play material which is available in their cul¬
ture and manageable at their age. What is available depends on the
cultural circumstances and is therefore common to all children
who share these drcumstanccs. Bens today do not play steamboat
but use bicycles as more tangible objects of co-ordination—which
docs not prevent them from imagining, on the way to school or the
grocery, that they arc flying through the air and machine-gun¬
ning the enemy; or that they arc the Lone Ranger himself on a
glorious Silver. What is manageable, however, depends on the
child’s powers of co-ordination, and therefore is shared only by
those who have reached a certain level of maturation. What has a
common meaning to all the children in a community (Le., the
idea of having a reel and string represent a living thing on a leash)
may have a special meaning to some (Le., all those who have just
learned to manipulate reel and string and may tbus be ready to

192 Childhood and Society

enter a new sphere of participation and communal symboGzation).
Yet all of this may have, in addition, a unique meaning to individ¬
ual children who have lost a person or an animal and therefore
endow the game with a particular significance. What these chil¬
dren “have by the string” is not just any animal—^it is the personi¬
fication of a particular, a significant, and a lost animal—or person.
To evaluate play the observer must, of course, have an idea of what
aU the children of a given age in a given community are apt to play.
Only thus can he decide whether or not the unique meaning tran¬
scends the common meaning. To understand the vmique meaning
itself requires careful observation, not only of the play’s content
and form, but also of accompanying words and visible affects,
especially those which lead to what we shall describe in the next
chapter as “play disruption.”

In order to approach the problem of anxiety in play, let us con¬
sider the activity of building and destroying a tower. Many a
mother thinks that her little son is in a “destructive stage” or even
has a “destructive personality” because, after building a big, big
tower, the boy cannot follow her advice to leave the tower for
Daddy to see, but instead rrmst kick it and make it collapse. The
almost manic pleasure with which children watch the collapse in
a second of the product of long play labor has puzzled many,
especially since the child does not appreciate it at all if his tower
falls by accident or by a helpful uncle’s hand. He, the builder,
must destroy it himself. This game, I should think, arises from the
not so distant experience of sodden falls at the very time when
standing upright on wobbly legs afforded a new and fascinating
perspective on existence. The child who consequently learns to
make a tower “stand up” enjoys causing the same tower to vraver
and collapse: in addition to the active mastery over a previously
passive event, it makes one feel stronger to know that there is
somebody weaker—^and towers, unlike little sisters, can’t cry and
call Mummy. But since it is the child’s still precarious mastery over
space which is thus to be demonstrated, it is understandable that
watching somebody else kick one’s tower may make the child
see himself in the tower rather than in the kicker: all fun evapo-

Toys and Reasons 193

rates. Qrcus clowns later take over when they obligingly fall all
over the place from mere ineptness, and yet continue to challenge
gravity and caxisality with ever renewed innocence: there are,
then, even big people who are funnier, dumber, and wobblier
Some children, however, who find themselves too much identified
with the clown cannot stand his downfalls: to them they are “not
funny.” This example throws light on the beginning of many an
anxiety in childhood, where anxiety around the child’s attempt
at ego mastery finds unwelcome “support” from adults who treat
him roughly or amuse him with exercises which he lilces only if
and when he himself has initiated them.

The child’s play begins with and centers on his own body. This
we shall call autocosmic play. It begins before we notice it as
play, and consists at first in the exploration by repetition of sen¬
sual perceptions, of kinesthetic sensations, of vocalizations, etc.
Next, the child plays with available persons and things. He may
playfully cry to see what wave length would serve best to make
the mother reappear, or he may indulge in experimental excursions
on her body and on the protrusions and orifices of her face. This
is the child’s first geography, and the basic maps acquired in such
interplay with the mother no doubt remain guides for the ego’s
first orientation in the “world.” Here we call as a witness San¬
tayana: •

. . . Far, far in a dim past, as if it had been in another world or
in a pre-natal condition, Oliver remembered the long-denied privilege
of sitting in his mother’s lap. It had been such a refuge of safety, of
sofmess, of vantage: You were carried and you were enveloped in
an amplitude of sure protection, like a king on his throne, with his
faithful bodyguard many ranks deep about him; and the landscape
beyond, with its messengers and its motley episodes, became the most
entertaining of spectacles, where everything was unexpected and
exciting, yet where nothing could go wrong; as if your mother her¬
self had been telling you a story, and these piemres were only the
illustrations to it which painted themselves in your listening mind.”

*Geoige Santayana, The Lott Puritan, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1936.

194 Childhood and Society

The microsphere —^i.e., the small world of manageable toys—is
a harbor which the child establishes, to return to when he needs to
overhaul liis ego. But the thing-world has its own laws: it may re¬
sist reconstruction, or it may simply break to pieces; it may prove
to belong to somebody else and be subject to confiscation by
superiors. Often the microsphere seduces the child into an un¬
guarded expression of dangerous themes and attitudes whicli
arouse anxiety and lead to sudden play disruption. This is the
counterpan in waking life of the anxiety dream; it can keep chil¬
dren from trying to play just as the fear of night terror can keep
them from going to sleep. If thus frightened or disappointed in
the microsphere, the child may regress into the autosphere, day¬
dreaming, thumb-sucking, masturbating. On the other hand, if
the first use of the thing-world is successful and is guided prop¬
erly, the pleasure of mastering toy things becomes associated
with the mastery of the traumata which were projected on them,
and with the prestige gained through such mastery.

Finally, at nursery-school age playfulness reaches into the
macrosphere, the world shared with others. First these others arc
treated as things, arc inspected, run into, or forced to “be horsie.”
Learning is necessary in order to discover what potential play
content can be admitted only to fantasy or only to autocosmic
play; what content can be successfully represented only in the
microcosmic world of toys and things; and what content can be
shared with others and forced upon them.

As this is learned, each sphere is endowed with its own sense
of reality and mastery. For quite a while, then, solitary play re¬
mains an indispensable harbor for the overhauling of shattered
emotions after periods of rough going in the social seas. This, and
the fact that a child can be counted upon to bring into the solitary
play arranged for him whatever aspect of his ego has been ruffled
most, form the fundamental condition for our diagnostic reliance
on “play therapy,” which will be discussed next.

What is infantile play, then? We saw that it is not the equiva¬
lent of adult play, that it is not recreation. The playing adult steps
sideward into another reality; the playing child advances forward

Toys and Reasons 195

to new stages of mastery. I propose the theory that the chOd’s play
is the infantile form of the human ability to deal with experi¬
ence by creating model situations and to master reality by experi¬
ment and planning. It is in certain phases of his work that the adult
projects past experience into dimensions which seem manageable.
In the laboratory, on the stage, and on the drawing board, he re¬
lives the past and thus relieves leftover affects; in reconstructing
the model situation, he redeems his failures and strengthens his
hopes. He anticipates the future from the point of view of a cor¬
rected and shared past.

No thinker can do more and no playing child less. As William
Blake puts it: “The child’s toys and the old man’s reasons are the
fruits of the two seasons.”

z. PLAY AND CURE

Modem play therapy is based on the observation that a child
made insecure by a secret hate against or fear of the natural pro¬
tectors of his play in family and neighborhood seems able to use
the protective sanction of an understanding adult to regain some
play peace. Grandmothers and favorite aunts may have played
that role in the past; its professional elaboration of today is the play
therapist. The most obvious condition is that the child has the toys
and the adult for himself, and that sibling rivalry, parental nag¬
ging, or any kind of sudden interruption does not disturb the un¬
folding of his play intentions, whatever they may be. For to “play
it out” is the most natural self-healing measure childhood af¬
fords.

Let us remember here the simple, if often embarrassing, fact
that adults, when traumatized, tend to solve their tension by “talk¬
ing it out.” They are compelled, repeatedly, to describe the pain¬
ful event: it seems to make them “feel better.” Systems designed
to cure the soul or the mind make ritual use of this tendency by
providing, at regular intervals, an ordained or otherwise sanc¬
tioned listener who gives his undivided attention, is sworn not to
censure arbitrarily or to betray, and bestows absolution by ex¬
plaining how the individual’s problem makes sense in some larger

196 Childhood and Society

context, be it sin, conflict, or disease. The method finds its limita¬
tions where this “clinical” situation loses the detachment in which
life can be reflected, and itself becomes a passionate conflict of de¬
pendence and hostility. In psychoanalytic terms, the limitation is
set by the tendency (especially strong in neurotics) to transfer
basic conflicts from their original infantile setting into every new
situation, including the therapeutic one. This is what Freud meant
when he said that the treatment itself, at first, becomes a “trans¬
ference neurosis.” The patient who thus transfers his conflict in
all its desperate immediacy becomes at the same time resistive to
all attempts at seeing the situation in a detached way, at formulat¬
ing its meaning. He is in resistance; in a war to end all wars, he
becomes more deeply embroiled than ever. At this point, non-
psychoanalytic therapeutic efforts often end; the patient, it is said,
cannot or does not want to get well or is too inferior to compre¬
hend his obligations in treatment. Therapeutic psychoanalysis,
however, begins at this point. It makes systematic use of the
knowledge that no neurotic is undivided in his wish to get well
and of necessity transfers his dependences and hostilities to the
treatment and the person of the therapist. Psychoanalysis ac¬
knowledges and learns from such “resistances.”

This phenomenon of transference in the playing child, as well
as in the verbalizing adult, marks the point where simple measures
fail—namely, when an emotion becomes so intense that it defeats
playfulness, forcing an immediate discharge into the play and
into the relationship with the play observer. The failure is char¬
acterized by what is to be described here as play disruption —i.c.,
the sudden and complete or diffused and slowly spreading inabil¬
ity to play. We saw such play disruption occur, on my provoca¬
tion, in Ann’s case, when she had to leave me and my tempting
toys in order to rejoin her mother. Similarly, we saw Sam trapped
by his overpowering emotions in the middle of a game. In both
cases we used play as an incidental diagnostic tool. I shall now
introduce a little girl who, although she came for diagnostic pur¬
poses only, led me through a full cycle of play disruption and
play triumph, and thus offered a good example of the way in

Toys and Reasons 197

which the ego, flooded by fear, regains through transference its
synthesizing power.

Our patient is Mary. She is just three years old. She is a some¬
what pale brunette, but looks (and is) intelligent, pretty, and
quite feminine. She is said to be stubborn, babyish, and shut-in
when disturbed. Recently she has enriched her inventory of ex¬
pression by nightmares and by violent arLxiety attacks in the
play group which she has recently joined. All that the play
group teachers can say is that Mary has a queer way of lifting
things and has a rigid posture: and that her tension seems to in¬
crease in connection with the routines of resting and going to
the toilet. With this information at hand we invite Mary to our
office.

Maybe a word should be said here about the thoroughly dif¬
ficult situation which ensues when a mother brings a child for
observation. The child has not chosen to come. He often does
not feel sick at all in the sense that he has a symptom which he
wishes to get rid of. On the contrary, all he knows is that cer¬
tain things and, most of all, certain people make him feel un¬
comfortable and he wishes that we would do something about
these things and people—not about him.’Often he feels that some¬
thing is wrong with his parents, and mostly he is right. But he
has no words for this and, even if he did have, he has no reason
to trust us with such weighty information. On the other hand,
he does not know what the parents have told us about him—
while God only knows what they have told the child about us.
For the parents, helpful as they may wish to be and necessary as
they are as initial informants, cannot be trusted in these matters:
the initial history given is often distorted by the wish to justify
(or secretly punish) themselves or to punish (and unconsciously
justify) somebody else, perhaps the grandparents who “told you
SO.

In this case, my office was in a hospital. Mary had been told
that she was coming to discuss her nightmares with me—a man
whom she had never seen before. Her mother had consulted a
pediatrician regarding these nightmares and Mary had heard the

198 Childhood and Society

mother and the doctor argue over the possible indication for a
tonsillectomy. I had hoped, therefore, that she would notice that
the appointments of my office indicated a strictly non-medical
affair and that she would give me a chance in simple and straight¬
forward terms to acknowledge the purpose of her visit, to tell
her that I was not a doctor and then to make clear that we were
going to play together in order to get acquainted. Such explana¬
tions do not quite settle a child’s doubts, but they may permit
him to turn to the toys and do something. The moment he does
something we can observe what he selects and repudiates in our
standard inventory of toys. Our next step, then, will be guided
by the meaning thus revealed.

Mary holds on to her mother as she enters my office. When
she offers me her hand it is both rigid and cold. She gives me a
brief smile, then turns to her mother, puts her arms around her,
and holds her close to the still open door. She buries her head in
her mother’s skirt as if she wanted to hide in it, and responds to
my advances only by turning her head to me—^with tightly
closed eyes. Yet she had for a split moment looked at me with a
smile that seemed to convey an interest—as if she wanted to see
whether or not the new adult was going to understand fun. This
makes her flight to her mother seem somewhat dramatic. The
mother tries to encourage her to look at the toys, but Mary again
hides her face in her mother’s skirt and repeats in a dramatically
babyish voice, “Mommy, mommy, mommy!” A dramatic young
lady: I am not even quite sure that she is not hiding a smile. I
decide to wait.

Now Mary does make a decision. Still holding on to her
mother, she points to a (girl) doll and says several times quickly
and babyishly, “What that, what that?” After the mother has
patiently explained that it is a dolly, Mary repeats “Dolly, dolly,
dolly,” and suggests in words not understandable to me that
the mother take off the dolly’s shoes. The mother tries to make
her perform this act herself, but Mary simply repeats her de¬
mand. Her voice becomes quite anxious, and it is clear that we
may have tears in a moment.

Toys and Reasons 199

Now the mother asks if it is not time for her to leave the
room and wait outside as she has told Mary she would. I ask
Mary whether we can let her mother go now and she, unex¬
pectedly, makes no objection, not even when she suddenly finds
herself without anybody to lean on. I try to start a conversa¬
tion about the doll, which the mother has left in Mary’s hand.
Mary grasps it firmly around the legs and suddenly, smiling
mischievously, she begins to touch various things in the room
with the doll’s head. When a toy falls from the shelf, she looks
at me to see whether she has gone too far; when she sees me smile
permissively she laughs and begins to push smaller toys, always
with the doll’s head, in such a way that they fall too. Her ex¬
citement increases. With special glee she pushes with the doll’s
head a toy train which is on the floor in the middle of the room.
She overturns all the cars, apparently having some exciting kind
of fun. But as the engine overturns she suddenly stops and be¬
comes pale. She leans with her back against the sofa, holds the
doll over her lower abdominal region, and drops it on the floor.
She picks it up again, holds it over the same region, and drops
it again. While repeating this several times, she begins first to
whine and then to yell, “Mommy, mommy, mommy.”

The mother re-enters, sure that communication has failed, and
asks Mary whether she wants to go. 1 tell Mary that she may go if
she wishes but that I hope she will be back in a few days. Quickly
calmed, she leaves with her mother, saying good-by to the secre¬
tary outside as if she had had a pleasant visit.

Strangely enough, I too felt that the child had made a suc¬
cessful communication. With children, words are not always
necessary at the beginning. I had felt that the play was leading
up to a conversation. The fact of the mother’s anxious inter¬
ruption was, of course, as significant as the child’s play disruption.
Together, they probably explain the child’s babyish anxiety. But
what had she communicated with this emotional somersault, this
sudden hilarity and flushed aggressiveness, and this equally sud¬
den inhibition and pale anxiety?

The discernible mode content had been pushing things, not

200 Childhood and Society

with her hand but with the doll as an extension of her hand; and
then dropping the same doll from the genital region.

The doll as an extension of the hand has been, as it were, a
pushing tool. This suggests that she may not dare to touch or
push things with her bare hand—just as according to observa¬
tion in her play group she seemed to touch or lift things in her
own special way. This, together with the general rigidity in
her extremities, suggests that Mary may be worried about her
hands, maybe as aggressive tools.

The transfer of the doll to the lower abdominal region leads
to the suggestion that she was dramatizing the loss from that
region of an aggressive tool, a pushing instrument. The attack¬
like state which overcame her at this point reminds me of some¬
thing which 1 learned long ago: severe hysterical attacks in
adult women have been interpreted as dramatizations represent¬
ing both partners in an imagined scene. Thus, one hand in tearing
off the patient’s dress may dramatize an aggressor’s approach,
while the other, in clutching it, may represent the victim’s at¬
tempt to protect herself. Mary’s attack impressed me as being
of such a nature: by dropping the doll several times, panicky
and yet as if obsessed, she seemed to be inexorably driven to
dramatize both the robbed and the robber.

But what was to be stolen from her? Here we would have to
know which meaning is more relevant, the doll’s use as an ag¬
gressive tool—or the doll as representing a baby. In the play
school, toilet situations were prominent among those which led
to similar outbreaks of anxiety. In this play hour the dropped
doll had first been the prolongation of an extremity and a tool
of (pushing) aggression, and then something lost in the lower
abdominal region under circumstances of extreme anxiety. Does
Mary consider a penis such an aggressive weapon, and does she
dramatize the fact that she does not have one? From the mother’s
account it is entirely probable that on entering the nursery school
Mary was given her first opportunity to go to the toilet in the
presence of boys.

I am thinking of the mother when she raps on the door. She

201

Toys and Reasons

has left the child, now quite composed, outside to come back
and tell me that Mary was bom with a sixth finger which was re¬
moved when she was approximately six months old. Just prior
to the outbreak of her anxiety attacks, Mary had repeatedly and
urgently asked about the scar on her hand (“What that, what
that?”) and had received the routine answer that it was “just a
mosquito bite.” The mother admits that the child when some¬
what younger could easily have been present when her con¬
genital anomaly was mentioned. Mary, the mother adds, has re¬
cently been equally insistent in her sexual curiosity.

We can now understand the fact that Mary feels uneasy about
the aggressive use of her hand, which has been robbed of a finger.
But why did she put the hand extension over the genital region
only to dramatize its loss from there? Is there some association
between the lost finger and the absent penis? Such an association
would bring into juxtaposition the observation of sex differ¬
ences in the play school and the immediate question of an opera¬
tion.

Before Mary’s second visit, her mother offered this further
information: Mary’s sexual curiosity had recently received a
specific blow when her father, irritable because of a regional
increase in unemployment which threatened his means of liveli¬
hood, had shown impatience with her during her usual morn¬
ing visit to him in the bathroom. In fact, he had shoved her out
of the room. As he told me later, he had angrily repeated the
words, “You stay out of here!” She had liked to watch the shav¬
ing process and had also on recent occasions (to his slight an¬
noyance) asked about his genitals. A strict adherence to a rou¬
tine in which she could do, say, and ask the same thing over and
over again had always been a necessary condition for Mary’s in¬
ner security. She was “heartbroken” over the consequent exclu¬
sion from the father’s toilet.

We also discussed the fact (which I have already mentioned)
that Mary’s disturbed sleep and foul breath had been attributed
by a pediatrician to a bad condition of the tonsils, and that the
mother and the physician had engaged in a discussion in front

202

Childhood and Society

of Mary as to whether she needed an immediate operation or not.
Operation^ then, and separation are seen to be the common de¬
nominators: the actual operation on the finger, the anticipated
operation of the tonsils, and the mythical operation by which
boys become girls; the separation from her mother during play¬
school hours, and the estrangement from her father. At the end
of the first hour of play observation, then, this was the closest
we could come to meanings on which all of the play elements
and biographic data seemed to converge.

The antithesis of play disruption is play satiation, play from
which a child emerges refreshed as a sleeper from a dreamless
sleep. Both disruption and satiation arc very marked and very
clear only in rare cases. More often they are diffused and must
be ascertained by detailed study. But not so in Mary’s case. Dur¬
ing her second appointment she obliged me with as dramatic a
specimen of play satiation as she had previously demonstrated
of play disruption.

At first Mary again smiles bashfully at me. Again she turns her
head away, holding on to her mother’s hand and insisting that
the mother come with her into the room. Once in the room,
however, she lets her mother’s hand go and, forgetting about
the mother’s and my presence, she begins to play animatedly
and with obvious determination and goal-mindedness. I quickly
close the door and motion the mother to sit down, because I
do not want to disturb the play.

Mary goes to the comer where the blocks are on the floor.
She selects two blocks and arranges them in such a way that she
can stand on them each time she comes to the comer to pick
up more blocks. Thus, play begins again with an extension of
extremities, this time her feet. She now makes a collection of
blocks in the middle of the room, moving to the comer and
back without hesitation. Then she kneels on the floor and builds
a small house for a toy cow. For about a quarter of an hour she
is completely absorbed in the task of arranging the house so
that it is strictly rectangular and at the same time fits tightly
about the cow. She then adds five blocks to one long side of the

Toys and Reasons 203

house and experiments with a sixth block until its position satisfies
her (see Figure 6).

This time, then, the dominant emotional note is peaceful play
concentration with a certain maternal quality of care and order.
There is no climax of excitement, and the play ends on a note
of satiation; she has built something, she likes it, now the play
is over. She gets up with a radiant smile—which suddenly gives
place to a mischievous twinkle. Before I realize the mischief I
am about to fall victim to, I note that the close-fitting stable
looks like a hand—^with a sixth finger. At the same time it ex¬
presses the “inclusive” mode, a female-protective configuration,
corresponding to the baskets and boxes and cradles arranged by
little and big girls to give comfort to small things. Thus we see
two restorations in one: The configuration puts the finger back
on the hand and the happily feminine pattern belies Ae “loss
from the genital region” previously dramatized. TTie second
hour’s play thus accomplishes an expression of restoration and
safety—and this concerning the same body parts (hand, genital
region) which in the play disruption of the first hour had ap¬
peared endangered.

But, as I said, Mary suddenly looks teasingly at me, laughs,
takes her mother’s hand and pulls her out of the room, saying
with determination, “Mommy, come out.” I wait for a while,
then look out into the waiting room. A loud and triumphant,
“Thtay in there!” greets me. I strategically withdraw, where-

204 Childhood and Society

upon Mary closes the door with a bang. Two further attempts
on my part to leave my room are greeted in the same gay way.
She has me cornered.

There is nothing to do but to enter into the spirit of the
game. I open the door slightly, quickly push the toy cow through
the opening, make it squeak, and withdraw it. Mary is beside
herself with pleasure and insists that the game be repeated a
few times. She gets her wish, then it is time for her to go home.
When she leaves she looks triumphantly and yet affectionately
at me and promises to come back. I am left with the task of fig¬
uring out what has happened.

From anxiety in the autosphere in the first hour, Mary had
now graduated to satiation in the microsphere—and to triumph
in the macrosphere. She had taken the mother out of my space
and locked me into it. This game had as content: a man is teas-
ingly locked into his room. It is only in connection with this
playful superiority that Mary had decided to talk to me, and this
in no uncertain terms. “Thtay in there!” were the first words
she had ever addressed to me! They were said clearly and in a
loud voice, as if something in her had waited for the moment
when she would be free enough to say them. Wbat does that
mean.5

I think we have here an episode of “father transference.” It
will be remembered that from the moment Mary came into my
room at the beginning of the first contact she showed a some¬
what coquettish and bashful interest in me. Since it can be ex¬
pected that she would transfer to me (the man with toys) a con¬
flict which disturbed her usually playful relationship with her
father, it seems more than probable that in this game she is re¬
peating with active mastery (“Thtay in there”) and with some
reversal of vectors (out-in) the situation of exclusion of which
she has been a passive victim at home (“Stay out of here”).

To some this may seem like a lot of complicated and devious
transformations for such a little girl. But here it is well to real¬
ize that these matters are difficult for rational thinking only.
It would indeed be diflicult to think up such a play trick It is

Toys and Reasons 205

even difficult to recognize and analyze it. But it happens, of
course, unconsciously and automatically: here, never under¬
estimate the power of the ego—even of such a little girL

This episode is presented to illustrate the self-curative trend
in spontaneous play; for play therapy and play diagnosis must
make systematic use of such self-curative processes. They may
help the child to help himself—and they may help us to advise
the parents. Where this fails, more complicated methods of treat¬
ment (child psychoanalysis) • must be initiated—methods which
have not been discussed in this chapter. With advancing age,
prolonged conversation would take the place of play. Here, how¬
ever, it was my purpose to demonstrate that a few play hours
can serve to inform us of matters which the child could never
verbalize. Trained observers, in the possession of numerous data,
can see from a few play contacts which of these data are sub¬
jectively relevant to the child, and why. In Mary’s case, her play
disruption and her play satiation, if seen in the framework of
all the known circumstances, strongly suggests that a variety of
contemporaneous events had been incorporated into a system of
mutually aggravating items. In her play she restored her finger,
reassured herself, reaffirmed her femininity—and told the big
man off. Such play peace gained must, however, be sustained by
the parents.

Mary’s parents accepted (and partly themselves suggested)
the following recommendations. Mary’s curiosity in regard to
both her scar and her genitals required a truthful attitude. She
needed to have other children, especially boys, visit her for play
at her home. The matter of the tonsils called for the decision of
a specialist, which could be candidly communicated to the child.
It did not seem wise to awaken and to restrain her during her
nightmares; perhaps she needed to fight her dreams out, and
there would be opportunity to hold her lightly and to comfort
her when she awoke spontaneously. The child needed much
activity; playful instruction in rhythmic motion might relax

*Anna Freud, Psycho-Analytical Treatment of Children, Imago Publishing Co,
London, 1946.

2o 6 Childhood and Society

some of the rigidity in her extremities, which, whatever the in¬
itial cause, may have been at least aggravated by fearful anticipa¬
tion since hearing for the first time about the secret amputation
of her finger.

When Mary, somewhat later, paid me a short visit, she was en¬
tirely at home and asked me in a clear, loud voice about the color
of the train I had taken on my vacation. It will be remembered
that she overturned a toy engine on the occasion of her first visit:
now she could talk about engines. A tonsillectomy had proved
unnecessary; the nightmares had ceased; Mary was making free
and extensive use of the new play companions provided in and
near her home. There was a revived play relationship with her
father. He had intuitively made the most of Mary’s sudden en¬
raptured admiration for shining locomotives. He took her for
regular walks to the railroad yards where together they watched
the mighty engines.

Here the symbolism which has pervaded this clinical episode
gains a new dimension. In the despair of play disruption, the toy
engine apparently had a destructive meaning in some context
with phallic-locomotor anxiety: when Mary pushed it over, she
apparently had that awesome “Adam, where art thou” experi¬
ence which we first observed in Ann. At the time, Mary’s play
relationship to her father had been disrupted, and this (as she
could not know or understand) because of his worries over a
possible disruption of his work status. This she seems to have
interpreted entirely in terms of her maturational state and of her
changes in status: and yet her reaction was not unrelated to the
unconscious meaning implied in the father’s actions. For threat¬
ened loss of status, threatened marginality, often result in an
unconscious attempt by more stringent self-control and by puri¬
fied standards to regain the ground lost or at least to keep from
slipping any further. This, I believe, made the father react in a
less tolerant way to the little girl’s exploration, thus offending
and frightening her in the general area which was already dis¬
turbed. It was, then, this area which appeared in her play in a

Toys and Reasons 207

condensed form, while she attempted, from the frightfulness of
isolation, to work her way back to playful mutuality.

Neither Mary’s play nor the insight it provided could change
the father’s economic worries. But the moment he recognized
the impact of his anxieties on his daughter’s development, he
realized that from a long-range point of view her anxieties mat¬
tered much more than the threatened change of his work status.
In fact, actual developments did not confirm his apprehensions.

The father’s idea of taking walks to the engine yards was
felicitous. For now the real engines became symbols of power
shared by father and daughter alike and sustained by the whole
imagery of the machine culture in which this child is destined to
become a woman.

Thus at the end of any therapeutic encounter the parent must
sustain in a child what the adult patient must gain for himself:
a realignment with the images and the forces governing the cul¬
tural development of his day, and from it an increased sense of
identity.

But here, at last, we must try to come to a better description
and definition of what we mean by identity.

3. THE BEGINNINGS OF IDENTITY

A. PLAY AND MILIEU

A child who has just found himself able to walk, more or
less coaxed or ignored by those around him, seems driven to
repeat the act for the pure enjoyment of functioning, and out
of the need to master and perfect a newly initiated function.
But he also acts under the immediate awareness of the new status
and stature of “one who can walk,” with whatever connotation
this happens to have in the co-ordinates of his culture’s space-
time—be it “one who will go far,” “one who will be able to
stand on his own feet,” “one who will be upright,” or “one who
must be watched because he might go too far.” The incorpora¬
tion of a particular version of “one who can walk” into the ego
is one of the many steps in child development which (through

2o 8 Childhood and Society

the coincident experience of physical mastery and of cultural
meaning, of functional pleasure and of social prestige) con¬
tribute to a more realistic self-esteem. This self-esteem grows to
be a conviction that the ego is learning effective steps toward a
tangible collective future, that it is developing into a defined
ego within a social reality. The growing child must, at every
step, derive a vitalizing sense of reality from the awareness that
his individual way of mastering experience (his ego synthesis) is
a successful variant of a group identity and is in accord with its
space-time and life plan.

In this children cannot be fooled by empty praise and con¬
descending encouragement. They may have to accept artificial
bolstering of their self-esteem in lieu of something better, but
their ego identity gains real strength only from wholehearted
and consistent recognition of real accomplishment—i.c., of
achievement that has meaning in the culture. \Vc have tried to
convey this when discussing problems of Indian education, but
yield to a more lucid statement: *

Dr. Ruth Underhill tells me of sitting with a group of Papago
ciders in Arizona when the man of the house turned to his little three-
year-old granddaughter and asked her to close the door. The door
was heavy and hard to shut. The child tried, but it did not move.
Several times the grandfather repeated: “Yes, close the door."’ No
one jumped to the child’s assistance. No one took the responsibility
away from her. On the other hand there was no impatience, for after
all the child was small. They sat gravely waiting until the child suc¬
ceeded and her grandfather gravely thanked her. It was assumed that
the task would not be asked of her unless she could perform it, and
having been asked, the responsibility was hers alone just as if she were
a grown woman.

The essential point of such child training is that the child is from in¬
fancy continuously conditioned to responsible social participation,
while at the same time the tasks that are expected of it arc adapted
to its capacity. The contrast with our society is very great. A child
docs not make any contribution of labor to our industrial society

^Ruth Benedict, ‘^Continuities and Discontinuities in Cultural Conditioning,’'
Fsyebiatryj i; 161-167 (1938).

Toys and Reasons 209

except as it competes with an adult; its work is not measured against
its own strength and skill but against high-geared industrial require¬
ments. Even when we praise a child’s achievements in the home, we
are outraged if such praise is interpreted as being of the same order as
praise of adults. The child is praised because the parent feels well
disposed, regardless of whether the task is well done by adult stand¬
ards or not and the child acquires no sensible standard by which
to measure its achievement. The gravity of a Cheyenne Indian
family ceremoniously making a feast out of a little boy’s first
snowbird is far removed from our behavior. At birth the little boy
was presented with a toy bow and arrow, and from the time he could
run about, serviceable bows and arrows suited to his stature were
specially made for him by the man of the family. Animals and birds
were brought to his awareness in a graded series beginning with those
most easily taken, and as he brought in his first of each species his
family duly made a feast of it, accepting his contribution as gravely as
the buffalo his fatlier brought. When he finally killed a buffalo, it was
only the final step of his childhood conditioning, not a new adult role
witii which his childhood experience had been at variance.

It dawns on os, then, that the theories of play which are
advanced in our culture and which take as their foundation the
asstimpcion that in children, too, play is defined by the fact that
it is not work, are really only one way in which we exclude
our children from an early increase in their sense of identity.

But then, with primitives it is relatively easy. Their cultures
are exclusive. Their image of man begins and ends with their idea
of a strong or clean Yurok or Sioux, in their defined segments
of nature. In our civilization the image of man is expanding. As
it becomes more individuated, it also tends to include untold
millions in new regions, nations, continents, and classes. New
syntheses of economic and emotional safety arc sought in the
formation of new entities based on more inclusive identities.

Primitive tribes have a direct relationship with the sources and
means of production. Their techniques arc extensions of the
human body; their magic is a projection of body concepts. Chil¬
dren in these groups participate in technical and magic pursuits.
Body and environment, childhood and culture may be full of

Z lO

Childhood and Society

dangers, but they arc all one world. This world may be small,
but it is magically coherent. The expansiveness of civilization,
on the other hand, its stratifications and specialization, make it
impossible for children to include more than segments of the
society which is relevant to their existence in their ego synthesis.
Tradition itself has become an environment to be adjusted to.
Machines, far from remaining tools and extensions of man’s
physiological functions, destine whole organizations of people
to be extensions of machinery. Childhood, in some classes, be¬
comes a separate segment of life, with its own folklore.

The study of contemporary neuroses, however, points to the
significance of this lag between child training and social reality.
Neuroses contain, so we find, unconscious and futile attempts to
adjust to the heterogeneous present with the magic concepts of
a more homogeneous past, fragments of which arc still trans¬
mitted through child training. But mechanisms of adjustment
which once made for evolutionary adaptation, tribal integration,
caste coherence, national uniformity, etc., are at loose ends in an
industrial civilization.

No wonder, then, that some of our troubled children con¬
stantly break out of their play into some damaging activity in
which they seem to os to “interfere” with our world; while
analysis reveals that they only wish to demonstrate their right
to find an identity in it. They refuse to become a specialty called
“child,” who must play at being big because he is not given an
opportunity to be a small partner in a big world.

B. SON OF A BOMBARDIER

During the last war a neighbor of mine, a boy of five, under¬
went a change of personality from a “mother’s boy” to a violent,
stubborn, and disobedient child. The most disquieting symptom
was an urge to set fires.

The boy’s parents had separated just before the outbreak of
war. The mother had moved in with some women cousins, and
when war began the father had joined the air forces. These
women frequently expressed thdr disrespect for the father. They

211

Toys and Reasons

cultivated babyish traits in the boy. The father, however, did
well in war; in fact, he became a hero. On the occasion of his
first furlough the little boy had the experience of seeing the man
he had learned not to be like become the much-admired center
of the neighborhood’s attention. The mother annoimced that
she would drop her divorce plans. 'Die father went back to war
and was eventually lost over Germany.

After the father’s departure the affectionate and dependent
boy developed more and more disquieting symptoms of destruc¬
tiveness and defiance, culminating in fire setting. He gave the
key to the change himself when, protesting against his mother’s
whipping, he pointed to a pile of wood he had set afire and ex¬
claimed (in more childish words), “If this were a German city,
you would have liked me for it.” He thus indicated that in set¬
ting fires he fantasied being a bombardier like the father, who
had told of his exploits.

We sec here the identification of a son with his father, result¬
ing from a suddenly increased conflict at the very close of the
Oedipus age. The father, at first successfully replaced by the
“good” little boy, suddenly becomes a threat, a competitor for
the mother’s love. He thus devaluates radically the usefulness
of the boy’s feminine identifications; In order to save himself
from both sexual and social disorientation, the boy must, in the
shortest possible time, regroup his identifications; but now the
fact that the great competitor is killed increases the guilt for
the competitive feeling itself and compromises the boy’s new mas¬
culine initiative. The boy caimot even prepare to meet this father
<m his next return, in a more equal encounter. The father has re¬
moved himself forever to the world above the skies.

A diild has quite a number of opportunities to identify him¬
self, more or less experimentally, with habits, traits, occupations,
and ideas of real or fieddous people of cither sex. Certain crises
force him to make radical selecdons. However, the historical
era in which he lives offers only a limited number of socially
meaningful models for workable combinadons of idcntificadon
fragments. Their usefulness depends on the way in which they

2IJ Childhood and Society

simultaneously meet the requirements of the organism’s matura-
donal stage and the ego’s habits of synthesis.

To my little neighbor the role of the bombardier suggested
a possible synthesis of his temperament (vigorous); his matu-
rational stage (phallic-urethral-locomotor); his social stage
(oedipus) and his social situation (living with women); his
capacities (muscular, mechanical); his father’s temperament (a
bombardier rather than a salesman); and a current historical
prototype (aggressive hero). Where such synthesis succeeds, a
most surprising coagulation of constitutional, temperamental,
and learned reactions may produce exuberance of growth and
unexpected accomplishment. Where it fails, it must lead to severe
conflict, often expressed in unexpected naughtiness or delin¬
quency.

When the worst of this boy’s dangerous initiative had sub¬
sided, he was observed swooping down a hill on a bicycle, en¬
dangering, scaring, and yet deftly avoiding other children. They
shrieked, laughed, and in a way admired him for it. In watching
him, and hearing the strange noises he made, I could not help
thinking that he probably imagined himself to be an airplane
on a bombing mission. But at the same time he gained in play¬
ful mastery over his locomotion; he exercised circumspection
in his attack, and he became a virtuoso on a bicycle.

One should learn from such an example that re-education
must seize upon the forces mobilized for playful integration.
For should a child feel that the environment tries to deprive him
too radically of all the forms of expression which permit him to
develop and to integrate the next step in his ego identity, he
will defend it with the astonishing strength encountered in ani*
mals who are suddenly forced to defend their lives. And indeed,
in the social jungle of human existence, there is no feeling of
being alive without a sense of ego identity. Deprivation of iden¬
tity, not frustration, leads to murder.

The desperate intensity of many a symptom, then, may be the
defense of a step in ego identity which to the child promises to
integrate the rapid changes talring place in all areas of his life.

Toys and Reasons 213

What to the observer looks like an especially powerful manifes¬
tation of naked instinct is often only a desperate plea for the
permission to synthesize and sublimate in the only way possible.
We can therefore expect our young patients to respond only
to therapeutic measures which will help them to acquire the
prerequisites for the successful completion of their ego identity.
Therapy and guidance may attempt to substitute more desirable
for less desirable items, but the total configuration of the ego
identity remains unalterable. It follows that therapy and guid¬
ance by professionals arc doomed to failure where the culture
(through the mother) refuses to provide an early basis for an
ego identity and where opportunities for appropriate later ad¬
justments are missing.

Our little son of a bombardier aptly illustrates a general point.
The ego identity develops out of a gradual integration of all
identifications. But here, if anywhere, the whole has a different
quality from the sum of its parts. It is the integration of the whole,
not the quality or strength of the parts, which makes the dif¬
ference. Under favorable circumstances children have the nu¬
cleus of a separate identity early in life; often they defend it even
against the necessity of overidentifying with one of their parents.
This is difficult to learn from patients, because the neurotic ego
has, by definition, fallen prey to overidentifications which isolate
the small individual both from his budding identity and from his
milieu.

C. BLACK roENTmr

But what if the “milieu” is determined to let live only at the
expense of a permanent loss of identity?

Consider, for example, the chances for a continuity of iden¬
tity in the American Negro child. 1 know a colored boy who,
like our boys, listens every night to Red Rider. Then he sits
up in bed, imagining that he is Red Rider. But the moment comes
when he sees himself galloping after some masked offenders and
suddenly notices that in his fancy Red Rider is a colored maiL
He stops his fantasy. While a small child, this boy was extremely

214 Childhood and Society

expressive, both in his pleasures and in his sorrows. Today he is
calm and always smiles; his language is soft and blurred; no¬
body can hurry him or worry —or please him. White peo¬
ple like him.

Negro babies often receive sensual satisfactions which provide
them with enough oral and sensory surplus for a lifetime, as
clearly betrayed in the way they move, laugh, talk, sing. Their
forced symbiosis with the feudal South capitalized on this oral-
sensory treasure and helped to build a slave’s identity: mild, sub¬
missive, dependent, somewhat querulous, but always ready to
serve, with occasional empathy and childlike wisdom. But un¬
derneath a dangerous split occurred. The Negro’s unavoidable
identification with the dominant race, and the need of the master
race to protect its own identity against the very sensual and
oral temptations emanating from the colored race (and from the
memory of their mammies, in particular), established in both
groups an association: light—clean—clever—^white, and dark—
dirty—dumb—snigger. The result, especially in those Negroes
who left the poor haven of their Southern homes, was often a
violendy sudden and cruel cleanliness training, as attested to in
the autobiographies of Negro writers. It is as if by cleansing, a
whiter identity could be achieved. The attending disillusionment
transmits itself to the phallic-locomotor stage, when restrictions
as to what shade of girl one may dream of interfere with the free
transfer of the original narcissistic sensuality to the genital sphere.
Three identities arc formed: (i) mammy’s oral-sensual “honey-
child”—tender, expressive, rhythmical; (2) the evil identity of
the dirty, anal-sadistic, phallic-rapist “nigger”; and (3) the clean,
anal-compulsive, restrained, friendly, but always sad “white
man’s Negro.”

So-called opportunities offered the migrating Negro often
only turn out to be a more subtly restricted prison which en¬
dangers his only historically successful identity (that of the
slave) and fails to provide a reintegration of the other identity
fragments mentioned. These fragments, then, become dominant
in the form of racial caricatures which are underscored and

Toys and Reasons 215

stereotyped by the entertainment industry. Tired of his own
caricature, the colored individual often retires into hypochon¬
driac invalidism as a condition which represents an analogy to
the dependence and the relative safety of defined restriction in
the South: a neurotic regression to the ego identity of the slave.

I have mentioned the fact that mixed-blood Indians in areas
where they hardly ever see Negroes refer to their full-blood
brothers as “niggers,” thus indicating the power of the national
imagery which serves to contrast the dominant ideal images and
the dominant evil images in the inventory of available proto¬
types. No individual can escape this opposition of images which,
in a great variety of syndromes, is all-pervasivc in the men and
in the women, in the majorities and in the minorities, and in aU
the classes of a given national or cultural unit. Psychoanalysis
shows that the unconscious evil identity (the composite of every¬
thing which arouses negative identification—^Le., the vidsh not
to resemble it) consists of the images of the violated (castrated)
body, the ethnic outgroup, and the exploited minority. Thus
a pronounced he-man may, in his dreams, prejudices, and illu¬
sions, prove to be mortally afraid of ever betraying a woman’s
sentiments, a Negro’s submissiveness, and a Jew’s intellectuality.
For the ego, in the course of its synthesizing efforts, attempts to
subsume the most powerful evil and ideal prototypes (the final
contestants, as it were) and with them the whole existing imagery
of superior and inferior, good and bad, masculine and feminine,
free and slave, potent and impotent, beautiful and ugly, fast
and slow, tall and small, in a simple alternative, in order to make
one battle and one strategy out of a bewildering number of
skirmishes.

While children may feel that colored people have become dark
by a dirtying process, colored people may consider whites a
bleached form of colored man. In ei^er case there is the idea of
a washable layer.

All folks was bom black, an’ dem what’s tumt white, dey jest had
more sense. Angel of de Lord come down an’ told de ondre bunch to

2i6

Cliildhood and Society

meet on dc fo’th Friday at dc dark o’ dc moon an’ wash dcysclvcs in
Jordan. He oxplaincd to ’em dat dey’d all turn white an’ straighten
dc kinks outen deir hair. Angel kept preachin’ an’ preachin’, but
dem fool niggers didn’t pay him no mind Angel can’t teach a nigger
nothin’. When dc fo’th Friday come a mighty litdc sprinklin’ of ’em
went down to dc river an’ commenced to scrub. Water was mighty
low. ’Twam’t like Old Missip’—’sensin’ dc Lord’s river,—’twam’t no
morc’n a creek. You jest oughter seed dat crowd o’ niggers settin’
on dc fence snickerin’ at dem what went in washin’. Snickerin’ an’
throwin’ slams. More niggers dan you ever sec in Vicksburg on circus
day.

Dem what went in dc river kept scrubbin’ and washin’, special deir
hair to git dc kinks out. Old Aunt Grinny Granny—great-grand-
mammy of all dem niggers—she sot on a log all day long, earin’ cheese
and crackers and lowrarin’ dem what was washin’. When fust dark
come, she jumped up and dapped her hands: “Fore Gawd, dem nig¬
gers is gitrin’ white!” Grinny Granny jerked oiBF her head handker-
chcr an’ went tumblin’ down dc bank to wash her hair, an’ all dem
fool niggers followed her. But dc water was all used up, jest a tiny
drap in dc bottom, no morc’n enough to moisten dc palms o’ deir
hands and dc soles o’ deir feet. So dat’s why a nigger is white in dem
places.*

Folklore here makes use of a factor which radal prejudice
(shared by black and white alike) has in common with sexual
prejudice (also shared, deep down, by man and woman alike).
The differentiating factor, whether it is the darker color of
the skin or the non-male form of the genitals, is assumed to have
happened to the less-endowed, in the form of some oversight or
punishment; and it is more or less outspokenly treated as a blem¬
ish.

The Negro, of course, is only the most flagrant ease of an
American minority which by the pressure of tradition and the
limitation of opportunity is forced to identify with its own evil
identity fragments, thus jeopardizing whatever participation in
an American identity it may have earned.

•Members of the Federal Writers’ Project, Phrases of the PeopUy The Viking
Press, New York, 1937.

Toys and Reasons 217

What may be called an individual’s ego space-time thus pre¬
serves the social topology of his childhood surroundings as well as
the image of his own body, with its social connotations. To study
both it is essential to correlate a patient’s childhood history with
the history of his family’s sedentary residence in prototypal areas
(East), in “backward” areas (South), or in “forward” areas
(western and northern frontier), as these areas were gradually
incorporated into the American version of the Anglo-Saxon
cultural identity; his family’s migration from, through, and to
areas which at various periods may have represented the ex¬
treme sedentary or the extreme migratory pole of the develop¬
ing American character; the family’s religious conversions or
digressions, with their class implications; abortive attempts at
becoming standardized on a class level and the loss or abandon¬
ment of that leveL Most important is that segment of the family’s
history which provided the last strong sense of cultural identity.

All of this impresses us with the dangers awaiting the minority-
group American who, having successfully graduated from a
marked and well-guided stage of autonomy, enters the most de¬
cisive stage of American childhood: that of initiative and indus¬
try. As indicated, minority groups of a lesser degree of Ameri¬
canization are often privileged in the enjoyment of a more sensual
early childhood. Their crisis comes when their mothers, losing
trust in themselves and using sudden correctives in order to ap¬
proach the vague but pervasive Anglo-Saxon ideal, create violent
discontinuities; or where, indeed, the children themselves learn
to disavow their sensual and overprotective mothers as tempta¬
tions and a hindrance to the formation of a more American per¬
sonality.

On the whole, it can be said that American schools success¬
fully meet the challenge of training children of play-school age
and of the elementary grades in a spirit of self-reliance and en¬
terprise. Children of these ages seem remarkably free of preju¬
dice and apprehension, preoccupied as they still are with grow¬
ing and learning and with the new pleasures of association
outside their families. This, to forestall the sense of individual

2i 8 Qiildhood and Society

inferiority, must lead to a hope for “industrial association," for
equality with all those who apply themselves wholeheartedly
to the same skills and adventures in learning. Individual suc¬
cesses, on the other hand, only expose the now overly encouraged
children of mixed backgrounds and of somewhat deviant en¬
dowments to the shock of American adolescence: the standard¬
ization of individuality and the intolerance of “differences.”

The emerging ego identity, then, bridges the early childhood
stages, when the body ego and the parent images were given
their specific meanings, and the later stages, when a variety of
social roles became available and increasingly coercive. A last¬
ing ego identity, we have said, cannot begin to exist without
the trust of the first oral stage; it cannot be completed with¬
out a promise of fulfillment which from the dominant image of
adulthood reaches down into the baby’s beginnings and which,
by the tangible evidence of social health, creates at every step
an accruing sense of ego strength. What follows in the next chap¬
ter is a list of ego qualities—criteria by which the individual
demonstrates that his ego, at a given stage, is strong enough to
integrate the timetable of the organism with the structure of
social institutions.

CHAPTER

7

Eight Stages of Man

I. TRUST VS BASIC MISTRUST

The fikst demonstration of social trxist in the baby is the ease
of his feeding, the depth of his sleep, the relaxation of his bowels.
The experience of a mutual regulation of his increasingly recep¬
tive capacities with the maternal techniques of provision gradu¬
ally helps him to balance the discomfort caused by the im¬
maturity of homeostasis with which he was bom. In his
gradually increasing waking hours he finds that more and more
adventures of the senses arouse a feeling of familiarity, of hav¬
ing coincided with a feeling of inner goodness. Forms of com¬
fort, and people associated with them, become as familiar as
the gnawing discomfort of the bowels. The infant’s first social
achievement, then, is his willingness to let the mother out of
sight without undue anxiety or rage, because she has become an in¬
ner certainty as well as an outer predictability. Such consistency,
continuity, and sameness of experience provide a rudimentary
sense of ego identity which depends, I think, on the recognition
that there is an inner population of remembered and anticipated
sensations and images which arc firmly correlated wdth the outer
population of familiar and predictable things and people. Smil¬
ing crowns this development.

The constant tasting and testing of the relationship between
inside and outside meets its crucial test during the rages of the

»*»

220

Childhood and Society^

biting stage, when the teeth canse pain from within and when
outer friends either prove of no avail or withdraw frcnn the
only action which promises relief: biting. I would assume that
diis experience of an urge turning upon the self has much to do
with the masochistic tendency of finding cruel and cold com¬
fort in hurting oneself whenever an object has eluded one’s
grasp.

Out of this, therefore, comes that primary sense of badness,
that original sense of evil and malevolence which signifies the
potential loss of all that is good because we could not help de¬
stroying it inside, thus driving it away outside. This feeling per¬
sists in a universal homesickness, a nostalgia for familiar images
undamaged by change. We have illustrated how tribes dealing
with one segment of nature develop a collective magic which
seems to treat the Supernatural Providers of food and fortune
as if they were angry and must be appeased by prayer and self-
torture. Primitive religions, the most primitive layer in all re¬
ligions, and the religious layer in each individual, abound with
efforts at atonement which try to make up for vague deeds
against a maternal matrix and try to restore faith in the good¬
ness of one’s strivings and in the kindness of the powers of the
universe.

Wliat we here call trust coincides with what Therese Benedek
has called confidence. If I prefer the word “trust,” it is because
there is more naivete and more mutuality in it: an infant can
be said to be trusting where it would go to far to say that he
has confidence. The general state of trust, furthermore, implies
not only that one has learned to rely on the sameness and con¬
tinuity of the outer providers, but also that one may trust one¬
self and the capacity of one’s own organs to cope with urges;
and that one is able to consider oneself trustworthy enough so
that the providers will not need to be on guard lest they be
nipped.

In psychopathology the absence of basic trust can best be
studied in infantile schizophrenia, while weakness of such trust
is apparent in adult personalities of schizoid and depressive char¬
acter. The re-establishment of a state of trust has been found to

221

Eight Stages of Man

be the basic requirement for therapy in these cases. For no mat¬
ter what conditions may have caused a psychotic break, the
bizarreness and withdrawal in the behavior of many very sick
individuals hides an attempt to reconquer social mutuality by a
testing of the borderlines between senses and physical reality,
between words and social meanings.

Psychoanalysis assumes the early process of differentiation be¬
tween inside and outside to be the origin of the mechanisms of
projection and introjection which remain some of our deepest
and most dangerous defense mechanisms. In introjection we feel
and act as if an outer goodness had become an inner certainty.
In projection, we experience an inner harm as an outer one: we
endow significant people with the evil which actually is in us.
These two mechanisms, then, projection and introjection, arc
assumed to be modeled after whatever goes on in infants when
they would like to externalize pain and internalize pleasure, an
intent which must yield to the testimony of the maturing senses
and ultimately of reason. These mechanisms are, more or less
normally, reinstated in acute crises of love, trust, and faith in
the adult. Where they persist, they mark the “psychotic char¬
acter.”

The firm establishment of endming patterns for the solution
of the nuclear conflict of basic trust versus basic mistrust in mere
existence is the first task of the ego, and thus first of all a task for
maternal care. But let it be said here that the amount of trust
derived from earliest infantile experience does not seem to de¬
pend on absolute quantities of food or demonstrations of love,
but rather on the quality of the maternal relationship. Mothers,
I think, create a sense of trust in their children by that kind of
administration which in its quality combines sensitive care of
the baby’s individual needs and a firm sense of personal trust¬
worthiness within the trusted framework of their culture’s life
style. This forms the basis in the child for a sense of identity
which will later combine a sense of being “aU right,” of being
oneself, and of becoming what other people trust one will be¬
come. There are, therefore (within certain limits previously de¬
fined as the “musts” of child care), few frustrations in either this

222

Childhood and Society

or the following stages which die growing child cannot endure
if the frustration leads to the ever-renewed experience of greater
sameness and stronger continuity of development, toward a final
integration of the individual fife cycle with some meaningful
wider belongingness. Parents must not only have certain ways
of guiding by prohibition and permission; they must also be able
to represent to the child a deep, an almost somatic conviction that
there is a meaning to what they are doing. Ultimately, children
become neurotic not from frustrations, but from the lack or loss
of societal meaning in these frustrations.

». AUTONOMY VS. SHAME AND DOUBT

Anal-muscular maturation sets the stage for experimentation
with two simultaneous sets of social modalities: holding on and
letting go. As is the case with all of these modalities, their basic
conflicts can lead in the end to either hostile or benign expecta¬
tions and attitudes. Thus, to hold can become a destructive and
cruel retaining or restraining, and it can become a pattern of care:
to have and to hold. To let go, too, can turn into an inimical let¬
ting loose of destructive forces, or it can become a relaxed “to let
pass” and “to let be.” Culturally speaking, these attitudes are
neither good nor bad; their value depends on whether their hostile
implications are turned against enemy, or fellow man—or the self.

The latter danger is the one best known to us. For if denied the
gradual and well-guided experience of the autonomy of free
choice (or if, indeed, weakened by an initial loss of trust) the
child will turn against himself all hu urge to discriminate and to
manipulate. He will overmanipulate himself, he will develop a
precocious conscience. Instead of taking possession of things in
order to test them by purposeful repetition, he will become ob¬
sessed by his own repetitiveness. By such obsessiveness, of course,
he then learns to repossess the environment and to gain power by
stubborn and minute control, where he could not find large-scale
mutual regulation. Such hollow victory is the infantile model for
a compulsion neurosis. It is also the infantile source of later at¬
tempts in adult fife to govern by the letter, rather than by the
spirit-

Eight Stages of Man 223

Outer control at this stage, therefore, must be firmly reassur¬
ing. The infant must come to feel that the basic faith in existence,
which is the lasting treasure saved from the rages of the oral stage,
will not be jeopardized by this about-face of his, this sudden vio¬
lent wish to have a choice, to appropriate demandingly, and to
eliminate stubbornly. Firmness must protect him against the
potential anarchy of his as yet untrained sense of discrimination,
his inability to hold on and to let go with discretion. As his en¬
vironment encourages him to “stand on his own feet,” it must
protect him against meaningless and arbitrary experiences of
shame and of early doubt.

Shame is an emotion insufficiently studied, because in our civili¬
zation it is so early and easily absorbed by guilt. Shame supposes
that one is completely exposed and conscious of being looked at:
in one word, self-conscious. One is visible and not ready to be visi¬
ble; which is why we dream of shame as a situation in which we
are stared at in a condition of incomplete dress, in night attire,
“wdth one’s pants down.” Shame is early expressed in an impulse
to bury one’s face, or to sink, right then and there, into the ground.
But this, I think, is essentially rage turned against the self. He who
is ashamed would like to force the world not to look at him, not
to notice his exposure. He would like to destroy the eyes of the
world. Instead he must wish for his own invisibility. This poten¬
tiality is abundantly used in the educational method of “shaming”
used so exclusively by some primitive peoples; its destructive¬
ness is balanced in some civilizations by devices for “saving face.”
Visual shame precedes auditory guilt, which is a sense of badness
to be had all by oneself when nobody watches and when every¬
thing is quiet—except the voice of the superego. Such shaming
exploits an increasing sense of being small, which can develop
only as the child stands up and as his awareness permits him to
note the relative measures of size and power. (1 would assume that
the sense of omnipotence referred to in psychoanalytic literature
as the earliest matrix of experience is actually a retrospective illu¬
sion which occurs when the child, now endowed with a more
powerful muscular equipment, despairs of autonomy and revives
oral rages and hallucinations.)

224 Childhood and Society

Doubt is the brother of shame. Where shame is dependent on
the consciousness of being upright and exposed, doubt, so clinical
observation leads me to believe, has much to do with a conscious¬
ness of having a front and a back—and especially a “behind.” For
this reverse area of the body, with its aggressive and libidinal
focus in the sphincters and in the buttocks, cannot be seen by
the child, and yet it can be dominated by the will of others. The
“behind” is thus the individual’s dark continent, an area of the
body which can be magically dominated and effectively invaded
by those who would attack one’s power of autonomy and who
would designate as evil those products of the bowels which were
felt to be all right when they were being passed. This basic sense
of doubt in whatever one has left behind forms a substratum for
later and more verbal forms of compulsive doubting; this finds
its adult expression in paranoiac fears concerning hidden perse¬
cutors and secret persecutions threatening from bclund and from
within the behind.

3. INITIATIVE VS. GUILT

The ambulatory stage and that of infantile genitality add to the
inventory of basic social modalities that of “making,” first in the
sense of “being on the make.” There is no simpler, stronger word
to match the social modalities previously enumerated. The word
suggests pleasure in attack and conquest. In the boy, the emphasis
remains on phallic-intrusive modes; in the girl it turns to modes
of “catching” in more aggressive forms of snatching and “bitchy”
possessiveness, or in the milder form of making oneself attractive
and endearing.

The danger of this stage is a sense of guilt over the goals con¬
templated and the acts initiated in one’s exuberant enjoyment of
new locomotor and mental power: acts of aggressive manipula¬
tion and coercion which go far beyond the executive capacity of
organism and mind and therefore call for an energetic halt on
one’s contemplated initiative. While autonomy concentrates on
keeping potential rivals out, and is therefore more an expression of
jealous rage most often directed against encroachments by

Eight Stages of Man 225

younger siblings, initiative brings with it anticipatory rivalry
with those who have been there first and may, therefore, occupy
with their superior equipment the field toward which one’s initia¬
tive is directed- Jealousy and rivalry, those often embittered and
yet essentially futile attempts at demarcating a sphere of un¬
questioned privilege, now come to a climax in a final contest for a
favored position with the mother; the inevitable failure leads to
resignation, guilt, and anxiety. The child indulges in fantasies of
being a giant and a tiger, but in his dreams he runs in terror for
dear life. This, then, is the stage of the “castration complex,” the
fear of losing the (now energetically eroticized) genitals as a pun¬
ishment for the fantasies attached to their excitements.

Infantile sexuahty and incest taboo, castration complex and
superego all unite here to bring about that specifically human
crisis during which the child must turn from an exclusive, pre¬
genital attachment to his parents to the slow process of becoming
a parent, a carrier of tradition. Here the most fateful split and
transformation in the emotional powerhouse occurs, a split be¬
tween potential human glory and potential total destruction. For
here the child becomes forever divided in himself. The instinct
fragments which before had enhanced the growth of his infantile
body and mind now become divided into an infantile set which
perpetuates the exuberance of growth potentials, and a parental
set which supports and increases self-observation, self-guidance,
and self-punishment.

Naturally, the parental set is at first infantile in nature: the fact
that human conscience remains partially infantile throughout life
is the core of human tragedy. For the superego of the child can be
primitive, cruel, and uncompromising, as may be observed in in¬
stances where children overcontrol and overconstrict themselves
to the point of self-obliteration; where they develop an over-
obedience more literal than the one the parent has wished to exact;
or where they develop deep regressions and lasting resentments
becatise the parents themselves do not seem to five up to the new
conscience which they have installed in the child. One of the
deepest conflicts in life is the hate for a parent who served as the

226 Childhood and Society

model and the executor of the superego, but who (in some form)
was found trying to get away with the very transgressions which
the child can no longer tolerate in himself. The suspiciousness and
evasiveness which is thus mixed in with the all-or-nothing quality
of the superego, this organ of tradition, makes moral (in the sense
of moralistic) man a great potential danger to his own ego—and
to that of his fellow men.

The problem, again, is <me of mutual regulation. Where the
child, now so ready to overmanipulate himself, can gradually de¬
velop a sense of paternal responsibility, where he can gain some
insight into the institutions, functions, and roles which will per¬
mit his responsible participation, he will find pleasurable accom¬
plishment in wielding tools and weapons, in manipulating
meaningful toys—and in caring for younger children.

In pathology, the conflia over initiative is expressed either in
hysterical denial, which causes the repression of the wish or the
abrogation of its executive organ by paralysis or impotence; or in
overcompensatory showing off, in which the scared individual, so
eager to “duck,” instead “sticks his neck out.”

In adults, where once hysteria was the usual form of patho¬
logical regression in this area, a plunge into psychosomatic disease
is now common. 1 think that this direct attack on the organism it¬
self can be attributed to a weakness in underlying trust which
makes autonomy bothersome and facilitates a partial regression to
the stage of weak homeostasis. It is as if the culture had made a
man overadvertise himself and sincerely identify with his own ad¬
vertisement, while he knew all along that his mother never be¬
lieved in it.

4. INDUSTRY VS. INFERIORITY

Before the child, psychologically already a rudimentary parent,
can become a biological parent, he must begin to be a worker and
potential provider. With the oncoming latency period, the nor¬
mally advanced child forgets, or rather sublimates, the necessity to
“make” people by direct attack or to become papa and mama in a
hurry: he now learns to win recognition by producing things. He

Eight Stages of Man 227

has mastered the ambulatory field and the organ modes. He has
experienced a sense of finality regarding the fact that there is no
workable future within the womb of his family, and thus becomes
ready to apply himself to given skills and tasfa, which go far be¬
yond the mere playful expression of his organ modes or the pleas¬
ure in the function of his limbs. He develops industry—^Le., he ad¬
justs himself to the inorganic laws of the tool world. He can be¬
come an eager and absorbed unit of a productive situation. To
bring a productive situation to completion is an aim which gradu¬
ally supersedes the whims and wishes of his autonomous organism.
His ego boundaries include his tools and skills: the work principle
(Ives Hendrick) teaches him the pleasure of work completion
by steady attention and persevering diligence.

His danger, at this stage, lies in a sense of inadequacy and in¬
feriority. If he despairs of his tools and skills or of his status among
his tool partners, his ego boundaries suffer, and he abandons hope
for the ability to identify early with others who apply themselves
to the same general section of the tool world. To lose the hope of
such “industrial” association leads back to the more isolated, less
tool-conscious “anatomical” rivalry of the oedipal time. The
child despairs of his equipment in the tool world and in anatomy,
and considers himself doomed to mediocrity or mutilation. It is at
this point that wider society becomes significant in its ways of ad¬
mitting the child to an understanding of meaningful roles in its
total economy. Many a child’s development is disrupted when
family life may not have prepared him for school life, or when
school life may fail to sustain the promises of earlier stages.

5. IDENTiry VS. ROLE DIFFUSION

With the establishment of a good relationship to the world of
skills and tools, and with the advent of sexual maturity, childhood
proper comes to an end. Youth begins. But in puberty and
adolescence all samenesses and continuities relied on earlier arc
questioned again, because of a rapidity of body growth which
equals that of early childhood and because of the entirely new
additiem of physied genital maturity. The growing and develop-

2 28 Childhood and Society

ing youths, faced with tliis physiological revolution within them,
are now primarily concerned with what they appear to be in the
eyes of others as compared with what they feel they are, and
with the question of how to connect the roles and sldlls cultivated
earlier with the occupational prototypes of the day. In their search
for a new sense of continoity and sameness, adolescents have to
refight many of the battles of earlier years, even though to do so
they must artificially appoint perfectly well-meaning people to
play the roles of enemies; and they are ever ready to install lasting
idols and ideals as guardians of a final identity: here puberty rites
“confirm” the inner design for life.

The integration now taking place in the form of ego identity
is more than the sum of the childhood identifications. It is the ac¬
crued experience of the ego’s ability to integrate these identifica¬
tions with the vicissitudes of the libido, with the aptitudes de¬
veloped out of endowment, and with the opportunities offered in
social roles. The sense of ego identity, then, is the accrued con¬
fidence that the inner sameness and continuity arc matched by the
sameness and continuity of one’s meaning for others, as evidenced
in the tangible promise of a “career.”

The danger of this stage is role diffusion. Where this is based
on a strong previous doubt as to one’s sexual identity, delinquent
and outright psychotic incidents are not uncommon. If diagnosed
and treated correctly, these incidents do not have the same fatal
significance which they have at other ages. It is primarily the in¬
ability to settle on an occupational identity which disturbs
young people. To keep themselves together they temporarily
overidentify, to the point of apparent complete loss of identity,
with the heroes of cliques and crowds. This initiates the stage of
“falling in love,” which is by no means entirely, or even primarily,
a sexual matter—except where the mores demand it. To a con¬
siderable extent adolescent love is an attempt to arrive at a defini¬
tion of one’s identity by projecting one’s diffused ego images on
one another and by seeing them thus reflected and gradually
clarified. This is why many a youth would rather converse, and
settle matters of mutual identification, than embrace.

Puberty rites and confirmations help to integrate and to affirm

Eight Stages of Man 229

the new identity. In the last part of this book we shall discoss the
way in which the revolutions of our day attempt to solve and also
to exploit the deep need of youth to redefine its identity in an in¬
dustrialized world

<S. INTIMACY VS. ISOLATION

It is oiJy as young people emerge from their identity struggles
that their egos can master the sixth stage, that of intimacy. What
we have said about genitality now gradually comes into play.
Body and ego must now be masters of the organ modes and of
the nuclear conflicts, in order to be able to face the fear of ego loss
in situations which call for self-abandon: in orgasms and sexual
unions, in close friendships and in physical combat, in experiences
of inspiration by teachers and of intuition from the recesses of the
self- The avoidance of such experiences because of a fear of ego
loss may lead to a deep sense of isolation and consequent self-ab¬
sorption.

This, then, may be the place to complete our discussion of
genitality.

For a basic orientation in the matter I shall quote what has
come to me as Freud’s shortest saying. It has often been claimed,
and bad habits of conversation seem to sustain the claim, that
psychoanalysis as a treatment attempts to convince the patient
that before God and man he has only one obligation; to have good
orgasms, with a fitting “object,” and that regularly. This, of
course, is not true. Freud was once asked what he thought a nor¬
mal person should be able to do well. The questioner probably
expected a complicated answer. But Freud, in the curt way of
his old days, is reported to have said: “Lieben und arbeiten” (to
love and to work). It pays to ponder on this simple formula; it
gets deeper as you think about it. For when Freud said “love” he
meant gemtal love, and genital love; when he said love and work,
he meant a general work-productiveness which would not pre¬
occupy the individual to the extent that he loses his right or
capacity to be a genital and a loving being. Thus we may ponder,
but we cannot improve on the formula which includes the doc¬
tor’s prescription for human dignity—and for democratic living.

230 Childhood and Society

Gcnitality, then, consists in the unobstructed capacity to de¬
velop an orgastic potency so free of pregenital interferences that
genital libido (not just the sex products discharged in Kinsey’s
“outlets”) is expressed in heterosexual mutuality, with full sensi¬
tivity of both penis and vagina, and with a convulsion-like dis¬
charge of tension from the whole body. This is a rather concrete
way of saying something about a process which we really do not
understand. To put it more situationally: the total fact of finding,
via the climactic turmoil of die orgasm, a supreme experience of
the mutual regulation of two beings in some way brea^ the point
oflF the hostilities and potential rages caused by the oppositeness of
male and female, of fact and fancy, of love and hate. Satisfactory
sex relations thus make sex less obsessive, overcompensation less
necessary, sadistic controls superfluous.

Preoccupied as it was with curative aspects, psychoanalysis
often failed to fonnulate the matter of genitality in a way signif¬
icant for the processes of society in all classes, nations, and levels
of culture. The kind of mutuality in orgasm which psychoanaly¬
sis has in mind is apparendy easily obtained in classes and culmres
which happen to make a leisurely institution of it. In more com¬
plex societies this mutuality is interfered with by so many factors
of health, of tradition, of opportunity, and of temperament, that
the proper formulation of sexual health would be rather this: A
human being should be potentially able to accomplish mutuality
of genital orgasm, but he should also be so constituted as to bear
frustration in the matter without undue regression wherever con¬
siderations of reality and loyalty call for it.

While psychoan^ysis has on occasion gone too far in its em¬
phasis on genitality as a universal cure for society and has thus
provided a new addiction and a new commodity for many who
wished to so interpret its teachings, it has not always indicated
all the goals that genitality actually should and must imply. In
order to be of lasting social significance, the utopia of genitality
diould include:

1. mutuality of orgasm

2. with a loved partner

3- of the other sex

Eight Stages of Man 231

4. with whom one is able and willing to share a mutual trust

5. and with whom one is able and willing to regulate the
cycles of

a. work

b. procreation

c. recreation

6 . so as to secure to the offspring, too, a satisfactory develop¬
ment.

It is apparent that such utopian accomplishment on a large scale
cannot be an individual or, indeed, a therapeutic task. Nor is it a
purely sexual matter by any means.

7. GENERATIVITY VS. STAGNATION

The discussion of intimacy versus isolation has already included
a further nuclear conflict which, therefore, requires only a short
explicit formulation: I mean generativity versus stagnation. I
apologize for creating a new and not even pleasant term. Yet
neither creativity nor productivity nor any other fashionable
term seems to me to convey what must be conveyed—^namely,
that the ability to lose oneself in the meeting of bodies and minds
leads to a gradual expansion of ego interests and of libidinal ca-
thexis over that which has been thus generated and accepted as a
responsibility. Generativity is primarily the interest in establish¬
ing and guitog the next generation or whatever in a given case
may become the absorbing object of a parental kind of responsi¬
bility. Where this enrichment fails, a regression from generativity
to an obsessive need for pseudo intimacy, punctuated by moments
of mutual repulsion, takes place, often with a pervading sense
(and objective evidence) of individual stagnation and interper¬
sonal impoverishment.

8. EGO INTEGRITY VS. DESPAIR

Only he who in some way has taken care of things and people
and has adapted himself to the triumphs and disappointments ad¬
herent to being, by necessity, the originator of others and the
generator of things and ideas—only he may gradually grow the
fruit of these seven stages. I know no better word for it than ego

Childhood and Society

integrity. Lacking a clear definition, I shall point to a few con¬
stituents of this state of mind. It is the ego’s accrued assurance of
its proclivity for order and meaning. It is a post-narcissistic love of
the human ego—^not of the self—as an experience which conveys
some world order and spiritual sense, no matter how dearly paid
for. It is the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as some¬
thing that had to be and that, by necessity, permitted of no substi¬
tutions: it thus means a new, a different love of one’s parents. It is
a comradeship with the ordering ways of distant times and differ¬
ent pursuits, as expressed in the simple products and sayings of
such times and pursuits. Altliough aware of the relativity of all the
various life styles which have given meaning to human striving,
the possessor of integrity is ready to defend the dignity of his own
life style against all physical and economic threats. For he knows
that an individual life is the accidental coincidence of but one life
cycle with but one segment of history; and that for him all human
integrity stands or falls with the one style of integrity of which
he partakes. The style of integrity developed by his culture or
civilization thus becomes the “patrimony of his soul,” the seal of
his moral paternity of himself (“. . . pero el honor/Es patrimonio
del alma”: Calderon). Before this final solution, death loses its
sting.

The lack or loss of this accrued ego integration is signified by
fear of death: the one and only life cycle is not accepted as the
ultimate of life. Despair expresses the feeling that the time is short,
too short for the attempt to start another life and to try out al¬
ternate roads to integrity. Disgust hides despair.

Each individual, to become a mature adult, must to a sufficient
degree develop all the ego qualities mentioned, so that a wise In¬
dian, a true gentleman, and a mature peasant share and recognke
in one another the final stage of integrity. But each cultural en¬
tity, to develop the particular style of integrity suggested by its
historical place, utilizes a particular combination of these con¬
flicts, along with specific provocations and prohibitions of
infantile sexuality. Infantile conflicts become creative only if sus¬
tained by the firm support of cultural institutions and of the
special leader classes representing them. In order to approach or ex-

Eight Stages of Man *33

pcriencc integrity, the individual must know how to be a follower
of image bearers in religion and in politics, in the economic order
and in technology, in aristocratic living and in the arts and sci¬
ences. Ego integrity, therefore, implies an emotional integration
which permits participation by followership as well as acceptance
of the responsibility of leadership.

Webster’s Dictionary is kind enough to help us complete this
outline in a circular fashion. Trust (the first of our ego values)
is here defined as “the assured reliance on another’s integrity,”
the last of our values. I suspect that Webster had business in
mind rather than babies, credit rather than faith. But the formu¬
lation stands. And it seems possible to further paraphrase the
relation of adult integrity and infantile trust by saying that
healthy children will not fear life if their parents have integrity
enough not to fear death.

In this book the emphasis is on the childhood stages. In order to
indicate the whole conceptual area which is awaiting systematic
treatment, I shall conclude this chapter with a diagram. In this, as
in the diagram of pregenital zones and modes, the diagonal repre¬
sents the sequence of enduring solutions, each of which is based on
the integration of the earlier ones. At any given stage of the life
cycle the solution of one more nuclear conflict adds a new ego
quality, a new criterion of increasing strength. The criteria pro¬
posed in this chart are to be treated in analogy to the criteria for
health and iUncss in general—^i.c., by ascertaining whether or not
there is “a pervading subjective sense oP’ the criterion in question,
and whether or not “objective evidence of the dominance of” the
criterion can be established by indirect examination (by means of
depth psychology). Above the diagonal there is space for a future
elaboration of the precursors of each of these solutions, all of
which begin with the beginning; below the diagonal there is
space for the designation of the derivatives of these solutions in
the maturing and the mature personality.

*34

Childhood and Society

Figure 7

PART FOUR

Youth and the Evolution of

Introduction to Part Four

With the attempt at formulating integrity as the mature quality
accrued from all the ego stages and libidinal phases, the scope of a
book on childhood and society seems to have been overstepped—
and with k, the range of psychoanalytic child psychology as now
formulated. For psychoanalysis has consistently described the
vicissitudes of instincts and of the ego only up to adolescence, at
which time rational genitality was expected to absorb infantile
conflicts or irrational fixation to preserve them for repeat per¬
formances under manifold disguises. The main recurrent theme
thus concerned the shadow of frustration which falls from child¬
hood on the individual’s later life—and on his society. In this book
we suggest that, to understand either childhood or society, we
must expand our scope to include the study of the way in which
societies lighten the inescapable conflicts of childhood with a
promise of some security, identity, and integrity. In thus reinforc¬
ing the values of the ego, societies create the only condition under
which human growth is possible.

Successive civilizations, while exploiting appropriate syndro¬
mes of infantile fears, can also be shown to raise the correspond¬
ing infantile ego value to highest collective endeavor. A religion,
for example, may organize the nuclear conflict of sense of trust
versos sense of evil, collectively cultivating trust in the form of
faith and exploiting the sense of evil in the form of ^ Such an

*J7

238 Childhood and Society

organization may have its era in history when it reinforces this
particular ego value with a collective power capable of creating
civilizations and of providing for the participation of its followers
in one form of human mtegrity. That organizations have a knack
for outliving their historical ascendancy is another matter. As
other ego values (Le., autonomy) become the nuclei of collective
endeavors, older organizations may increasingly depend on a ruth¬
less exploitation of infantile fears. A church may have to take
refuge in a system of indoctrination intended to convince people
of the inescapable reality of a particular kind of evil in order to be
able to annoimcc that it alone possesses the key for the only door
to salvation.

The history of societies records the rise and faU of upper classes,
elites, and priesthoods which in their aristocratic aspirations culti¬
vated one or the other of the ego values, giving true comfort and
providing true progress, but which for the sake of the survival of
their own petty hierarchies learned to exploit the infantile anxie¬
ties which they at first alleviated. Kings who, when great, were
heroes in the drama of patriarchy have protected themselves and
their rule by relying on the taboo against patricide. Feudal systems,
which at their best are models for the apportioning of responsi¬
bility among leaders and led, have maintained themselves by
threatening anarchy and loss of face to dissidents. Political sys¬
tems have thrived on the provocation of manifold and morbid
doubt; economic systems on the guilty hesitation to initiate
change. Yet political, economic, and technical elites, wherever
they have accepted the obligation to perfect a new style of living
at a logical point in history, have provided men with a high sense
of identity and have inspired them to reach new levels of civiliza¬
tion. All in all, one may conclude that the price in concomitant
misery has been too high; but this is a matter for purely philo¬
sophical deliberation.

These are impressions. I do not have the knowledge necessary
to approach in any systematic fashion the relationship between
ego qualities, social institutions, and historical eras. But it seems
to me that just as there is a basic affinity of the problem of basic

Introduction to Part Four 239

trust to the institution of religion, the problem of autonomy is
reflected in basic political organization and that of initiative in
the economic order. Similarly, industry is related to technology;
identity to social stratification; intimacy to relationship patterns;
generativity to education, art, and science; and integrity, finally,
to philosophy. I can pursue here only one specific direction sug¬
gested and confirmed by my own observations, especially on
children. I have focused on the problem of ego identity and
on its anchoring in a cultural identity because I believe it to be
that part of the ego which at the end of adolescence integrates the
infantile ego stages and neutralizes the autocracy of the infantile
superego. It is the only inner arrangement which prevents the
superego’s permanent alliance with the unreconstructed renmants
of latent infantile rage.

I know very well that this shift in conceptual emphasis is dic¬
tated by historical accident—^Le., by the revolutions that are tak¬
ing place in our lifetime, affecting our personal fortunes as well
as the symptoms presented and the unconscious demands made on
us by our patients. To condense it into a formula: the patient of
today suffers most under the problem of what he should believe
in and who he should—or, indeed, might—^be or become; while
the patient of early psychoanalj^ suffered most under inhibi¬
tions which prevented him from being what and who he thought
he knew he was. In this country especially, adult patients and the
parents of prospective child patients hojje to find in the psycho¬
analytic system a refuge from the discontinuities of existence, a re¬
gression and a return to a more patriarchal one-to-one relation¬
ship.

As early as 1908 ^ Freud pointed to the origin of the neuroses of
his time, in the double standard for the two sexes and the excessive
demands made by upper-class pretenses on the wives and mothers
in his urban environment. He acknowledged, as partially relevant,
the damaging influence of rapid changes in soda! role suffered by

^Sigmimd Freud, *T)ie Kulturellc Sex- V, Intemadonaler Psychoanalydscher
ualmoral and die modeme Nervosi- Verlag, Wien, 1924.
taet,** GtsmaneUt Sebriften, Band

240 Childhood and Society

individuals who moved from the country to the dty or who
climbed from the middle to the upper class. In all of this, how¬
ever, he discerned as the mainspring of psychopathology a deep
upset in the individual’s sexual economy owing to the manifold
hypocrisies and sexual repressions imposed on him.

To wortliy subjects suffering from these arbitrary standards
Freud offered the psychoanalytic method, a form of radical self¬
enlightenment, wliich soon burst die bounds of narrow historical
determination. For with it he found, in the depth of the inhibited
individuals of his time, residues of and analogies to the taboos and
conventions of all times. Beyond explaining the symptoms char¬
acteristic of its own period, it uncovered a timeless elite of brood¬
ing neurotics, successive versions of King Oedipus, Prince Ham¬
let, and the Brothers Karamazov, and it determined to manage the
spectacle of their tragic conflicts within a private method of self¬
enlightenment. Making their peace with the complexes emanat¬
ing from the daemonic Id, they would thereby gain not only
health, but also a victory for reason and individuation.

The history of civilization will record that Freud, in attempt¬
ing to meet the demands of his neurological practice, inadvertently
crowned that revolution in human consciousness which in an¬
tiquity had lifted the tragic individual from the anonymous chorus
of the archaic world and which had made self-conscious man the
“measure of all things.” The scientific inquiry which had then
been directed toward “all things” was redirected by Freud to
include human consciousness itself: we shall return, in the con¬
clusion, to the dilemma caused by this re-application of the spirit
of inquiry to its ovm organ and origin. In the meantime, the
thematic aflinity of the basic Freudian neuroses to the themes of
Greek tragedy are obvious, in terminology as well as in spirit.

The spirit of Freud’s work, then—^in spite of terms and tech¬
niques connoting the physiological and physical laboratory of the
nineteenth century—^vastly antedates the world wars, the world
revolutions, and the rise of the first industrial culture in this
country. Freud remained aloof from all of these developments.
The Storm Troopers who searched his home (where he had sur-

Intr6d^cfl(^ to’ Pant Fodr 241.

ptiWiiided himself tidch idumy dlioiee' little 9esttats’'^iMn the p^-
tragic; the pren^-coiisdotis dayg jof- -erdiaie antiquity) /onty
seemed to confiAii ins original a|q}t«^ch to group psydiology^
whkh led him to 'conclude that anyorgatflissed group was a ktentt
mob and a potetidal enemy to the spirit of individuation andr
reaSoh. ' , ■ -

The crowning Value 6f whit Freud called the ^primacy of the
inrelleCt” was the cornerstone of the earfy' psydioanalyst’sddenr
Qty, giving him a-jirm foOthold ki the-eta of enlightmment, as
well ^ in the ripe inteQe'ctuaiity of his own race. Only once, in q
letter loa Jewish lodge, did'Freud* admewledge ehis'“Heunlich>t
keit^der ^ichen umeren Konsnru&tion’* *w^an tBitransbcable^turn
of phrase-whidi', 1 feel, contains what we try to'^ormolate in the
term “identity.'*' * ’ - •

Safely relying, th«t, on the basic premiscLof iotellectual integi
rity, Freud could take ceitain fundamental phndples df moralky
for granted; and with morality, cultural hientity.-To'him the ego
stood like- a caudous- and sometknes ^direwd patrtdan, not only
between'the anidtehy-'of primeval instkiets and die fury of the
archaic consdence, but also between die pressure of upper-class
6otfVeiHrion anddie tmufehy of moh spirit; ’The bearo’ of such an
identity UOttld'iura'Wfeh dignified horror from mass > develops
mdits'Wldehf^ihreatened'to throw doubf upon themself«deceiimin»i
don ofego. ^{^preoccupied with'symptpamc which oharac«
^rfsS6d die defined ego's defenses,- psychoanclysis> had, at fnst)
little re $ay riiout th^<>wuy in whadt the ego’s s 3 mthesis gTow»t«
or fads to grow—out of the soil of social organization. • .

*l,itenLl^, secret fsmfljjirity of the conscioos attraction in Jewry: power-
fdcndbal psj^chofo^ical Consrttfctioin.^ fni, tmv&*balfeed ^cttiotioiw
Sigmund Fveitd^ ^Ansprache doi^ die 4 wtkle Gtfufdilsin^QChfe’*H
A^tgUpd^r d(^ Vctciiw R’qai B’qth clevconsclo^snessof aninncrid^ntiy
(1926),^ Gesammetie Werkty ^V<3. (^die klafe Bewti^sthefir der'uin'erra
XIA, Imago Publishing Cov^^^ Ltmu . ^Ideodeaec^X. Bixutiyi, iw metugmsd
don, 1941. In this speech, Fren^ jdp- wo traau w^uch he fi 4 t be owed ^
cussed his relationship to Jewry and Jewish ancestry freedom from ptejti-
discarded religiod^ faith'hnd nationdl dides^«duch the Ide of the as-

pride as prune boedSb” Be jthe^ J teUteq^aj^d die eeadiAfss te
pointedL m poeuc rather than scientific oppoiitioa.
thidisl^m m udcomciotis as wdP^ds'a ’ '

242 Childhood and Society

The founders and early practitioners of psychoanalysis, then,
focused on one single endeavor—introspective honesty in the serv¬
ice of self-enlightenment. Since this became the ruling tenet of
the psychoanalytic method and the acid test for its disciples and
patients everywhere, remarkably little became known of the par¬
ticular flavors of living which offered the little Oedipus and Elec-
tra of various cultural milieus zestful participation in a style of
life. The alliance of the superego with a high sense of cultural
identity remained neglected; ways by which a given environment
permits and cultivates self-abandon in forms of passion or reason,
ferocity or reserve, piety or skepticism, bawdiness or propriety,
gracefulness or stenmess. In fact, all pronounced varieties of cul¬
tural expression except those pertaining to “Kultur” became sus¬
pect as disguises or defenses, all too costly bulwarks against the id
and (like the superego) akin to and dangerously identical with
the id. While it is true, of course, that those guiding values have
all at times allied themselves with brutality and narrow-minded¬
ness, they nevertheless have inspired what cultural development
man has had and cannot be omitted from the psychologicsd bal¬
ance sheet, past, present, or future.

And so it comes about that we begin to conceptualize matters of
identity at the very time in history when they become a prob¬
lem. For we do so in a country which attempts to make a
super-identity out of all the identities imported by its constituent
immigrants; and we do so at a time when rapidly increasing
mechanization threatens these essentially agrarian and patrician
identities in their lands of origin as well

The study of identity, then, becomes as strategic in our time as
the study of sexuality was in Freud’s time. Such historical relativ¬
ity in the development of a field, however, does not seem to pre¬
clude consistency of ground plan and continued closeness to ob¬
servable fact. Freud’s findings regarding the sexual etiology of the
neurotic part of a mental disturbance are as true for our patients
as they were for his; while the burden of identity loss which stands
out in our considerations probably burdened Freud’s patients as
well as ours, as re-interpretations would show. Different periods

Introduction to Part Four 243

thus permit us to sec in temporary exaggeration different aspects
of an essentially inseparable whole.

In this fourth and last part I shall explore problems of identity
connected with the entry into the industrial revolution of three
great countries: America, Germany, and Russia. Our special focus
will be on the need, in the youth of all of these countries, for a
new, a fraternal conscience.

I shall begin with this country, although I do so only with
deep hesitation. In recent years a great many books and articles on
the character structure of nations have shown rather clearly that
this is still a most precarious subject in general and a nearly for¬
bidding one in the case of this country.

The point is that it is almost impossible (except in the form of
fiction) to write m America about America for Americans. You
can, as an American, go to the South Sea Islands and write upon
your return; you can, as a foreigner, travel in America and write
upon taking leave; you can, as an immigrant, write as you get
settled; you can move from one section of this country or from
one “class” of this country to another, and write while you still
have one foot in each place. But in the end you always write about
the way it feels to arrive or to leave, to change or to get settled.
You write about a process of which you arc a more or less willing,
but always pleasurably harassed, part, and your style soon runs
away with you in the high gear of dithyrambic or outraged ex¬
pression.

The only healthy American way to write about America for
Americans is to vent a gripe and to overstate it. This, however,
calls for a delicate gift and for a particular intellectual ancestry,
neither of which is easily acquired

I shall restrict myself, then, to stating from the point of view of
one who has practiced and taught psychoanalysis in this country
what kind of sense of identity and what kind of loss of identity
seems to reveal itself in American patients, big and little.

CHAPTER

8

Reflections on the American Identify

I. POLARITIES

It is aconimoapJacc to state that whatever one may come to coo-
^ider a tmly American trait can be shown to have its equally
^a^acteristic opposite. This, <me suspects, is true of all “nationiJ
jcharacteis,” or (as 1 would prefer to call them) national identities
true, inTact that one nmy begin leather than end with ^
proposition that a nation’s identity is derived from the ways in
wh^ history has, aS' it were, nounterpomted certain opposite
potcntialiriies} the wa)^. ip. wUtdt it Mfts this pounterptmt to a
unique s^lc of dvilizatipnr or lets it 4isihtegmte into mere coa-
tra4ction.

My psychoanalytic work has led me to a few formuladonsia
drisrmatter, whicb l>sba|l repeet^herp m revised fosm. 1

1 This dynamic omiptry subif ots its.inhabitaats to more extreme
contrasts and abrupt chari^ during,a lifetime or 4 g^erarion
riian is normally the case with other grpar natioa&'MostiQfther kir
habitants are faced, in tbek own lives oTt vrithin tho-orbit of their
dosest rdarives, withdtfxnarivesjjces^tri^ by-snch polatiries,asi
9pen roads of ianmgmtionarid joelqas ishmda^ ntadition; pop-
going intepariomdi^ wd dffisntjsoleriowriri;'^b<)iste^^
petition and self-effacing co-operation; and many others. The in¬
fluence of the resulting contradictory slogans on the develo^Hnent
of an individnal ego probably depends on the coincidence of nu-

*44

Reflections <m the Americsii Identity *45

dear ego suges -mth criticd chan|^ in the faOuly^ gd>gra{£ic
ahd ecdnoitiiO ^dssittides;

' The procesii of American identity foliation splits to SupJjOrt
an individuaTs ego identity as long as he cah preseirve a ruttain
dement of deliberate tentadvene^ of autonomons choice. Thi in¬
dividual must be able to convince himself that the next ste|> is
to Urn and that no hiattet #hd?elie'is sCa^g or |[tdhg h^afwi^
has the dhtnde ofleavthg or'dirdihg bet the opposite
chooses td do S6. In this coundy the ttdgrant dbes not want tb be
told to move on, nor the stdentity man'to -stay tvhere he is; tot
the life style (and the family histofy) Of e^fch <^ntsnns the op^
posite denient as a poteddai ahetnatiire whit^ he wishes tO'con¬
sider Ins most private and Individual decision. ' '

Thus the functioning AlnaiCan, as the hdr Of a history of ex¬
treme contrasts and abrupt changes, bases his final ego idendty on
some tentadve cOmbinadon of dynamic polarides siich asmigtw*
tory and sedentary, individualisdc and standardized, comjpeddve’
and co-opetadve;, ptoiis and freethinking, responsible and cynical,
etc. '

While we see extreme elaboradons of one or the Othtf Of theSe
poles in regional, occupadonal, and diaracterological types, tmal=>
yds reveals that this extremeness (of ngidky or ot vac^ydOn)^
contains an inner defense igaScast the always implied,'' deeply
feared, or secredy hoped-fOr opposite extreme.

To leave his'choices open, the American, <m the ndmle, fives
with two sets Of “troths”: aOtt of religious principles or religiodsly
proimunCed pOlidcal principles of a tugldy poritan <|na£ty, smd
a see of shifting slogans, whidi indicate whiat, at a givim dme, one
may get away widi on the basis of not more than a hunoh, a mOod^
ok a ObdOh.'Thns, the same cfdld may have been exposed in Suc-
cesfiOfi or dtiOmateiy to sodden dedrionsexpresring the^slogang
“Ldfi liet'die^ell out hittc”’and'again, “LdrVsuyand keep die
bastafSif eUt'^—koknentidn only two of the most sweeping ones}
Withbut itif pkrfehsO'Of logic or pime^ej dogwir are conVuiC-^
ing enough to those involved to jukify action whether within'6¥
just outside of the lofty law (iu so far as it happens to be can-

246 Childhood and Society

forced or forgotten, according to changing local dimate). Slo¬
gans contain time and space perspectives as definite as those elab¬
orated in the Sioux or Yurok system; they are experiments in
collective dme-spacc to which individual ego defenses are co¬
ordinated. But they change, often radically, daring one and the
same childhood.

A true history of the American identity would have to cor¬
relate Parrington’s observations on the continuity of formulated
thought with the rich history of discontinuous American slogans
which pervade public opinion in comer stores and in studies, in
the courts and in the daily press. For in principles and concepts
too, an invigorating polarity seems to exist on the one hand be¬
tween the inteUcctual and political aristocracy which, always
mindful of precedent, guards a measure of coherent thought and
indestractible spirit, and, on the other hand, a powerful mobocracy
which seems to prefer changing slogans to self-perpetuating prin¬
ciples. This native polarity of aristocracy and mobocracy (so ad¬
mirably synthesized in Franklin D. Roosevelt) pervades Ameri¬
can democracy more effectively than the advocates and the critics
of the great American middle class seem to realize. This Ameri¬
can middle class, decried by some as embodying an ossification of
all that is mercenary and philistine in this country, may represent
only a transitory series of overcompensatory attempts at settling
tentatively around some Main Street, fireplace, bank account, and
make of car, it docs not, as a class should, preclude high mobility
and a cultural potential unsure of its fii^ identity. Status ex¬
presses a different relativity in a more mobile society: it re¬
sembles an escalator more than a platform; it is a vehicle, rather
thanagoaL

All countries, and especially large ones, complicate their own
progress in their own way with the very premises of their begin¬
nings. We must try to formulate the way in which self-contradic¬
tions in American history may expose her youth to an emotional
and political short circuit and thus endanger her dynamic poten-
tiaL

Reflections on the American Identity 247
2. “MOM"

In recent years the observations and warnings of the psychi¬
atric workers of this country have more and more converged on
two concepts: the “schizoid personality” and “maternal rejec¬
tion.” Essentially this means not only that many people fall by the
wayside as a result of psychotic disengagements from reality, but
also that all too many people, while not overtly sick, nevertheless
seem to lack a certain ego tonus and a certain mutuality in social
intercourse. One may bugh at this suggestion and point to the
spirit of individualism and to the gestures of animation and of
jovial friendliness characterizing much of the social life in this
country; but the psychiatrists (especially after the shocking ex¬
perience during the last war, of being forced to reject or to send
home hundreds of thousands of “psychoneurotics”) sec it differ¬
ently. The streamlined smile within the perfectly tuned counte¬
nance and within the standardized ways of exhibiting self-control
docs not always harbor that true spontaneity which alone would
keep the personality intact and flexible enough to make it a going
concern.

For this the psychiatrists tend to blame “Mom.” Case history
after case history states that the patient had a cold mother, a domi¬
nant mother, a rejecting mother—or a hyperpossessive, over-
protective one. They imply that the patient, as a baby, was not
made to feel at home in this world except under the condition that
he behave himself in certain definite ways, which were inconsist¬
ent with the timetable of an infant’s needs and potentialities,
and contradictory in themselves. They imply that the mother
dominated the father, and that while the father offered more
tenderness and understanding to the children than the mother did,
he disappointed his children in the end because of what he “took”
from the mother. Gradually what had begim as a spontaneous
movement in thousands of clinical files has become a manifest
literary sport in books decrying the mothers of this covmtry as
“Moms” and as a “generation of vipers.”

Who is this “Mom”? How did she lose her good, her simple

24 ? : Quldhood and Society

name? How could she become an excuse for all that is rotten in the
state of the nation and a subjedt of fiterary temper tantrums? Is
Mom really to bkme?

, In a clinKal sense, of course, coi>lame may mean just to point to
what, the infonned worker ^cercly . considers', the primaryicaiose
of the caJbmity. But there is in zno^ of our psychiatric '\^6rk ain
undertone of revengeful tximnph, as if a vilk^ had been spotted
and cornered. Tlie blame attached to themothers in this oountay
i(namcly, that they arc-frigid sexually, rejective of their children,
and andoiy dominant in their homes) has in dtself a spedfic
moralistic pnnitiveness. No doubt both patients and psychiatric
workers were blamed too much when they were, childly now
they blame all mothers, because all-causality has become linked
widhbkone...

- ' .It was,:of Course^ a vindictive; injustice to give the name of
“Mom” toa certain dangerous type of mother, a type apparently
tharacterked by a number, of fsKd; contrachedons in her mother¬
hood. Such injustice can .only he explained and justified by the
jpmzialisric habit of $ensationilt:6nriaposition-;^a part of the pub-
heist folkways of otir day. It is true that where the “psyebo-
neuroQo” AiAerican soldier felt^inadequately prepared for Hfe,
be.- often: implicitly and more often juncensciously blamed his
mother^ and that the expert fek compelled to agree with him.
But it is also true that the road from Main Street to die foxhale was
longcrr~geographically, cukurally, and' psychologicaHy^^-than
was the road to the freme lines: from the home towns of nations
which were open to . attack and had: been .attadeed, 'or which
had prepared themselves .to: Attack other people’s homelands and
now feared fortheir own. It seems senseless to blame the American
faihily for theifailnresv but to deny it credit for the gigande h»4
man achievement of.^overcaming that distance.: 5 ;:

.“Mom,” them like, similar prototypes in'other: countiies-»¥>«ee
the “German fathtri” tu be disemssed in the neixt chapter^»vis a
cpmposkejmagetof traits, none of which are presenrdl'at once in
one single woman. No Woman/consciously a.spires fccr.be such'a
“Mo*B,”.aind yet she may find ithathdr ; ekperkUUe:;chmrei!gd.’'on

Reflections oaor the American Identity

this Gestalt, as if riie wercfotcedto assusiie aTdlci.'Toriieririiiucri:/
worker, “Mom” is something comparaUe to “classical”
diiatric syndrome which you come to use as a yardstidc rithdiigh
you have never seen it in pure fornti la-cartoons; she ibeocMnes ar
caricature, immediately, convincing to alL. Before analysing;

then, as a historical phenomenon, let ns. focus on her!
htom the point of ;vjew of the pathogenic demands which she.
makes on childreri and by :whidi we (or shall 1 say, I?) recogf:

nide hecprmeiace in oar clmicad wock:j ?/‘

'“MQmr:is'the. onquesQQR!ed^authorit^ in matters of moseS!
arntmosals ihrhdi< hotbe;^ and (thr(M^li> clUhs)^in tho communityt
yet she permits herself to remain, in her own way, vaki in hen
appearanc^ic^otiatical'in jicrjdeaiands,-.and!iihfantile in her emo-

ClOIlUSL. ' 1j ' j . j‘ vi*t j

; a. In anyrituarion in iidhk4 'this discrepancy clashes with the
respect which rite deanandsrfrctm het: childrai, she blames her chil'^
drai; sheoeiwc.hla!raes,hei!Sclfii >: •. >

. 3/.She 'thns axtificidQy.maintains what Rtlth .Benedict would
cadi the disoonrinakyabgetMventhe cfaMV atnl. the ad^^ status
withoat endowing this di&qpetMtia6ozt^iiiridt the higher meaning
cmanating.frotn snperibrejiaoiiple.:

4 i Bhc shows adetriTBiincdliQstihty'to any ficcscxprcssionofithd
mostTAatve fanns.of sensual^and soxualpleasure on ^ part of;bee
chihicea, and shemakesitidear tmmigbtbat cl^father^ when^sotb
uaIlydBmanding;.is afeorej-Yetiasishcgrowj.Htddfa^.Shitsceim.uijo
willing jCQ sacrifloe. such exxemai e%nsofsBxuahcQmpetition asjUoo
youthful .dresses,, frills of eiMbitioBSsm, and “makc-upi” losadtfc
Ciom'^riie is avidly addicted to sexual' display in books, mo>des<
and gossip ■ r ? .• ■’

; 5 . i She reaches self-restraint andsclf-controlv .bht dw is..imabJe
to restrict her imake of calorics in. order, tojamain within the

bouridsiof the.dresacsaheipoe£ors,i..>r r.r.

6. She expectsjilmr icluldren.td be!hpdi0n'tbanndm.,>.h)it she
is- hypochooidriacallyjcoademod with, htedwitewsrfWjeing. -s • /.

Bhc stands kit fheESupearicar yalui%:«)f liladiriewi'yetjshs.her-:
sslfrioda noC'wanctD‘he6Qmt Wadtvdne.isaRpr^ljyiaka^

250 Childhood and Society

of that status which in the past was the fruit of a rich life, namely
the status of the grandmother.

This will be sufEcient to indicate that “Mom” is a woman in
whose life cycle remnants of infantility join advanced senility to
crowd out the middle range of mature womanhood, which thus
becomes self-absorbed and stagnant. In fact, she mistrusts her
own feelings as a woman and mother. Even her overconcem does
not provide trust, but lasting mistrust. But let it be said that this
“Mom” is not happy; she does not like herself; she is ridden by
the anxiety that her life was a waste. She knows that her children
do not love her, despite Mother’s Day and alL “Mom” is a victim,
not a victor.

Assuming, then, that this is a “type,” a composite image of suffi¬
cient relevance for the epidemiology of neurotic conflict in this
country: its explanation would obviously call for the collabora¬
tion of historian and psychologist, and for a new kind of history, a
kind which at the moment is admittedly in its impressionistic and
sensational stages. “Mom,” of course, is only a stereotyped carica¬
ture of existing contradictions which have emerged from intense,
rapid, and as yet unintegrated changes in American history. To
trace its beginning, one would probably have to go all the way
back to the time whoi it was up to the American woman to
evolve one common tradition, on the basis of many imported tra¬
ditions, and to base on it the education of her children and the style
of her home life; when it was up to her to establish new habits of
sedentary life on a continent originally populated by men who
in their countries of origin, for one reason or another, had not
wanted to be “fenced in.” Now, in fear of ever again acquiescing
to an outer or inner autocracy, these men insisted on keeping their
new cultural identity tentative to a point where women had to
become autocratic in their demands for some order.

The American woman in frontier communities was the object
of intense rivalries on the part of tough and often desperate men.
At the same time, she had to become the cultural censor, the re¬
ligious conscience, the aesthetic arbiter, and the teacher. In that
early roi^h economy hewn out of hard nature it was she who

Reflections on the American Identity 251

contributed the finer graces of living and that spirituality without
which the community falls apart. In her children she saw future
men and women who would face contrasts of rigid sedentary and
shifting migratory life. They must be prepared for any number
of extreme opposites in milieu, and always ready to seek new goals
and to fight for them in merciless competition. For, after all,
worse than a sinner was a sucker.

We suggested that the mothers of the Siotix and of the Yurok
were endowed with an instinctive power of adaptation which
permitted them to develop chfld-training methods appropriate for
the production of hunters and hunters’ wives in a nomadic
society, and of fishermen and acorn gatherers in a sedentary
valley society. The American mother, 1 believe, reacted to the
historical situation on this continent with similar unconscious ad¬
justment when she further developed Anglo-Saxon patterns of
child training which would avoid weakening potential frontiers¬
men by protective matemalism. In other words, I consider what
is now called the American woman’s “rejective” attitude a modem
fault based on a historical virtue designed for a vast new country,
in which the most dominant fact was the frontier, whether you
sought it, or avoided it, or tried to live it down.

Next to the frontier, my historian and I would have to turn to
puritanism as a decisive force in the creation of American mother¬
hood and its modem caricature, “Mom.” This much-maligned
puritanism, we should remember, was once a system of values
designed to check men and women of emptive vitality, of strong
appetites, as well as of strong individuality. In connection with
primitive cultures we have discussed the fact that a living culture
has its own balances which make it durable and bearable to the
majority of its members. But changing history endangers the bal¬
ance, During the short course of American history rapid develop¬
ments fused with puritanism in such a way that they contributed
to the emotional tension of mother and child. Among these were
the continued migration of the native population, unchecked
immigration, industrialization, urbanization, class stratification,
and female emancipation. These are some of the influences which

. s«d Society

fat; poritaniOT on tti« de|i;nsivc—and a ^stem is apt to become
rigid when it becomes -dcfeiisivc. Puritanism, beyond denning
oqaial sin for full-blooded and stfong-willed people, gradoally ex¬
tended itself to the total sphere of bodily living, compromising aH
^Knsoality—including marital relationships—and spreading its
fiigiidity over the tasks of pregnancy, childbirth^ nursing, and
training. The result was that men were bom who failed to. learn
from, their mothers to love the goodness of sensuality, before they
learned to hate its sinful uses. Instead of hating sip, they learned
to mistrust life. Many became puritans without fakh or test.

The frontier, of course, remained the decisive influence which
served to establish ki the American idemity the extre^ poiarka-
tion which characterises it. The original polarity was cultiva-
taon of tlic sedentary and migratory, poles. For the same.families,
the same mothers, were forced to prepare men ar^d wotpen who
would take root in the cornmunity life sai^ , the-jradual class
stratifleation of the new villages and towns arrd at the same time
to prepare these children for the posable physical hardships of
homesteading on, the frorttiers. Towirs, too, developed thek sed¬
entary e^teiicc and oriented thdr m>^ard: life to work bench
and writing desk, flrcplacc and, ;dt?ar, while through them, on the
^ads.and rails, arangeis passed bjraggmg of God knows what
greener pastures.,jYou had ckherre foUpw—or to stay behind and
brag locker, The point is that thp cab .ofthe frontier, the tempta¬
tion to move op, fpreed those who stayed to become defensively
sedentary, ,and defensively prppd. In a .world .which developed
dm slogan, “If you can sec your neighbor’s chimpey, it is tiipc to
move on,” mothers had raise sons and daughters who would be
determined to ignore the call of the frontier—but who .would go
with equal determination once they were forced or chose to go.
V^Tjep they betrnne too old, however, there was im choosing, and
they remained to mpport the most sectarian, the* most standard¬
ized adhesiveness, 1 think that k was the fear of hepoming topold
tp choose which gave old age and death a bad name in.thk count^>
(Only recently have old couples found a splupop, the;iurips^

Reflections. oai'tlte> Aineriom i Identity 25^3 .

tndkr^systeni^ :wluich: |«rmits'tlian to settle dovmeo .perpenieji!
traveling and.to’dieoailirli^aiBls.)'

We kjtanv. lKJwt the'-prddc^ inumgradt snd

onione'another, as l^e areas Ixcamesadled and l>eg!20 td 'havei*,.'
past: To t&B nenr American, with a xegibnaL tindio^^
cadon, newcomers increasingly caoreito be xsharaccensed; by
fiict thm they had escaped from-something Dr:otbiet4 rather ^than?
by the Qonunoil values'd)ey sought;':an!d:then-:these;were aJso^tbfd

masses ot i^orant. and neeeiTedrchatteis t>r the exptmdjng mdus^i
trial labor market. For and against all of-these latter: Americans^-;
Americammothets had co.'establish new moral stantkrds and rigid
tcstS'Of social ascondancy'rsvf . r,,

America became (i have heard this word, before) a meltioig.
pot; and it was the lAnglo^Saxon woman’s determinarion which)
assured that of all the ingredients mixed, puri£ani$nnH>rrSUch asrit?
then was*—would be the roost pervaaveatreak. The older,-Angler't
Saxon type became ever more rigid,-though at the samC' timpj
decent and kind in its way. Bat the daughters of immigrant$, too*
fnrarically tried to emulate standards of conduct wbidb they hade
not leamedas.small children. It is here, I jchink,. that the self-madp)
personality originated as the female counterpart of the self-raadOi
man; it khcre diat we find the origin ol the popular American
concept of an ^ego” whidi is its own parent and master. In faetii
the psychoanalysis of the children of immigrants clearly revedstor
what extxxit they, as the first real Americans in their family* berx
come their parents’cultural parents. '' ■ *

'This idea of a selfimade egO vvas mtum rdbfOfced and yet mod^;
ified by industrialization and by class stratification. Indu^tializar;
tioo, for exsunple, brought with it mechanical'child trrining. .Ip
was as if this new man-made world of machines* .Which was. jtO;
replace the “segmoits of nature” and the ‘'l>cascs ofprey,’^ oflereth
itS'mastci^ only to those who would become like it, as tbe filiout)
‘^Incame” buffalo, the rYurok silmon. Thus, a movement m child;

tnalning began which tended co ad just: the ;luanan> organism Irooi’

254 Childhood and Society

the very start to clocklike punctuality in order to make it a stand¬
ardized appendix of the industrial world. This movement is by no
means at an end either in this country or in countries which for the
sake of industrial production want to become like us. In the pur¬
suit of the adjustment to and mastery over the machine, Ameri¬
can mothers (especially of the middle class) found themselves
standardizing and overadjusting children who later were expected
to personify that very virile individuality which in the past had
been one of the outstanding characteristics of the American. The
resulting danger was that of creating, instead of individualism, a
mass-produced mask of individuality.

As if this were not enough, the increasing class differentiation
in some not large but influential classes and regions combined
with leftovers of European aristocratic models to create the ideal
of the lady, the woman who not only does not need to work, but
who, in fact, is much too childlike and too determinedly unin¬
formed to even comprehend what work is all about. This image,
in most parts of the coimtry, except the South, was soon chal¬
lenged by the ideal of the emancipated woman. This new ideal
seemed to call for equality of opportunity; but it is well known
how it came, instead, to represent a pretense of sameness in equip¬
ment, a right to mannish behavior.

In her original attributes, then, the American woman was a
fitting and heroic companion to the post-revolutionary man, who
was possessed with the idea of freedom from any man’s autocracy
and haunted by the fear that the nostalgia for some homeland and
die surrender to some king could ever make him give in to
political slavery. Mother became “Mom” only when Father be¬
came “Pop” under the impact of the identical historical discon¬
tinuities. For, if you come down to it, Momism is only misplaced
paternalism. American mothers stepped into the role of the
grandfathers as the fathers abdicated their dominant place in
the family, in the field of education, and in cultural life. The post-
revolutionary descendants of the Founding Fathers forced their
women to be mothers and fathers, while they continued to culti¬
vate the role of freeborn sons.

Reflections on the American Identity 255

I cannot try to appraise the quantity of emotional disturbance
in this country. Mere statistics on severe mental disorders do
not help. Our improved methods of detection and our mission¬
ary zeal expand together as we become aware of the problem,
so that it would be hard to say whether today this country has
bigger and better neuroses, or bigger and better ways of spot¬
lighting them—or both. But I would, from my clinical experi¬
ence, dare to formulate a specific quality in those who arc dis¬
turbed. I would say that underneath his proud sense of autonomy
and his exuberant sense of initiative the troubled American (who
often looks the least troubled) blames his mother for having let
him down. His father, so he claims, had not much to do with it
—except in those rare cases where the father was an extraor¬
dinarily stem man on the surface, an old-fashioned individualist,
a foreign paternalist, or a native “boss.” In the psychoanalysis of
an American man it usually takes considerable time to break
through to the insight that tbere was a period early in life when
the father did seem bigger and threatening. Even then, there
is little sense of that specific rivalry for the mother as stereo¬
typed in the oedipus complex. It is as if the mother had ceased
to be an object of nostalgia and sensual attachment before the
general development of initiative led to a rivalry with the “old
man.” Behind a fragmentary “oedipus complex,” then, appears
that deepseated sense of having been abandoned and let dovra
by the mother, which is the silent complaint behind schizoid
withdrawal. The small child felt, it seems, that there was no use
regressing, because there was nobody to regress to, no use in¬
vesting feelings because the response was so uncertain. What
remained was action and motion right up to the breaking point.
Where action, too, failed, there was only withdrawal and the
standardized smUe, and later, psychosomatic disturbance. But
wherever our methods permit us to look deeper, we find at the
bottom of it all the conviction, the mortal self-accusation, that
it was the child who abandoned the mother, because he had been
in such a hurry to become independent.

American folklore highlights this complex in its original powder.

*5^ m :i

iath«s^^!o£di«;binib bf 9 qdiQ^4^p(ei;, who, fc-

oordii^ tO:^e. 'widely known lateir^^ed in an anempc

to show that !a he-man is the eqtud of $ay. macfuaet ,The, sag^
not equally well known, goes as follows: , ,

Now John Henry was a man, but he’s loflig dcajd. ‘

The nigW John itJenry was bom the mdbh w^ coppen*cbl‘Qjed
and thie sky was black. The stars Wouldn’t shine and the rain fell hard.
Forked li^tnihg cleaved the air and the eardi trembled like alea£
The panthers aquall^ in the brake like a baby and the Mississippi
River ran Upstream a thousand miles. John Henry weighed forty4cM),r
pounds. ■ ■ ■ ■'

They didn-’t know what to make oJf John Henry*when Jk was
bom). They looked at hinvand then, went and looked at the. river.

“Ue got a bass voice like a preacher,” his mainm,a s^d,

, “He got shoqiders-like a-cotton-rollin’ rousterbqutj’l’ his papa said.

“JJe got.blue ghins like a conjure man,’* the nurse wdrnah said. '

, , “I might^reach some,” said John Henry, “but I ain’t ^gdiiter be iiib
preacher. I nugiu. roll cotton bn de boats, but I ain’t gbntcr be ho
cotton-rollin’ fbiiiterbbut I might gbt Hue gun^ like a conjure man,
but 1 ain’t gontef 'git faniiliar wid dc spiritSk ’Gausc >my name is John
Hehiy, and ^ch folks call me by my name, dey'll know I’m a natchal

■ i “His name is John-Henry,’! said his .mamma. 'Tilt’s a faefc”

“And when you calls him by his name,” said his papa, “he’s a natchal
man.”

,1: So about that tune. John Henry raised up ands^ct^d. ‘TVclJ,’* ,he
jRlid,. “ain’t hit about mpper-^e.>” . - , i

. . “^ho hit’s about supp«-timc,” i^d his msunih^ /

. . “^d after,” said Im .papa, \ '

,“And long after,” the nutw wofnaii^' '' ' ’' ' ^

, “Well,** said John Hdiry^ “did db had they sbflper?"

^ ,^Thcy did," saidliis'mainfha. n j : ’ -

“All''de dogs," said his ■

' “li.oflg since,” said the ttitrsfc wbniiiil.'' ’'; ii.** ; *■ '

* “Well, den,” sdd John HerllTi “*inTi asgood aside dogs.’*' . , :

'•'■-Arid wkeri'Joha^Henry said thachegbtond: He ^pared'back ip his
bed and broke out the slats. ,Hc opened *

Hfcikrk fitidfbrd; m: 'irT-jir,./-

Reflections on the American Identity 157

put out the lamp. He cleaved his tongue and ipat, and it pot out the
fire. “Drai’t make me mad!" said Jolm Henry, and the thunder rum¬
bled and roOecL ‘‘Don’t let me git mad on ^ day I’m bawn, ’cause
Fm skeered of my ownse’f when I gits mad."

And John Henry stood op in the iraddle of the floor and!he told
them what he wanted to eat. “Bring me four ham bones and a pot-full
of cabbages," he said. “Bring me a bait of turnip greens tree-top ^ 1 ,
and season hit down wid a side er middlin’. Bring me a pone er cold
cawn bread and some hot podicket to wash hit down. Bring me t^o
hog jowls and a kitdeful er whippowill peas. Bring me a sl^etful er
red-hot biscuits and a big jugful er cane molasses. ’Cause my name is
John Henry, and Fll see you soon."

So John Heruy walked out of the house and away from the Kadt
River Country where all good rousterbonts arc bom.

There arc, of course, analogous stories in other cotintries,
from Hercules to Buslaev. Yet there arc specific points in this
story which I feel are thoroughly American. To pharacterize
the kind of humor employed here would demand an objective
approach beyond my present means. But what we must keep
in mind, for further reference, is the fact that John Henry be¬
gins with a gigantic gripe: h‘e is thwarted iri his enormous ap¬
petite; he begs, “don’t let me git mM on de day Fm bawn”; he
solves the dilemma by jumping ott his oWn feet and by boast¬
ing of the capacity of his gut; he vim not commit himself to
any identity as predetermined by the stigmata’of birth; and he
leaves to become a man who is nothing but a man before an^
attempt is made to provide him with what he has demanded.'

3. JOHN HENRY

This same John Henry is the hero of a legend which reports
how, in his very death, he demohstratted die triumph of'^fle^ over
machine:

Cap’n says to John tjenry,

"Gonna bring me a steam drill ’round,

* Gonna take that steam drill out on the job,

, . Gonna, whop that steel on down,

, Lawd,|.4wd, gonna whop that steel on down."

258 Childhood and Society

John Henry told his cap’n,

Said, “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man.

And bcfo’ I’d let that steam drill beat me down
Fd die with this hammer in my hand,

Lawd, Lawd, Fd die with the hammer in my hand.” *

The tunc of this ballad, according to the Lomaxes, “is rooted in
a Scottish melody, its devices arc those of medieval balladry, but
its content is the courage of the common man” who believes to
the end that a man counts only as a man.

John Henry thus is one of the occupational models of the
stray men on the expanding frontier who faced new geographic
and technological worlds as men and without a past. The last
remaining model seems to be the cowboy who inherited their
boasts, their gripes, their addiction to roaming, their mistrust
of personal ties, their libidinal and religious concentration on
the limits of endurance and audacity, their dependence on “crit¬
ters” and climates.

These workmen developed to its very emotional and societal
limits the image of the man without roots, the motherless man,
the womanless man. Later in this book we shall maintain that
this image is only one of a particular variety of new images ex¬
isting over the whole world; their common denominator is the
freeborn child who becomes an emancipated adolescent and a
man who refutes his father’s conscience and his nostalgia for a
mother, bowing only to cruel facts and to fraternal discipline.
They bragged as if they had created themselves tougher than
the toughest critters and harder than any forged metal:

Raised in the backwoods, suckled by a polar bear, nine rows of
jaw teeth, a double coat of hair, steel ribs, wire intestines, and a barbed
wire tail, and 1 don’t give a dang where I drag ic Whoopee-whee-a-

ha! *

They preferred to remain anonymous so that they could be the
condensed product of the lowest and the highest in the universe.

*J. A. Lomax and A. Lomax (Eds,), Frederic A. Stokes New York,
Folksong US.A., Ducll, Sloan and 1902. Quoted in E. A, Botkin, A
Pearce, New York, 1947. Treasury of American Folklore,

•Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville Days^ Crown Publishers, New York, 1944.

Reflections on the American Identity 259

Fm shaggy as a bear, wolfish about the head, active as a cougar,
and can grin like a hyena, until the bark will curl off a gum log.
There’s a sprinkling of ail sorts in me, from the lion down to the
skunk; and before the war is over, you will pronounce me an entire
zoological institute, or I miss a figure in my calculation.*

If there is totemism in this, taken over from the Indians, there
is also a commitment of tragic incongruity: for you can meet a
“segment of nature” by identifying with it, but if you try to be
colder and harder than machines, if you aspire to wire guts, your
intestines may let you down.

When discussing two American Indian tribes, we concluded
that their particular forms of early training were well synchro¬
nized with their world images and their economic roles in them.
Only in their myths, in their rituals, and in their prayers did we
find references to what their particular form of expulsion from
infantile paradise had cost them. In a great and diverse nation
like America, is there any form of folk life which would be apt
to reflect typical trends in the early relationship to the mother.^

I think that the folk song is the psychologiad counterpart in
agricultural lands to the communal prayer chants of the primi¬
tives. The primitives’ songs, as we saw, are songs addressed to
the Supernatural Providers: these people put all the nostalgia
for the lost paradise of infancy into their songs in order to make
them convincing through the magic of tears. Folk songs, how¬
ever, express the nostalgia of the working men who have learned
to coerce the soil with harsh tools ■wielded in the sweat of their
brow. Their longing for a restored home is sung as recreation
after work—and often as an accompaniment to it, if not as an
auxiliary tool, in their work songs.

In its “old-time love songs” American song has inherited much
of the quiet depth of the European folk song: “Black, black,
black is the color of my true love’s hair.” But it is primarily in
the melodies that the memory of the old world’s deep valleys,
quiet mills, and sweet lassies survives. In its changing words Ae

Colonel Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in TexaSy Written by Himseify

liki Childhood atMl Sodety

folk song; in dm coantry ddil)eratcly cnltirates that “spBt
sonality” which mach latef enters melody in the era of Jazi. AS
a discrepancy between melody and word it is already attested
to in the supposedly oldest American song, “Springfield Moun^
tain,” The sweetest melodies may serve both the goriest arid the
most disrespectftti verses; even the love songs' have la te«idaic3)i
fio (fissipace deep sehtiment "If yon look between the iiftes,’^fsei
the Lomaxes say, “yon cannot help but be strudt by two re¬
peatedly expres^ attitudes toward love. . . . Love » danger-*
ous—‘It ain’t nothing but a notion that is gone wkh the wind.'
. 4 . Love is for laughter, and courtship is a comedy. Ap|[nr-
ently these people who weren’t afraid of Indians, or londiness;
or the varmints, or the woods, or freedom, or wild horses, or
prairie fires, or drought, or six-guns, were afraid of'love.” * <

It is, then, in the very love songs, that we find not only the
sorrow of having been abandoned (an international theme) but
also the fear of committing yourself to deep emotions, lest yon
get caught and hurt, by “keerless love."

Instead of romanticism there is in much of American song a
stubborn clinging to the ugly facts of poverty, loneliness, and
toil on a continent that punished as it challenged. Theire is a
special emphasis on animals which arc of immediate TXid coct-
stant nuisanoe value: “June bugs, possums, coons, roosters, geese,
hound dogs, mocking birds, rattlesnakes, biUy goats, razor-back
bogs, liver lipped mules.” The use of animals fmticolarly serves
the class of nonsense songs and fancy word play which must half
hide from the severe elders and half..revt^ to the yoding folk
some kind of erotic allusions, when-at “innocent” play parties
dance steps had to be avoided and yet approximated in “play
steps”:

And it’s ladies to the center and it’s gents
around the ro'vv,

And we’U rally jToipd the canebrake and
the buffalo.

•Coma* and I.oma*. op rk

Rcfiectioios on'thc'Ameijciui Identity

The will te'School, the Wy¥

act the fool, j

Rally round the barnyard and chase the old
Ijray mule.

Oh, the havrk shot the buzzard and the buzzard
shot the crow

And we’ll rally round the canebrake and shoot
the buffalo.*

Ntmscnsc becomes most irreverent in its dealings with the de¬
cline and end of expendable old things. These are mostly ani¬
mals—“the old gray mare,” who “ain’t what she used to be,**
or “the old red rooster,” who “can’t crow like he ustcr,” oar
^ont Nancy’s gray goose;

Go tell Aunt Nancy
Her old gray goose is dead.

The one she’s been savin’

To make her feather bed.

The guslin’s are mournin’

’Cause their mammy’s dead.

She only had one fe-eathcr,

A-stickin’ in her head.*

The bitter and yet gay irony in this last verse refers to the days
when, according to the Lomaxes, “a goosefeathcr bed was the
very prime in sleeping, because it cradled you and cuddled you
and almost covered you at the same time.” Sometimes, however,
^ gay good riddance applies undisguisedly to people;

My wife, she died, O then, O then.

My wife, she died, O then.

My wife, she died.

And I laughed till I cried.

To think 1 was single again.*

HM.

UUd.

262

Childhood and Society

It fits the free expression of these sentiments of “to hell with the
worn-out” and of “don’t take yourself too seriously” that so
much of American song must be walked, danced, and run to,
to reveal its true spirit. Here perpetual action fuses with gay
references to everyday work techniques expressing the Ameri¬
can creed, the faith in magic liberation by going places and by
doing things.

Cowboy songs, reflecting one of the last forms of the unique
and deviant ways of the highly specialized workmen of the
frontier, show an exquisite synthesis of work pattern and emo¬
tional expression. While trying to tire a bucking bronco, care¬
ful lest he let his muscular calm be sabotaged by fear or rage, or
while shoving his animals along the hot and dusty trail, careful
lest he hasten or upset the cattle which must be delivered in
the pink of well-fed condition, the cowboy engaged in the sing¬
song out of which came the purified versions of popular song.
Throughout, the rhyme and reason of the “cowboy’s lament”
remains the fact that for him there is no way back. There arc
the well-known tear-jerkers of the cowboy who will never sec
his mother again, nor his “darling sister”; or who will return to
a sweetheart only to find himself deceived once more. But more
genuinely pervading is the strange fact that this man’s man in his
songs becomes something of a mother and a teacher and a nurse¬
maid to the dogies whom he delivers to their early death:

Your mother was raised away down in Texas
Where the jimpson weed and the sand-burrs grow.

So we’ll fill you up on cactus and cholla.

Until you arc ready for Idaho.*

He sings lullabies to his dogies as they move through the early
prairie night on a thousand little hoofs:

Go slow, little dogies, stop milling around.

For I’m tired of your roving all over the ground.

There’s grass where you’re standin’,

So feed kind o’ slow.

•M. and T. Johnson, Early American Songs, Associated Music PubKsheis, Inc,
15 W. 45th Si., New York, 1943.

Reflections on the American Identity 263

And yon don’t have forever to be on the go,

Move slow, little dogies, move slow.“

And although he protests, “It’s your misfortune and none of
my own,” he feels identified with these little steers whom he
has branded, castrated, and nursed along until they were ready
to be shipped and slaughtered;

You ain’t got no father, you ain’t got no mother.

You left them behind when first you did roam.

You ain’t got no sister, you ain’t got no brother.

You’re just like a cowboy, a long way from homc.“

American song, then, in its melodies affirms the nostalgia for
the old, even while in its words it often expresses a deliberate and
stubborn paradox, a denial of trust in love, a denial of a need for
trust. It thus becomes a more intimate declaration of independ¬
ence.

In this country the image of the freeman is founded on that
northern European who, having escaped feudal and religious
laws, disavowed his motherland and established a country and
a constitution on the prime principle of preventing the resur¬
gence of autocracy. This image, of course, later developed along
lines which were quite unforeseeable to those original settlers
who merely wanted to reinstate on this continent a new Eng¬
land, an England with equaUy quaint villages, but with more
elbowroom for free thought. They could not foresee the per¬
sistent wild call of a continent which had never been anybody’s
motherland and which, with all its excessive rigors, became an
autocratic tempter. In America nature is autocratic, saying, “1
am not arguing, I am telling you.” The size and rigor of the
country and the importance of the means of migration and trans¬
portation helped to create and to develop the identity of au¬
tonomy and initiative, the identity of him who is “going places
and doing things.” Historically the overdefined past was apt to

'♦From Americay used by per- Birchard and Co^ publishers,

mission of the National Recreation As- ^^Jolinsoa, op. cit,
aockdon, copyright owners, and C Q

264 Childhood'^ and - Society ; i

be discarded folf.die undefined fiicult| geogt^|4iio^y migra¬
tion was an ever-pr^iit faCt; socially, diances and opportuni¬
ties. J.ay-m daring and. lock, in taking iull adysuxt^C Q^4;hc,cl)an-
nols of SQci^ xnQtility. , , . : . . - v n

ft is no coincidence, ^en, psychologicaJ ina^y^ diooid
find at the bottom of much specific mental, discomftut the cpm-
plex of having abandoned the mother and of having been aban¬
doned by her. In general, Americans do rtot ^^eficpce “this
country” as a. “motherland” in the. »ft, nostalgic sensp of “the
old counjty,” ‘Tliis. TOunt:ry''.is^^^^^^ ^ori bitjetly^and in a
remarkably unromantic and realistic way. Oratory may em¬
phasize loeaEdes; deSper foyaldeS ate ittadlied^ vdlohtaoty^
sofci^ibttt ■ arid opporturiities, sigififying- leVel of adhfcVeriidrit
rather than'local bclongirtg; Today wh^’ ^tHcrt is so muOH 'dc^
niaiht for horiies'iri defcAshKiHy -OWtidtfirfed,- dverfy ftiridarS-'
ized, and over-restricted neighborhoods, many people cdjdy
thefr hl<^ relaxed' rhbrriiSft6 Ao^oads'dduivtelisl^ 'm^trar^' in
and ardond automofive'-viefiMes, 'arid in catfajjs alld ’eat)ili^•'play•
irig that'iliey ire‘undbrififled%id'free to stayi fi^' toiri^t^b^
No'fibMtry’s'pdptdatiori fahher arid faster.'’After die

iyari mdre veteraris* of dus than of any dthef *riatibtf ehd^'’tei
Start their new lives in places hther'than the bothfe'rbwn' thbyfiad
dreamed of in the frbht firiea; To'triaity Americans, then,'whDe
there is^flb placcf 2 ce;hbniei,^’it is irnpbrtahrthat ybii Shbuld hc
able tb take it witii'you or-firih its faCsuhilc' a thousand mileS
away. Those tyitb the best places to Stay in probably travel the
iribst'■

But iii fhuls riiastering withverigcancc the expanses of a vast
cdhtiricht, Aniericaris^a^b^Iearried to control the second autocrat;
which wasunexpccfcdlyinet with hy the ’frbe sSbiisVtheTnabfiMei
' 'The autocracy of • the; Co n tinent afftf -the 'aUtotiacy 'bf'the
Machine must be uriderstobd wKen’ bitfc urfd^eitakes tb^sttidy’ bf
critidze Amerfcafi' child-fthiriittg 'mtillio’tfe' m^hibB'^timdj'tb' riikke
a child slightly nostalgic and yet faithful, autonomous smd 'yrt
reliable,* individualistic and yet prpifictahtpj;,
begin with systematic maternal “fe)€cxion'’ B in itsedf folkkipej

Reflections oa the Aroerican Identity

which nnist be'traced to facts, bom of necessity, and-to -fancy^
bOni of need; for the man and the woman who would fit into
die image of the sdUF-fhade man and the self-made personality,
and who ‘would create and “adjust” their ego identity as they
went along, did not have much use for protective mother love.
Indeed, where they received it as children, they had to repudiate
It laper. Where “Wdiii” id not esd^ she had to be invented
for such is the htstoric^ hppottance of “griping” in this country
that a man, to stand on his own feet in a powerfully chan^^g
world, must. lc;e(p^.hiniself up hy his own gripes. .

Because John Henry tvas bom after the dogs had been fed,
he jumped on his feet before be had his first meaL In view of
the continent before him, and of the tasks required of hint, his
first hours in this world were meaningful, although admittedly
extreme. But what will John Henry do in a double-breasted buri<-
tiess suit? What will happen to his “wire guts” whai he must
serve machines arid finds himself caught in the impersonal ma¬
chinery of iriodem life?

4. ADOLESCENT, BOSS. AND MACHD^

Adolescence is the age of the final establishment of a dominant
positive ego identity. It is then that a future within reach be¬
comes part of the conscious life plan. It is then that the ques^
tion arises whether or not the future was mdeipated in earikr
cxpectadons. :

■' The prCblcm posed by physiological maturadon has been
iscated forcefully by Anna Freud.** -

/^c physiological process which marks the attaimricrit of physical
sexual maturity is accompanied by a stimulation of the instinctual
processes. . . . Aggressive impulses are intensified to the point of
cbtnplecc unriifiness, hunger becomes voracity and the naughtiness 6f
the fatcncy-peridd ttims into the criminal behavior of adolescence.
Oral Wid anal intefests, long submerged, tome to the surface again,
of deanltness; laboriously acquired during the latcncy^periipd,

yAr^t Firpd, Mechanihm of The Hogarth Press

'to tfie i&ihtQtt of' London, 1937*

266 Childhood and Society

give place to pleasure in dirt and disorder, and instead of modesty and
sympathy we find exhibitionistic tendencies, brutality and cruelty to
animals. The reaction-formations, which seemed to be firmly estab¬
lished in the structure of the ego, threaten to fall to pieces. At the same
time, old tendencies which had disappeared come into consciousness.
TTie Oedipus wishes arc fulfilled in the form of phantasies and day¬
dreams, in which they have undergone but little distortion; in boys
ideas of castration and in girls penis-envy once more become the
center of interest. There are very few new elements in the invading
forces. Their onslaught merely brings once more to the surface the
familiar content of the early infantile sexuality of little children.

This is the picture in terms of the individual ego, which ap¬
pears to be invaded by a newly mobilized and vastly augmented
id as though from a hostile iimerworld, an inner outcrworld.
Our interest is directed toward the quantity and quality of sup¬
port the adolescent ego, thus set upon, may expect from the
outer outcrworld; and toward the question of whether ego de¬
fenses as well as identity fragments developed in earlier stages
receive the necessary additional sustenance. What the regress¬
ing and growing, rebelling and maturing youths are now pri¬
marily concerned with is who and what they arc in the eyes of
a wider circle of significant people as compared with what they
themselves have come to fed they arc; and how to connect the
dreams, idiosyncrasies, roles, and skills cultivated earlier with
the occupational and sexual prototypes of the day.

The danger of this stage is role diffusion; as Biff puts it in
Death of a Salesman: “I just can’t take hold. Mom, I can’t take
hold of some kind of a life.” Where such a dilemma is based on
a strong previous doubt as to one’s ethnic and sexual identity,
delinquent and outright psychotic incidents arc not uncommon.
Youth after youth, bewildered by his assumed role, a role forced
on him by the inexorable standardization of American adoles¬
cence, runs away in one form or another; leaves schools and jobs,
stays out at night, or withdraws into bizarre and inaccessible
moods. Once he is “delinquent,” his greatest need and often his
only salvation is the refusal on the part of older youths, of ad-

Reflections on the American Identity 267

viscrs, and of judiciary personnel to type him further by pat
diagnoses and social judgments which ignore the special dynamic
conditions of adolescence.

Among Americans with best-defined ego identities there is a
type of teen-age boy of whom we will sketch a composite por¬
trait. The family is Anglo-Saxon, mildly Protestant, of the white-
collar class. This type of boy is tall, thin, muscular in his body
build. He is shy, especially with women, and emotionally re¬
tentive, as if he were saving himself for something. His occa¬
sional grin, however, indicates a basic satisfaction with himself.
Among his peers, he can be rowdy and boisterous; with younger
children, kind and circumspect. His goals are vaguely defined.
They have something to do with action and motion. His ideal
prototypes in the world of sports seem to fulfill such needs as
disciplined locomotion; fairness in aggression; calm exhibition¬
ism; and dormant masculine sexuality. Neurotic anxiety is
avoided by concentration on limited goals with circumscribed
laws. Psychoanalytically speaking, the dominant defense mecha¬
nism is ego restriction.

This type of boy has a typical pair of parents. His mother is
somewhat of a “Mom.” She can be harsh, loud-voiced, and puni¬
tive. More likely than not she is sexually frigid. His father, while
exhibiting the necessary toughness in business, is shy in his in¬
timate relationships and docs not expect to be treated with much
consideration at home. Such parents in our case histories are still
noted down as pathogenic, while it is quite clear that they repre¬
sent a cultural pattern. What they will do to a child depends on
variables not covered by the existing clinical terms.

As for the mother, who shows a certain contempt for male
weakness, her bark is worse than her bite. She has a male ideal,
derived from the history of her family; it usually comes from
her father’s side, and she indicates to the son that she believes
that he has a chance to come close to this ideal. She is wise enough
(sometimes lazy or indifferent enough) to leave it to him whether
he wants to live up to this ideal or not. Most important, she is
not ovcrprotccdvc. Unlike mothers who drive on but cannot

2 i 58 >" ■" md Society

•fct gol (they aiv thie pathtogenic, the' “overprotcdtiTe”' btiesf;'Ihle
tloes noc overly^ee^the jidy' to herself. She giv'fe' her
children the freedom of the street, of the playground; aiid'of
parties; evcH'iiwo'the’^lightv The father is prevailed upon tidt to
worry and to dend lus-caar,--ot'iuther'“thc car.’^ It muk- jbe^'id-
outted ’xhat this mother is sure of h&w far thc'boy vdll go m
sexual matters, because unconsciously she knows tltot idte irt^ed
the devd out of him when he was small. In his early chQdhobd
she deliberapsly understimulated him sexually and emdtiohafly:

; 1 have indicated in how fat a certain detemiined lack df
matemalism in rach'mothers may be historically founded, not
only m rdigioas puritanism,' but in unconscious icdntihuadbn
historical conditions which made it dangerous for a tO lie-
licve more in-the past than m the future; dangerous to base hiS
identity on the adherence to his diMhood home and on the ex¬
clusion of possible migration in pursuit of a better chance; dan¬
gerous ever to appear to be a “sissy” instead of one who ha^
learned to tolerate a certain amount of deprivation and loneliriesS.

We have discussed the development of the bade body f^el^
ing out of the mutual regulation of mother and irifmt. Parts’ of
the body feel Uke “mine” and feel “good” to the d^rce in which*
early surroundings iit^ took them in tnist'^d then, with proper
connotations, gradually released them to the dtild’s own care;
Areas of greatest c»nfllct timiain afe^^ kbriipdy disconnected
from the body feeling; and lateffhohi tme’S identity. They re-'
main disturbing areas in the fast-| 3 F 6 vring 1 >ddy-of the adblesceht’
who will be overly concerned ^Mid-Sclf-cbhiBous abbur dieni
and suffer periods of a loss df dorttaet with Iiis ’ov^ body pa^'
There is no doubt that this adolescent in his most intimate feel¬
ings is detached fromhis genitals; they Havd been called “privatt^,'
all along, and this not in the sense that'they were his private'
ptopeity, but rather that they vtore too private even" for huh’
to touch. He has been threatened—early and almost ^dsisaalTy—
with' the loss of’ his genitals; skid' in accord' t^th the- g^heraf cj^.
restriction which is his’favorite defense mechahSih, hc has de^'^'
tached himself froift'fhem.'‘Of^thfe he Sj, of bodi^;'iuicbnsdbd^

Reflections on the American Identity i'Sg

iVigoroios ejc«fC!M hdps to keep his body image'inntocand pei^-
mits him to live out his intnisivenesr in the god-mifKfedness^txf
sportSi? li.r.'. ' ' ■■■■ ^

I The quafity o£ autonomy, as tve have said, depends^ a
consistent d^nidoa x]f individual privilege and obligation-ip riw
nutscry.- In ilie wake of. recent developments^ which - involve
our. adolesoenp all kinds of influences have weakened the bontk
of! privileges and obligations, with and against which the child
may develop his autonomy. Among these arc the decrease ht the
size.of our families, and early bowel training. A large group of
siblings can see to: it, and does, that there is feasible equality iii
die apporrioning'of privileges and Obligations to die' **too young”
and die‘’already old enough.”. A htge family, if utilized for this
pmpose, is a good school for democracy, especially if the parents
gradually learn to restrict themselves to a firm advisory capacity.
Small families accentuate diversides such as sex and age. In the
wake of the demand for early training in cleanliness, orderliness,
and punctuality, individual mothers, in small families^ c^ten face
one child at a time in a guerrilla war of wits and endurance. Out
mother, then, has utdiesitatingiy subscribed to the scienrific
slogan that it is best to “condition” the child as early as possible,
before the matter can become an issue of his muscular ambiva¬
lence. It makes sense to her to expect that very early training
will lead to antcHnatic compliance and maximum eflidency, with
a minimum of friction. After all, the method works with dogS:
With the ‘Tjchaviorist" psychology of her day, she failed tO
consider the fact that dogs are trained to serve and die; that they
will not diefosced to represent to their young Whdt their mdisteS
represented'to them. Children must eventually train their 6dm
children, ahfl any impovorfehment of their impulse life, for the
sake of avoiding-fricrion^ must be considered a possible liability
affecting inore ritan one lifetime; Generations will depend on
thc abilky of every f^ocrearing indivldtial to face his children
Iwidi the feeling that he was able to save some vita! mfhusiasm
frc«n the conflictsEof his childhood. ACnlally, such tJariy train¬
ing principles fail to worir from the start because they demind

270 Childhood and Society

too constant effort on the part of the parent: they beccwne parent
training rather than child training.

Our boy thus became “regular,” but he also learned to asso¬
ciate both meals and bowels with worry and haste. His belated
campaign for somatic autonomy thus started under bewildering
circumstances, and this with a definite initial deficit in the boy’s
ability to make choices because his area of control had been in¬
vaded before he could either object or comply by reasonably
free choice. I would like to suggest in all seriousness that early
bowel training and other arrangements invented to condition
the child in advance of his ability to regulate himself may be a
very questionable practice in the upbringing of individuals who
later on arc supposed to exert vigorous and free choice as citi¬
zens. It is here that the machine ideal of “functioning without
friction” invaded the democratic milieu- Much political apathy
may have its origin in a general feeling that, after all, matters of
apparent choice have probably been fixed in advance—a state
of affairs which becomes fact, indeed, if influential parts of the
electorate acquiesce in it because they have learned to view the
world as a place where grown-ups talk of choice, but “fix” things
so as to avoid overt friction.

As for the so-called oedipus stage when “the child identifies
with the superego of the parents,” it is most important that this
superego should make a maximum of collective sense in terms
of the ideals of the day. The superego is bad enough as a mere
institution, because it perpetuates internally the relation of the
big-and-angry adult and the small-but-bad child. The patriarchal
era exploited the universal evolutionary fact of an internalized
and unconscious moral “governor” in certain definite ways,
while other eras have exploited it in other ways. The paternal
exploitadtm apparently leads to suppressed guilt feelings and
fear of castration as a result of rebellion against the father; the
maternal one focuses on feelings of mutual destruction and mu¬
tual abandonment of mother and child. Each age, then, must find
its own way of dealing with the superego as a universally given
potentiality for the inner, automatic survival of a univcrssJ outer

Reflections on the American Identity 271

chasm between adult and child. TThe more idiosyncratic this re¬
lationship and the less adequate the parent in reflecting chang¬
ing cultural prototypes and institutions, the deeper the conflict
between ego identity and superego will be.

Ego restriction saves our boy much moral wear and tear. He
seems to be on reasonably good terms with his superego and
remains so in puberty and adolescence because of an ingenious
arrangement in American life which diffuses the father ideal. The
boy’s male ideal is rarely attached to his father, as lived with
in daily life. It is usually an uncle or friend of the family, if not
his grandfather, as presented to him (often unconsciously) by his
mother.

The grandfather, a powerful and powerfully driven man—ac¬
cording to a once widely prevailing American pattern, another
composite of fact and mydi—sought new and challenging en¬
gineering tasks in widely separated regions. When the initial
challenge was met, he handed the task over to others, and moved
on. His wife saw him only for an occasional impregnation. His
sons could not keep pace with him and were left as respectable
settlers by the wayside; only his daughter was and looked like
him. Her very masculine identification, however, did not per¬
mit her to take a husband as strong as her powerful father. She
married what seemed, in comparison, a weak but safe man and
settled down. In many ways, however, she talks like the grand¬
father. She does not know how she persistently belitdes the
sedentary father and decries the family’s lack of mobility, geo¬
graphic and social Thus she establishes in the boy a conflict
between the sedentary habits which she insists on, and the reck¬
less habits she dares him to develop. At any rate, the early
“oedipus” image, the image of the overpoweringly bigger and
greater father and possessor of the mother, who must be emu¬
lated or defeated, becomes associated with the myth of the grand¬
father. Both become deeply unconscious and remain so under
the dominant necessity of learning how to be a fair brother, re¬
stricted and restricting, and yet healthy and encouraging. The
father goes relatively free of his boys’ resentment, unless, of

ijri Childhood and Society

ooutse;; he happens to be “old-fashioned,^ obvjonsljr ^fii^ or a
man of the ‘^cJss type.” Othenaise he too betJomeS^ more of a
big brother. MoCh'rf sexual fivalry, like sesmality^in genend, hs^
been excluded from awareness. ■ . ;

The boysd ha^ inTnuhd/already in early-adolescericei'aratall,
often taller than thfei¥ fath@t'a. About this they thake slighdy coU'^
descending jokes: 'Jn^fac!!, it seems that somcthipg akin to the
Indians’ “joking tetatkwiship* is devclojung* berween fadier abd
son in this country. This joking is often applied to th^ aiaiginal
area where one may hope ‘^o get atpfay with sorhething'’— 4 .eii
elude the mother’s watchful eyd- e^bli$Hes a' mutual Idetn
tification which helps to avoid any direct opposition, ahd any
clear conflict of willk The boys’- dreams indicate'that diieir“’piiys-
ical prowess and their independent identity sUoUses aiugiety In
them; for once, when they were small boys, they wetu ^raid
Of these same farfiets ■oho" then seemed so wise" and so poteht.''ll
is as if these boys Were balancing on a^dghtrOpc.'Only ;if they
are stronger- than or different ftoin the real father" vHll-'th^ live
up to their secret ideals^ O** indeed,'to their mother’s expecta¬
tions; but only if dtey so’mehOSHr demonstrate that they are weaket
than the ofimipOtent father (or gtandf adier) image Of their child¬
hood udll'they brfree of aMiety: Thus^ 'Udiile they become boast¬
ful arid ruthle^in nU&ry te^eCts; they Cain be astorixshirigiy kuid
aridapologettc-m'otherk

■ Where the i^riVmii^ti^-is-’toriceimed, conventioh rirgei the
father,’too, tO restrain kriy tericfericy he maybave tO Challerige
the sOri and to' pSOvOkede^pos' -guik.'To this purpose the futU'rlj
is" eiriphasaed the pasi.' lf rhe soris irithfek’grOdp bte^

havibr' seen! ■ #6 Ke' %r^uu2sed’ n* the' pursuit' Of - ohO fde¬
gree of AmericimithHori? it k--the- fatherly 'ObligijtiOri tO teethe
chiMreiri proceed'in their wayi‘ im-fa<ti' be<MtiSe 'of'’d»ekr
greater ^affihity -^th the teiripO arid with 'th!e-ttiGhrilCal
Ki^bf'the kirmediate fUrurfe,' the children are in n sense “vtiseSt*
thm'thii’pareftlsi irid indet^ many children-ate more matft^
M the& cHiitlOok 'On-^hblcms of daily living.’The ‘faflifer
feby^doeS riot-hide his relative weakness behind^ ma:^ irf itt-

Reflections on the American Identity 273

flated patriarchal claims. If he shares with the son an admira¬
tion for an ideal type, be he baseball player or industrial leader,
comedian, scientist, or rodeo artist, the need to become like the
ideal is emphasized without burdening it with a problem of the
father’s defeat. If the father plays baseball with his son, it is not
in order to impress him with the fact that he, the father, comes
closer to the perfection of a common ideal type—for he proba¬
bly does not—but rather that they play together at identifying
with that type, and that there is always the chance, hoped for
by both, that the boy may more nearly approach the ideal than
the father did.

All of this by no means excludes the fact that the father is po¬
tentially quite a man, but he shows it more away from home, in
business, on camping trips, and in his club. As the son be¬
comes aware of this, a new, almost astonished respect is added
to his affection. ITiere are real friendships between fathers and
sons.

Fraternal images, boldly or gingerly, thus step into the gaps
left by decaying paternalism; fathers and sons are unconsciously
working on the development of a fraternal pattern which will
forestall the reactionary return of more patriarchal oedipus
patterns without, on the other hand, leading to a general impov¬
erishment of the father-son relationship.’*

How does his home train this boy for democracy? If taken
too literally, one may hardly dare to ask that question. Tlte boy

psychoanalytic patients from the not expected to challenge the social
upper classes the overwhelming im- values of the men who made them,
portance of the grandfather is often Their mastery persists in their grand-
apparent. He may have been t black- sons as a stubborn, an angry sense of
smith of the old world or a railroad superiority. Overtly inhibited, they
builder of the new, an as yet proud Jew can accept others only on terms of pre-
or an unreconstructed Southerner, arranged privilege. Unless they arc cx-
What these grandfathers have in com- ceptionalJy gifted, these men of the
mon is the fact that they were the last highest strata join those from the very
representatives of a more homogeneous lowest ones in feeling truly disin-
world, masterly and cruel with good herited in American life, wliich de¬
conscience, disciplined and pious with- mands tliat one enjoy the potential
out loss of self-esteem. ITieir w^orld in- promise of an ever more universal
vented bigger and better machinery identity,
like gigantic playthings which were

274 Childhood and Society

has no political sense whatsoever. The “dignity of man” has never
occurred to him. In fact, he does not even know any kind of in¬
dignation in the positive sense of becoming acutely aware of
the violation of a principle, with the exception of unjaimess. In
early life this takes the form of feeling cheated out of a birth¬
right, when bigger and smaller siblings, on the basis of their su¬
periority or inferiority, demand special privileges. Painfully
learning a measure of obligation and privilege as related to
strength and weakness, he becomes an advocate of fairness—un¬
fairness, primarily in sports, is probably the only subject which
would cause a facsimile of indignation—and then, of course,
bossiness of any kind. “No one can do this to me” is the slogan
of such indignation. It is the counterpart of other countries’ more
heroic honor or honneur, droit or fair play. While this boy may
grinningly join in some casual references to a lower race or class,
he is not really intolerant; for the most part his life is too pro¬
tected and “restricted” to bring him up against an individual
decision in this matter. Where he is up against it, he decides on
the basis of friendship, not citizenship. It is his privilege, not his
duty, to accept a pal of whatever kind. As far as general citizen¬
ship is concerned, he catches on to the school’s concept of be¬
havior which goes by this name, but he does not connect it with
politics. Otherwise, he more or less somnambulistically moves in
a maze of undefined privileges, licenses, commitments, and re¬
sponsibilities. He wants a vague, general success, and he is glad if
he can get it in fairness, or while being unaware of unfairness.
In this connection it must be said that our boy, mostly by de¬
fault and because of restricted vision, and often out of careless¬
ness. causes great harm to his less fortunate age mates of darker
shades, whom he excludes from his home, his clique, and him¬
self, because to see and to face them as actual human beings
might cause vague discomfort. He ignores them, although he
might have furthered their development of an American identity,
by following more actively the simple social principle that what
nobody can do to me, nobody should do to anybody else either.

But I submit that this boy’s family life harbors more democ-

Reflections on the American Identity 275

racy than meets the eye. It may not reflect the democracy of
the history books and the newspaper editorials, but k reflects a
number of trends characterizing, for better or worse, the demo¬
cratic process as it is, and as it must expand. 1 must point here to
one of those configurational analogies between family life and
national mores which are hard to fit into a theoretical pattern but
seem of utmost relevance:

“Now it is an unwritten but firm rule of Congress that no
important bloc shall ever be voted down—under normal cir¬
cumstances—on any matter which touches its own vital inter¬
ests.” ** This statement refers, of course, to political interest
groups (the farm bloc, the silver bloc, the friends of labor, etc.)
which utilize in a powerful, yet unofficial way, the official two-
party polarization—and are utilized by it. At times they con¬
tribute positive legislation, but more often—and what is some¬
times more important—they prevent unwelcome legislation.
What ensues of positive legislation may be good legislation, but
it must, first of all, not be unacceptable to any of the major blocs
(jiLst as a candidate for president may be a potentially great man,
but must be a man not unacceptable to any large bloc of voters).
This principle not only keeps any one group from complete
domination, but it also saves each group from being completely
dominated.

The American family, similarly, tends to guard the right of
the individual member—parents included—not to be dominated.
In fact, each member, as he grows and changes, reflects a variety
of outside groups and their changing interests and needs: the
father’s occupational group, the mother’s club, the adolescent’s
clique, and the children’s first friends. These interest groups de¬
termine the individual’s privileges in his family; it is they who
judge the family. The sensitive receptor of changing st}’^les in
the community and the sensitive arbiter of their clash within the
home is, of course, the mother; and I think that this necessity to
function as arbiter is one more reason why the American mother

“John Fischer, “Unwritten Rules of American Politics," Harper’s Magazine,
•97: 27-36, November, 1948.

276 Childhood and Society

instinctively hesitates to lavish on her children the land of naive
animal love which, in all its naivete, can be so very selective and
unjust; and which, above all, may weaken the child in his de¬
termination to seek in his peers what the family cannot and should
not give him. The mother remains, in a sense, above the parties
and interests; it is as if she had to see to it that each party and
interest develops as vigorously as possible—up to the point where
she must put in a veto in the interest of another individual or of
the family as a whole. Here, then, we must expect to find the
inner rationale for a variety of activities and inactivities: they
represent not so much what everybody wants to do, but rather
what, of all the available things to do, is least unacceptable to
anybody concerned. Such an inner arrangement, of course, is
easily upset by any show of vested interest, or special interest,
or minority interest: and it is for this reason that there is a great
amount of apparently petty bickering whenever interests clash.
The family is successful if the matter is settled to the point of
“majority concurrence,” even if this is reluctantly given; it is
gradually undermined by frequent decisions in favor of one in¬
terest group, be it the parents or the babies. This give-and-take
cuts down to an extraordinary degree the division of the family
into unequal partners who can claim privileges on the basis of
age, strength, weakness, or goodness. Instead, the family becomes
a training ground in the tolerance of different interests —^not of
different beings; liking and loving has little to do with it. In fact,
both overt loving and overt hating are kept on a low key, for
cither might weaken the balance of the family and the chances
of the individual member, for the over-all important thing is
to accrue claims for future privilege justifiable on the basis of
one’s past concessions.

The meaning of it all is, of course, an automatic prevention
of autocracy and inequality. It breeds, on the whole, undog-
matic people, people ready to drive a bargain and then to com¬
promise. It makes complete irresponsibility impossible, and it
makes open hate and warfare in families rare. It also makes it
quite impossible fw the American adolescent to become what

Reflections on the American Identity 277

his brothers and sisters in other large countries become so easily,
uncompromising ideologists. Nobody can be sure he is right, but
everybody must compromise—for the sake of his future chance.

The analogy here to the two-party system is clean Ameri¬
can politics is not, as is that of Europe, “a prelude to civil war”;
it cannot become either entirely irresponsible or entirely dog¬
matic; and it must not try to be logical. It is a rocking sea of
checks and balances in which uncompromising absolutes must
drown. The danger is that such absolutes may be drowned in
all-around acceptable banalities, rather than in productive com¬
promise.

In the family, the corresponding danger is that the interests
which are not unacceptable to the whole family become areas
so devoid of real issues that family life becomes an institution
for parallel daydreaming where each member is tuned in on his
favorite radio program, or withdrawn behind the magazine rep¬
resenting his interests. A general low tonus of mutual responsi¬
bility may empty the pattern of majority concurrence of its
original indignation, and thus of its dignity.

Where in Europe then, adolescence would lead to a con¬
flict with the father, and the necessity of either rebelling or
submitting (or, as we shall see in the chapter on Germany, first
rebelling and then submitting) there is, on the whole, no neces¬
sity for such exertion in the American family. The adolescent
swings of the American youth do not overtly concern the father,
nor the matter of authority, but focus rather on his peers. The
boy has a delinquent streak, as had his grandfather in the days
when laws were absent or not enforced. This may express it¬
self in surprising acts of dangerous driving or careless destruc¬
tion and waste, an individual counterpart to the mass plundering
of the continent. This stands in surprising contrast to the de¬
fense mechanisms of ascetic self-restriction—until one realizes
that occasional utter carelessness is the necessary counterpart
and safety-valve of self-restriction. Both carelessness and self-
restriction “feel” self-initiated; they underscore the fact that
there is no boss—and that there need be little thought.

278 Childhood and Society

Our boy is anti-intellectual. Anybody who thinks or feels too
much seems “queer” to him. This objection to feeling and think¬
ing is, to some extent, derived from an early mistrust of sensual¬
ity. It signifies some atrophy in this sphere, and then again, it is
representative of a general tentativeness, of a wish not to medi¬
tate and not to make op his mind until the free exploration by
action of a number of chances may force him to think

If this boy attends church, and as I suggested he is Protestant,
he finds a milieu which makes no great demands on his ability
to surrender to moods of damnation or salvation or even of sim¬
ple piety. In church life he must prove himself by overt behavior
which demonstrates discipline by self-restriction, thus earning
the fellowship of all those whose good and fair fortunes on earth
God obviously legitimizes. Church membership, then, makes
things ever so much easier, since at the same time it provides a
clearer definition of one’s social and credit status in the com¬
munity. Here again, sociologists, in their somewhat naive and
literal criticism of the “American class system,” seem sometimes
to overlook the historic necessity in America of finding in com¬
munity and church life a scope for activities which are accept¬
able to all tlie individuals concerned. This calls for some initial
principle of selection, for some uniformity. Without it, democ¬
racy would not have begun to work in this country. But the
sociologists are right in pointing out that all too often mem¬
bership of lesser or greater exclusiveness, sectarianism, and fad-
dism leads to a mere shell of fraternal congregation where the
habits of family life are further indulged rather than brought to
any political or spiritual fruit. The church community becomes
a frigid and punitive Mom; God a Pop who in view of public
pressure cannot avoid providing for those of his children who
prove worthy by self-restricted conduct and proper appearance;
while the brethren have the prime obligation of proving their
credit-worthiness by being moderate in dealing with one another
and by diverting more energetic tactics to “outsiders.”

The type of adolescent I am discussing here is not and will
never be a true individualist. But then it would be hard to point

Reflections on the American Identity 279

out any true individualist within the orbit of his experience—
unless it be for some the myth of their mother’s father. But this
image becomes buried in self-constriction or is, at the most, held
in abeyance for the day when, as grown men, they may become
the ‘"bosses” of something or other.

With this individualistic core in him, complicated as it is by
the transmission through the mother, our adolescent is allergic
to the professional kinds of individualism displayed by writers
and politicians. He mistrusts both—they make him feel uncom¬
fortable, as if they reminded him that there is something that
he should be or should do but that he cannot remember. He has
experienced, or rather faced, no autocracy except that of his
mother, who by now has become Mom, in the original and
kinder sense, to him. If he resents her he tries to forget it.

He is aware that his older sister, slim, trim, and poised, on
occasion seems to get almost physically upset in the mother’s
presence. The boy cannot sec why; but then, this belongs to
the general area of women’s whims which he carefully circum¬
navigates. He does not know, he does not want to know, the
burden which the sister must carry in becoming a woman and
a mother without becoming like the woman who is her mother.
For she must be the self-made woman of her period; she must
work on herself, in competitive companionship with all the
other girls who make and are made by the new standards. Mar¬
garet Mead has impressively described the difficult job which
these girls share, namely, the necessity of saving a full measure
of warmth and sexual responsiveness through the years of cal¬
culated appearances when even naturalness on occasion must
be affected.^* The sister’s crisis will come when she becomes a
mother and when the vicissitudes of child training will perforce
bring to the fore the infantile identification with her mother.
There is much less of “Mom” in her than there was in her mother;
whether this remnant will be decisive depends on region, class,
and kind of husband

“Margaret Mead, Male and FemalCy William Morrow and Co., New York, 1949^.

28 o

Childhood and Society

This American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents
of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine
age, witli the question: freedom for what, and at what price? Tlie
American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression
that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither
does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his
native autocrats when he sees them. He is too immediately oc¬
cupied with being efficient and being decent.

This adolescent will make an efficient and decent leader in a
circumscribed job, a good manager or professional worker and
a good officer, and will most enjoy his recreation with “the boys”
in the organizations to which he belongs. As a specimen, he illus¬
trates the fact that in war or in peace, the fruit of American
education is to be found in a combination of native mechanical
ability, managerial autonomy, personalized leadership, and un¬
obtrusive tolerance. These young men truly are the backbone
of the nation.

But are they, as men, not strangely disinterested in the run¬
ning of the nation? Arc these freeborn sons not apt to be remarka¬
bly naive, overly optimistic, and morbidly self-rest rained in their
dealings with the men who run them? They know how to ac¬
cept a circumscribed task; they can be boisterous when on a
spree; but on the whole, they respectfully shy away from all
bigness, whether it is dollars or loud words. They (theoretically)
hate autocrats, but they tolerate bossism because they usually
cannot differentiate between a boss and “bosses.” We have re¬
peatedly mentioned this category of “boss,” and it is time to state
explicitly that there is a boss and a “boss,” just as there is a Mom
and a “Mom.” We use both words without quotation marks in
their more colloquial and more affectionate sense, in the sense of
my Mom, and my boss; while we designate with quotation marks
the “Moms” who make for Momism as discussed above and the
“bosses” that constitute the bossism to which we must now make
reference.

For the old autocrats have disappeared, and the new ones know
how to hide behind the ambiguity of language, which fills the

Reflections on the American Identity 281

legislatures and the daily press, industrial strife and organized
entertainment. “Bosses” arc self-made autocrats and, therefore,
consider themselves and one another the crown of democracy.
As far as is necessary, a “boss” stays within the law, and as far as
is possible he enters boldly into the vacuum left by the emanci¬
pated sons in their endeavor to restrict themselves in fairness to
others. He looks for areas where the law has been deliberately
uncharted (in order to leave room for checks, balances, and
amendments) and tries to use it and abuse it for his own pur¬
poses. He is the one who—to speak in highway terms—passes
and cuts in where others leave a little space for decency’s and
safety’s sake.

Here it is not a matter of taste or mere principle which makes
me join those who decry the danger of bossism. I approach the
matter from the point of view of psychological economy.
“Bosses” and “machines,” I have learned, arc a danger to the
American identity, and thus to the mental health of the nation.
For they present to the emancipated generations, to the genera¬
tions with tentative identities, the ideal of an autocracy of irre¬
sponsibility. In them is seen the apparently successful model,
“he who measures himself solely by what he can get away with
and by what he can appear to be.” They make “functioning”
itself a value above all other values. In their positions of auto¬
cratic power in legislation, in industry, in the press, and in the
entertairunent world, they knowingly and unknowingly use the
machinery of democracy to put something over on the naive
sons of democracy. They thrive on the complication of “ma¬
chinery”—a machinery kept deliberately complicated in order
that it may remain dependent on the hard-bitten professional of
the “inside track.” That these men run themselves like machinery
is a matter for their doctor, psychiatrist, or undertaker. 'I'hat
they view the world and run the people as machinery becomes a
danger to national health.

Consider our adolescent boy. In his early childhood he was
faced with a training which tended to make him machinelike
and clocklike. Thus standardized, he found chances, in his later

282

Childhood and Society

childhood, to develop autonomy, initiative, and industry, with
the implied promise that decency in human relations, skill in
technical derails, and knowledge of facts would permit him free¬
dom of choice in his pursuits, that the identity of free choice
would balance his self-coercion. As an adolescent and man, how¬
ever, he finds himself confronted with superior machines, com¬
plicated, incomprehensible, and impersonally dictatorial in their
power to standardize his pursuits and tastes. These machines do
their powerful best to convert him into a consumer idiot, a fun
egotist, and an efficiency slave—and this by offering him what he
seems to demand. Often he remains untouched and keeps his
course: this will largely depend on the wife whom he—as the
saying goes—chooses. Otherwise, what else can he become but a
childish joiner, or a cynical little boss, trying to get in on some
big boss’ “inside track”—or a neurotic character, a psychosomatic
case?

For the sake of its emotional health, then, a democracy cannot
afford to let matters develop to a point where intelligent youth,
proud in its independence and burning with initiative, must leave
matters of legislation, law, and general policy to “insiders” and
“bosses.” American youth can gain the full measure of its identity
and of its vitality only by being fully aware of autocratic trends
in this and in any other land as they repeatedly emerge from
changing history. And this not only because political conscience
cannot regress without catastrophic consequences, but also be¬
cause political ideals are part and parcel of an evolution in con¬
science structure which, if ignored, must lead to illness. As Freud
put it: men are not only worse, but also better, than they think
they are.

As we consider what consequences must arise from the particu¬
lar dangers threatening the emotional state of the nation, our at¬
tention is drawn to Momism and to bossism, the two trends which
have usurped the place of paternalism: Momism in alliance with
the autocratic rigor of a new continent, and bossism with the
autocracy of the machine and the “machines.”

Psychktric enlightenment has begun to debunk the supersti-

Reflections on the American Identity 283

tion that to manage a machine you must become a machine, and
that to raise masters of the machine you must mechanize the im¬
pulses of childhood. But let it be clear that the humanization of
early childhood—as pioneered by enlightened obstetricians and
pediatricians—^must have its counterpart in a political rejuvena¬
tion. Men and women in power must make a concerted effort to
overcome the rooted conception that man, for his own good,
must be subject to “machines” either in politics, business, educa¬
tion, or entertainment. American adolescents believe deeply in
truly free enterprise; they prefer one big chance in a hundred
little ones to an average-sized certainty. The very fact that for
this same reason they do not contemplate rebellion (as those seem
to fear who would gag their sources of information) obligates us
to protect youth against a state of affairs which may make their
gestures of free men seem hollow and their faith unfounded.

The question of our time is, How can our sons preserve their
freedom and share it with those whom, on the basis of new knowl¬
edge and new identity, they must consider equals? This makes
it necessary for men and women in power to give absolute prior¬
ity over precedent and circumstance, convention and privilege, to
the one effort which can keep a democratic country healthy: the
effort to “summon forth the potential intelligence of the younger
generation” (Farrington).

In America, this problem is the dilemma of the grandsons of
rebels. In other countries youth is still involved in the first phases
of revolution against autocracy—^revolution immensely more
complicated than was the American struggle for freedom. Let ns
mm to their problems.

CHAPTER

9

The Legend of Hitler s Childhood

The most ruthless exploiters of any nation’s fight for an identity
have been x 4 dolf Hitler and his associates, who for a decade were
the undisputed political and military masters of a great, industri¬
ous, and studious people. To stop these experts of the cheap word
from becoming a threat to the whole of Western civilization the
combined resources of the industrial nations of the world were
mobilized.

The West would now prefer to ignore the question mark
which thus challenges the idea of unilinear progress. It hopes that,
after some feeding and policing by occupation troops, these same
Germans will emerge as good customers, easily domesticated; that
they will return to the pursuit of Kulttcr^ and forever forget the
martial foolishness they were once more trapped into,

I do not think that wc arc improving the chances of progress
in Germany or anywhere else by forgetting too soon what hap¬
pened. Rather, it is our task to recognize that the black miracle of
Nazism was only the German version—superbly planned and
superbly bungled—of a universal contemporary trend. The trend
persists; Hitler’s ghost is counting on it.

For nations, as well as individuals, are not only defined by their
highest point of civilized achievement, but also by the weakest
one in their collective identity: they arc, in fact, defined by the
distance, and the quality of the distance, between these points.

284

I'hc Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 285

National Socialist Germany has provided a clear-cut illustration
of the fact that advancing civilization is potentially endangered
by its own advance, in that it splits ancient conscience, endangers
incomplete identities, and releases destructive forces. I shall there¬
fore go back only one step in our history and repeat here a few
formulations written at the beginning of World War II, in prep¬
aration for the arrival of the—oh, so arrogant—first Nazi prison¬
ers. Some of these formulations may already sound dated. Yet
those who know the German scene today, and especially those
who are aware of the inner dilemma of German youth, will prob¬
ably agree that the psychological problems presented here have
not been solved, cither for Germany proper, or for the continent
of which she is the center.

I shall take as my text the Brown Piper’s sweetest, most alluring
tune: the account of his childhood, in Mein Ka 7 npf.

**In this little town on the river Inn, Bavarian by blood and Austrian
by nationality, gilded by the light of German martyrdom, there lived,
at the end of the eighties of last century, my parents: the father a
faithful civil servant, the mother devoting herself to the cares of the
household and looking after her children with eternally the same lov¬
ing care'' ^

The sentence structure, the tone quality, indicate that we arc to
hear a fairy talc; and indeed we shall analyze it as part of a modem
attempt to create a myth. But a myth, old or modem, is not a lie.
It is useless to try to show that it has no basis in fact; nor to claim
that its fiction is fake and nonsense. A myth blends historical fact
and significant fiction in such a way that it “rings true” to an area
or an era, causing pious wondemient and burning ambition. The
people affected will not question trath or logic; the few who can¬
not help doubting will find their reason paralyzed. To study a
myth critically, therefore, means to analyze its images and themes
in their relation to the culture area affected.

^Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Rcynal & Hitchcock edition. New York, 1941, by
arrangement with Houghton-Mifflin Company.

286

Childhood and Society

I. GERMANY

"This little unvn. . . . Bavarian by blood and Austrian by
nationality, gilded by the light of German martyrdom. . .

Hidcr was bom in the Austrian town of Braunau, near the
German border. He thus belonged to the Austrian Empire’s Ger¬
man minority.

It had been in Braunau, he records, that a man named Palm was
shot by Napoleon’s soldiers for printing a pamphlet: In the Hour
of Germany's Deepest Humiliation. Palm’s memorial stands in the
center of the town.

There was, of course, no German Reich in Palm’s time. In fact,
some of the German states were Napoleon’s mihtary allies. But
having used the all-inclusive, the magic term “Germany,” Pahn,
when dehvered to Napoleon by the Austrian police, became the
idol of die nationalist movement calling for a greater Germany.

Having pointed to Palm’s resistance to and martyrdom under
the sinister Bonaparte, the story proceeds to describe young
Adolfs heroic opposition to his father, and tells of the German
minority’s hatred of the Austrian emperor. Little Adolf belonged,
so he says, to “those who in painful emotion long for the hour
that will allow them to return to the arms of the beloved mother”

It is here that his imagery begins to involve terms of family re¬
lations which openly identify his “oedipus” situation with his
country’s national problems. He complains that this “beloved
mother, . . . the young Reich,” by her “tragic alliance with
the old Austrian sham state . . . herself sanctioned the slow ex¬
termination of the German nationality.”

Hitler’s mother was twenty-three years younger than his
father; and, as we shall see, the mother, as a good woman of her
day, valiantly stood up for the man who beat her. The father was
a drunkard and a tyrant. The equation suggests itself that in
Hitler’s national as well as domestic imagery, the young mother
betrays the longing son for a senile tyrant. Little Adolf’s personal
experience thus blends with that of the German minority whidi

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 287

refuses to sing “God Save Emperor Francis,” when the Austrian
anthem is sung and substitutes for it “Germany over All. “The
direct result of tliis period was: first, I became a nationalist; sec¬
ond, I learned to grasp and to understand the meaning of history
. . . so that at fifteen, I already understood the difference be¬
tween dynastic patriotism and popular nationalism.”

Such seemingly naive coincidence of themes lends itself easily
—much too ea.sily—^to a psychoanalytic interpretation of the first
chapter of Mein Kampf as an involuntary confession of Hitler’s
oedipus complex. Tliis interpretation would suggest that in Hit¬
ler’s case the love for his young mother and the hate for his old
father assumed morbid proportions, and that it was this conflict
which drove him to love and to hate and compelled him to save or
destroy people and peoples who really “stand for” his motiier and
his father. There have been articles in the psychoanalytic litera¬
ture which claim such simple causality. But it obviously takes
much more than an individual complex to make a successful
revolutionary. Tlie complex creates the initial fervor; but if
it were too strong it would paraly 7 .e the revolutionary, not in¬
spire him. The striking use of parental and familial images in Hit¬
ler’s public utterances has that strange mixture of naive confes¬
sion and shrewd propaganda which characterizes the histrionic
genius. Goebbels knew this and he guided his barking master well
—^until very close to the end.

I shall not now review the psychiatric literature which has
described Hitler as a “psychopathic paranoid,” an “amoral sadistic
infant,” an “overcompensatory sissy,” or “a neurotic laboring
under the compulsion to murder.” At times, he undoubtedly was
all of that. But, unfortunately, he was something over and above
it all. His capacity for acting and for creating action was so rare
that it seems inexpedient to apply ordinary diagnostic methods
to his words. He was first of all an adventurer, on a grandiose
scale. The personality of the adventurer is akin to that of an actor,
because he must always be ready to personify, as if he had chosen
them, the changing roles suggested by the whims of fate. Hitler
shares with many an actor the fact that he is said to have been

288 Childhood and Society

queer and unbearable behind the scenes, to say nothing of in hk
bedroom. He undoubtedly had hazardous borderline traits. But
he knew how to approach the borderline, to appear as if he were
going too far, and then to turn back on his breathless audience.
1 litler knew how to exploit his hysteria. Medicine men, too, often
have this gift. On the stage of German history. Hitler sensed to
what extent it was safe to let his own personality represent with
hysterical abandon what was alive in very German listener and
reader. Thus the role he chose reveals as much about his audience
as about himself; and precisely that which to the non-German
looked queerest and most morbid became the Brown Piper’s most
persuasive tunc for German cars.

z. FATHER

“. . . the falter a faithful civil servant . . ."

Despite this sentimental characterization of the father. Hitler
spends a heated portion of his first chapter in reiterating the asser¬
tion that neither his father nor “any power on earth could make
an official” out of him. He knew already in earliest adolescence
that the life of an official had no appeal for him. How different
he was from his father! For though his father, too, had rebelled
in early adolescence and at the age of thirteen had run away from
home to become “something ‘better,’ ” he had, after twenty-three
years, returned home—and become a minor official. And “nobody
remembered the little boy of long ago,” This futile rebellion. Hit¬
ler says, made his father old early. Then, point for point, Hitler
demonstrates a rebellious technique superior to that of his father.

Is this the naive revelation of a pathological father-hate? Or if
it is shrewd propaganda, what gave this Austrian German the
right to expect that the talc of his boyhood would have a decisive
appeal for masses of Reichs-Germans?

Obviously, not all Germans had fathers of the kind Hitler had,
although many undoubtedly did. Yet we know that a literary
theme, to be convincing, need not be true; it must sound true, as
if it reminded one of something deep and past. The question, then,
is whether the German father’s position in his family made hun

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 289

act—either all of the time, or enough of the time, or at memorable
times—in such a way that he created in his son an inner image
which had some correspondence to that of the older Hitler’s pub¬
licized image.

Superficially, the position in his family of the German middle-
class father of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century
may have been quite similar to other Victorian versions of “life
with Father.” Bur patterns of education arc elusive. They vary in
families and persons; they may remain latent only to appear dur¬
ing memorable crises; they may be counteracted by determined
attempts to be different.

I shall present here an impressionistic version of what I consider
one partem of German fatherhood. It is representative in the
sense in which Galton’s blurred composites of photography arc
representative of what they are supposed to show.

When the father comes home from work, even the walls seem
to pull themselves together (“nehwen sich Tusammen”). Tlic
mother—although often the unofficial master of the house—be¬
haves differently enough to make a baby aware of it. She hurries
to fulfill the father’s whims and to avoid angering him. The chil¬
dren hold their breath, for the father does not approve of “non¬
sense”—that is, neither of the mother’s feminine moods nor of
the children’s playfulness. The mother is required to be at his
disposal as long as he is at home; his behavior suggests that he looks
with disfavor on that unity of mother and children in which they
had indulged in his absence. He often speaks to the mother as he
speaks to the children, expecting compliance and cutting off any
answer. The little boy comes to feel that all the gratifying tics
with his mother arc a thorn in the father’s side, and that her love
and admiration—^thc model for so many later fulfillments and
achievements—can be reached only without the father’s knowl¬
edge, or against his explicit wishes.

The mother increases this feeling by keeping some of the child’s
“nonsense” or badness from the father—if and when she pleases;
while she expresses her disfavor by telling on the child when the
father comes home, often making the father execute periodical

290 Childhood and Society

corporal punishment for misdeeds, the details of which do not
interest him. Sons arc bad, and punishment is always justified.
Later, when the boy comes to observe the father in company,
when he notices his father’s subservience to superiors, and when
he observes his excessive sentimentality when he drinks and sings
with his equals, the boy acquires that first ingredient of Welt-
schnerz: a deep doubt of the dignity of man—or at any rate of
the “old man.” All this, of course, exists concurrently with respect
and love. During the storms of adolescence, however, when the
boy’s identity must settle things with his father image, it leads to
that severe German Puhertat which is such a strange mixture of
open rebellion and “secret sin,” cynical delinquency and sub¬
missive obedience, romantici.sm and despondency, and which is
apt to break the boy’s spirit, once and for all.

In Germany, this pattern had traditional antecedents. It al¬
ways just happened to happen, although it was, of course, not
“planned.” Indeed, some fathers who had resented the pattern
deeply during their own boyhood wished desperately not to in¬
flict it on their boys. But this wish again and again traumatically
failed them in periods of crisis. Others tried to repress the pattern,
only to augment both their and their children’s neuroticisms.
Often the boy sensed that the father himself was unhappy about
his inability to break the vicious circle; for this emotional im¬
potence the boy felt pity and dLsgust,

What, then, made this conflict so universally fateful? What
differentiates—in an unconscious but decisive way—^thc Ger¬
man father’s aloofness and harshness from similar traits in other
Western fathers? I think the difference lies in the German father’s
essential lack of true inner authority—that authority which re¬
sults from an integration of cultural ideal and educational method.
The emphasis here definitely lies on German in the sense of
Reichs-German. So often when discussing things German, we
think and speak of well-preserved German regions, and of “typi¬
cal” yet isolated instances where the German father’s inner au¬
thority seemed deeply justified, founded as it was on old rural
and small urban GemutUebkeit; on urban Kultur; on Christian

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 291

Denrut; on professional Bildtmg; or on the spirit of social Reform.
The important point is that all of this did not assume an integrated
meaning on a national scale as the imagery of the Reich became
dominant and industrialization undermined the previous social
stratification.

Harshness is productive only where there is a sense of obliga¬
tion in command, a sense of dignity in voluntary obedience. This,
however, only an integrating cause can provide: a cause that
unites past and present in accord with changes in the economic,
politied, and spiritual institutions.

The other Western nations had their democratic revolutions.
They, as Max Weber demonstrated, by gradually taking over the
privileges of their aristocratic classes, had thereby identified with
aristocratic ideals. There came to be something of the French
chevalier in every Frenchman, of the Anglo-Saxon gentleman in
every Englishman, and of the rebellious aristocrat in every Amer¬
ican. 'Fhis something was fused with revolutionary ideals and
created the concept of “free man”—a concept which assumes in¬
alienable rights, indispcasablc self-denial, and unceasing revolu¬
tionary watchfulness. For reasons which we shall discuss
presendy, in connection with the problem of Lebensraum, the
German identity never quite incorporated such imagery to the
extent necessary to influence the unconscious modes of edu¬
cation. Tie average German father’s dominance and harshness
was not blended with the tenderness and dignity which comes
from participation in an integrating cause. Rather, the average
father, cither habitually or in decisive moments, came to repre¬
sent the habits and the ethics of the German top sergeant and
petty official who—“dress’d in a little brief authority”—^would
never be more but was in constant danger of becoming less; and
who had sold the birthright of a free man for an oflicial title or a
life pension.

In addition, there was the breakdown of the cultural institu¬
tion which had taken care of the adolescent conflict in its tradi¬
tional—and regional—^fomis. In the old days, for example, the
custom of Wanderschaft existed. The boy left home in order to

292 Childhood and Society

be an apprentice in foreign lands at about the age—-or a little later
—at which Hitler announced his opposition, and at which Hitler’s
father had run away from home. In the immediate pre-Nazi era,
some kind of break either still took place, with paternal thunder
and maternal tears; or it was reflected in more moderate conflicts
which were less effective because more individualized and often
neurotic; or it was repressed, in which case not the father-boy
relation, but the boy’s relation to himself, was broken. Often the
—exclusively male—teachers had to bear the brunt of it; while the
boy extended his idealistic or cynical hostility over the whole
sphere of Burger lie bkeit —the German boy’s contemptible world
of “mere citizens.” The connotation of this word Burger is hard
to transmit. It is not identical with the solid burgher; nor with the
glutted bourgeois of the class-conscious revolutionary youth; and
least of all with the proud citoyen or the responsible citizen, who,
accepting his equal obligations, asserts his right to be an individual.
Rather it means a kind of adult who has betrayed youth and ideal¬
ism, and has sought refuge in a petty and servile kind of con¬
servatism. This image was often used to indicate that all that was
“normal” was corrupt, and that all that was “decent” was weak.
As “VVanderbirds,” adole.scent boys would indulge in a romantic
unity with Nature, shared with many co-rebels and led by special
types of youth leaders, professional and confessional adolescents.
Another type of adolescent, the “lone genius,” would write
diaries, poems, and treatises; at fifteen he would lament with Don
Carlos’ most German of all adolescent complaints: “Twenty
years old, and as yet nothing done for immortality!” Other adoles¬
cents would form small bands of intellectual cynics, of delin¬
quents, of homosexuals, and of race-conscious chauvinists. The
common feature of all these activities, however, was the exclusion
of the individual fathers as an influence and the adherence to some
mystic-romantic entity; Nature, Fatherland, Art, Essence, etc.,
which were clear images of a pure mother, one who would not
betray the rebellious boy to that ogre, the father. While it was
sometimes assumed that the mother would openly or secretly
favor, if not envy, such freedom, the father was considered its

The Legend of Hider’s Childhood 293

mortal foe. If he failed to manifest sufficient enmity, he would be
deliberately provoked: for his opposition was the life of the ex¬
perience.

At this stage, the German boy would rather have died than be
aware of the fact that this misguided, this aimless initiative in the
direction of utter impracticability would arouse deep-seated guilt
and lead to stunned exhaustion. The identification with the
father which in spite of everything had been well established in
early childhood would come to the fore. In intricate ways
treacherous Fate (= reality) would finally make a Burger out of
the boy—a “mere citizen” with an eternal sense of sin for having
sacrificed genius for Mammon and for the mere wife and mere
children whom anyone can have.

Naturally, this account is made typical to the point of carica¬
ture. Yet I believe that both the overt type and the covert pattern
existed, and that, in fact, this regular split between precocious
individualistic rebellion and disillusioned, obedient citizenship
was a strong factor in the political immaturity of the German:
this adolescent rebellion was an abortion of individualism and of
revolutionary spirit. It is my belief that the Gennan fathers not
only did not oppose this rebellion, but, indeed, unconsciously
fostered it, as one sure way of maintaining their patriarchal hold
over youth. For once a patriarchal superego is firmly established
in early childhood, you can give youth rope: they cannot let
themselves go far.

In the Reichs-German character, this peculiar combination of
idealistic rebellion and obedient submission led to a paradox. The
German conscience is self-denying and cruel; but its ideals arc
shifting and, as it were, homeless. The German is harsh with him¬
self and with others; but extreme harshness without inner au¬
thority breeds bitterness, fear, and vindictiveness. Lacking
co-ordinated ideals, the German is apt to approach with blind
conviction, cruel self-denial, and supreme perfectionism many
contradictory and outright destructive aims.

After the defeat and the revolution of 1918 this psychological
conflict was increased to the point of catastrophe in the German

294 Qiildhood and Society

middle classes; and the middle classes anywhere significantly in¬
clude the worker class in so far as it aspires to become middle-class.
Tlieir servility toward the upper class, which had lost the war, was
now suddenly robbed of any resemblance to a meaningful sub¬
ordination. The inflation endangered pensions. On the other hand,
the groping masses were not prepared to anticipate or usurp either
the role of free citizens or that of class-conscious workers. It is
clear that only under such conditions could Hitler’s images imme¬
diately convince so many—and paralyze so many more.

I shall not claim, then, that Hitler’s father, as described in
derogatory accounts, was, in his manifestly rude form, a typical
German father. It frequently happens in history that an extreme
and even atypical personal experience fits a universal latent con¬
flict so well that a crisis lifts it to a representative position. In fact,
it will be remembered here that great nations are apt to choose
somebody from just beyond the borders to become their leader:
as Napoleon came from Oarsica, Stalin comes from Georgia. It is
a universal childhood pattern, then, which is the basis for the
deep wondennent which befell the German man who read about
Hitler as a youth. “No matter how firm and determined my
father might be ... his son was just as stubborn and obstinate
in rejecting an idea which had little or no appeal for him. I did not
want to become an official.” This combination of personal revela¬
tion and shrewd propaganda (together with loud and determined
action) at last carried with it that universal conviction for which
the smoldering rebellion in German youth had been waiting: that
no old man, be he father, emperor, or god, need stand in the way
of his love for his mother Germany. At the same time it proved to
the grown-up men that by betraying their rebellious adolescence
they had become unworthy of leading Germany’s youth, which
henceforth would “shape its own destiny.” Both fathers and sons
now could identify with the Fiihrer, an adolescent who never
gave in.

Psychologists overdo the father attributes in Hitler’s historical
image; Hitler the adolescent who refused to become a father by
any connotation, or, for that matter, a kaiser or a president. He

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 295

did not repeat Napoleon’s error. He was the Fuhrer; a glorified
older brother, who took over prerogatives of the fathers without
overidentifying with them; calling his father “old while still a
child,” he reserved for himself the new position of the one who
remains young in possession of supreme power. He was the un¬
broken adolescent who had chosen a career apart from civilian
happiness, mercantde tranquillity, and spiritual peace: a gang
leader who kept the boys together by demanding their admira¬
tion, by creating terror, and by shrewdly involving them in
crimes from which there was no way back. And he was a ruthless
exploiter of parental failures.

“The question of my career was to be settled more quickly than
I had anticipated. . . . When I was thirteen my father died quite
suddenly. My mother felt the obligation to continue my educa¬
tion for the career of an official.” Thus thwarted. Hitler developed
a severe pulmonary illness, and “all that I had fought for, all that
I had longed for in secret, suddenly became reality. . . .” His
mother had to grant the sick boy what she had denied the healthy
and stubborn one: he could now go and prepare to be an artist.
He did—and failed the entrance examination to the national art
school. Then his mother died, too. He was now lonely and free.

Professional failure followed that early school failure which in
retrospect is rationalized as character strength and boyish tough¬
ness. It is well known how in picking his sub-leaders Hitler re¬
deemed similar civilian failures. He got away with this only be¬
cause of the German habit of gilding school failure with the
suspicion of hidden genius; “humanistic” education in Germany
suffered from the severe split of fostering duty and discipline
while glorifying the nostalgic outbreaks of poets.

In his dealings with the “old” generation inside or outside
Germany, Hitler consequently played a role as stubborn, as devi¬
ous, and as cynical as he reports his to have been in relation to
his father. In fact, whenever he felt that his acts required public
justification and apology, he was likely to set the stage as he did
in the first chapter of Mein Kampf. His tirades were focused on
one foreign leader—Churchill or Roosevelt—and described him

296 Childhood and Society

as a feudal tyrant and a senile fool. He then created a second
image, that of the slick, rich son and decadent cynic: Duff-
Cooper and Eden, of all men, are the ones he selected. And,
indeed, Germans acquiesced to his broken pledges, as long as
Hitler, the tough adolescent, seemed merely to be taking advan¬
tage of another man’s senility.

3. MOTHER

“. . . the mother devoting herself to the cares of the household
and looking after her children with eternally the same loving
care."

Beyond this continuation of his fairy tale. Hitler says little of
his mother. He mentions that she was sometimes lovingly wor¬
ried about the fights he, the boy hero, got into; that after the
father’s death, she felt “obliged”—out of duty rather than in¬
clination—to have him continue his education; and that soon she,
too, died. He had respected his father, he says, but loved his
mother.

Of “her children” there is no further word. Hitler never was
the brother of anyone.

That Hitler, the histrionic and hysterical adventurer, had a
pathological attachment to his mother, there can be little doubt.
But this is not the point here. For, pathological or not, he deftly
divides his mother image into the two categories which are of
the highest propagandistic value: the loving, childlike, and
slightly martyred cook who belongs in the warm and cozy back¬
ground—and the gigantic marble or iron virgin, the monument
to the ideal. In contrast to the sparsity of reference to his personal
mother, then, there is an abundance of superhuman mother fig¬
ures in his imagery. His Reichs-Gennan fairy tale does not simply
say that Hitler was born in Braunau because his parents lived
there; no, it was “Fate which designated my birthplace.” This
happened when it happened not because of the natural way of
things; no, it was an “unmerited mean trick of Fate” that he was
“bom in a period between two wars, at a time of quiet and order.”
When he was poor, “Poverty clasped me in her arms”; when sad.

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 297

“Dame Sorrow was my foster mother.” But all this “cruelty of
Fate” he later learned to praise as the “wisdom of Providence,”
for it hardened him for the service of Nature, “the cruel Queen of
all wisdom.”

When the World War broke out, “Fate graciovisly permitted”
him to become a German foot soldier, the same “inexorable God¬
dess of Fate, who uses wars to weigh nations and men.” When
after the defeat he stood before a court defending his first revo¬
lutionary acts, he felt certain “that the Goddess of History’s
eternal judgment will smilingly tear up” the jury’s verdict.

Fate, now treacherously frustrating the hero, now graciously
catering to his heroism and tearing up the judgment of the bad
old men; this is the infantile imagery which pervades much of
German idealism; it finds its most representative expression in
the theme of the young hero who becomes great in a foreign
country and returns to free and elevate the “captive” mother:
the romantic counterpart to the saga of King Oedipus.

Behind the imagery of superhuman mothers there thus lurlcs
a two-faced image of maternity: the mother at one time appears
playful, childlike, and generous; and at another, treacherous,
and in league with sinister forces. This, 1 believe, is a common
set of images in patriarchal societies where woman, in many
ways kept irresponsible and childlike, becomes a go-between and
an in-between. It thus happens that the father hares in her the
elusive children, and the children hate in her the aloof father.
Since “the mother” regularly becomes and remains the uncon¬
scious model for “the world,” under Hitler the ambivalence
toward the maternal woman became one of the strongest fea¬
tures of German official thinking.

The Fulmer’s relationship to motherhood and family remained
ambiguous. In elaboration of a national fantasy he saw in himself
a lonely man fighting and pleasing superhuman mother figures
which now try to destroy him, now are forced to bless him. But
he did not acknowledge women as companions up to the bitter
end, when, obviously to prepare for the appearance of a pre¬
tender a la King of Rome, he made an honest woman out of Eva

298 Childhood and Society

Braun, whom he presently shot with his own hands—or so the
legend ends. But the wives of other men gave birth to their
children in the shelter of the chancellery, while he himself, ac¬
cording to his official biographer, “is the embodiment of the
national will. He does not know any family life; neither does
he know any vice.”

Hitler carried this official ambivalence toward women over
into his relationship to Germany as an image. Openly despising
the masses of his countrymen, who, after all, constitute Ger¬
many, he stood frenziedly before them, and implored them with
his fanatical cries of “Germany, Germany, Germany” to be¬
lieve in a mystical national entity.

But then, the Germans have alwa^-s been inclined to manifest
a comparable attitude of ambivalence toward mankind and the
world at large. That the world is essentially perceived as an
“outer world” is true for most tribes or nations. But for Ger¬
many the world is constantly changing its quality—and always
to an extreme. The world is experienced either as vastly superior
in age and wisdom, the goal of eternal longing and Wanderlust;
or as a mean, treacherous, encircling encampment of enemies
living for one aim—namely, the betrayal of Germany; or as a
mysterious Lebensreaem to be won by Teutonic courage and to
be used for a thousand years of adolescent aggrandizement.

4. ADOLESCENT

In this country, the word “adolescence,” to all but those who
have to deal with it professionally, has come to mean, at worst,
a no man’s land between childhood and maturity, and at best, a
“normal” time of sports and horseplay, of gangs and cliques and
parties. The adolescent in this country offers less of a problem
and feels less isolated because he has, in fact, become the cultural
arbiter; few men in this country can afford to abandon the ges¬
tures of the adolescent, along with those of the freeman forever
dedicated to the defeat of autocrats.

From here, then, it is hard to see what adolescence may mean
in other cultures. In the primitive past, dramatic and bizarre

The Legend of Hider’s Childhood 299

adolescence rites were performed in an endeavor to modify and
snblimate the adolescent’s budding manhood. In primitive rituak
the adolescent was forced to sacrifice some of his blood, some
of his teeth, or a part of his genitals; in religious ceremonies he
is taught to admit his sinfulness and bow his knee. Ancient rites
confirmed the boy’s intention of becoming a man in his father’s
world but at the same time of remaining eternally the modest son
of a “Great Father.” Leaders of the ritual dance, redeemers, and
tragic actors were the representatives of guilt and expiation.
Germany’s adolescent rebellion was a climactic step in a universal
psychological development which parallels the decline of feudal¬
ism: the inner emancipation of the sons. For while there are close
parallels between primitive adolescence rites and those of Na¬
tional Socialism, there is one most significant difference. In
Hitler’s world, the adolescent marched with his emancipated
equals. Their leader had never sacrificed his will to any father.
In fact, he had said that conscience is a blemish like circumcision,
and that both arc Jewish blemishes.

Hitler’s horror of Jewry—an “emasculating germ” represented
by less than i per cent of his nation of 70 million—is clothed
in tlic imagery of phobia; he describes the danger emanating
from it as a weakening infection and a dirtying contamination.
Syphilophobia is the least psychiatry can properly diagnose in
his case. But here again, it is hard to say where personal symptom
ends and shrewd propaganda begins. For the idealistic adoles¬
cent’s imagery is typically one of purest white and blackest black.
His constant preoccupation is with the attainment of what is
white, and the phobic avoidance and extirpation of everything
black, in others and in himself. Fears of sexuality, especially, make
the adolescent suggestible to words like these: “Alone the loss
of purity of the blood destroys the inner happiness forever; it
eternally lowers man, and never again can its consequences be
removed from body and mind.” *

The pre-Nazi German adolescent was passionately cruel with
himself; it was not in order to indulge himself that he opposed
*Ibid.

300 Childhood and Society

his father. When he “fell,” his guilt was great. Hitler, so this
adolescent was made to feel, was the man who had the right to
be cruel against black everywhere because he was not lenient
with himself. What aroused suspicions in sensible non-Germans
—^namely. Hitler’s proclaimed abstinence from meat, coffee,
alcohol, and sex—here counted as a heavy propaganda factor.
For Hitler thus proved his moral right to free the Germans
from their postwar masochism and to convince them that they,
in turn, had a right to hate, to torture, to kill.

In the children. Hitler tried to replace the complicated con¬
flict of adolescence as it pursued every German, with simple
patterns of hypnotic action and freedom from thought. To do
so he established an organization, a training, and a motto which
would divert all adolescent energy into National Socialism. The
organization was the Hitler Youth; the motto, “Youth shapes
its own destiny.”

God no longer mattered: “At this hour when the earth is
consecrating itself to the sun, we have only one thought. Our
sun is Adolph Hitler.” * Parents did not matter: “All those who
from the perspective of their ‘experience,’ and from that alone
combat our method of letting youth lead youth, must be si¬
lenced. . . ” * Ethics did not matter: “An entirely fresh, new¬
born generation has arisen, free from the preconceived ideas,
free from compromises, ready to be loyal to the orders which arc
its birthright.” • Brotherhood, friendship did not matter: “I heard
not a single song expressing any tender emotion of friendship,
love of parents, love for fellow-man, joy of living, hope for future
life.” • Learning did not matter: “National Socialist ideology is
to be a sacred foundation. It is not to be degraded by detailed
explanation.” ’

What mattered was: to be on the move without looking back-

•Quoted in G. Ziemer, Education for •Quoted in Ziemer, op, ciu

Death, Oxford University Press, New • Ziemer, op, ciu

York, 1941. •Quoted in Ziemer, op, cit,

•Quoted in Hans Siemsen, Hitler
Youth, Lindsay Drummond, London,

1941,

The Legend of Hider’s Childhood 301

ward. “Let everything go to pieces, wc shall march on. For to¬
day Germany is ours; tomorrow, the whole world.”

On such a foundation Hitler offered a simple racial dichotomy
of cosmic dimensions: the German (soldier) versxis the Jew.
The Jew is described as small, black, and hairy all over; his back
is bent, his feet are flat; his eyes squint, and his lips smack; he
has an evil smell, is promiscuous, and loves to deflower, im¬
pregnate, and infect blond girls. The Aryan is tall, erect, light,
without hair on chest and limbs; his glance, walk, and talk are
stramm, his greeting the outstretched arm. He is passionately
clean in his habits. He would not knowingly touch a Jewish girl
—except in a brothel.

Tliis antithesis is clearly one of ape man and superman. But
while in this country such imagery may have made the comics,
in Germany it became official food for adult minds. And let us
not forget (for the Germans will not forget) that for long years
German youth and the German army seemed to indicate a
success for Hitler’s imagery. Healthy, hard, calm, obedient,
fanatic, they “challenge everything that is weak in body, in in¬
tensity, and in loyalty.” * They were arrogant in the extreme;
and it was only in their sneering arrogance that the old German
fear of succumbing to foreign “cultured” influence could be
recognized.

In women, too. National Socialist race consciousness estab¬
lished a new pride. Girls were taught to accept joyfully the func¬
tions of their bodies if mated with selected Aryans, They re¬
ceived sexual enlightenment and encouragemenL Childbirth,
legitimate or illegitimate, was promoted by propaganda, by sub¬
sidies, by the institution of “State children,” who were bom
“for the Fiihrer.” Breast feeding was advocated; what American
psychiatrists at that time dared suggest only in professional jour¬
nals, the German state decreed: “Stillfahigkeit ist Stillwille”—
ability to nurse is the will to nurse. TTuis German babyhood was
enriched for the sake of the race and of the Fiihrer.

•Ziemer, op. ctL

302 Childhood and Society

In his imagery no actor and no effective innovator is really in¬
dependent, nor can he dare to be entirely original: his originality
must consist in the courage and singular concentration with
which he expresses an existing imagery—at the proper time. If
he does so, however, he is convincing to himself and to others
—and paralyzes his adversaries, in so far as they unconsciously
partake of his imagery, so that they will wak, become insecure,
and finally surrender.

In Gennany, then, we saw a highly organized and highly edu¬
cated nation surrender to the imagery of emotional adolescence.
We have indicated that we cannot lay the blame for this on the
power of the leaders’ individual neuroses. Can we blame the
childhood patterns of the led?

5. LEDENSRAUM, SOLDIER, JEW

The mere impressionistic comparison of a nation’s familial
imagery with her national and international attitudes can easily
become absurd. It seems to lead to the implication that one could
change international attitudes by doctoring a nation’s family pat¬
terns. Yet nations change only when their total reality changes.
In America, the sons and daughters of all nations become Ameri¬
cans, although each remains beset by their specific conflict:
and I dare say that many a German-American reader will have
recognized some of his own father’s problems in this chapter.
He will recognize it because there is a lag between his father’s
world and his: his father lives in a different space-time.

The very ease with which comparisons between childhood
patterns and national attitudes can be drawn, and the very ab¬
surdity to which they can lead, obscure the important truth
which is, nevertheless, involved. We shall therefore use this
chapter to illustrate the way in which historical and geographic
reality amplify familial patterns and to what extent, in turn, these
patterns influence a people’s interpretation of reality. It is im¬
possible to characterize what is German without relating Ger¬
many’s familial imagery to her central positiem in Europe. For,
as we saw, even the most intelligent groups must orient them-

The Legend of Hitler’s Childltood 303

selves and one another in relatively simple subverbal, magic
design. Every person and every group has a limited inventory of
historically determined spatial-temporal concepts, which deter¬
mine the world image, the evil and ideal prototypes, and the un¬
conscious life plan. These concepts dominate a nation’s striv¬
ings and can lead to high distinction; but they also narrow a
people’s imagination and thus invite disaster. In German his¬
tory, such outstanding configurations arc encirclement versus
Lehensraum; and disunity versus unity. Such terms arc, of course,
so universal that they seem unspecific; the observer who real¬
izes the weight which these words carry in Gennan thinking
must suspect them of being insincere propaganda. Yet nothing
can be more fatal in international understanding than the at¬
tempt to belittle or to argue another nation’s mythological
space-time. The non-German does not realize that in Gcnnany
these words carried a conviction far beyond that of ordinary
logic.

The official version of Lehensraum stated that the Nazi state
must assure, within Europe, military hegemony and armaments
monopoly, economic preponderance, and intellectual leadership.
Beyond this, Lehensraum had an essentially magic meaning.
What is this meaning?

At the end of the first World War Max Weber wrote that
destiny had decreed [even a realistic German says “destiny,” not
“geography” or “history”] that Germany alone should have as
its immediate neighbors three great land powers and the greatest
sea power and that it should stand in their way. No other coun¬
try on earth, he said, was in this situation.*

As Weber saw it, the necessity to create national greatness
and security in a thoroughly encircled and vuhierable position
left two alternatives: Germany might retain its regional quality
and become a modern federation like Switzerland—likable and
useful to everybody and a danger to nobody; or it might quickly
develop a Reich, fashioned out of quite unfavorable political

•Max Weber, Gesammelte Politisebe Scbrrften, Drci Masken Vcrlag, Munich,
1921.

304 Childhood and Society

characteristics, a Reich as mature and powerful as that of Eng¬
land or France, capable of playing power politics, in order to
build with the West a cultural and military defense unit against
the East. But Weber was a ‘‘realist,^’ which meant he considered
only what, according to the considered thinking of his conserva¬
tive mind, seemed “reasonable.” He did not dream that within
a few years a man would stand up and proclaim, even bring to
near fulfillment, a third alternative—namely, that Germany
would become a nation so powerful and so shrewdly led that
the whole encircling combination of Paris, London, Rome, and
Moscow could one by one be overrun and occupied long enough
to be emasculated “for a thousand years.”

This plan still appears fantastic to the non-German. He won¬
ders how such a scheme could live together in one and the same
national mind with the simple kindness and the cosmopolitan
wisdom representative of the “real” Gennan culture. But, as
pointed out, the world meant regional, not national, virtues when
it spoke of German culture. It persistently underestimated the des-

10A recent publication in this coun- tion with an ineffaceable scase of guilt,
try (H. H, Gerth and Wright C Mills, One may cenainly infer an inordi-
Frojn Max Weber: Essays in Social^ naicly strong Oedipus situation,
ogjy Oxford University Press, New “Throughout his life, Weber main-
York, 1946, pp. 28-29) gives an ac- tained a fiill correspondence with his
count of certain events in Webers life mother, who once referred to him as
which will be Quoted here because *an older daughter/ She eagerly sought
they strikingly illustrate the familial couascl w'ith him, her first-bom, rather
patterns under discussion: than with her husband, in matters con-

“His strong sense of chivaby was, ccraing the demeanor of her third son.
in part, a response to the patriarchal One should also pay heed to what
and domineering attitude of his father, was, to be sure, a passing phase of
who understood his wife’s love as a young Weber’s aspiration: his desire
wiDingness to serve and to allow her- to become a real he-man at the uni-
sclf to be exploited and controlled by versity. After only three semesters, he
him. This situation came to a climax succeeded in changing externally from
when W’eber, at the age of 31, in the a slender mother’s boy to a massive,
presence of his mother and his wife, beer-drinking, duel-marked, cigar-
saw fit to hold judgment over his pufhng student of Imperial Gcnnany,
father: he would remorselessly break whom his mother greeted with a slap
all relations with him unless he met in the face. Clearly, this was the fa-
thc son’s condition: the mother should ther’s son. The two models of identifi-
risk him ‘alone’ without the father, cation and their associated values.
We have noted that the father died rooted in mother and father, never
only a shon time after this encounter disappeared from Max Weber’s inner
and that Weber came out of the situa- life, . . .*

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 305

pcratc German need for unity which, indeed, cannot be appre¬
ciated by peoples who in their own land take such unity for
granted. The world is apt once more to underestimate the force
with which the question of national unity may become a matter of
the preservation of identity, and thus a matter of (human) life
and death, far surpassing the question of political systems.

Throughout her history, the area of Germany has been sul>-
jected, or has been potentially tnilnerable, to sweeping invasions.
It is true that in a hundred-odd years her vital centers had not
been occupied by an enemy; but she remained conscious of her
vulnerable position, both rationally and irrationally.

The threat of military invasion, however, is not the only one.
Whether invading or being invaded by different countries, Ger¬
many has been impres.sed by foreign values. Mer attitude to¬
ward these values, and their relation to her own cultural diver¬
sity, constitute a clinical problem hard to define. But one may
say that no other young nation of similar size, density, and his¬
torical diversity of population, with a similar lack of naniral
frontiers, is exposed to cultural influences as divergent in their
nature and as disturbing in their succession as the influences
emanating from Germany’s neighbors. As is true for the ele¬
ments which make for individual anxiety, it is the consistent
mutual aggravation of all these items which has never allowed
German identity to crystallize or to assimilate economic and social
evolution in gradual and logical steps.

The German image of disunity is based on a historical feeling
of discomfort which may be called the “Limes complex.’’ The
Limes Germanicus was a wall—comparable to the Chinese wall
—built by the Romans through western and southern Germany
to separate the conquered provinces from those which remained
barbaria This wall was destroyed long ago. But it was replaced
by a cultural barrier which separated the area in the south in¬
fluenced by the Church of Rome from that of Protestant north¬
ern Germany. Other empires (military, spiritual, cultural) have
thus reached into Germany; from the west, sensual and rational
France; from the east, illiterate, spiritual, and dynastic Russia;

306 Childhood and Society

from the north and northwest, individualistic *'protestantism,**
and from the southeast, oriental voluptuoasness. All conflicts be--
tween east and west, north and south, were fought out in battle
somewhere in Gennany—and in the German mind.

Germany, from the beginning, was tluis constantly disturbed
by a traumatic sequence of divergent influences, which aggra¬
vated and kept acute a specific fonn of the universal con¬
flict beru^cen suggestibility and defensive stubbornness. Hitler
thus promised Germany not only the military conquest of the
invasion centers surrounding the Reich, bur also a victory of race
consciousness over the “bacteriar’ invasion of foreign aesthetics
and ethics within the Gennan mind. His aim was not only the
eternal obliteration of Germany’s military defeat in the first
World VV'ar, but also a complete purge of the corrupt foreign
values which had invaded German culture. 7 'o the tormented
Germans this was real ‘'freedom”; other freedoms, in comparison,
seemed vague and unessential.

Thus the appeal of Adolf Hitler’s violent remedy was directed
toward a Retch which was large and felt potentially great; but
which at the same time felt vulnerable in its frontiers and unde¬
veloped in its political core. It was directed toward a national
mind with a great regional heritage and burning spiritual ambi¬
tions but with a morbid suggestibility and a deep insecurity in
its basic values. Only he who can fathom the effect of such a
situation on the struggle for identity in a nation’s youth can
divine their danger—and his.

Germany’s desperate paradoxes led to those extremes of Ger¬
man contradictions which—before Hitler—were considered to
constitute two different Germanics. In reaction to the sense of
cultural encirclement one type of Rcichs-Gennan became, as it
were, too broad, while the other became too narrow, lliat other
nations have analogous conflicts between cosmopolitanism and
provincialism docs not remove the necessity of understanding
the German version of this dilemma. The “too broad” type de¬
nied or hated the German paradox and embraced the whole
encircling “outer world”; he became cosmopolitan beyond rccog-

The Legend of Hitler’s Childliood 307

nition. The “narrow" type tried to ignore foreign temptations
and became “German” to the point of caricature. The first was
always glad to be mistaken for an Englishman, a Frenchman, or
an American; the second arrogantly overdid the narrow inven¬
tory of his few genuine characteristics. The first felt and thought
on an Olympian scale; the second became obedient and mechani¬
cal to the exclusion of all thought and feeling. The first was a
lifelong nostalgic, a voluntary exUe, a potential suicide or psy¬
chotic; the second remained at home, or wherever he went made
himself at home and, gritting his teeth, remained a Gennan.

The world admired the first type and sneered at the second;
the world ignored, until it was too late, the fact that neither of
these types led to a rebirth on a national level of that maturity
and of that monumental dignity which at times had character¬
ized the burghers and artisans of Germany’s regions. Tlie world
ignored the fact that neither type felt sure in himself and safe
in the world, that neither of them accepted a part in man’s po¬
litical emancipation.

It is a fatal error to assume that National Socialism came about
in spite of Gennany’s intellectual greatness. It was the natural
result of the particular social—or rather asocial—orientation of
its great men.

We need not limit ourselves here to the consideration of such
a lonely hater of man’s realities as Nietzsche, who was fortunate
enough to die demented and deluded instead of being forced to
witness the stark reality of the unifonned supermen whom he had
helped to create. No, we may think of men with an exquisite eye
for realities, such as Thomas Mann, who during the first World
War is reported to have encouraged the Gennans by saying that,
after all, the possession of a philosopher such as Kant more than
compensated for the French Revolution, and that the Critique of
Pttre Reason was, in fact, a far more radical revolution than was
the proclamation of the rights of man.^^

I realize that this may well have been a great intellectual’s

“Janet Planner, “Goethe in Hollywood," The New Yorker, December to, 1941.

3o 8 Childhood and Society

way of saying the wrong thing at the right time, which is an
intellectual’s privilege during his nation’s emergencies. But the
statement illustrates the German’s awe of overpowering, lonely,
and often tragic greatness, and his readiness to sacrifice the in¬
dividual’s right in order to emancipate the greatness in his own
heart.

Neither as aloof a cosmopolitan as Goethe, nor as aloof a
statesman as Bismarck—then the dominant images in the German
school’s inventory of guiding images—had essentially contrib¬
uted to a German image of political man.

The attempt, after the defeat of 1918, to create a republic led
to a temporary dominance of the “too broad” German. The
leaders of that era could not prevent the merging of political
immaturity and intellectual escapism which combined to create
a myth of strange, almost hysterical passion: Fate had sent de¬
feat to Germany in order to single her out from among the na¬
tions. Fate had elected her to be the first great country to ac¬
cept defeat voluntarily, to shoulder moral blame completely, and
to resign political greatness once and for all. Thus Fate had used
all the Allied countries with all their soldiers, alive and dead,
merely to elevate Germany to an exalted existence in an unlimited
spiritual hebensraum. Even in this very depth of masochistic
self-abasement—impressively decried by Max Weber—world
history was still a secret arrangement between the Teutonic
spirit and the Goddess of Fate. Germany’s basic relationship to
history had not changed. The world seems to have been sur¬
prised when this spiritual chauvinism gradually turned back into
militarism, when it again employed sadistic rather than masoch¬
istic images and techniques. The Great Powers at this point failed
in their responsibility to “re-educate” Germany in the only way
in which one can re-educate peoples—namely, by presenting
them with the incorruptible fact of a new identity within a more
universal political framework Instead, they exploited Gennan
masochism and increased her universal hopelessness. The too
narrow German, in bitter hiding since defeat, now came for-

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 309

ward to prepare the widest possible earthly Lebensraum for the
narrowest type of German: Aryan world domination-

Caught between the too narrow and the too broad, the few
statesmen capable of dignity, realism, and vision broke under
the strain or were murdered. The Germans, without work, with¬
out food, and without a new integrity, began to listen to Hitler’s
imagery, which, for the first time in Reichs-German history, gave
political expression to the spirit of the German adolescent. There
was magic weight in the words, “I, however, resolved now to
become a politician,” with which the unbroken adolescent closes
the seventh chapter of Mein Kampf.

When Hitler thus undertook to bring the adolescent imagery
of his people to political dominance, a magnificent tool gradually
became his—the German anny. Book knowledge of the war of
1870-71 had been Hitler’s “greatest spiritual experience.” In 1914,
when he had been permitted to become a Reichs-Gcrman soldier,
he had moved into the full light of that heroic history. Then
had come defeat. Hitler had denied with hysterical fanaticism—
he himself had been blinded by gas, some say by emotional ex¬
ertion—that the light had withdrawn from that image. He had
appeared determined to redeem it. His enemies, inside and out¬
side Germany, had shrugged their shoulders.

But here again it is necessary to look beyond the obsessive
and to see the ingenious. From the first World War’s Thomas
Mann to the second’s Nazi philosopher, the German soldier was
conceived of as a personification, or even the spiritualization, of
what is German. He represented “the Watch on the Rhine”:
the human wall replacing Germany’s nonexistent natural fron¬
tiers. In him unity through blind obedience proved itself and
aspirations toward democratic diversity defeated themselves.
It would be dangerous to overlook the fact that this position,
exploited as it was by a noisy type of high-stepping young of¬
ficer, also helped to develop an officer aristocracy which in true
absorption of the aristocratic-revolutionary principles of other
nations harbored one of the few politically mature European

310 Childhood and Society

types in Gennany. If Hitler, therefore, denied the defeat of this
amiy with all the weapons of self-deception and falsehood, he
saved for himself and for German youth the only integrated
image that could belong to everybody.

TTic treaty of Versailles, cleverly exploited, proved helpful
in the creation of a new streamlined German soldier. The small
army became an army of specialists. Thus the oldest and least
modified Reichs-German type was re-created with the insignia
of the modern technician. A spirit of teamwork and of personal
responsibility replaced that of blind obedience; maturity, instead
of caste, became the mark of the officer. With such new material
the Blitzkrieg was prepared: not only a technical feat, but also
a sweeping solution and salvation for the traumatized German
people. For it promised a victory of movement over the Allied
superiority in artillery power (and the industrial might behind
it) which, during the first World War, had “nailed down^’ the
Germans until they became ready to trust Wilson, to break up,
and to attend to higher things. Furrhcnnorc, Gennany’s youth, in
the Blitzkrieg, experienced “finalities of a revolution reaching into
spiritual, mental and material depths.’’ It relieved the feeling
of encirclement and of peripheral vulnerability. And, to quote
a Nari: ‘TTic instinctive pleasure which youth finds in the power
of engines here divines the expansions of mankind’s limitations,
which were so narrow from the start and, on the whole, have not
been widened by civilization.” ^ It would be fatal to brush aside
such Nazi mysticism. To defeat motorized Germany, the youth
of other countries also had to learn like modem centaurs to grow
together with their fighting machines into new restless beings of
passionate precision. Hitler tried to anticipate an age that would
experience a motorized world as natural; and to fuse it with the
image of a totalitarian “state machine.” He took it as a personal
insult when he saw the industries of the democracies go into high
gear {Gclump —^rubbish—he tried to call their output). When
their firepower came on wings right into his cities, and above

^W. W. Backhaos, ‘TJeberwindung dcr Materialschlacht,’* Das Reicb, Bedki,
July 13, 194^

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 311

all, when he saw that Anglo-Saxon youths could identify with
their machines without losing their heads, he was incredulous.
When he then saw the Russians perform miracles not only of
defense but also of offense, his irrational fury knew no bounds,
for in his inventory of images he had characterized them not
only as uneejua) to his soldiers, but as people below any possible
comparison: nien of the mud (Sumpfmenschen), he called them,
and subhuman. They thus became, toward the end, c(]uivalent to
the other subhunians, the Jews: only the more fortunate Russians
had a country and an amiy.

It is obvious enough that much envy was hidden in Hitler’s
fantastic overcstimation of the Jewdsh “danger,” embodied as it
was in such a small pan of the population, and a highly intellcctu-
alizcd one at that. But as we have said, the narrow (German al¬
ways felt endangered, denationalized, by infomiarion which ex¬
posed him to the relativity and diversity of cultural values. The
Jew seemed to remain himself despite dispersion over the world,
while the German trembled for his identity in his own country.
In fact, these mysterious Jews seemed to be making of intellectual
relativity a means of racial self-preservation. To some Germans,
this was not understandable without assuming an especially
devious chauvinism, a hidden Jewish pact with Fate.

6 . A NOTE ON JEWRY

Oswald Spengler had already suspected that antisemitism was
largely a matter of projection; which means that people see over-
clearly in Jews what they wish not to recognize in themselves.
A hidden pact with Fate, of the variety which would hide dreams
of world conquest behind a display of intellectual superiority, is
an idea entirely akin to German chauvinism.

While projections are hostile and fearful distortions, they are
commonly not without a kernel of profound meaning. True, the
projector who sees a mote in his brother’s eye overlooks the beam
in his own. Yet there usually is something in the neighbor’s eye
which lends itself to specific magnification. It was by no means
a coincidence that at this crucial moment in history (when “one

312 Childhood and Society

world” became a real image, two worlds an unavoidable reality)
the most encircled of the civilized nations should be susceptible
to propaganda which warned of die devilish powers of the most
dispersed nadon. We cannot attempt to define Jewry at this
point; but we must ask in passing what seems to make the Jew
a favorite target of the most vicious projections—and this by no
means only in Germany. In fact, in Russia, too, we have recently
witnessed a violent campaign against “cosmopolitan intellec¬
tuals.”

Does the Jew remind the Western world of those sinister blood
rites (mentioned above) in which the father-god demands a token
of the boy’s sexual member, a tax on his masculinity, as a sign of
the covenant.^ Psychoanalysts offer the explanation that the Jew
thus arouses “castration fear” in peoples who have not accepted
circumcision as a hygienic measure. We saw how, in Germany,
this fear could be extended to that more inclusive fear of giving
in, of losing one’s adolescent will. The fact that the Jews had
left their homeland and sacrificed their national right of organ¬
ized self-defense undoubtedly played a role here. It was as if, on
both scores, they were in the habit of “asking for it”: from their
God and from their host-countries.

I think that the identity problem suggested in this book permits
of another interpretation. The universal conflict of defensive ri¬
gidity and of adaptive flexibility, of conservatism and progressiv-
ism, in the Jews of the Diaspora expresses itself in the opposition of
two trends: dogmatic orthodoxy, and opportunistic adaptability.
These trends, of course, were favored by centuries of dispersion.
We may think here of types, such as the religiously dogmatic,
culturally reactionary Jew, to whom change and time mean abso¬
lutely nothing: the Letter is his reality. And we may think of his
opposite, the Jew to whom geographic dispersion and cultural
multiplicity have become “second nature”: relativity becomes
for bun the absolute, exchange value his took

There arc extreme types which can be seen as living carica¬
tures: the bearded Jew in his kaftan, and Sammy Click. I'he
psychoanalyst, however, knows that this same set of opposites.

The Legend of Hitler’s Childhood 313

this conflict between the adherence to the Letter, and the sur¬
render to the changing price of things pervades the unconscious
conflicts of men and women of Jewish extraction who do not
consider themselves, nor are considered by others, as “Jewish” in
a denominational or racial sense. Here the Letter may have be¬
come a political or scientific dogma quite removed from the
dogma of the Talmud, but treated not unlike the way quotations
from the Talmud were treated by their ancestors; and exchange
value may have become obsessive preoccupation with the com¬
parative value—of values. Economically and professionally, later
stages of history have exploited what earlier history initiated:
the Jews were confined to what they did best, while they, of
course, learned to perfect what they were permitted to do. Thus
they have become not only the traditional traders of goods, but
also the mediators in culture change, the interpreters in the arts
and sciences, the healers of inner conflict. Their strength, in these
fields, lies in a responsible sense of relativity.

This defines Jewish weakness as well: for where the sense of
relativity loses its responsibility it can become cynical relativism.
Jewish genius, in turn, quietly possessed of the courage of the
ages, lifts the matter of relative values to a plane on which known
reality becomes relative to more inclusive orders.

In the religious sphere we have obscr\'ed that Christian ethics
is based on a radical subordination of this world to “the other
world,” of earthly empires to the Kingdom of God: when Hitler
called conscience a Jewish blemish, he included Christianity and
its doctrine of sin and salvation.

In modem times, man’s freedom of will, of the conscious
choice of his values, and of his power of judgment have been
questioned by the theories of three modem Jews. The Marxian
theory of historical determinism established the fact that our
values unconsciously depend on the means by which we make a
living. (As a psychological fact this is, of course, not identical
with the political doctrine of Marxism, which in a variety of
countries has led to a variety of socialisms.) In psychology,
Freud’s theory of the unconscious showed abundantly that we

314 Childhood and Society

arc unaware of the worst and of the best in our motivations.
Finally, it was Elinstein’s theory of relativity which gave mod¬
em reorientation the broad basis of changing physical theory.
He showed that, indeed, our measuring sticks are relative to the
relationships which we measure.

Is it, then, a historical coincidence that Marx, Freud, and
Einstein, all men of German-Jewish ancestry, have come to
formulate and, moreover, to persomfy these redefinitions of the
very ground man thought he stood on? Yet it is clear that the
theories of these men—who are divergent in many respects—
climaxed the cultural and scientific crisis of Europe not because
they were Jews, but because they were Jews and Germans and
Europeans,

Strong eras and strong countries assimilate the contributions
of strong Jews because their sense of identity is enhanced by
progressive redefinitions. In times of collective anxiety, how¬
ever, the very suggestion of relativity is resented, and this es¬
pecially by those classes which arc about to lose status and self¬
esteem. In their effort to find a platform of conservation, they
cling with grim single-mindedness to the few absolutes which
they hope to save. It is at this point that paranoid antisemitism is
aroused by agitators of many descriptions and purposes, who ex¬
ploit mass cowardice and mass cruelty.

I think that only the deathly nature of the identity problem
can throw some light on the fact that millions of Gennans par¬
ticipated and more millions acquiesced in the German “solution
of the Jewish problem.’^ Hiese methods defy comprehension to
such an extent that beyond abortive fits of revulsion, nobody
—be he American, Jew, or German—can as yet maintain any
consistent emotional rcacrion to them. This, then, was the cli¬
mactic accomplishment of the German mythological genius: to
create a reality which seems impossible even to those who know
it to have been fact.

‘^The foregoing definitions were conv- Israel It is too early to say what this
pleted when a new, nationalistic, iden- development will mean to Jewry at
dty was being heroically established in large.

The Legend of Hitler’s Qiildhood 315

The political and military machinery of National Socialism
is crushed. The form of its defeat, however, carries within it the
conditions for resurrection. For again Germany has been divided
against herself; the formation of a Gcnnan political identity has
been—^maybe fatally—delayed. Again German conscience finds
itself the helpless pointer on the balance scales of two world
moralities: tomorrow she may again claim to be the very arbiter
who holds these scales in her hands. For total defeat, too, breeds
a sense of total uniqueness, ready to be exploited once more by
those who may seem to offer a sense of total power together v ith
permanent unity, and a new sense of identity which redeems the
now senseless past.

Whoever hopes and works for a change in Europe which Mill
provide the Germans with a destiny of peace must first under¬
stand the dilemma of her youth and of the youth of other large
areas in the world, where abortive national identities must find
new alignments in an over-all industrial and fraternal identity. It
is for this reason that I have gone back into the period preceding
the last M'ar. Until the forces then at work prove to have been
harnessed in concerted efforts toward a truly new order, we can¬
not afford to forget.

CHAPTER

10

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s

Youth’

It is difficult today to learn much about Russia that Ls certain,
relevant, and articulate at the same time. What little I know has
recently been crystallized around the imagery of an outdated
Russian moving picture, and especially around the countenance
of a boy who is its hero.

The moving picture tells the Bolshevik legend of Maxim
Gorky^s childhood. As before with the National Socialist ver¬
sion of Hitler’s childhood, I shall analyze the imagery in relation
to the geograpliic locus and the historical moment of its origin.*
In some significant respects the two legends are not dissimilar.
They both show a growing, self-wdied youngster in bitter
fight with a father who is a merciless tyrant yet himself a senile
failure. Both Hitler and Gorky in adolescence fell mentally ill

'This chapter deveJoped out of my
participation as occasional consultant
in the Coiiunbia University Research
Project in Contemporary Cultures,
sponsored by the Office of Naval Re¬
search. For facts and insights I owe
thanks to the members of the Russian
group in this project, especially to
Sula Bcnct, Nicolas Galas, Geoffrey
Gorer, Nathan Leites, and Bertram
Schaffner; and above all to their semi¬

nar leader, Margaret Mead, who in-
trod need me to the moving picnirc re¬
viewed here.

^According to a prospectus in the film
library of the Museum of Modern Art
in New York, the moving picture dis¬
cussed here was first shown in Mos¬
cow in 1938. The producer was a
writer named Mark Donskoi, the firm
Soyuztetfilm. I saw the picture in
New York in March, 194S.

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 317

with the senselessness of existence and the futility of rcbellion.
They became intellectual proletarians, close to utter despair. It
is an ironic coincidence that both were known on the police
books of their respective countries as “paperhangers.” But here
the analogy ends.

Gorky became a writer, not a politician. True, after the Rus¬
sian revolution he continued to remain an idol of the Soviet
stare. He returned to Russia, and he died there. WTiether his
death was mysterious or merely mystified for political reasons
we do not know. At his bier Molotov compared his loss to that
of Lenin himself. But the reason for this national stature cer¬
tainly does not lie in doctrinaire fanaticism or in political astute¬
ness on the part of Gorky. For he, the friend of Lenin, said:
“Differences of outlook ought not to affect sympathies; 1 never
gave theories and opinions a prominent place in my relation to
people.” In fact, one gathers that both Lenin and Stalin were
exceptionally lenient with Gorky in ignoring certain acquaint¬
ances of his who were of questionable orthodoxy. The answer
lies in the fact that Gorky, consciously and stubbornly, was a
writer of and for the people. He, the “vagrant” and the “provin¬
cial,” lived in a double exile, one from the Tsarist police and the
other from the intellectual circles of his time. His Rettrinis-
cences show how calmly and deliberately he delineated him¬
self even in the presence of such overpowering idols as Tol¬
stoy.

Like Tolstoy, Gorky belongs to that epoch of Russian real¬
ism which made literate Russia so cruelly self-observant and
so miserably self-conscious. But his w'riring did not surrender to
the self-intoxication of misery which pervades that of his greater
contemporaries. He did not end up in a fatal deadlock of good
and evil, a final surrender to the demons of the past, as did Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky. Gorky learned to observe and to write simply,
because he saw “the necessity of representing exactly certain—
most rare and positive—phenomena of actuality.” The moving
picture portrays the growth of this frame of mind. Beyond that,
it illustrates a Russian dilemma, a Bolshevik dilemma, and, as 1

3i 8 Childhood and Society

shall try to show, the dilemma of a “protcstant” frame of mind
belatedly emerging in the countries of the East-
The film is an old one. At first it makes impossible demands
on American eyes and ears. But in content, it seems easy as a
fairy tale. It flows along as a loose and sentimental narrative ap¬
parently designed to bring the hero, little Alyosha, close to the
heart of audiences who recognize in it all their native Russia and
their childhood, and who at the same time know that this Alyosha
will some day be the great Gorky. In the Russians who saw
the picture with me it left only nostalgic pensiveness, and no
aftertaste of political controversy. The legend is its own propa¬
ganda.

i. THE LAND AND THE MIR

At the beginning there is the Russian trinity: empty plains,
Volga, balalaika. The vast horizons of central Russia reveal their
dark emptinesses; and immediately balalaika tunes rise to com¬
passionate crescendos, as if they were saying, “You arc not alone,
we are all here.” Somewhere along the Volga broad river boats
deliver bundled-up people into isobted villages and crowded
towns.

The vastness of the land and the refuge of the small, gay com¬
munity thus arc the initial theme. One is reminded of the fact
that “mir,” the word for village, also means world, and of the
saying, “Even death is good if you arc in the mir.” A thousand
years ago the Vikings called the Russians “the people of the
stockades” because they had found them huddling together in
their compact towms, thus surviving winters, beasts, and invaders
—and enjoying themselves in their own rough ways.

A bulky boat docks by a pier, which is crowded with festive
friends. Aunong them, a group of relatives close in on two arriv¬
als: Varvara, the widowed mother, and her boy, Alyosha. His
handsome little face first appears, wdde-eyed and open-mouthed,
as he emerges from behind his mother’s long full skirts, eyeing
with awe the noisy relatives who embrace and engulf them. And

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 319

indeed, as he dares to show more of his face, practical jokers test
the stamina of his curiosity. A mischievous little cousin puts out
his tongue and hoots at him; an uncle grasps his nose and gently
presses it in synchronization with the ship’s whistle. A handsome
young man laughs loudly when he sees him, good-nararedly so,
but one cannot be sure. Finally, the boy is cloutPAl on the head
and pushed into a small boat.

The family is then seen marching up the ceurer of the street
tramping heavily in compact closeness, like a procession of pil¬
grims, or maybe a band of prisoners—or both. Undercurrents
of hostile gossip become louder. Somebody whispers, “They are
still fighting over their shares of the old man’s property.” Some¬
body suggests that Alyosha’s widowed mother has come home
to exact another dowry from her father. The grandmother,
whose large frame leads the procession, whisperingly wails,
“Children, children,” as if the measure of progeny were over¬
flowing.

Now we see this large family at home, crowded into a small
room and immersed in a sequence of strange moods. A balalaika
suggests tentative tunes of misery and nostalgia. As if in lieu of
a prayer before the meal which is laid out before them, these
people indulge in musical self-commiseration, together and yet
each in his own preoccupied way. Old Gregory expresses the
theme most strikingly: in rhythm with the song he beats his own
head. It is not clear which he is enjoying more, the rhythm or
the beating.

But as if enough were enough. Uncle Yakov’s expression sud¬
denly changes. He takes a sip (of vodka?), he smells a whiff
(of an onion?) and plays a gay and rhythmic tune, singing some
nonsense of crickets and roaches. There is an immediate and
electrifying crescendo, too fast for a Western mind to compre¬
hend. Then we see Gypsy dance the squatting dance.

Gypsy is young and handsome; and as he loosens his sleeves,
pulls his shirttails out, and generally “unties” himself, he gives
the most relaxedly vigorous performance of the whole picture.

320 Childhood and Society

He leaps in the air, slaps his heels, and kicks his legs out from
under him. The whole crowded room responds, as if in a gay
earthquake. The furniture rocks, dishes jiggle, even the water
in the decanter sways.

This most manly performance somehow is then replaced with
a scene of generous femininity. The grandmother herself is pre¬
vailed upon to dance. Grandmother is really an enormous old
woman, heavily wrapped in clothing, with a square head and
broad face, and with a smile like the dawn. This heavy crea¬
ture manages to be first childishly shy, then girlishly pleased,
and then to move her strong frame in a sincerely serene fashion
suggesting utter charm and lightness. She does not move her feet
much, her body remains straight and regal; but as she slowly
turns, she extends first one, then both of her arms, lifting her
heavy shawl, as if baring to everybody her broad breasts.

At this moment she suddenly stops, pales, and draws her shawl
around her shoulders. The music stops, motion freezes. All eyes
stare at the door: grandfather has entered. To be sure: we had
not even missed him. Yet nothing could be stronger than the im¬
plication that it was only in his absence that grandmother could
bare her heart and her body to her children.

These vigorous scenes mark a happy beginning, or rather the
reference to a happy past. As Westerners we had better pre¬
pare ourselves for Ae fact that there is no happy ending in this
movie: no love story, no success story. What we see at the be¬
ginning is the remembrance of things past; at the end there will
be a future of which only one thing is certain: it will be bitter.
“Gorky” means “bitter.”

For the grandfather has entered, and with him miserliness and
the hate of men. His face is tense, his motions jerky; he is all
secretive excitement. It seems that instead of joining them he
left to buy a tablecloth, a white tablecloth. As he childishly shows
it around, it becomes plain that to him the white tablecloth is a
symbol of his status: He is trying to use the reception for an
egotistic display of the fact that he is now rich enough to be
able to afford a white tablecloth. He is obviously a first-

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 321

generation small factory owner, hardly urbanized, yet already
exposed to proletarization.

Immediately whispers and shouts take up the question of his
property. When is he going to retire, to distribute his wealth to
his already nearly middle-aged sons?

As angry whispers increase, the grandfather shouts in a shrill,
senile way: “Silence! 1 give to no one!” His voice betrays the
despair but also the last strength of a cornered animal. The
grandfather’s shouting is like a signal for murderous glances be¬
tween his sons. Soon the sons roll on the floor fighting one an¬
other in drunken rage. The grandfather’s coat gets entangled
and his sleeve is tom. He (quite surprisingly) turns against his
wife. “Witch!” he whines. “You gave birth to wild animals !”—2
theme to be remembered.

As the guests disperse in panic, as the festive table becomes
a ruin, poor little Alyosha flees to the top of the stove, the
refuge of babies. He has seen enough for his first day. So far
he has not said a word. What it all meant and what it will mean
to him in the end can be seen only in the way he acts or indeed
refrains from participating, as the theme of this reception is
elaborated in a sequence of variations.

So that we may concentrate on the nature of these variations, I
shall outline first the whole story.

Aloysha’s father, Maxim Pyeshkov, left the house of his in-laws,
the Kashirins, years ago. He has died in a faraway region. Var¬
vara, the mother, and Alyosha are forced to return. The Kashirins
are a greedy lot. The uncles (Vanya and Yakov) want the senile
grandfather to turn his dye factory over to them. He refuses. At
first they get even with him in “practical jokes.” He revenges
himself by flogging his small grandsons. One of the uncles sets
fire to the establishment, and the disintegration of the family be¬
gins. Alyosha’s mother finds refuge in a marriage to a petty offi¬
cial and moves to the city. Alyosha is left with his grandparents
and must witness the grandfather’s economic and mental decline.
He finds friends outside of the family. At home, there are old
Gregory, the foreman who during the fire loses his eyesight, and

32 2 Childhood and Society

Ivan (“Gypsy”)» the apprentice, who later dies. In the streets
Alyosha befriends a gang of homeless boys and a crippled young¬
ster, Lyenka. Most decisive, however, is his encounter with a
mysterious boarder, who is later arrested by the police as an “an¬
archist.” At the end we sec Alyosha, now perhaps twelve or four¬
teen, set a resolute face toward the horizon. He leaves decay be¬
hind. Little is said of what lies ahead.

Throughout these scenes Alyosha does not say or do much.
He participates rarely, but he observes eagerly, and mostly he re¬
acts by refraining from participation. Such dramatization by
omission is hardly a feature of what we Westerners consider
a story.

By studying the omissions as much as the commissions, I
gradually became convinced that the very meaning of these
scenes is that of way stations of temptation: temptations of a kind
strange to us.

To put it in terms of our radio announcements: will Aloysha
submit to his grandmother’s primitive fatalism? VV^ill his mother’s
betrayal make him a pessimist? Will his grandfather’s sadism pro¬
voke him into patricidal rage—and futile remorse? Will the
fratricidal uncles induce him to share their crimes—and their
drunken soul-baring? Will the blind and the crippled arouse
paralyzing pity and cheap charity in him? Will it all deflect him
—from becoming Gorky?

Each scene and each significant person thus represents a tempta¬
tion to regress to the traditional morality and to the ancient folk¬
ways of his people, to remain bound by the traditional superego
within and by serfdom without. On the positive side, Alyosha Ls
seen to become sure of himself, as if he had taken a secret vow;
and he seems to devote himself to an unformulated goal.

Westerners, of course, have learned to identify what we here
call temptations with the quaintness of the Russian soul—and
with its brand of CHiristianity. And we get angry if people do not
stick to the brand of soul which they have advertised and which
has become their easy label. But we must try to understand:
Alyosha, by virtue of his fate as a displaced Pyeshkov among the

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 323

Kashirins, demonstrates the way stations of an emergent new
Russian frame of mind, a Russian individualism. No Luther, no
Calvin has shown him new recesses of the mind; and no founding
fathers and pioneers have opened up uncharted continents where
he might overreome his inner and his outer serfdom. By himself,
and in secret agreement with kindred minds, he must leam to
protest, and to develop—^in the very widest sense—a “protestant”
morality.

1. THE MOTHERS

We have met with a display of grandmother’s strength, charm,
and generosity in the reception scene. By far the greatest tempta¬
tion, and the one which accompanies Alyosha to the very end, is
that of finding refuge in his grandmother’s peace of mind (as—at
the very beginning of the picture—he hid in his mother’s full
skirts) and becoming part of her calm conscience. This old
woman seems to represent the matter-of-factness of the earth,
the self-evident strength of the flesh, and the native stoutness of
the heart. Her maternal generosity is boundless. Not only did she
bear and nurse the Kashirin breed, whom she has learned to en¬
dure; she also found and fondled Gypsy, making the homeless
boy free and gay.

It becomes increasingly clear to Alyosha that the grandmother
is even nursing the wailing grandfather along. In the fatal matter
of property distribution, her principles are simple if “unprin¬
cipled”: “Give it away,” she says; “you will feel better.” And in
the face of the old man’s horror she says, “I’ll go begging for
you.” At the same time she lets the senile man beat her, simply
going down on her knees as if he had actually been strong enough
to push her down. Alyosha is bewildered. “You arc stronger than
he!” he cries. “Yes,” she acknowledges, “but he is my husband.”
Soon she becomes Alyosha’s mother as well For as Varvara leaves
the grandmother says simply: “I will be his grandmother and his
mother.”

This woman seems to know no law but that of giving; no prin¬
ciples except the complete trust in her own inner endurance; in

324 Childhood and Society

this she obviously symbolizes the primitive trust of the people,
their ability to survive and to persist, and yet also their weakness
in enduring what will ultimately enslave them.

Alyosha comes to accept the grandmother’s grandiose endur¬
ance as something from another world. This world, it seems, is
the oldest Russia and the deepest stratum of her identity. It is the
primitive Russia which persisted through the early Christian era,
when wooden images survived forced baptisms and naive Chris-
tianizations. It is the peace of mind of the original stockade, the
primitive mir which had found some organization close to the
earth and some faith in animistic dealings with the wild forces in
nature. Grandmother sdll uses animistic practices in secret. She
remembers the old ballads and can say them simply and forcefully.
She is not afraid of God or of the elements. She proves to be on
quite good terms with fire, which throughout the picture sym¬
bolizes destructive passion.

During the great fire grandmother enters the burning house to
remove a bottle of vitriol; and she easily calms the horse which is
rearing and plunging. “Did you really think 1 would let you bum
in there.^ ” she says, and the horse seems to be reassured. She accepts
the passions of men as she accepts the fire: both are external if un¬
avoidable evils. It is as if she had lived long before passions had
made men ambitious, greedy, and, in turn, childishly repentant;
and as if she expected to outlast it all.

Her passion, then is compassion. Even when she prays to God,
she is most intimate with Him, as if He really resided in the icon
right in front of her. Her approach is that of equality, or even
that of a mother asking something of a child of hers who had hap>-
pened to become God. She does not need to be destructive in her
passion, because her conscience is without cruelty. Thus she is a
primitive Madonna, a mother of God and man, and of spirits, too.

The grandmother thus assumes that place in the boy’s life which
women in Russia play traditionally for “anybody’s” children:
the role of the babushka, and that of the nyanya: women who
are at home in this world because (and often only as long as)
they make it a home for others. Like the big stove in the center of

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 325

the house, they can be relied upon eternally—a reliance of the
kind which makes a people endure and permits it to wait, to wait
so long that reliance becomes apathy and stamina becomes serf¬
dom,

Alyosha must not only learn to leave his mothers, but more, to
leave without a residue of sinfulness which makes a straying soul
penitently hold on to mother symbols: as if, in tearing himself
away, he had destroyed his mother. For it seems as if much of
the morbid and unrestrained surrender of the soul had its source
in the necessity of overcoming an overwhelming sense of having
ravished and abandoned the maternal origin and of restoring by
soul-fusion the earliest sense of home.

That home, it seems, is not of necessity the real mother. There
are series and degrees of motherhood in peasant Russia which
prevent an exclusive mother-fixation and give the child a rich in¬
ventory of giving and frustrating mother-images. The babushka
is and remains the representative of the mother-image of infancy,
unmarred by the growing boy’s more specific jealousies.

In our picture Alyosha’s “real” mother becomes vague and al¬
most without a will of her own; she gradually recedes, first as a
source of strength and then as an object of affection. There is a
moment at the beginning when this mother, to protect her child,
proudly sails into one of the unkind uncles, kicking him over like
a piece of furniture. At this point Alyosha gives in to temptation
and says loudly, “My mother is strong.” The poor boy has to eat
these words later, when he is flogged by his grandfather,
while his awe-stricken mother can only whimper, “Don’t do it,
papasha.” “Ntm is your mother strong?” echoes the mean little
cousin. The weakness of women is not physicaL It is that they
“give in.”

While the grandmother is a law unto herself and is unprincipled
only because she antedates the principles of formulated morality,
the mother chooses the hypocritical safety of petty oflScialdom.
She sells herself in marriage to a uniformed lackey of a man, and
explains to the boy that thus will she be able to buy freedom for
him. This once, this single once, he acts violently, passionately.

326 Childhood and Society

He insults the mother’s suitor, throws himself on his bed, and
cries as a child cries. As she leaves she permits him to immerse
himself once more in her physical presence, by enfolding him in
her shawl. But there is no suggestion that he intends to follow her,
to take advantage of her personal and social betrayal. “It seems
to be your fate to stay wath me,” says old Kashirin. The boy is
silent and grim.

One wonders: Tine traditional division and diffusion of mother¬
hood in peasant Russia probably made the world a more reliable
home, since mothering w'as not dependent on one frail relation¬
ship bur was a matter of homogeneous atmosphere. And yet a
bitter nostalgia was plainly related to the mother’s turning to
“another man,” or the mother’s permitting herself otherwise to
be degraded and destroyed—or so it often seems in the literature.
As to Alyosha’s special case, remember that Hitler’s father, too,
was an official, a member of the servile and yet officious “mid¬
dling” class.

The Alyosha of the moving picture determinedly swallows his
nostalgia. What such “swallowed nostalgia” did to the real Gorlcy
we shall see later when discussing his fits of anger and contempt
and his strange attempt at suicide in young manhood. His writing
long suffered from nostalgia. Chekhov wrote to him: “[YourJ
lack of restraint is felt especially in the description of nature . . .
in your description of women . . . and in your love scenes. You
speak a great deal about waves ...” * Gorky worked hard to
overcome this weakness.

3. SENILE DESPOT AND CURSED BREED

The grandfather is a little man with “reddish beard, green eyes,
and hands that seemed to be smeared with blood, the dye had so
eaten into the skin. His abuse and prayers, his jests and moralizing,
all merged in some strange way into a rasping, caustic whine that
ate like rust into one’s heart.” * The movie reflects this dcscrip-

•A. Roskin, From the Banks of the *Maxim Gorlcy, Reminiscences of
VolgOj Philosophical Library, New Tolstoy, The Viking Press, Inc^ New
Yorl^ 1946. York.

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 327

don faithfully. The grandfather is depicted as the destroyer of all
boyish gaiety. He is a man dependent to the point of childishness
on his money and on his wife’s strength- A sadisric-retentive
miser, he gradually regresses to the dependence of a beggar.

The variables of his character become most apparent in the
flogging scene. The anger of the man, which flared up at the
violent end of the reception scene, smoulders on. We become
acquainted with the dye establishment where the uncles, hunched
over their sewing, furtively diink of mean revenge. Practical
jokes again precede more direct destruction. The uncles make
Sasha heat grandfather’s thimble over a flame and put it back in
place. As he puts Iiis outstretched finger into it, he “nearly goes
through the ceiling” with pain. But the grandfather’s very core
is invaded when Alyosha, in his only boyish prank, is led by the
other boys to dye the new tablecloth, to destroy its whiteness.
The grandfather decides to flog the boys—on the Sabbath, after
church.

The flogging is shown in great detail: the grandfather’s cold
preparations; the women’s dramatic but impotent intervention;
the whining of the whip and the writhing of the small bodies.
Gypsy must hold them down on the bench of torture.

After the flogging Alyosha hes in bed—on his face, for his
back is marked with long, thin welts. Suddenly the grandfather
enters. The boy views him first suspiciously, then angrily. But
the grandfather dangles nicely shaped cookies before his eyes.
Tlie boy kicks him, the old man ignores it. Kneeling down by
the boy’s bed, he pleads with him: “You are not suffering for
nothing, it will all add up.” The sadist thus introduces the mas¬
ochistic tlieme that suffering is good for salvation, that as we
suffer we stack up credit for ourselves on a heavenly board of
accounting. But he goes further. He speaks of his own suff'erings
as a Volga boatman, in his youth. When you draw barges in bare
feet along river beaches with sharp stones, “your eyes fill, your
soul weeps, your tears drop,” he says with deep emotion. Again,
the implication is that a man’s suffering explains and excuses his
imparting further suflfering on those weaker than himself, a Rus-

328 Childhood and Socie^

sian form of saying, “What was good enough for me is good
enough for you.” The boy does not seem moved. He makes no
gesture of peace; nor does he repay the outpouring of the grand¬
father’s soul with an exchange of commiseration. The grandfather
is called away.

Another temptation has passed: that of acquiring in a moment
of torment an identification with the tormentor and with his sado¬
masochistic reasoning. If the boy had permitted his anger at this
moment to turn into pity, if he had let his soul pour out to the
tormentor who was opening his own soul to him, he would have
acquired that pattern of masochistic identification with authority
which apparently has been a strong collective force in the history
of Russia. The Tsar, as the little white father, was just such a
»ymbol of pitied autocracy. As we shall see, even the man whom
history called Ivan the Terrible was to his people only Ivan the
Severe, for he claimed that as a child he had suffered under the
cruelty of the court oligarchy.

The grandfather’s sado-masochistic mood-swings are illus¬
trated in other scenes. As his property slips away from him he
wails before the icon, “Am 1 a worse sinner than the others?” The
icon docs not answer. But the grandmother takes him into her
arms, almost on her lap. She calms him and promises to go begging
for him. He collapses on her in foolish fondness, only to rally
suddenly and to knock her down in a rage of jealousy, for he
claims she loves the cursed breed more than she loves him. The
implication is obvious that his wife is his property and his property
is a kind of substitute mother without whom he cannot live. The
“privileged owner’s” otter defeat in the oedipus game is, of
course, one of the prime propagandistic notes of the picture—
just as the defeat of Hitler’s father was a necessary note in his
imagery. The grandfather becomes more and more senile, and be¬
comes useless as a provider.

In one of the final scenes Alyosha brings his fight with his
grandfather to victorious conclusion. He has just given grand¬
mother a coin which he has earned; she looks tenderly at turn. At

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 329

this point Alyosha becomes aware of his grandfather’s eyes, which
arc narrowed down with hate. Alyosha takes on the challenge and
a duel of the eyes ensues. The boy’s eyes become thin as razor
blades and it is as if the two wanted to pierce and cut one another
with their glances. They both know that this is the end, and that
the boy must leave. But he leaves undefeated.

This cutting of eye by eye is an impressive encounter. Yet
there is something Russian about this particular use of the eye as
an aggressive and defensive weapon. In Russian literature there
is endless variation in the use of the eye as a soulful receptor, as an
avid grasper, and as the very organ for mutual soulful surrender.
In regard to the great models of political and literary life, how¬
ever, the emphasis is on the eye as an incorruptible instrument for
the manipulation of the future. Gorky’s description of Tolstoy is
typical: “With sharp eyes, from which neither a single pebble nor
a single thought could hide itself, he looked, measured, tested,
compared.” Or again, his eyes arc “screwed up as though strain¬
ing to look into the future.”

Equally typical is Trotsky’s description of Lenin: “W’hen
Lenin, his left eye narrowed, receives a wireless containing a
speech he resembles a devilishly clever peasant who docs not let
Itself be confused by any words, or deluded by any phrases.
That is highly intensified peasant shrewdness, lifted to the point
of inspiration.” ‘

The scene of the grandfather sitting by the bedside of his
bruised grandson, in that shabby hut, begging his forgiveness,
somehow reminded me of a famous Russian painting showing a
similar scene in a palace: Ivan the Terrible sits by the corpse of
his oldest son, whom he has murdered- Paternal violence a la
Kashirin characterizes Russia’s leading families from the begin¬
ning of history, and it permeates the literature of the pre¬
revolutionary epoch. In both it developed to heights of crude

*I.eon Trotsky, “The Russian in Lenin," Current History Magazine, March,
1924.

330 Childhood and Society

violence unknown m comparable regions and periods of history.
The coincidence of these two scenes invites a digression into
history.

The original Slavs were peaceful and prolific peasants, hunters,
and stockade dwellers. About a thousand years ago they asked
Rurilc, a Viking, to undertake their protection against nomadic in¬
vaders from the south. They apparently thought to buy, against
reasonable concessions, peace and the permission to maintain the
status quo of hunting with primitive weapons, of cultivating
the soil with their crude wooden tools, and of worshiping their
wooden idols and nature gods. Whatever forced them to surren¬
der their autonomy to those shiningly armored, light-skinned
warriors of the north, they received more protection than they
had bargained for. The protectors begot sons who wanted to be
in on the protection business. “Foreigners” muscled in. Soon, pro¬
tecting the people against other protectors became an established
occupation. Tlic first prince initiated the grand-prince system, a
kind of rank-order of residences for his sons which led to end¬
less feuds over the cities which first emerged: Kiev and Nov¬
gorod. Such feuds were repeated over and over in smaller and
larger segments of the land, making the people at last wish and
pray for the one “strong father,” the central authority who would
unite the various sons even if he had to murder them all. Tlius in
early Russian history the stage was set for the interplay of the
people who needed guidance and protection against enemies; the
oligarchic protectors who became petty tyrants; and the central
super-tyrant who was a victim as well as a redeemer.

The protectors forcibly introduced Christianity (of the Byzan¬
tine variety) and with it another hierarchy which forever re¬
mained locked in conflict with itself and with the worldly princes.
While both the princes and the priests had their cultural and
often their ethnic origins in a variety of other lands, they gradu¬
ally began to perform the spectacle which the books call Russian
history: a sequence of dynastic struggles which not only survived
the terrible Tartar invasion but gained in violent momentum and
national scope. By way of counterpoint, these led to the estab-

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 331

Ushment of a nation, of a Russian Christianity, and of a Russian
tsardom: in the fifteenth century Moscow became “the third
Rome” and Ivan 111 the first ruler of all the Russians and the
Protector of the True Faith. He made ancient Russia into a na¬
tional state; his son expanded this Russian state over its numerous
and varied neighbors.

With Ivan the Terrible the tradition, existing since the tenth
century, of “quarrelsome and murderous sons” reached its climax.
Parricide had abounded in high circles for centuries. But Ivan,
whom history calls “the Terrible,” slew his oldest, his favorite,
son with his own hands. He (like old Kashirin at bruised Alyo¬
sha’s bedside) blamed his sufferings as a boy for the cruel madness
of his manhood. The people agreed. As I have pointed out, they
did not call him the Terrible, as did history; tliey called him the
Severe. For had he not been the victim of the oligarchic aristoc¬
racy—his enemies, and the people’s—who had made his boyhood
miserable? And indeed this first Tsar had turned in his saner
moments to the people, had permitted them to petition him, had
initiated judiciary reforms and introduced printing. In his insaner
states he continued to gloat over lists of murdered aristocrats, only
to indulge, in rum, in the most abject remorse. The people idol¬
ized and gladly strengthened the authority of this Tsar in order
to keep the princes, aristocrats, and middle classes in check.

As centralization progressed and national organization devel¬
oped, the paradoxes of Russian history became self-perpemating.
For one: with every step toward organized and centralized state¬
hood in this immense land, the number of middlemen increased.
They governed and policed “for the Tsar,” they taught school
and collected taxes, and they extorted and corrupted. It is an old
theme in Russia that every progress on a national scale is paid for
with new power to a bureaucracy—which explains an “inborn”
hostile indifference of the people both to progress in general and
to the contemporary oligarchy in particular.

Secondly, every step toward Westernization and enlighten¬
ment led to increased serfdom. Ivan, in pursuit of his holy “sever¬
ity,” robbed the peasants of their right to change masters on St.

332 Childhood and Society

George’s day. Catherine, friend and enlightened correspondent of
Voltaire, gave away 800,000 crown slaves to be tortured and sold
at will by individual aristocratic owners. And when much later
Alexander II liberated twenty million slaves, because he feared
that they might liberate themselves, he only exposed them to
landlessness, prolctarization, and at best the necessity of tilling
with antiquated tools small portions of land to be paid for in in¬
stallments.

But what interests us here is the third paradox: the people’s tacit
permission for these tsars to behave in an exceptionally irrational
way. Peter the Great, a precocious boy and impetuous like Ivan,
was Russia’s first emperor and the greatest of Russia’s monarchic
reformers. He, too, murdered his oldest son, although with pro¬
gressing civilization he used his secret police, not a club in his own
hands. In addition to such outright family murders, there were
in Russian history all kinds of strange regency arrangements.
There were mysterious and immensely popular pretenders, al¬
leged sons of murdered tsars, who, like Alyosha, came back to
challenge the evildoers; and who were almost holy by mere virtue
of not belonging to the dominant “cursed breed.” Maybe the
height of oedipal atrocity was reached when near-demented Tsar
Paul (the people called him the Poor), at the death of his mother
Catherine, had his father (whom she had murdered) exhumed
and put beside her. Fie forced her numerous lovers to stand
splendid military guard over the decomposition of the imperial
corpses.

Historians take it for granted that such is “history.” But how
explain not only a people’s passive consent to but passionate
altruistic identification with such imperial tragedies and come¬
dies? Why should a sturdy and prolific people have bowed to
foreign protectors? Why did it admit their system into its na¬
tional life, involving its very life style ever deeper in a rela¬
tionship of mutual possessedness? Is the explanation to be sought
first in the superiority of murderous nomads and wild beasts, and
then in the impotence of this immense population against the
armed olig^chy?

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 333

The answer is probably that forms of leadership not only de¬
pend on the historical dangers to be warded off by their work of
organization; they must also serve what we call projections of all
kinds of psychological processes. Monarchs, even if foreign (and
often, because they are foreign) become outer safeguards of as
yet weak inner moral forces; aristocratic elites become personifi¬
cations of dimly perceived new ideals. It is for this purpose that
monarclis and aristocrats must demonstrate on the stage of history
the full cycle of the conflict: they must first sin more, and then
atone more deeply, and finally emerge with increased stature.
While they try to accomplish this cycle, the people will gladly
serve as their whispering chorus and their sacrificial animals. For
only grandiose sin promises total salvation.

This, then, is more than a “projection” either of inner badness
(the id) or of the cruel conscience of the superego. 1 think it has
also a collective ego function; it serves a process of distantiation,
objectivation, and mastery: it serves the development of a better-
defined national and moral identity. Ivan and Peter are great, not
in spite of the tragic passions which seemingly marred their
stature as leaders, but because they could display on a gigantic
scale the tragedy of early patriarchal organization and its inner
counterpart, the superego; and because in doing so, they advanced
national consciousness and national conscience, each by a decisive
step. Maybe our concept of liistory must be expanded to include
an analysis of the dynamic demands made by the governed masses
on their most “self-willed” masters who thus are forced to act
out the conflicts of human evolution on the macrocosmic stage
of history: in this sense, perhaps, kings are the toys of the people.
In later stages their tragedies and comedies are delegated to a
fictitious macrocosm, the stage, or to die microcosm of fiction.

Russian realistic literature finally put the tragedy of patricide
and fratricide back into the ordinary Russian himself.* Such lit-

•Freud, in his paper “Dostoevski and ure up to a common artistic greatness.
Patricide," likened The Brothers Kara- but also and especially because they
mazov to Shakespeare’s Hamlet and to take as their central theme the oedipus
Sophocles’ King Oedipus^ and this not complex,
only because these three works meas-

334 Childhood and Society

craxy pronouncement of individual responsibility parallels the
growth of political responsibility: Russian literature and Russian
history were late and explosive in reaching—in one terrifyingly
condensed century—the preliminary stages of an effective liter¬
ary consciousness and of a political conscience, while the back¬
wardness of the vast peasant masses continued to reflect a primi¬
tive historical level which the West had left behind in Hellenic
days.

Let us pause here to remember that at the time of the Russian
revolution four-fifths of the Russian population w^cre peasants.
The gigantic task of the outer transformation and inner conver¬
sion of these masses of peasants can hardly be overestimated, not
because they wanted another form of government., but because
they had never diought of an organized interlocking of their
daily lives with any form of government.

The moving picture’s characterization of the moody ‘‘breed”
points to at least one collective complex of a singularly archaic
character which has kept the peasant masses of Russia (and, in
fact, of much of the Eurasian continent) in inner serfdom as
their outer serfdom was assured by princes and priests. I refer to
the psychological consequences of an ancient technological revo¬
lution: the agricultural revolution. Here the mysteries of pre¬
history are as deep as those of early childhood. They both force
us to mythologize in order to gain the beginning of an under¬
standing.

In connection with the hunters and fishermen of prehistoric
North America we employed one key which opened certain
primitive rituals to interpretation. We pointed out that primi¬
tive human beings try to understand and to master the great
Unknown in its expansion in space and time by projecting the
attributes of human structure and growth on it: thus geographic
environment is personified, and historical past is endowed with
the imagery of human childhood. In this sense, then, the earth be¬
comes a mother who, once upon a rime, gave freely. The transi¬
tion from nomadic to agricultural life implied the usurpation of
segments of the soil, and their partition; the violation of the soil

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 335

with coercive tools; the subjugation of the earth as an enforced
provider. Whatever inner evolution accompanied this techno¬
logical step, it was mystically associated with that primal sin
which, in individual life, consists of the first awareness of the
coercive-manipulative wish to control the mother with the ma¬
turing organs of bite and grasp.

The “cursed breed” then represents the children who in their
rapacity would jealously usurp and destroy the mother; and the
men, whom the task of collectively tilling the soil made ambi¬
tious, jealous, and exploitive. Thus the sense of a primal guilt,
which we discussed earlier, supports a universal institution, chain¬
ing the peasant to the cycle of sorrowful atonement and manic
feasting as well as to that of the productive year. Christianity, of
course, took hold of this self-perpetuating cycle and suj^erim-
posed on it its own yearly calendar of sin and expiation, of death
and redemption.

I can conclude this dark subject only by referring to a memoir
of Gorky’s which betrays the manic identification of earth and
woman.

He [Chekhov] used to say;

“If every man did all he could on the piece of eartli belonging to
him, how beautiful would this world be!”

I had started to write a play called Vasska Busslacv and one day I
read to him Vasska’s boastful monologue:

“Ha, were I only endowed with more strength and power
Fd breathe a hot breath—and make die snows melt!

Fd go round the earth and plough it through and through!

Fd walk for years and years and build town after town.

Put up churches without number, and grow gardens without end,
Fd adorn the earth—as though it were a maiden fair.

Clasp it in my arms—as though it were my bride;

Lift it to my heart, and carry it to God: . . • .

“Fd have given it to you, Lord, as a fine gift—

Only—^no—^it would not do—I am too fond of it myself!

^Maxim Gorky, Rendniscences of Anton Cbekbov^ The Viking Press, Inc.,
New York.

336 Childhood and Society

Chekhov liked this monologue very much, and coughing excitedly
said:

•"That’s very fine indeed! Very true, and very human! In this lies
the essence of all philosophy. Man has made die earth habitable—
therefore he must also make it comfortable for himself.”

He shook his head in obstinate affirmation and repeated:

•‘He will!”

He asked me to read Vasska’s boastful speech over again. I did so
and he listened attentively to the end, then he remarked:

“llie last two lines are unnecessary—they are impertinent. There
is no necessity for that. . .

4. TflE EXPLOITED

A. SAINT AND BEGGAR

Gypsy, the foundling, was not bom in sin like the rest of the
breed, the uncles, the “wild animals.” Not having been bom in
sin, he has, as the grandmother puts it, a “simple soul.” I le has a
graceful body, as he well demonstrated in his squatting dance,
while the other men seem wooden and unfree in their motions
and when drunk or enraged are like trucks without brakes. Not
being anybody’s son, Gypsy expects no property and envies
none. It is as if his orphanhood suggested immaculate conception.
And, indeed, in a subtle way, Gypsy is pictured as a Christian,
charitable and always in hope.

Gypsy speaks to Alyosha of his father. He was different: be
understood. For this reason he was hated by the Kashirins. Here
a theme is introduced which is later taken up at the appearance of
the anarchist, the representative of those who understand and ac¬
cept homelessness. They arc hated by the fathers and their
rapacious sons as bearers of an entirely new principle which can¬
not be fought with old weapons: they read, think, plan.

Gypsy recognizes those who understand but he himself docs
not “understand.” He has another fault and is dangerously dif¬
ferent in another way: he is After the flogging his arm

shows bloody welts, and he confesses cheerfully that in holding
the boy down on the bench he had let his arms absorb the heaviest
blows. *^1 took the blows for love,” he tells the spellbound boy,
whose heart goes out to him. But then Gypsy expounds on

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 337

methods of how to take blows. Don’t shrink back, he tells him,
but try to relax. And shout as much as you wish. He confesses
that he has taken so many blows that his hide would make good
book covers.

Again, the implication of this scene is not formulated- But it
seems to concern the temptation of good-natured non-violence, of
Christian goodness and of learning to endure the pains of the
world by adjusting to its beatings. Alyosha is touched and fasci¬
nated, but remains reserved. And indeed, soon after, he sees
Gypsy die in a picturesque and symbolic way.

One of the uncles wants to erect a huge cross for his dead wife
(whom, as Gypsy knows, he has murdered). He asks Gypsy to
help him carry it up the designated hill. As everybody can see,
the enormous cross is too heavy for one man. But Gypsy in
childlike pride boasts that he can carry it on his back—all alone.
Alyosha for a moment feels an urge to help him; the audience
trembles with fear that the little boy may try to help support that
big cross, bur then—as at several highly critical moments—
Alyosha simply lets himself be deflected, and leaves his friend to
his fate.

In a scene obviously intended to suggest Calvary, Gypsy is
seen in silhouette stumbling up a faraway hill with the huge cross
on his bent back. It apparently crushes him, for soon he is carried
back to the house, where he dies on the floor. A little wliite
mouse, with which he has endlessly entertained himself and the
children, escapes from his clothing and runs over to Alyosha, who
catches it. It is as if Gypsy’s ‘‘white soul” were trying to find a
new home, in Alyosha,

If the grandmother represents the primitive folkways, and the
grandfather and the uncles the greedy era of the ownership of
lands and goods and wives and titles, then Gypsy is the simple
saint of a primitive Christian era. He is cheerfully good, and
charitable to the end.

This boy Alyosha, then, watches the destruction around him
and yet maintains a sleepwalker’s siirefootedness in the avoidance
of fatal involvements and of traditional pitfalls. Docs Alyosha
have no sympathy, no morality?

338 Childhood and Society

Take his encounter with old Gregory, the very individual who
drags him away as Gypsy’s Calvary approaches (for Gregory,
nearly blind, can sec what lies ahead). He is an impressive, a
prophetic figure. But he has worked in the grandfather’s dye
factory for nearly four decades, and faces unemployment when
his waning eyesight is gone. Because the grandfather refuses to
take care of him, Gregory will have to go begging. Alyosha is
horrified. “1 will go with you,” he cries compassionately. “I will
lead you by the hand!”

But after the fire, as blinded Gregory stumbles around with
outstretched amts, miserably calling Alyosha, the boy hides from
him and lets him stumble on alone in Iiis eternal night. Two or
three times he is later shown following Gregory, then a beggar
on the street and on the fairground. In fact, Alyosha stalks Greg¬
ory as if fascinated by the sight.

The Western movie-goer cannot help thinking what a touch¬
ing picture they would make together, the tall blinded patriarchal
figure and the boy who leads him by the hand. He envisages an
ending where the tormented grandfather reforms and sends out
a statewide alarm for the two, when it may already be too late.
The sheriff’s posse or the state motorcycle patrol reaches the old
man and the small boy just as they arc about to reach a bridge
weakened by a flooded river. . . .

But it is clear that what we are watching in tliis picture is the
emergence of a new frame of mind, a frame of mind which to us
is primarily characterized by its omissions. What is omitted, again
and again, is action based on a sense of guilt. Thus neither remorse
nor reform seems to count in this new frame of mind. What
counts is critical patience, incorruptible avoidance and absolute
intolerance of wrong action, clear inner direction, and then—
action.*

•See the following exchange at the Moscow trials:

Vishinsky: “Did you endorse these negotiations [with the Germans]?**
Bukharin: “Or disavow? 1 did not disavow, consequently I endorsed.**
Vishinsky: “But you say that you learned of this post factum.**
Bukharin: “Yes, die one docs not contradict die other.**

The Legend of Maxiin Gorky’s Youth 339

The Western observer at tliis point decides that the picture has
less than a moral, that it is amoral. It may be, however, that the
picture merely poses moral alternatives quite different from those
to which we are committed. When Alyosha avoids being drawn
into the temptation of sacrificing his young life to the blind old
man he breaks, it is true, a promise to an individual—a promise
possibly made on the basis of a sense of shared guilt, a sense that
he should make up for his grandfather’s economic sins, perhaps a
deeper sense of ocdipal sin. Opposed to this “temptation” there
would be an inner vow, a vow to follow a direction, an as yet in¬
distinct plan which, instead of the self-perpetuation of inner
guilt, will lead to co-operative action beyond good and evil. Such
a vow is personified by another member of the cast: the anarchist.

But a final scene should be noted which in its crude imagery
shows the utter contempt of the new generation for the moral
collapse of the old. As the by now thoroughly senile grandfather
begs his way through the crowd at the fair, old Gregory, his erst¬
while foreman, responds to his wail and hands him a piece of
bread. The grandfather, now recognizing the blind man, throws
the bread away, crying: “You have eaten me out of my house! ”
It is a cruel scene, from our point of view; but little Alyosha turns
away from it, not even with visible disgust. To leave the ruins of
men and systems behind seems to be a job which does not call for
any expenditure of emotion.

B. THE S'FRANGER

AH this time there is a man in the village, in fact in a room of
grandfather’s house, who belongs nowhere and speaks with no
one. He is not a serf, and yet he owns nothing; he has nothing to
sell, and yet he seems to eat. He calls himself a chemist, yet he
does not seem to work. With his black hair, his high forehead, and
his sharp, bespectacled eyes, he looks like a youngish, somewhat
starved Trotsky.

As Alyosha one day trustingly slides through this man’s win¬
dow into his underground room, the man quickly hides a book.
Then he calmly gases the boy out of his room by opening a bottle

340 Childhood and Society

with some malodorous vapors. The boy is offended, but even
more fascinated.

He sees the man again at a meeting at which the grandmother
sings ancient legends and ballads. In simple and strong words we
hear her recite a long legend which contains the sentence: *‘Be~
bind the conscience of others he did not hide” At this the man
gets strangely excited as if hearing an oracle. He mumbles some¬
thing concerning “the people, our people” (which apparently
refers to the quality of old folk wisdom) and leaves the room
hurriedly. It may be symbolical that, thus swayed with emotions,
he leaves his glasses behind. At any rate, Alyosha picks them
up.

In the next scene Alyosha sees the strange man lying in the
grass on top of the cliff overlooking the river. The man hardly
^anks him for the glasses. In fact, he somewhat rudely indicates
that the boy may sit beside him if he can manage to be quiet and
to join his contemplative mood. Thus this man, tlie river, the vast
horizon, and a new frame of mind become and remain associated.
The man’s commanding presence seems to proclaim that you
mtist be able to be silent; you must be able to meditate; you must
be willing to envisage the distant horizon. Explicitly he says:
“You must remember all the legends the grandmother knows.
You must learn to read and to write.” Alyosha is astonished, but
apparently takes a deep liking to the man’s fervor and sincerity.

Their friendship does not last long; or rather, their friendship
must outlast a very short acquaintance, for the greedy grand¬
father forces the stranger to vacate his room and the man decides
to leave town.

A gang of homeless boys accompany him to the river. But he
puts his arm on Alyosha’s shoulder. He passionately tells the boy:
“One must learn how to take life.” He says this with such mis¬
sionary fervor that one senses a significance in it which surpasses
the words used. Here we must turn linguist.

The man’s gestures indicate that he means “take” in the sense
of grasping or holding on, and not in the sense of enduring or
holding out. Yet when I saw the picture the first time, my Rus-

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 341

nan interpreter insisted that the man had said “braf ”—^take =
endure. For reasons to be discussed presently, this difference
seemed so basic that I persisted in inquiring into the origin of the
discrepancy between the word and the gesture. And indeed, in
the book on which this movie is based, the revolutionary says:
“One must know how to take (Russian tozyal^) each single thing.
Do you understand? It is very difficult to learn how to take
(•wzyaf).” IVzyat' means “to take” in the sense of “grasp.” It is
apparent, then, that the word but not the meaning was lost some¬
where between the book and the picture.

The meaning is: One must learn nor to wait until one is given,
one must grasp what one wants and hold on to it. We have dis¬
cussed this alternative in connection with the social modalities of
the oral stages. Obviously this man does not only mean to say that
one must grasp, but also that one must do so with a good con¬
science, with a new conscience; that one must grasp and not
regress from sheer sense of sin over having grasped.

As we shall sec, this determined “grasping,” paired with a
resistance against sinking back into dependence, is of outstanding
importance in the Bolshevik psychology. We have already re¬
ported on Alyosha’s piercing, cutting way of reacting to the
grandfather’s hateful glance; we have pointed to the importance
of focusing, comprehending, grasping in vision and foresight; and
we have shown his incorruptibility of purpose, irrespective of
personal feelings.

It later becomes apparent that the stranger was a revolutionary.
The police were looking for him. They caught up with him some¬
where beyond the horizon; for one day when a miserable group
of shabby, shackled prisoners pass through Alyosha’s street on
their way to the boat and to Siberia, the stranger is among them,
pale and ghostlike but almost gay.

The caption says, “Thus ended my friendship with the first of
a series of strangers in their own country—the best people.”

Alyosha, then, has come face to face with a member of the
underground of professional revolutionaries, called for a time in¬
telligentsia because of their religious belief in the necessity not

34 ^ Childhood and Society

only of reading and writing but also of mental discipline as the
salvation from apathy, Ictliargy, and serfdom.

a FATHERLESS GANG AND LEGLESS CUllJD

As the anarchist disappears, Aloysha seems to grow in stature.
He now has a goal, a fellowship. We must remember that liis
father, too, “understood”—and disappeared. Yet wc arc horri¬
fied to watch tills mere boy identify with the martyred ghost of
a man whose ethos was contained in a few obscure remarlcs.
Alyosha is a mere child; where is his childhood, who are his age
mates? Docs he ever play? •

Wc saw the abortive participation in the practical jokes of his
cousins and their malicious and devious ways of getting even with
the old man. The flogging scene—or, shall wc say, the greater
maturity following the grandfather’s moral defeat after the
flogging scene—put an end to that. In a later scene, as Alyosha
loolcs around the neighborhood, he comes across a group of well-
fed children who with stones and yells have fallen upon an idiot
boy. Alyosha immediately stands up for the idiot, whereupon
they turn on him by calling him a “Kashirin.” He protests, “I am
a Pyeshkov.” Like boys all the world over, they end up by throw¬
ing words at one another: Kashirin! Pyeshkov! Kashirin! Pyesh¬
kov! But as the boys begin to beat and kick him, a gang of starved
and ragged young creatures appears suddenly, frees him, and im¬
mediately befriends him.

This gang consists of homeless boys—“proletarians” in the
original sense. Alyosha becomes one of them, economically, in
that he joins their occupation of searching garbage pits for items
that can be sold to junk dealers; spiritually, in that he shares their
feeling that they cannot rely on their parents—if, indeed, they
have any. Thus in a few scenes Alyosha’s proletarization is dramat¬
ically demonstrated. He, a fatherless Pyeshkov, takes the side of
the idiot boy who is bom with inferior endowment; he associates

•Tolstoy once said to Gorky: is Tolstoy, The Viking Press, Inc., New

not easy to believe that you were once York.)
a child.” (Gorky, Reminiscences of

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 343

with those who have sunk below all caste and class. In one impres¬
sive scene he stumbles upon the fact that one of the gang, a boy
with Asiatic features, does not even know where he came from.
AJyosha laughs; it is one of his last laughs. Seeing the Asiatic's
despair and rage, he becomes immune to one more tern [Station: to
be proud of the name Pyeshkov. (As we know, he later chose his
father’s first name, Maxim, and the last name Gorky, which means
bitter.)

Now he is a proletarian too. After “work” he and his gang lie
up on the cliff—that mild elevation from which the dispossessed
look toward the horizon and the future. 7'here they dream—of
what? Of keeping pigeons so that they can set them free: “1 love
to sec pigeons circling in the bright summer sky.”

One day Alyosha hears a gay young voice from a cellar win¬
dow. I Ic follows the voice and finds Lyenka, a crippled boy, in
bed. His legs are paralyzed, they “don’t live, they are just there,”
as he explains. I le is thus imprisoned in his cellar. But he proves to
be living in a world of his own, a world of play and daydreams. He
keeps little animals in boxes and cages. They must share his cap¬
tivity. But one day he dreams he will sec die meadows and the
prairie, and then he will open all the little boxes and set the
animals free. In the meantime they are his microcosm; they reflect
the world outside. One little roach is “the landlord,” another the
“official’s wife.” The very oppressors of the real world are the
captives of his play world. It is as if his crippled state permitted
him to be the only child with a playful mind in the picture. His
laugh is the gayest and freest; his eyes are full of a delighted
sparkle. His sense of power seems to know no bounds; he is sure,
he tells Alyosha excitedly, that “a mouse could grow to be a
horse.”

Seeing the boy’s love for the animal companions of his impris¬
onment and his necessity and ability to invest a small thing like
a mouse with mythical possibilities, AJyosha after a faint trace of
hesitation gives him Gypsy’s white mouse. This little mouse, we
remember, had been Gypsy’s dying gift to him. It was his last
link to gaiety; it was his last toy. Why docs he give it away? Is

344 Childhood and Society

it pity, charity? Again Aloysha seems to grow in moral stature
by sacrificing a comfort, and by resisting a temptation; the
temptation to play, to dream, to hang on to fetishistic substitutes
which make prisons more bearable, and thus add to their shackles.
He knows that he will have to go without a toy. Thus, each of
Alyosha’s acts (or refusals to act) is like a vow. One after
another, the bridges of regression are cut and the infantile com¬
forts of the soul forever denied

Lyenka, however, can get free only if somebody will make him
free, will give him legs. And this is what Alyosha puts the “gang”
to work on. From among the treasures which they salvage
from the garbage heaps, they save items of machinery out of
which they build him a carriage, a mechanical prosthesis of loco¬
motor freedom.

D. THE SWADDLED BABY

The figure of Lyenka does not seem to be taken from Gorky’s
book. I do not know who invented it. But it seems significant that
this most emotionally gay of all the children is, as it were, the
least motional. His legs are tied “arc not alive, just there.” This
suggests a discussion of an outstanding Russian problem of child
training: swaddling.

In the great Russian peasant population, and to a varying degree
in ail the regions and classes which shared and continue to share
the common cultural heritage of the great central plains of Rus¬
sia, the item of child care called swaddling was developed to an
extreme. While the custom of bandaging newborn infants is
widespread, the ancient Russian extreme insists that the baby be
swaddled up to the neck, tightly enough to make a handy “log of
wood” out of the whole bundle, and that swaddling be continued
for nine months, for the greater part of the day and throughout
the night. Such procedure docs not result in any lasting loco¬
motor deficiency, although the unswaddled infant apparently has
to be taught to crawl. But the procedure falls under the heading
of those items of child training which must have a significant re¬
lation to the world image of the whole culture. I shall indicate to

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 345

what extent there seems to exist an affinity between the swaddling
situation and the themes of the movie under discussion.

If daily Russian reality of young Gorky’s time manifested 2
fraction of the loudness, intensity, and variety of emotional ex¬
pression which wc sec in this motion picture, the child’s aware¬
ness of emotion must be vivid and kaleidoscopic.

And indeed, there is no other literature which, like the Russian,
abounds in vasomotor excess. In Russian literature, people seem
both isolated and effusive. It is as if each individual were strangely
imprisoned in himself as in a restraining box of strangled emotions.
Yet he is forever seeking other souls by sighing, paling, and
blushing, by weeping and fainting. Many of the characters popu¬
lating this literature seem to live for the moment when some
intoxication—glandular, alcoholic, or spiritual—will permit a
tem[)orary fusion of emotion, often only an illusory mutuality
which must end in exhaustion.

It is interesting to reflect, then, that the swaddled baby, when
he becomes aware of such emotionality, is himself hindered from
responding to it in a “motional” way, such as kicking with arms
and legs or moving his fingers. He is hindered from lifting his
head, from grasping support, and from extending his visual field
over the auditory sources of the perceived commotion. Such an
arrangement can, indeed, be thought of as burdening the vaso¬
motor system with the task of buffeting and balancing all these
vivid impressions. Only during the periodical experience of being
unswaddlcd would the baby partake of his ciders’ effusiveness.

Is the Russian soul a swaddled soul? Some of the leading
workers in the research organization, to wliich I owe my ac¬
quaintance with this moving picture, definitely think so.^^

However, in order to evaluate the significance of an item of
child training such as swaddling in the totality of a culture’s con¬
figuration, it would be necessary to assume not a single one-way

i^Geoffrey Gorcr, “Some Aspects of also Geoffrey Gorer and John Rick-
the Psychology of the People of Great man. The People of Great RussiOy The
Russia,** The American Slavic and Cresset Press, London, 1949.

Eastern European RevirWy 1949. See

34^ Childhood and Society

diain of causality (in the sense that Russians are the way they
are—or the way they like to appear—^because they are swaddled)
but rather a two-way flow of amplification. Thus the almost uni¬
versal—^and incidentally, quite practical—custom of swaddling
would have received amplification as a result of that synthesizing
trend which put geography, history, and human childhood over
a few common denominators. We observe a configurational af¬
finity between these Russian facts:

1. The compact social life in a lonely stockade isolated in the
rigors of the central plains and its periodic liberation after the
spring thaws;

2. The long periods of tight swaddling alternating with mo¬
ments of rich interchange of joyous affection at the time of un¬
swaddling; and

3. The sanctioned behavior of wooden endurance and apathetic
serfdom on the one hand, and on the other, periodic emotional
catharsis achieved by effusive soul-baring.

W'^hen asked why babies must be swaddled, simple Russians
have answered with astonishment: Wfiat other way was there to
carry a baby and to keep him warm through a Russian winter?
And besides, how could one otherwise keep him from scratching
and harming himself, and of scaring liimself with the sight of his
own hands? Now it is probably true that a swaddled baby, espe¬
cially when just unswaddled, has not sufficient mastery over liis
own movements to keep from scratching and hitting himself. The
further assumption that therefore he has to be swaddled again is
a favorite trick of cultural rationalization. It makes a particular
pattern of infant-restraint culturally self-supporting. You must
swaddle the infant to protect him against himself; this causes
violent vasomotor needs in him; he must remain emotionally
swaddled in order not to fall victim to wild emotion. This, in turn,
helps to establish a basic, a prcverbal, indoctrination, according
to which people, for their own good, must be rigidly restrained,
while being oflFered, now and then, ways of discharging com¬
pressed emotion. Economically and politically seen, swaddling.

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 347

then, is part of a system of stubborn institutions which support
and prolong the Russian combination of serfdom and “soul.”
Gorky said in his play Philistines: “When a man is tired of lying
on one side, he turns over on the other, but when he is tired of
the conditions in which he lives he only grumbles. Then make
an effort—and turn over!” A man, properly motivated, can make
an effort to turn over or indeed, as we would say, to get up; but
in the face of the adversity of being chained to certain conditions
his mind may act according to its earliest experience of being tied
down. And what the swaddled baby can do least of all is turn
over. He can only sinlc back, give in, be patient, and hallucinate,
dwelling on his vasomotor sensations and on the adventures of
his bowels, till the moment of locomotor liberation comes again
upon him.

ITiis, it seems to me, is s)Tnbolized by Lyenka, the child with
the greatest emotion and with the most impaired motion; the
child with the most vivid imagination and the greatest dependence
on others. When Alyosha gives him the little white mouse it is as
if he were growing beyond the necessity of holding on to a play
fetish and to dreams of omnipotence such as swaddled and im¬
prisoned souls may be in need of. He does not pity Lyenka.
Rather, he recognizes his state, compares it with his own, and acts
accordingly. He sees to it that Lyenka gets mechanized legs—
but he does not identify with him.

While the motion picture does not show Alyosha and his gang
at play, Gorky’s Reminiscences gives an account of a fantastic
game indulged in by these young “outlaws.” As we shall sec,
Gorky’s interpretation of this game is entirely in tune with the
theories advanced in our chapter on play.

As a lad of about ten I used to lie demm under a ballast train, com¬
peting in audacity with my chunis, one of whom, the postman’s son,
played the game with particular cool-headedncss. It is an almost safe
amusement, provided the furnace of the locomotive is raised high
enough and the train is moving up-hill, not down-hill—for then the

348 Childhood and Society

brake-chains of the cars are tightly stretched, and can’t strike you or,
having caught you, fling you on to the sleepers. For a few seconds you
experience an eerie sensation, you try to press as fiat and close to the
ground as possible, and with the exertion of your whole will to over¬
come the passionate desire to stir^ to raise your bead. You feel that the
stream of iron and timber, rusliing over you, tears you oflf the ground
and wants to drag you off somewhere, and the rumble and grinding
of the iron rings as it were in your bones. Then, when the train has
passed, you lie motionless for a minute or more, powerless to rise^
seeming to swim along after the train; and it is as if your body
stretches out endlessly, grows, becomes lights melts into air^ and—the
next moment you will be flying above the earth. It is very pleasant to
feel aU this,

“What fascinated you in such an absurd game?” asked Andreyev.

I said that perhaps we were testing the power of our wills, by op¬
posing to die mechanical motion of huge masses die conscious im¬
mobility of our puny litde bodies.

“No,” he replied, “that is too good; no child could think of that.”

Reminding him of how children love to “tread the cradle”—to
swing on the supple ice of a new frozen pond or of a shallow river-
bank, I said that they generally liked dangerous garnes.^^

I have italicized those passages which admit of a further in¬
terpretation. In accordance with the laws of play, this game was a
collective acting out, an active repetition of a passive experience,
combined with an externalization of an inner storm: the train now
gives (by invitation) to the immobile body those sensations which
the infant had experienced as a result of being restrained and con¬
fined.

In the moving picture, Alyosha does not participate in any
games. He keeps his eyes open, if often narrow with inquisitive¬
ness: he “lifts his head,” focuses his vision, tries to apprehend and
to perceive with clarity and to concentrate with discipline—all of
this in order eventually to grasp life. The picture says more about
the things he frees liimself from^ than about the tilings he wants to
be free for.

“Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev, Pursuir
Press, N^w York.

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth

349

5. THE PROTESTANT

Alyosha is leaving. The gang accompanies him to the fields. On
the little wagon, now completed, they take Lyenka along. Lyenka
is beside himself with joy and anticipation: he is in motion and he
is going to set his animals free. In a scene which would well have
marked the happy ending of the movie in any other culture,
Lyenka throws his precious birds up in the air and lets them take
to their wings and to the endless spaces.

As the gang waves and shouts good-by, Alyosha simply and
unemotionally sets his face toward the horizon.

Where is he going, the youth with steel in his eyes? Tl'ie picture
does not say. Obviously he is going to go and become Gorky, and
beyond that, some kind of new Russian. What became of young
Gorky, and what marked the new Russian?

Gorky went to study in the University of Kazan. “If anybody
had proposed to me ‘Go and study, but on condition that you’ll be
publicly birched every Sunday on Nikolaycwsky Square’ I most
likely would have agreed.” But he soon felt the discrimination
against him as a penniless peasant. He therefore became a student
in what he called the “free” university of the revolutionary youth.

But Gorky had always been sensitive and impressionable, and
his basic, sentimental sadness was counteracted only by his deter¬
mination to “grasp” life, almost to force it to give him faith. His
discipline as a writer later on consisted of a struggle to say more by
using fewer words. Against this nostalgic trend young Gorky
tried to develop a heart that could grasp, yet love; a soul with teeth
in it. Like so many of his like-minded contemporaries, it nearly
killed him.

At the age of twenty he attempted suicide by shooting himself
in the side. “I lay the blame of my death,” he wrote in a remarkable
suicide note, “on the German poet Heine who invented a tooth¬
ache of the bean. ... It will be seen from my passport that I am
A. Pyeshkov, but from this note, I hope, nothing will be seen.” **
He will have to forgive os if we do see a meaningful relationship
>2Roskin, op. cH. ^»Roskin, op. cit.

350 Childhood and Society

between this toothache of the heart and his, and his nation’s
struggle to overcome regressive nostalgia and “to learn to grasp
life.’’ The term used had, indeed, been invented by the bitterly
(or may we say bitingly) nostalgic Heine, who recommended as
a remedy for the heart’s toothaches a certain toothpowder in¬
vented by Bertold Schwarz—the inventor of gunpowder. Gorky
later formulated to Cliekhov his depressive period as a time of
“stony darkness,” of ^^immobilitj forever poised.^ Having broken
the deadlock by risking self-destruction, he recovered and set out
to wander and to work.

“1 have come into the world not to compromise,” he said in his
first epic poem. Alyosha had followed Gregory and all the others,
watching in order to find out where he should and should not be
involved in living the life of the people; Gorky literally stalked
people and situations to see where he could wrest from life, as a
homeless wanderer, those “rare and positive” phenomena which
would keep his faith alive.

His analytic incorruptibility “lifted to the point of inspiration”
is never more epically expressed than in the famous letter which
he wrote upon the receipt of die gripping news that old Tolstoy
had wandered off from home, wife, and estate,^^

• . . There is a dog howling in my soul and I have a foreboding of
some misfortune. Yes, newspapers have just arrived and it is already
clear: you at home are beginning to **create a legend”; idlers and
good-for-nothings have gone on living and have now produced a
saint. Only think how pernicious it is for the country just at this
moment, when the heads of disillusioned men arc bowed down, the
souls of the majority empty, and the souls of the best full of sorrow.
Lacerated and starving they long for a legend. They long so much
for alleviation of pain, for the soothing of torment. And they 'u ill
create just what he desires, but what is not wanted—the life of a
holy man and saint.

. . . Well, now he is probably making his last assault in order to
give his ideas the highest possible significance, so that he might assert
his holiness and obtain a halo. That is dictatorial, although his teach-

^Maxim Gorky, Remhoscences of Tolstoy^ The Viking Press, Inc., New York.

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 351

ing is justified by the ancient history of Russia and by his own suffer-
ings of genius. Holiness is attained by flirting with sin, by subduing
the will to live. People do desire to live, but he tries to persuade them:
**That’s all nonsense, our earthly life,^ It is very easy to persuade a
Russian of this: he is a lazy creature who loves beyond anything else
to find an excuse for his own inactivity.

... A strange impression used to be produced by his words: am
happy, I am very happy, I am too happy.” And then immediately
afterwards: ‘"To suffer.” To suffer—that too was true in him. 1 don’t
doubt it for a second, that he, only half convalescent, would have been
really glad to be put into prison, to be banished, in a word to embrace
a martyr's crown.

In the last analysis, he saw in Tolstoy’s conversion the ancient
curse of Russia:

, . . He always greatly exalted immortality on the other side of
this life, but he preferred it on this side. A writer, national in the
trucsT and most complete sense, he embodied in his great soul all the
defects of his nation, all the mutilations w’e have suffered by the or¬
deals of our history; his misty preaching of “non-activity,” of “non-
rcsistance to evil,” the doctrine of passivism, all this is the unhealthy
ferment of the old Russian blood, envenomed by Mongolian fatalism
and almost chemically hostile to the West with its untiring creative
labor, with its active and indomitable resistance to the evils of life.
What is called Tolstoy’s “anarchism” essentially and fundamentally
expresses our Slav anti-Statism, w^hich, again, is really a nationd
characteristic, ingrained in our flesh from old times, our desire to
scatter nomadically. Up to now we have indulged that desire pas¬
sionately, as you and everyone else know. We Russians know it too,
but we always break away along the lines of least resistance; we sec
that this is pernicious, but still we crawl further and further away
from one another; and these mournful cockroach journey ings are
called “the history of Russia,” the history of a State which has been
established almost incidentally, mechanically—to the surprise of the
majority of its honest-minded citizens—by the forces of die Variags,
Tartars, Baltic Germans, and petty officials. . . .

In viewing this motion picture and in trying to determine what
Alyosha became free for, it is hard to avoid two pitfalls, a bio-

^•Gorky, oD. ciL

352 Childhood and Society

graphical and a historical one. It seems clear that Alyosha, as the
collective myth of the film, has great affinity to Gorky’s image of
himself, to his ideals, and to the legend which he, as any great
writer, worked so hard to become. Yet the real Gorky’s ways of
solving, by creativity and by neurosis, the problem which he
shouldered as a youth, is tangential to our discussion.

The historical pitfall would lie in a hostile comparison of this
picture’s simple humanity and eanhiness, its implicit revolutionary
spirit, with the stilted and stagnant revolutionary “line” which
we have become used to in what reaches us now of Soviet writings
and movies. We are concerned here with tlte need of the led, not
with the fate of the leader.

TTie importance of the picture for the consideration of this book
lies in its simple reference to a few psychological trends which arc
basic to revolutions in general; and specifically to those in areas
which face industrialization while still immersed in the imagery of
an ancient agricultural revolution.

Our motion picture offers for discussion only some of the
imagery of one of these areas: the great Russian plains. While
other ethnic areas would call for the consideration of different or
related imageries, yet the general impression is that Russia proper
has been as decisive and pervading an influence in this revolution
as, say, the Anglo-Saxons were in the American Revolution.

To summarize: In the imagery suggested by this movie, the
grandmother has a dominant place. She seems to represent the
people in their mystical unity with flesh and earth: good in itself
but cursed by the greediness of the “breed”: Paradise lost. To
become or remain a party to the grandmother’s strength would
mean surrender to timelessness, and eternal bondage to the faith
of primitive economy. It is that faith which makes the primitive
hang on to the methods of ancient tools and of magpeal in¬
fluence over the forces of nature; it is that faith which, in turn,
provides him with a simple remedy for any sense of sin: projec¬
tion. Badness all lies in evil forces, in spirits, in curses: you must
regulate them with magic—or be possessed by them. To the
Bolshevik revolutionary the grandmother’s goodness reaches back

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 353

into times before good and evil entered the world; and, one
assumes, it reaches into the far future when classless society will
overcome the morality of greed and exploitation. In the meantime
grandmother is a danger. She is the political apathy of the Russian’s
very timelcssness and childish trust. Maybe she is the virtue, as it
has been put recently, which permits the Kremlin to wait, and the
Russian people to wait longer.

A second set of images seems to concern the wood-fire dichot¬
omy. The uncles, and the other men, are stout, square, heavy,
awkward, and dull, like logs of wood; but they are highly com¬
bustible. They are wood—and they are fire. Tlie swaddled “log
of wood” with its smoldering vasomotor madness, the wooden
Russian people with their explosive souls: are such images left¬
overs of a very recent or, in Russia, even contemporary 'wooden
age? Wood provided the material for the stockades as well as for
the overheated ovens through the long winters. It was the basic
material for tools. But it also incorporated the danger of being
consumed by its own combustibility. Houses and villages and
wood supplies burned beyond recovery—a fatal tendency in view
of the fact that the forests themselves perished in fires and receded
from prairies and marshes. What magic means were invoked to
save them.?

A third set of images centers in iron and fteel. In the picture it is
present only in the appearance of the little wheel for Lyenka’s cart.
The scavenger boys find it, but instead of turning it into money
they use it to complete the prosthesis for Lyenka’s locomotor
liberation. But then, the wheel takes a special place among the
basic human inventions. It goes beyond the tools which represent
mere extensions of and prostheses for the limbs; moving within it¬
self, it is basic for the idea of the machine, which, man-made and
man-driven, yet develops a certain autonomy as a mechanical or¬
ganism.

Beyond this, however, steel is, in many ways, suggested as a
symbol of the new frame of mind. W’hile the wood and fire
imagery suggests a cyclic personality structure characterized by
apathetic drudgery, childlike trust, sudden outbreaks of consum-

354 Childhood and Society

ing passion, and a sense of depressing doom, the imagery of steel
suggests incorruptible realism and enduring, disciplined struggle.
For steel is forged in fire, but it is not combustible or subject to
destruction by fire. To master it means to triumph over the weak¬
ness of the flesh-soul and the deadness and combustibility of the
wood-mind. As it is forged, steel forges a new generation and a
new elite. Such, at least, must be the connotation of names like
Stalin (steel) and Molotov (hammer), and of official behavior
which underscores without cessation the incorruptibility of Bol¬
shevik perception, the long range of its vision, its stecl-likc clarity
of decision, and tlic machine-like firmness of action. On the de¬
fensive, such composure again becomes woodenness—or com¬
bustible oratory.

We see now where Gorky meant to stand and where this mo¬
tion picture of the early days of the Russian revolution puts him;
into that vanguard of revolutionaries called the “intelligentsia,”
which—with all its morbid ruminations—prepared the new mo¬
rality by learning to grasp and hold, first facts and ideas, and then
political and military control itself. It is hard for us to realize what
superhuman inspiration seemed involved at the time in Lenin’s
decision to ask the workers and peasants on the collapsing fronts
to hold on to their guns; and what a miracle it must have seemed
that the worn-out masses complied. It was Gorky who called
writers “the engineers of society,” and, in turn, spoke of an in¬
ventor as “a poet in the domain of scientific technique, who arouses
that sensible energy which creates goodness and beauty.” As the
revolution established itself, the highly educated and in many ways
Westernized intellectual elite gave place to a planned, meticu¬
lously trained elite of political, industrial, and military engineers
who believed themselves to be the aristocracy of the historical
process itself. They are our cold, our dangerous adversaries today.

But there was a time when the intelligentsia wanted passion¬
ately to be of the people and for the people; and, no doubt, they
once amplified and were amplified by a dark and illiterate tend¬
ency in die Russian masses (or, at any rate, in a decisive segment of
these masses) to find its national idendty in a passionate interna-

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 355

donal cause. In Alyosha we see the son of a mystic and earthy
past as well as a potential founding father of an industrial world
future.

The American farmer’s boy is the descendant of Founding
Fathers who themselves were rebel sons. They had refused to
hide behind any crown or cross. They were heirs of a reforma¬
tion, a renaissance, the emergence of nationalism and of revolu¬
tionary individualism. They had before them a new continent
which had not been their motherland and which had never been
governed by crowned or ordained fathers. This fact permitted
an exploitation of the continent which was crudely masculine,
rudely exuberant, and, but for its women, anarchic. Tlie Ameri¬
cans have, if any people has, fulfilled Chekhov’s dream. They have
made conquered earth comfortable and machinery almost pleasant,
to the ambivalent envy of the rest of the world. Protestantism,
individualism, and the frontier together created an identity of
individual initiative which in industrialization found its natural
medium. In an earlier chapter we pointed to the problems which
this identity faced as the continent was gradually exploited in its
width and depth, and as voracious initiative began to cat into the
human resources of the nation; and we have pointed to some of
the derivatives of the protestant revolution.

I shall now try to make more explicit what I meant earlier when
referring to Alyosha’s new frame of mind as a form of delayed
Eastern protestantism.

The temptations Alyosha turns away from—and a protestant
toms away from and against—are not dissimilar to those which
the early Protestants felt emanated from Rome: the enchantment
of God as a spirit that enters through the senses as the light of the
stained windows, the fume of the incense and the lullaby of the
chant; the mystic immersion in the mass; the “clinical” view of life
as a childhood disease of the soul; and most of all, the permission
“to hide behind another’s conscience.”

If we turn to the community of men which Alyosha seems to
be turning toward, the parallelism with protestant patterns be-

356 Childhood and Society

comes even clearer. For from a centralized organization for medi¬
ated salvation (and thus the exploitation of infantile and primitive
fears) Alyosha and his comrades turn to the establishment of a
responsible elite. Their means of selection is not faith in the
Invisible, but conduct within a community which examines, se¬
lects, and judges. Their conscience is not based on the paroxysms
of the sin-and-expiation cycle, but on a discipline of mind. This
discipline determines their form of sacrifice, which is the empha¬
sis on ego restriction, on a systematic discipline of the senses rather
than on spectacular atonement. Their state of salvation is not de¬
termined by the inner glow of faith and of love for the believers,
but in disciplined success in this world, in a determined alignment
vnth contemporary economic forces. Their damnation and their
death is not the consciousness of sin and the certainty of hell, but
the exclusion from the community, and even the self-exclusion
from the historical process, a moral annihilation compared with
which death from whatever hand is a mere biological trifle.

The framework of this Eastern protestant reorientation is of
course radically different from the VVestem one; it is proletarian
and industrial, and it is Russian and Orthodox. The latter two ele¬
ments have determined the pitfalls of this orientation and the
enormity of its tragedy.

We can continue and conclude our analogy here. The Com¬
munist Party, in absorbing an emerging protestantism, could not
tolerate an important protestant ingredient: sectarianism. To
maintain absolute power it felt the need for absolute unity. The
party’s desperate and finally cruel attempts at warding off sectarian
splits arc well documented in tlie minutes of its early conventions,
which were characterized by a hair-splitting most reminiscent of
ecclesiastic history: the issues were the truth of dialectic history,
the infallibility of the Politburo, and the mystic wisdom of the
masses. We know how this hair-splitting ended.

Max Weber’s prediction that an attempt at dictatorship for the
proletariat could only lead to a dictatorship of the middleman, of
bureaucracy, now proves to have been prophetic. Again, the
Russian people believe in one man in the Kremlin, whom they do

The Legend of Maxim Gorky’s Youth 357

not blame for the cruelties of his middlemen and whom they
believe to be their defender against usurpers and exploiters, foreign
and domestic.

As of today, they believe this honestly, because there is nothing
else that they could believe on die basis of what they know. There¬
fore, their best is invested in this belief. Our devoted studies should
concern the fact that the original emergence of a revolutionary
frame of mind in Russia and Asia, volcanic as it was, may have
been an attempt, and in view of the historical process an unavoid¬
able one, to approach the stage of human conscience which char¬
acterized our protestant revolution. Whether or not a few men on
the Eurasian continent or some nervous council of ministers will
plunge us into war—wc do not know. But it may well be that the
future—with or without war—will belong to those who will
harness the psychological energies freed from the wasteful super¬
stitions of ancient agricultural moralities on die European, Asiatic,
and African continents. Physics, in learning to split the atom, has
released new energy, for peace and for war. With the help of
psychoanalysis wc can study another kind of energy which is re¬
leased when the most archaic part of our conscience is “split.”
As civilization enters into an industrialized era, such a split is
inevitable. The enormous energy thus released can be benevolent,
and it can be malevolent. In the end, it may be more decisive than
material weapons.

As wc Americans, with the friendly cocrcivcness of a Paul
Bunyan (the Russians would say, a Vassily Buslaiev), throw gadg¬
ets and robots into die world market, wc must learn to under¬
stand that wc help to create revolutionized economic conditions.
We must be able to demonstrate to grim Alyoshas everywhere that
our new and shiny goods (so enticingly wrapped in promises of
freedom) do not come to them as so many more sedatives to make
them subservient to dieir worn-out upper classes, as so many
more opiates to lull them into the new serfdom of hypnotized
consumership. They do not want to be granted freedom; what
they want is to be given the opportunity to grasp it, as equals.
They do not want progress where it undermines their sense of

358 CMdhood and Society

initiative. They demand autonomy, together with unity; and
identity together with the fruits of industry. We must succeed
convincing the Alyoshas that—from a very long-range point
view—^their protestantism is ours and ours, theirs.

R. B-

CHAPTER

11

Conclusion: The Fear of Anxiety

Feeling under his right thumb the thin sheaf of pages left of this
book, the reader may wonder what kind of short conclusion
could do justice to the matters of immediate concern illustrated
in the last chapter. Here I must concede that whatever message
has nor been conveyed by my description and discourse has but
a slim chance of being furthered by a formal conclusion. 1 have
nothing to offer except a way of looking at things. From peripheral
illustrations, I must now retrace this viewpoint to its origin in
psychoanalytic work and to concrete contributions which we can
hope to make.

This return to our point of departure is nor an evasion. It must
be remembered that until quite recently our clinical insights into
the relationship of childhood and sodery have found little or no
corollary in the sciences of sodology and history. As we clarify
these matters as far as our methods will pennit, we must be cau¬
tious in suggesting practical application. There is no time left in
wliich to be as naive historically as, in all past history, the historians
have been psychologically.

To reconcile historical and psychological methodologies, we
must first learn to deal with the fact that psychologies and psy¬
chologists are subject to historical laws and that historians and
historical records arc subject to those of psychology. Having
learned in clinical work that the individual is apt to develop an

J5»

360 Childhood and Society

amnesia concerning his most formative experiences in childhood,
we are also forced to recognize a universal blind spot in the
makers and interpreters of history: they ignore the fateful func¬
tion of childhood in the fabric of society, l listorians and philoso¬
phers recognize a “female principle” in the world, but not the
fact that man is bom and reared by women. TTiey debate principles
of formal education, but neglect the fateful dawn of individual
consciousness. They forever insist on a mirage of progress where
man’s (the male’s) logic will lead to reason, order, and peace,
while each step toward this mirage brings a new alignment of
principles which lead to war, and worse. Moralistic man and ra¬
tionalizing man continues to identify himself with abstractions of
himself, but refuses to see how he became what he really is and
how, as an emotional and political being, he undoes with infantile
compulsions and impulsions what his thought has invented and
what his hands have built. All of this has its psychological basis—
namely, the individual’s unconscious determination never to meet
his childhood anxiety face to face again, and his superstitious ap¬
prehension lest a glance at the infantile origins of his thoughts and
schemes may destroy his single-minded stamina. He therefore
prefers enlightenment away from himself; which is why the best
minds have often been least aware of themselves.

But may it not be merely superstition that makes man turn away
from his latent anxiety as if from the head of a Medusa? May it
not be that man, at this stage of the game, must and can expand
his tolerant awareness to his latent aiudeties and to the infantile
origins of his preconceptions and apprehensions?

Every adult, whether he is a follower or a leader, a member of
a mass or of an elite, was once a child. He was once small. A
sense of smallness forms a substratum in his mind, ineradicably.
His triumplis will be measured against this smallness, his defeats
will substantiate it. The questions as to who is bigger and who can
do or not do this or that, and to whom—these questions fill the
adult’s inner life far beyond the necessities and the desirabilities
which he understands and for which he plans.

Every society consists of men m the process of developing fr(«n

Conclusion; The Fear of Anxiety 361

children into parents. To assure continuity of tradition, society
must early prepare for parenthood in its children; and it must take
care of the unavoidable remnants of infantility in its adults. Tliis
is a large order, especially since a society needs many beings who
can follow, a few who can lead, and some who can do both, alter¬
nately or in different areas of life.

Man’s childhood learning, which develops his highly specialized
brain-eye-hand co-ordination and all the intrinsic mechanisms of
reflection and planning, is characterized by prolonged depend¬
ence. Only thus does man develop conscience, that dependence
on himself which will make him, in turn, dependable; and only
when thoroughly dependable in a number of fundamental values
(truth, justice, etc.) can he become independent and teach and
develop tradition. But this dependability offers a problem because
of its very origin in childhood, and because of the forces employed
in its development. We have discussed the retardation of sexual
development and its concentration on and deflection from the
family; and we have discussed the importance of early patterns of
aggressive approach (organ modes) for the development of social
modalities. Both of tliese developments force early ideals into an
association with the images left behind by infantile tension and
rage.

Thus the immature origin of his conscience endangers man’s
maturity and his works; infantile fear accompanies him through
life. This we, the psychoanalysts, are attempting to correct in
individual cases; this we try to explain and to conceptualize, be¬
cause there is no universal cure—only, maybe, an alleviation by
gradual insight—for the fact that each generation must develop
out of its childhood and, overcoming its particular brand of child¬
hood, must develop a new brand, potentially promising, poten¬
tially dangerous.

Mark Twain, probably in one of hb depressed moods, called
man “the immodest animal,” the only creature who knows that
he b naked, or, as wc would put it, the creature with a self-con¬
scious sexuality. Here Mark Twain failed to mention the redeem¬
ing human specialty in which he himself specialized; humor, the

362 Childhood and Society

abiEty at rare moments to play with and to reflect fearlessly on
the strange customs and institutions by which man must find sclf-
realizatiom But the fact remains that the human being in early
childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily
function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is no culture which
does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of
counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.
Thus there remains in man’s sense of achievement the suspicion of
its infantile roots; and since his earliest sense of reality was learned
by the painful testing of inner and outer goodnesses and badnesses,
man remains ready to expect from some enemy, force, or event in
the outer world that which, in fact, endangers him from within:
from his own angry drives, from his own sense of smallness, and
from his own split inner world. Thus he is always irrationally
ready to fear invasion by vast and vague forces which arc other
than himself; strangling encirclement by everything that is not
safely clarified as allied; and devastating loss of face before all¬
surrounding, mocking audiences. These, not the animal’s fears,
characterize human anxiety, and this in personal affairs as well as
in world affairs.

In conclusion I shall summarize at least some of the basic fears.
But first let me hope that I have succeeded in indicating my recog¬
nition of the obvious—namely, that the existence of power spheres,
of spheres of influence, jurisdiction, and possession, and, above all,
of spheres of exploitation, are matters pertaining to the social
process and arc not in themselves to be explained as originating in
infantile anxiety: they arc the expression of the geographic-histori¬
cal reality in which we exist. The problem to be elucidated is that
of the extent to which man is apt to project on political and eco¬
nomic necessity those fears, apprehensions, and urges which arc
derived from the arsenal of infantile anxiety.

And another reservation: we must learn to differentiate between
fears and anxieties. Fears arc states of apprehension which focus
on isolated and recognizable dangers so that they may be judi¬
ciously appraised and realistically countered. Anxieties arc diffuse
states of tension (caused by a loss of mutual regulation and a

Conclusion: The Fear of Anxiety 363

consequent upset in libidinal and aggressive controls) which mag¬
nify and even cause the illusion of an outer danger, without point¬
ing to any avenue of defense or mastery. These two forms of ap¬
prehension obviously often occur together, and we can insist on
a strict separation only for die sake of the present argument. If,
in an economic depression, a man is afraid that he may lose his
money, his fear may be Justified. But if the idea of having to live
on an income only ten times, instead of twenty-five times, as
large as that of his average fellow-citizen causes him to lose his
nerve and to commit suicide, then we must consult our clinical
formula, which may help us find out, for example, that wealth
was the cornerstone of his identity and that the economic depres¬
sion coincided with the man’s climacteric. TTic fear of losing his
money, then, became associated with the anxiety aroused by the
idea of having to live a role not characterized by unlimited re¬
sources, and tliis at a time when the fear of losing his sexual potency
had mobilized an infantile anxiety once connected with ideas of
being inactivated and castrated. In the adult, then, impairment
of judgment by infantile rage is the result of a state of irrational
tension brought about by a short circuit between rational adult
fears and associated infantile anxieties. This is the truth behind
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s simple yet magic statement that we have
nothing to fear but fear itself, a statement which for the sake of
our argument must be parapiirased to read: We have nothing to
fear but anxiety. For it is not the fear of a danger (which we
might be well able to meet wdth judicious action), but the fear
of the associated state of aimless anxiety which drives us into
irrational action, irrational flight —or, indeed, irrational denial
of danger. When threatened with such anxiety, we either magnify
a danger which we have no reason to fear excessively—or we
ignore a danger which we have every reason to fear. To be able
to be aware of fear, then, without giving in to anxiety, to train
our fear in the face of anxiety to remain an accurate measure and
warning of that which man must fear—this is a necessary con¬
dition for a judicious frame of mind. Latent infantile panics com¬
mon to all mankind or to particular sections of it are used by

364 Childhood and Society

shrewd leaders, cCqnes, and pressure groups to make people see
exaggerated dangers—or to make them ignore existing danger
until it is too late.

We can only summarize some of the anxieties involved and
let each (author and reader alike) ask himself in what way his
own walk of life may contribute to the neutralization of the
panic which shadows man as he progresses.

In childhood, of course, fear and anxiety are so close to one
another that they are indistinguishable, and this for the reason
that the child, because of his immature equipment, has no way of
differentiating between inner and outer, real and imagined, dan¬
gers: he has yet to learn this, and while he learns, he needs the
adult’s reassuring instruction- In so far as the child fails to be con¬
vinced by the adult’s reasoning and especially where he perceives
instead the adult’s latent horror and bewilderment, a panicky
sense of vague catastrophe remains as an ever ready potentiality.

Babies are startled by a number of things, such as a sudden
loss of support or a sudden intense noise or beam of light. Such
events are accidental and rare, and are quickly adjusted to, unless
a baby has learned to fear suddenness in the changes around him.
From here on it is difficult to say when he fears the recurrence of a
particular event, or suddenness as such, and when he reacts with
anxiety to the adult ineptness or tension which is expressed in
recurring suddenness. Fear of such objective things as loss of sup¬
port or noise thus easily becomes anxiety connected with the
sodden loss of attentive care.

The unavoidable imposition on the child of outer controls
which are not in sufficient accord with the quality and quantity of
his inner control at the time, is apt to produce in him a cycle of
anger and anxiety. This leaves a residue of an intolerance of being
manipulated and coerced beyond the point at which outer control
still feels like self-control. C^jnnected with this is an intolerance of
being interrupted in a vital act, or of not being permitted to con¬
clude an act in an idiosyncratically important way. All of these
axixieties lead to self-coercion by empty stereotypy and lonely

Conclusion; The Fear of Anxiety 365

repetition. Here we find the origins of compulsion and obsession
and the concomitant need for the vengeful manipulation and co¬
ercion of others.

The intolerance of not being permitted to bring experiences to
completion has its counterpart in the fear of being impoverished
in a particular organ mode. On the oral level, there is something
of a fear of being left empty (nutritional) and of being starved of
stimulation (sensory and sensual). 'Fliese fears later become inter¬
changeable, so that sensation-seeking and fear of starvation may
characterize people who have more than enough to eat but less
than enough sensual intimacy.

The anxiety caused by the fear of losing autonomy, in its in¬
testinal form, concerns the possible emptying and robbing of
one’s inside by inimical people and inner saboteurs who can make
the bowels let go against one’s own sovereign wish. Correspond¬
ing to the ambivalent aspect of this stage, an alternate fear would
concern the danger of being closed up, of being forced to contain
the bulging bowel, of having no “outlet.”

In the muscular area there is also a double intolerance: the
anxiety caused by the sense of being restrained and held to the
point of muscular impotence has its counterpart in that of not
being held at all, of losing outer bounds and boundaries, and with
them the necessary orientation for the definition of one’s auton¬
omy. The alliance of muscular and anal sadism, then, seems to
foster the fear of being attacked from the rear, of being either
overwhelmed and bound, or raped rectally, in the apparent way
of animals.

Standing alone has many connotations of pride and isolation,
of wishing to be admired, and of the fear of being exposed to
devastating inspection and, of course, of falling.

In the center of the boy’s locomotor-phaUic fears lurks that of
castration. The clinical evidence for the strategic existence of a
fear for that sensitive organ, the penis, which so defiantly “sticks
its neck out” is overwhelming. More generally, there is a fear of
remaining small either in one’s total size or in one’s genital stature,
of not having been provided with “the right stuff.”

366 Childhood and Society-

On the ambulatory side, there is the anxiety of being immobih
lized and imprisoned, and yet, again, ako an anxiety of not being
guided, of not finding borderlines defined so that one may fight
and assert one’s initiative. Here is the infantile origin of (the
man’s) need for an enemy so that he may arm himself against and
fight a concrete adversary and thus be freed of the constant anx¬
iety of unknown enemies who, at unpredictable times, may find
him unarmed and uncovered.

The fear of remaining empty (oral) or being emptied (anal)
has a different quality in girk, since the body image of the girl
(even before she “knows” her arrangements as m the form of an
anatomical diagram) includes a valuable inside, an inside on the
development of which depends her fulfillment as an organism and
as a role bearer. Thk fear of being left empty, and, more simply,
that of being left, seems to be the most basic feminine fear, extend¬
ing over the whole of a woman’s exktencc. It k normally intensi¬
fied with every menstruation and takes its final toll during the
menopause. No wonder, then, that the anxiety aroused by these
fears can express itself either in complete subjection to male
thought, in desperate competition with it, or in efforts to catch
the male and make him a mere took

Here I must take special note of one of the most paradoxical and
far-reaching consequences of the feminine fear of being left. Lest
their men dkcard and abandon them in the periodical pursuits of
competition, conquest, and war, women arc apt not to question
these pursuits, which, again and again, lead to the disruption of
the home and to the slaughter of sons. They pretend that they
really believe in war and in man’s magnificent equipment, where
actually they have merely learned to accept as inevitable a martial
excitement which is essentially outside their comprehension. It
may well be that war cannot be banned until women, for the sake
of a worthwhile survival, dare to recognize and to support the as
yet undeveloped power of tmarmed resistance. But here women
must first Icam to understand their fear of being abandoned, and
their unwillingness to question judidously man’s cultivation of
war for war’s sake.

Conclusion: The Fear of Anxiety 367

Somewhere, of course, the little girl learns to hate him who so
smugly has what it takes—and can take it with him. By way of a
‘^projections too complicated for a brief account, the little girl’s
hate intensifies her fear of being raped, an anxiety easily fused
with the various pregeniral fears of being eaten into, being robbed,
and being emptied. Men, in turn, make ample use of this anxiety
when they need women’s consent to their martial fantasies and
aggressive provocations: there is always a woman, a country, or
a principle, symbolized as a superhuman woman, who must be
protected against capture and rape.

These, then, arc some of the basic intolerances, fears, and re¬
sulting anxieties which arise from the mere fact that human life
begins with a long, slow childhood and sexuality with an attach¬
ment to parental figures. Fears based on the structure and growth
of the organism arc emphjusized here because they are the earliest,
the most pervasive, and the least conscious rhemes of fear. A com¬
plete summary would give equal weight to the little being’s be¬
wilderment in the face of those unpredictable tensions and rages
which periodically overwhelm the adults around him. In later
childhood and in early adolescence, of course, all these fears be¬
come part and parcel of interpersonal involvements (‘‘oedipus
complex,” “sibling rivalry”) which concern bigger and smaller
rivals and their conflicting demands. For the former claims a
right of ownership based on having been there first and being
stronger, the latter an e(]ual right on the basis of having come last
and being weaker—contradictions not ea.sily reconciled either in
systems of child training or in political systems.

VVe concluded that only a gradually accruing sense of identity,
based on the experience of social health and cultural solidarity at
the end of each major childhood crisis, promises that periodical
balance in human life which—in integration of the ego stages—
makes for a sense of humanity. But wherever this sense is lost,
wherever integrity yields to despair and disgtist, wherever gen-
crativity yields to stagnation, intimacy to isolation, and identity
to diffusion, an array of associated infantile fears arc apt to be¬
come mobilized: For the superego is the internalization of the

368 Childhood and Society

external inequality of parent and child; and only an ego identity
safely anchored in the “patrimony” of a cultural identity can
balance the superego in order to produce a workable cquilibriunt^

In the last section of this book I have illustrated some of the
problems which face the youth of the world of today. Industrial
revolution, world-wide communication, standardization, central¬
ization, and mechanization threaten the identities which man has
inherited from primitive, agrarian, feudal, and patrician cultures.
What inner equilibrium these cultures had to offer is now en¬
dangered on a gigantic scale. As the fear of loss of identity domi¬
nates much of our irrational motivation, it calls upon the whole
arsenal of fear which is left in each individual from the mere fact
of his childhood. In tliis emergency masses of people become ready
to seek salvation in some reactionary pseudo identity.

At this point I would not blame the reader for sympathizing
with Socrates, who, as he drank the cup of poison, calmly watched
the numbness creep upon him and asked his friends to give an
offering to Asclcpius, the god of medicine, since it was only in
being poisoned that he expected to be cured. Matters do not im¬
prove by the insight (in the foregoing indicated only by a few
suggestions) that the anxieties outlined reach into adult life, and
this not only in the form of neurotic anxiety, which, after all, is
kept in bounds by most and can be cured in some; but more terri-

^Thc concept of ego identity may be
misunderstood in two ways. One mis¬
conception would be that a sense of
identity is achieved primarily through
the individual’s complete surrender to
given social roles and through his in¬
definite adaptation to the demands of
social change. This, of course, would
mean a fixation on an adolescent solu¬
tion. No ego, it is true, can develop
outside of social processes which offer
workable prototypes and roles. The
healthy and strong individual, how¬
ever, adapts these roles to the farther
processes of his ego, thus doing his
share in keeping the social process
alive.

The second misconception concerns

the identity of those individuals who
devote themselves to the study and the
lonely pursuit of human integrity and
who in doing so seem to live beside
and above the group from which they
have emerged. Such individuals were,
in their development, by no means
independent of their group’s identity,
which, in fact, they may have ab¬
sorbed to the point of outgrowing it.
Nor are they free from a new com¬
mon identity, though they may share
k only with a very few who may not
even be living in the same era (I am
thinking here of Gandhi, and his re¬
lationship both to India and to Jesus
of Nazareth).

Q)nclusioix: The Fear of Anxiety 369

fyingly in the form of collective panics and afflictions of the
collective mind. In fact, the anxieties named in the preceding pages
could be taken out of their context of childhood and serve as
headings for a treatise on group panics and their propagandistic
exploitation.

This then is one of our jobs: to perfect methods which, in given
situations, facilitate the elucidation of such prejudices, apprehen¬
sions, and lapses of judgment as emanate from infantile rage and
from the resulting rigidity of the adult’s defenses against his own
latent anxiety.

Assuming that our clinical experience has led us to detect mean¬
ingful connections in the relationship between the anxieties of
infancy and the upheavals of society, what order of irusight is this
and what kind of power does it offer us? Will the utilization of
this knowledge help us create synthetic child-training systems
which will manufacture the desired kind of personality in our
children? Can it help us to look through the infantile weaknesses
of our enemies so that we may outsmart them? And—should we
harbor such hopes—would insight thus applied really still be in¬
sight?

Our knowledge of these matters is based on the study of anx¬
iety and therefore highlights primarily the ways in which anxiety
is produced and exploited. We can (as I pointed out in the first
chapter) make the origin of individual anxiety retroactively plausi¬
ble by analysis: but we have only begun to study the combination
of elements which, in a given case, would have resulted in an
interesting variation of, rather than a neurotic deviation from,
human functioning. We have studied variations less than we have
studied deviations, and this for the reason that variations get along
so well without us.

In psychoanalytic circles, we have witnessed a little private
history of tentative child-training systems dedicated to instinct
indulgence or to the avoidance of anxiety in our children. We
know that not infrequently only a new system of superstitions
has resulted. Obsessively comparing variations of childhoods to

J70 Childhood and Society

the childhood memories of adult deviants, some of us have inad¬
vertently driven our children into an identification with our pa¬
tients. At least, one little son of a psychiatrist recently expressed it
in so many words; when this carefully and considerately brought
up child was asked what he wanted to be when big and strong, he
said, “A patient.” He meant, of course, that he wanted to be the
kind of being who seemed so absorbingly interesting to his parents.
Since he has said it, there is hope that he will not need to do it,
and that his parents will learn from him in time. But such experi¬
ences should show us that it is not easy to construct by mere scien¬
tific synthesis a foolproof system which will lead our children in
a desired direction and avoid an undesirable one. Obviously, good
can come only from a continuing interplay between that which
we, as students, are gradually learning and that which we gener¬
ally believe in, as people.

In the matter of societal processes, too, we begin to know some¬
thing about the place of anxiety, superstition, and unscrupulous
propaganda in collective grumblings, upheavals, and traasforma-
tions. But we do not know half so well in what way a new idea
suddenly does the seemingly impossible and creates or maintains
a variation of civilization in the midst of an apparent chaos of
deviant contradictions.

The situation here is rather similar to that in the field of atomic
research. There, physicists have, under the pressure of a danger
to our civilization, striven in shortest order to perfect work of the
highest theoretical and most far-reaching practical significance.
The public, on the whole, is inclined to say “thank you” for an
inconceivable weapon, leaving it to the scientists to find defense
weapons equal to tlie offensive danger which they have created,
and relying, for the rest, on the good old ways of professional
diplomacy. The scientists have organized to enlighten the public,
but they themselves cannot create and govern a new international
organization which alone would meet the danger which they
know so well. To build a super-cyclotron is one thing; to build a
super-state another. The scientists have at their disposal only the
voice of enlightenment, hope in mankind, and their own scientific

Conclusion; The Fear of Anxiety 371

ethics. They do not have an easy time of it, because (whatever
their declared loyalties and unalterable commitments) there is a
point where scientific ethos and armament races do not live well
together in one identity, and on being forced together endanger
the very spirit of inquiry.

In our field, too, we know some of the story, but not the whole
story. We have seen spectacular evidences of the fact that psy¬
choanalytic constructs serve to clarify unconscious dynamics, \^'^c
have studied convincing cures and shocldng reverses. W'e have
offered surprising clarifications in the field of motivational forces,
and we arc firmly approaching the study of society. Yet emergen¬
cies prevail upon us to offer our judgment regarding societal and
international events. Some of us respond by taking on as so many
patients the problems of social organization. Others put their faith
in what is called interdisciplinary teamwork, a kind of halt-and-
blind co-operation, in which a social scientist with little psycho¬
logical vision carries in piggy-back fashion a psychologist who
has not learned to move with case in the larger events of this
world, so that together they may grope their way through con¬
temporary history. But I think that our work must contribute
more significantly to a new manner of man, one whose vision
keeps up with his power of locomotion, and his action with his
boundless thinking. Only in so far as our clinical way of work
becomes part of a judicious way of life can we help to counteract
and reintegrate the destructive forces which are being let loose
by the split in modem man’s archaic conscience.

Judiciousness in its widest sense is a frame of mind which is
tolerant of differences, cautious and methodical in evaluation,
just in judgment, circumspect in action, and—^in spite of all this
apparent relativism—capable of faith and indignation. Its opposite
is prejudice, an outlook characterized by prejudged values and
dogmatic divisions; here everything seems to be clearly delineated
and compartmentalized, and this by “nature,” wherefore it must
stay forever the way it always has been. By thus relying on pre¬
conceived notions the prejudiced frame of mind creates a rigidity
which can become imcomfortable; but it has the advantage of per-

372 Childhood and Society

mitting the projection of everything that feek alien within one’s
own heart on some vague enemy outside —z mechanism which
makes for a certain limited stability and standardization, until a
catastrophe endangers the whole brittle structure of preconcep¬
tions.* The judicious outlook, in turn, permits a greater flexibility
and variability, but it admittedly endangers the imbalanced and
neurotic individual who may choose to pursue it. As he abandons
all prejudice, he forfeits the mechanism of projection: his danger
becomes introspection and “introjection,” an over-concern with
the evil in himself. One may say tliat he becomes prejudiced
against himself. Some measure of this must be tolerated by men of
good will. Men of good will must learn to fear accurately and to
cope judiciously with the anxiety aroused by a renunciation of
prejudice. Psychoanalysis has done the groundwork here; new
forms of communication must cement the fundament; society
must build the structure.

Clinical knowledge, then, like any knowledge, is but a tool
in the hands of a faith or a weapon in the service of a superstition.
Instead of coming to the conclusion that particular items of child
training and their minute timing and dosage make and unmake
men, and that we must, therefore, proceed with self-conscious
circumspection and minute planning, we may allow for an al¬
ternative. We may consider that the relationships between infan¬
tile anxiety and adult destructiveness exist in the forms demon¬
strated in thk book only because they serve systems of superstition
and exploitation. It may well be that (within certain limitations
designating what an organism can integrate and an ego synthesize)
details become decisive only if and when preconceptions and ap¬
prehensions are attached to them by superstitious adults: in which
case the decisive question is whether these adults and their chil¬
dren are living in an integrated system of superstitions, or whether
their superstitions are fragmentary and individualized retarda-

*Scc the work of T. W. Adorno, Else tarram Personality, Haq>cr & Brothers,
Frenkel-Bninswik, Daniel J. Levinson, New York, 1950.
tnd R. Nevitt Sanford, 7 'be Autbori-

Conclusion; The Fear of Anxiety 373

dons and regressions, contrasting sharply with conscious methods
and aspirations.

Our concerted efforts, therefore, should focus on a relaxation
of unconscious superstition in the handling of infants and on the
political and economic means of assuring a sense of identity to
growing children. To this end, however, it is necessary to under¬
stand the basic fact that human childhood provides a most funda¬
mental psychological basis for human exploitation. The polarity
Big—Small is the first in the inventory of existential oppositions
such as Male and Female,* Ruler and Ruled, Owner and Owned,
Light Skin and Dark, over all of which emancipatory struggles
arc now raging both politically and psychologically. ITie aim
of these stniggles is the recognition of the divided function of
partners who are equal not because they are essentially alike, but
because in their very difference they are both essential to a com¬
mon function.

Here we must qualify, at least in its simplified interpretation, the
statement which summarized the first impact of psychoanalytic
enlightenment on this country—namely, that frustration leads to
aggression. Man, in the service of a faith, can stand meaningful
frustration. Rather, we should say that exploitation leads to fruit¬
less rage: exploitation being the total social context which gives a
specific frustration its devastating power. Exploitation exists where
a divided function is misused by one of the partners involved in
such a way that for the sake of his pseudo aggrandizement he de¬
prives the other partner of whatever sense of identity he had
achieved, of whatever faith in integrity he had approached. The
loss of mutuality which characterizes such exploitation eventually
destroys the common function and the exploiter himself.

In our country, probably more than in any other large country,
the child is the adult’s partner. We treasure as a promise of things
to come the simple daily observation that wherever the spirit of
partnership pervades a home and wherever childhood provides a

•I'his is comprehensively discussed by William Morrow and Co,, New York,
Margaret Mead in Male and Female^ 1949.

374 Childhood and Society

status of its own, a sense of identity, fraternal conscience, and
tolerance results. We are also aware of the fact that the inhuman¬
ity of colossal machine organization endangers these very gains
of what is so specifically American. Responsible Americans know
the danger emanating from a “total war” machine and from its
facsimile in peacetime. But it is not superorganization alone which
today makes cultural values relative. The rapid spread of com¬
munication and the increasing knowledge of cultural relativity
endanger people who are in a marginal position, people who are
exposed to a numerical increase or the closer proximity or the
greater power of others-than-themselves. Among such people the
drive for tolerance has its point of diminishing returns; it causes
anxiety. Similarly, the drive for judiciousness is by no means as
immediately conducive to civic peace or, for that matter, to
mental health as the new American peace ship “Mental Hygiene”
would have us believe: for the tolerant appraisal of other identities
endangers one’s own. The superego, so long the mainstay of
morals, will make real tolerance dangerous until the identity of
judiciousness becomes relevant and inescapable. Such judicious¬
ness is essentially a matter of personal and civic morality; all that
psychology can contribute is instruction in the tolerance of anx¬
iety, and the concomitant recognition of hidden cocrciveness and
cxploitiveness.

Here psychology faces its humanistic crisis. For psychology, in
many respects, plays the role of the manipulator of man’s wilL
We have quoted VVilliam Blake as nominating, for the “fruits of
the two seasons,” the child’s toys and the old man’s reasons. We
presumed that he thus intended to acknowledge the dignity of
the child’s play; but maybe he meant to point also to a latent
infantility in mature reason. For in the use of reason there lies the
eternal temptation to do with human data in experiment and argu¬
ment what the child does with them in play: namely, to reduce
them to a size and an order in which they seem manageable. Thus
human data are treated as if the human being were an animal, or
a machine, or a statistical item. Much naive sense of power can be
derived from the fact that, properly approached, the human being

Conclusion: The Fear of Anxiety 375

up to a point is all of these things, and under certain conditions can
be reduced to being nothing but their facsimiles. But the attempt
to make man more exploitable by reducing him to a simpler model
of himself cannot lead to an essentially human psychology.

War has done much harm by putting a premium on the exploit-
ability of man for the common war effort. How good war psy¬
chology was is still debatable At best, it was an adjunct to a peo¬
ple’s total technical and moral power, and a substitute for neither.
At war we must try to do our best, fast; what we do well helps a
little, what we do badly may be written off to the fantastic waste
of war. And even where exploited, a man in wartime may feel at
least participant in this, his exploitation. In peacetime, however,
the persistent hammering at a man’s sensibilities may lead to a
blunting of his judgment and to a wavering in his moral response.
We must give serious consideration to the possibility that while
we may have disapproved of the defeated enemy’s ends, we may
have learned to admire (as we feared them) some of his means—
i.c., the means of mass indoctrination-

The alternative to an exploitation of the lowest common de¬
nominator of men is the deliberate appeal to their latent intelli¬
gence, and the systematic cultivation of new forms of group
^cussion.

An opportunity, some years ago, to hear from a small group of
pioneering doctors about the development of the technique of
“natural” childbirth (originated by Dr. Grantly D. Read) has
been one of the most encouraging experiences of my professional
life.* The facts are by now well known, although the necessary
data for a final evaluation may not yet be available. In the terms
used here, we would say that the objective is childbirth without
anxiety. The expectant mother will feel some fear because she
knows that pain is inevitable. But the fact that the mother has
learned, by exercise and instruction, to be aware of the loca¬
tion and the function of the contractions which cause the pain;

^Transactions of the Committee on Infancy and Early Childhood^ Josiah Macy,
Jr., Foundarion, New York.

37<S Childhood and Society

and the fact that she expects, at the height of the curve of pain, to
have the privilege of choosing consciously whether or not she
wishes to receive relief by drugs: this entirely judicious situation
keeps her from developing the state of anxiety which in the past
was caused by ignorance and superstition and which, more often
than not, was the real cause of excessive pain. Tlius, the mother
is able, if she so wishes, to watch in an overhead mirror her child’s
arrival into this world: nobody sees it before she does and nobody
has to tell her what sex it is. She has known the attending nurse for
months. She and the nurse are partners in a job; there is no con¬
descendingly offending nurses’ chat. There are a number of sur¬
prising physiological advantages for both mother and child, in the
absence of an artificial amnesia during this most natural process.
But more: the emotional impact of this unique experience and of
the full reactivity to the clarion call of the baby’s first cry, so
the mothers agree, arouses in them a permeating sense of mutu¬
ality. With the additional innovation of rooming-in, the baby re¬
mains close enough to be heard, touched, watched, held, and fed,
and the mother thus has the opportunity to observe and to learn to
know her baby’s idiosyncracics.

In the early days of this new development it was somewhat
astounding to hear the doctors refer to their work of preparing
the mothers by instruction as the “indoctrination” period; and to
hear the final success of the procedure explained as a result of
the mother’s “father-transference” on the obstetrician. To such
an extent had we, in this age of woman’s emancipation, forgotten
that childbirth is woman’s “labor” and accomplishment. To such
an extent has the expert developed the illusion that he must teach
and inspire life, when all that is needed is the dispelling of super¬
stitions which he and his teachers have helped to create, and a re¬
striction of his technical interference to the task of protecting
mother and child against hazards and accidents. But these men,
whatever they called it, engaged in the experiment, and women
in all walks of life knew with a somewhat surprised “naturalness”
what it was aU about. Their daughters will know it even more
naturally.

Conclusion: The Fear of Anxiety 377

Tliis, I think, could mark the beginning of a new era. Seen from
this new angle, the whole formidable array of worries and super¬
stitions discussed in this book could, step by step, become subject
to a more judicious approach; and this especially if group instruc¬
tion by experts and the mutual enlightenment of parents in group
discussion is carried over into all phases of parenthood: for I fully
believe that the new techniques of discussion which arc now being
developed in this country—and this in industry as well as in edu¬
cation—have a good chance of replacing the reassurance emanat¬
ing from a continuity of tradition.

“Natural” childbirth is not a return to primitivity. For some
time to come it is going to be the most expensive form of child¬
birth, if we consider the investment of time and attention which
must be added to the technical appointments of modem delivery.
Let us hope, then, that our society will not begrudge its new citi¬
zens this investment in time and money; and that it will make it
well worth their while to have entered this world less drugged and
more ready to keep their eyes open.

In this book I have attempted to demonstrate the origin in
psychoanalytic practice and theory of insights concerning the
prolonged inequality of child and adult as one of the facts of
existence which make for cxploitability, as well as for technical
and cultural virtuosity, in human life. I am painfully aware of the
fact that for the purpose of this demonstration I have exploited
my clinical experience without conveying the nature of the psy¬
choanalytic process itself as a new form of judicious partnership
in another basic inequality—that of healer and sick. Here one re¬
members with gratitude the moral step which Freud took when
he repudiated hypnosis and suggestion: a matter much too easily
rationalized on the grounds of therapeutic expediency. When
Freud decided that he must make the patient’s conscious ego face
his anxieties and his resistances, and that the only way to cure anx¬
iety is to invite it to be transferred into the doctor-patient relation¬
ship, he demanded both from his patients and from his doctors
that they realize a step in the evolution of conscience. True, Freud

j 78 Childhood and Society

substituted the psychoanalytic couch for the hypnotic one, thus
exposing the patient’s inhibited will and unavoidable infantile
regression to some sadistic and faddish exploitation. But the moral
idea was clearly stated for aU to behold: the “classical arrange¬
ment” was only a means to an end—namely, a human relationship
in which the observer who has learned to observe himself teaches
the observed to become self-observant. In his last days, Freud
must have been grimly aware of the frailties which emerged in
many of us who tried to live up to this revolutionary idea: it is
an idea not easily lived with and not easily sustained in a time of
upset identities; an idea difficult to organize according to pro¬
fessional custom and difficult to fit into a framework of remunera¬
tion. It is, therefore, only with humility that we may specify
what manner of human relationship was suggested in Freud’s
technical innovations. What are the dimensions of the psycho¬
analyst’s job?

The first dimension extends along the axis of cure-research.
The psychotherapist in the very act of curing has at his disposal
a model “experiment” which permits an approach to human prob¬
lems while the human being is alive and fully motivated to par¬
ticipation. True, a human being can lend parts of himself (vision,
audition, memory, etc.), as if they were Isolated functions, to
experiments; and an experimenter can put a human being in an
experimental situation as if the subject were a conflict-ridden
animal or a rattling robot and the experimenter an objective ob¬
server. But only in the clinical situation does the full motivational
struggle of a human being become part of an interpersonal situa¬
tion in which observation and self-observation become contempo¬
raneous expressions of a mutuality of motivation, of a division of
labor, of a common job. The observer’s frank and self-observing
participation in this job marks the second dimension: objectivity-
participation. To be objective, the clinician must know. But he
must know how to keep knowledge in abeyance: for each case,
each problem is new, not only because each event is individual,
and each individual is a distinct cluster of events, but also because
both he and his p>atient are subject to historical change. Neuroses

Conclusion: The Feax of Anxiety 379

change, as do the wider implications of therapy. TTie clinician’s
knowledge, therefore, must ever again yield to interj^crsonal ex¬
periment; fresh impressions must ever again be regrouped into
their common denominators in configurations; and the configura¬
tions, finally, must be abstracted into suggestive conceptual
models. The third dimension of clinical work, therefore, is or¬
dered along the axis of knowledge-imagination. By using a com¬
bination of both, the clinician applies selected insights to more
strictly experimental approaches.

Finally, I would consider tolerance-indignation a dimen.sion of
the psychotherapist’s work. Much has been said and is being said
about the therapist’s moral detachment from the multitude of
patients who bring to him varieties of conflicts and solutions: natu¬
rally, he must let them find their own style of integrity. But the
analyst has gone further. In analogy to a certain bird, he has tried
to pretend that his values remained hidden because his classical
position at the head of the “analytic couch” removed him from
the patient’s visual field. We know today that communication is
by no means primarily a verbal matter: words are only the tools
of meanings. In a more enlightened world and under much more
complicated historical conditions the analyst must face once more
the whole problem of judicious partnership which expresses the
spirit of analytic work more creatively than does apathetic toler¬
ance or autocratic guidance. The various identities which at first
lent themselves to a fusion with the new identity of the analyst—
identities based on talmudic argument, on messianic zeal, on puni¬
tive orthodoxy, on faddist sensationalism, on profes.sional and
social ambition—^all these identities and their cultural origins must
now become part of the analyst’s analysis, so that he may be able
to discard archaic rituals of control and learn to identify with the
lasting value of his job of enlightenment. Only thus can he set
free in himself and in his patient that remnant of judicious indig¬
nation without which a cure is but a straw in the changeable wind
of history.

The model of the “psychoanalytic situation” itself is probably
the greatest contribution which Freud has made to society. While

380 Childhood and Society

it is our task to perfect psychoanalytic technique for the benefit
of the patients, while we must deepen and expand our psychologi¬
cal insight, we may also cultivate £he hope that the implications of
our work for the development of new social attitudes, for a more
judicious way of man’s dealing with himself as well as with
others, reach into and beyond the dark future which may lie
immediately ahead.

Appendix

The conclusions on Sioux childhood which we reached in 1937 were
offered in a clinical, not a critical, spirit, for we were much impressed
with the intelligent good will of the individuals involved.

In 1942, five years after our improvised research, a companion of
our 1937 reservation days, Gordon MacGregor, directed an intensive
and extensive study of 200 Pine Ridge children. This he did as part
of a larger Indian Education Research Project which undertook to
gatlier detailed material on childhood and tribal personality in five
American Indian tribes. The study was jointly sponsored and staffed
by the University of Chicago and by the Indian Service, MacGregor
and his group had the opportunity, as we had not, to have Indian
children observed in school and home throughout a year, and this
by a team of observers who had had experience with other Indian
tribes as well as with white children, and who mastered t variety of
specially adapted tests.

I shall first abstract here a few of the items of old child training
which—according to MacGregor’s account^—^seem to have per¬
sisted in one form or another, especially among the full-blood or
slightly mixed-blood Indians of the reservation population.

Babies, so MacGregor reports, are now pinned into a tight bundle.
While held, they are lightly rocked without interruption. Some
children arc weaned as early as nine months, some as late as thirty-
six montlis; most of them somewhere between eleven and eighteen
months.

There is little thumbsucking. Pacifiers were observed in three

K 5 . MacGregor, Warriors without Weapons, University of Chicago Press, 1946*.

^81

382 Childhood and Society

cases: one was of rubber, one was of pork, and one was a wiener.
The habit of ‘^snapping the thumbnail against the front teeth^ is
recognized as a common Dakota habit. Tooth-clicking occurs pre¬
dominately among women and girls.

The development of the child is watched with amusement and
patience. There is no hurrying along the path of walking or talking,
lliere is no baby talk. The language usually taught first is the old
Indian one: Fjiglish is still a problem to many children when tliey
enter school.

Toilet training is accomplished primarily by example. When no
white people arc around, the infant perambulates without diapers or
underpants. However, there is a tendency to hasten control and to
specify localities for excretion.

Modem Dakota children are carefully trained to be generous.
Children receive valuable gifts such as horses. Qiildren of five, six,
and seven give freely—and pleasantly. ‘‘At one funeral where there
was much giving, a small boy of the bereaved family spent his only
dime to buy artificial orange powder in order to give a bucket of
orangeade ceremonially to the visiting youngsters.” Property is some¬
times removed but, if around, not protected against children, a fact
watched by white people “in bewilderment and utter frustration.”

The main means of education are warning and shaming. The chil¬
dren arc allowed to scream in rage; it “will make them strong.” Spank¬
ing, while more frequent, is still rare.

Little boys (instead of playing with bow and arrow, and buffalo-
foot bones) are given ropes and slingshots and, for the glory of the
proper hunting spirit, are encouraged to chase roosters and other
small animals. Girls play with dolls and at keeping house.

By the time he is five or six, the Dakota child has acquired a feeling
of security and affection in the family. Some separation of sexes is
initiated, but the institution of avoidance has been abandoned: this,
in fact, is noted as the most outstanding change. It is only in paired
dances that brothers and sisters will avoid one another.

Shaming is intensified, especially if the child continues to misbe¬
have, and misbehavior at home still consists primarily of selfishness
and competitiveness, the seeking after gains based on the disadvantage
of others. Tense home situations are evaded by visiting homes at some
distance.

In school those of more mixed blood are learning to enjoy com-

Appendix 383

petition, and school in general is enjoyed as a get-together when
family ties arc outgrown. Yet many withdraw from competitive
activities, and some refuse to respond at all. *‘To be asked to compete
in class goes against the grain with the Dakota child, and he criticizes
the competitive ones among his fellows.” This difficulty, paired with
the inability to speak English and fear of the white teacher, leads to
frequent instances of embarrassed withdrawal or running away. The
child is not punished when he runs home: his parents tliemselves are
used to quitting work or commimity when embarrassed or angered.

Younger boys hit girls more and girls are more embarrassed by it
than is usual in white schools. In older boys competitive games, such
as baseball, on occasion lead to embarrassment because of the neces¬
sary display of competitiveness. However, there is an increased tend¬
ency among boys to fight in anger both at home and in school.

The older girls still act afraid of boys and men, always travel with
other girls, refuse to ride horseback, and keep completely apart from
boys.

The boarding school, which (compared to the homes) is a place of
physical luxury and of rich opportunities for varied interests, affords
the pleasantest years in the child’s life—and yet the great majority of
students who enter high school do not graduate; they sooner or later
play tniant and finally quit for good. Causes arc, again and again,
embarrassment over situations in which the problem of shame and
competition, of full blood and mixed blood, and of male and female
have become insoluble because of the change in mores. Moreover,
long training docs not seem to promise a better-defined identity or a
more secure income.

Except in boom years, the boys and girls ready for life tend to stay
in the reservation or to return to it. Because of their early training,
their home seems to be the most secure place, although the school
years have made both home and youngster less acceptable to one
another. Having learned that poverty can be avoided, the youngsters
sec their fathers idle, or shiftless; now more ambitious, they deplore
the persLsrent trend toward dependence upon the government; now
more accustomed to white ways, they find the continuous pressure of
critical gossip destructive, especially where it undermines what little
they have integrated of white ways. As for themselves, what they
have learned in school has prepared them for a homogeneous develop¬
ment of tribal rehabilitation which is kept from jelling by the in-

384 Childhood and Society

ducements of the armed seirices, of migratory labor, and of industrial
work. The latter trends expose them to the problems of the poorest
white rural and colored urban populations. Only to be a soldier gives
new luster to an ancient role—when there happens to be a war on.

Those who, having identified with their teachers, go to college or
prepare for civil-service positions, as a rule seek employment on other
reservations to escape the double standard of their own, which recog¬
nizes them as better trained, yet expects them to be silent when their
more experienced elders speak. Thus potential leaders are lost to the
community.

Young men and women of integrity and stamina still emerge; but
they are the exceptions. Reliable new models for Dakota children
have not yet crystallized.

MacGregor’s study employed an extensive “battery” of interviews
and tests in order to arrive at a formulation of the “Dakota person¬
ality,” a composite picture which, he says, represents neither the
“personality of any one child nor the personalities of a majority of
the children: it could not be said to exist in all its elements in any one
child, let alone in a majority.” I shall not question or discuss the
methodology used in the study, but shall merely abstract the main
conclusions.

To settle one question which, I am sure, many a reader has been
wanting to ask: The intelligence of the Dakota children is slightly
above that of white children. Their health, however, corresponds to
that of the underprivileged rural whites. Chronic hunger, no doubt,
causes apathy, and much of the slowness, the lack of ambition, and
also the grinding bitterness of reservation life is simply due to hunger.
Yet MacGregor’s group, after exhaustive study, feels that the general
apathy is as much the cause as it is the result of the hunger; for it has
hindered initiative and industry in situations which had within them
chances of improvement.

We have outlined what, according to MacGregor’s study, has re¬
mained constant in Indian child rearing. Let us now see what is
changing.

The greatest change in Dakota life has probably been in the status
of the family as a whole: instead of being a reinforcement of self-
sufficiency it has become the refuge of those who feel isolated and
inefficient. The strongest remaining tie seems to be that between

Appendix 385

brothers: a healthy tie, easily transferable and usable for the establish¬
ment of new communal pursuits. The weakest relationship, however,
seems to be that between the children and their fathers, who cannot
teach them anything and who, in fact, have become models to be
avoided. Instead, boys seek praise from their age mates. Among girls,
almost all of the old avoidances have been abandoned or weakened to
the point where they are little more than empty acts of compliance.
A strange mixture of sadness, anger, and, again and again, shame and
embarrassment seems to have stepped into the breach of these old
respect relationships. Getting an education and getting a job are new
and strong ambitions, which, however, are apparently soon exhausted
because they cannot attach themselves to any particular roles and
functions. The children feel what their elders Imow—^namely, tliat
(and these are my words) ‘‘Washington,” the climate, and the market
make all prediction impossible.

Tests of thematic imagination among the Dakota children and
spontaneous stories told by them reflect their image of the world.
In the following, it must be kept in mind that such tests do not ask:
how do you see the world and how do you look at things?—since few
adults, fewer children, and no Indian children would know what to
say. The testers therefore present a picture, or a story, or pages with
vague inkblots on them, and say: what do you see in this ?—a pro¬
cedure which makes the child forget his reality, and yet unconsciously
give away his disappointments, his wishes, and, above all, his basic
attitude toward human existence.

Dakota children, so their testers say after careftil quantitative anal¬
ysis of the themes produced and the apperceptions revealed, de¬
scribe the world as dangerous and hostile. Affectionate relationships
in early home life are remembered with nostalgia. Otherwise the
world for them seems to have little definiteness and little purpose.
In their stories the characters are not named, there is no clear-cut
action and no definite outcome. Correspondingly, caution and nega¬
tivism become the major characteristics of the utterances of the group
as a whole. Their guilt and their anger arc expressed in stories of petty
and trivial criticism, of aimless slapping or of impulsive stealing, just
for vengeance. Like aU children, they like stories in which to escape
from the present, but the Dakota child’s imaginativeness returns to the
time before the coming of the white man. Fantasies of the old life
‘‘are not recounted as past glories but as satisfactions that may return

386 CMdhood and Society

to make up for the hardships and fears of the present,** As far as the
children’s stories and remarks reflect the social world of today, action
is always initiated by others, and it is mostly inconsiderate, untrust¬
worthy, and hostile action, leading to fights and to the destruction of
toys and property, and causing in the narrator sadness, fear, and
anger. Where action is self-initiated, it leads almost exclusively to
fighting, damaging of property, breaking of rules, and stealing. Ani¬
mals, too, arc represented as frightening, and this not only in the more
understandable cases of rattlesnakes, roaming dogs, and vicious bulls,
but also in that of horses, which these children, in actuality, Icam to
handle early and with intense pleasure. In the frequency of thematic
responses, worry about the death of other people, their sickness, or
their departure, is second only to descriptions of hostility emanating
from people or from animals. On the positive side there is the uni¬
versal wish to go to movies, fairs, and rodeos, where (as the testers
interpret it) children can be with many without being with anybody
in particular.

Tlic study concludes that the children in the earliest age group
tested (6 to 8) appear to have better-organized personalities than the
older age groups; that the group from 9 to 12 are the freest, the most
at case with themselves, although far behind white children in exuber¬
ance and vivacity; and that with the advent of puberty, the children
begin to retire more completely within themselves and to lose interest
in the world around them. They resign themselves and become apa¬
thetic and passive, although there is some difference between the
boys and the girls. The boys show more expression and ambition,
though in a somewhat unbalanced way; while the girls, as they enter
pubescence, show extreme agitation, followed by a display of paraly¬
sis of action. It is obvious that in this, both boys and girls bring to
their new culture, in vain, what they brought to the old one. In
adolescence, stealing triples and the fear of the ill will of society seems
to include all the elders and institutions, white and Indian, around
them.

In view of all of these observations it is hard to sec how Mac¬
Gregor’s group can have come to the conclusion that they reached—
namely, that the ‘‘crippled and negative” state of Dakota child per¬
sonality, and its rejection of life, emotion, and spontaneity, are due
to “repressive forces set in action early in the child’s life,” My con¬
clusion would be that early childhood among the Dakota, within

Appendix 387

the Cmks of poverty and general lisdessncss, is a relatively rich and
spontaneous existence which permits the school child to emerge from
the family with a relative integration—Lc*, with much trust, a little
autonomy, and some initiative. This initiative between the ages of
nine and twelve is still naively and not too successfully applied to play
and work; while it becomes inescapably clear only in puberty that
what initiative has been salvaged will not find an identity. Emotional
withdrawal and general absenteeism arc the results.

MacGregor’s material makes it particularly clear and significant
that the breakdown of the respect relationships, together with the
absence of goals for initiative, leaves unused and undiverted the in¬
fantile rage which is still provoked in early child training. I'he result is
apathy and depression. Similarly, without the balance of attainable
rewards, shaming becomes a mere sadistic habit, done for vengeance
rather tlian for guidance.

The view of the adult world as hostile, understandable as it is on
grounds of social reality, seems to have received a powerful reinforce¬
ment from the projection of the child’s inner rage—which is why
the environment is pictured not only as forbidding but also as de¬
structive, while loved ones arc in danger of departing or dying. Here
I feel strongly that the Dakota child now projects where in his old
system he diverted. An example would be the horse, once a friendly
animal, which here becomes the object of projection. As a picture of
threat it is probably the now hopelessly misplaced and distorted
original image of an inimical beast of prey. In other words, where in
the buflFalo days there was an animal on whom all the early provoked
hunting and killing instinct could be concentrated, tlierc is now no
goal for such initiative. Thus the individual becomes afraid of his own
unused power of aggression, and such fear expresses itself in his seeing,
outside of himself, dangers which do not exist, or which arc exag¬
gerated in fantasy. In social reality impulsive and vengeful stealing
finally becomes the lone expression of that ‘‘grasping and biting”
ferocity which once was the wcU-guided force behind hunting and
warring. The fear of the relatives’ death or departure is probably a
sign of the fact that hostility is no longer diverted and utilized, but
turns against the family itself. Excessive and groundless fear for an¬
other person is usually an expression of an unconscious death wish
toward liim. Yet the armospiicrc of the home, with all its poverty,
promises more integration because it represents the remnants of a once

388 Childhood and Society

integrated culture; even as a mere dream of restoration it has more
reality—than reality. It is, then, not this system of training as such and
its “repressive forces” which stunt the child, but the fact that for the
last hundred years the integrative mechanisms of child training have
not been encouraged to sustain a new promising system of significant
social roles, as they had done once before when the Dakota became
buffalo hunters.

The cattle economy, we arc happy to hear from MacGregor, is
making consistent progress, together with the rehabilitation of the
soil and the return of the high grass. However, the establishment of
a healthy cattle economy again called for government rations, which,
with the forgetful advance of history, are losing their original char¬
acter of a right acquired by treaty and are becoming common dole.
Industrial opportunities still call the Indian away from a consistent
concentration on his communal rehabilitation, while they offer the
shiftless Indian only the lower identities in the American success
system. But at least they pay well, and they pay for work rendered,
not for battles lost in the last century. In the end, with all respect and
understanding for the Indian’s special situation and nature, and with
fervent wishes for the success of his rehabilitation, the conclusion re¬
mains inevitable that he can in the long run benefit only from a cul¬
tural and political advance of the rural poor and of the non-white
population of the whole nation. Child-training systems change to
advantage only where the universal trend toward larger cultural
entities is sustained.

INDEX

Adolescence, 228 flE*

American, 218 ff,

German, 299-302, 309
Gorky’s, 316 ff•

Hitler’s, 298 ff.

Adolescent love, 228
Adorno, T. W., 372
Aggression, 24, 25, 199
and frustration, 373
and libido, 54 ff.

Agriculture, Sioux, loa
Aichom, August, 13
Ambivalence, 107
Sioux, 117
social, 159

American, see also under subject
American Indians, cultural pat¬
tern of, 96 ff.

American life, polarities in, 244 ff.
American woman, role of, 250
Amnesia concerning childhood,
360, 361

•‘Anaclitic depression,” 75
Anal fixation, 153, 159
Anality, 55, 76
Sioux, 124
Yurok, 158
Anal zone, 77 ff.

Anger, infantile, 74, 75; see also
Rage

Sioux, 120
Yurok, 144

Antisemitism, paranoid, 9, 314
as projection, 311 ff*

Anxiety, 193, 368

389

and somatic tension, 32
as fears, 362 ff.
avoidance of, 369
dream, 194
fear of, 359 ff.
in play, 291

infantile, 199, 200, 360
neurotic, 20
origin of, 75, 364
parental, 27
Sioux, 159, 160
Yurok, 160

Apathy, Sioux, 103, 115
Autocosmic play, definition of,

193

Autocrotism, 64; see also Mastur¬
bation

Autonomy, 77, 81, 222 ff.
fear of loss of, 365
origin of, 80

Backhaus, W. W., 310
Bateson, Gregory, 13, 14
Begg-Emery, Felice, 14
Bcnedek, Theresc, 220
Benedict, Ruth, 13, 249
Benet, Sulz, 316
Bios, Peter, 13
Body drives and play, 186
Body organs, see Body zones
Body zone fixation, 73
Body zones
anal, 48 ff.
eliminative, 76 ff.
genital, 81 ff.

Index

390

Body zones {continued)
oral, 67 S.

Botkin, B. 258
Bowel function, 44,49, 119
relation of to property, 124
Bowel training

in Western civilization, 77
Sioux, i24fr.

Yurok, 158 flf.

Breast feeding, 67, 74, 172
among Sioux, 118, 119,120, 121
among Yurok, 150
Buffalo in Sioux life, 100 131,

1371 ^^3

Burlingham, Dorothy, 13

Galas, Nicx)las, 316
Calderon, Pedro, 232
Castration, 225, 312, 329, 363, 365
Centrifugaliry, as cultural pattern
in scliizoplirenia, 170
Sioux, 140, 155

Ccntripetality, as cultural pattern
Yurok, 145,155
Childbirth

among Sioux, 117, 118
among Yurok, 150
“natural,"’ 375
without anxiety, 375
Child psychiatry, Yurok, 146 ff*
Child training, American, 250
and ideological differences, 115
and instincts, 90
and parent training, 269
and pregenitality, 89
and “traits,"" 121
for self-reliance, 217 ff,
tor social participation, 208,
209, 210

Indian, 381 ff.
mechanization of, 253, 254
primitive, 96
Russian, 344 ff.

Sioux, 106 ff., ii7ff., 124, 125,
138, 140, 251, 259
attitude toward white, no,
111

varieties of, 68, 77, 269
Yurok, 251, 259 ff.

Qcanlincss, see also Dirt
Negro attitude toward, 241
Sioux attitude toward, 114
Yurok attitude toward, 155,
*57

Compensation neurosis, 103
Compulsion, infantile, 222, 360
origin of, 365

Compulsion neurosis, 55, 153
Conscience, 56, 90, 92, 114, 222
infantile, 225
among Sioux, 138, 139
Cultural pattern
American, 244 ff.
primitive, 139 ff.

Sioux, 117 ff.

Yurok, 145, 155 ff.

Curiosity, 205
Cynicism, Yurok, 145

Dakota, see Sioux
Daydreams, 191
Death

fear of, 22, 29
instinct of, 64

Defense mechanism, 31, 136, 168,
221

“Demand feeding,"* Sioux, 119

Index

39 *

[democracy, 229, 246

German attitude toward, 309
Depression, infantile, 75
Dirt, attitude toward, 171, 174;

see also Qeanlincss
Donskoi, Mark, 316
Doubt, origin of, 80, 224
Dreams, 160, 165
Sioux, 133, 134

FIducation, Sioux, ioi, 128
138

Ego

and society, 11
development of, 163 ff.
integrity, 231 ff,
neurotic, 213
qualities, 219 ff*
restriction, 267, 268, 271
self-made, 253
strength, 218
Yurok, 158, 160

synthesis, 208, 210, 212, 215,
241

weakness, 180
Einstein, Albert, 314
Emotional disturbance
American, 255 ff,
integration, 233
tension, 251, 252
Enuresis among Sioux, no, 124
Erikson, Erik H., 157
Evil, sense of, 74, 75, 215, 220

Fables, Yurok, 152 ff.

Fanny, the Shaman, 146 ff.

Father

American, 272 ff.

German, 288 ff.

identification, 211, 293
transference, 203
Fear

feminine, 366
infantile, 12, 171, 360, 362
interpretation of, 54
of anxiety, 359 ff,
of autonomy loss, 365
of castration, 365
of death, 22, 29
of encirclement, 362
of identity loss, 368
of invasion, 362
of organ mode impoverish¬
ment, 365
of rape, 367
paranoiac, 224
Fears, anxiety as, 362 ff.

Federal Writers’ Project, 216
Feeding, 172
demand, 119
Femininity, 83, 84, 88
Festivals

Sioux, see Sun Dance
Yurok, see Fish dam building
Fetish, 171, 177
Finger play, 178
Fire serting as sy’^mptom, 210
Fish dam building, Yurok, 143,
156

Fixation, anal, 153, 159
Flanncr, Janet, 307
Fortitude, Sioux, 121, 130 ff.
Frank, Lawrence K., 13
Fremont-Smith, Frank, 14
Frcnkcl-Brunswik, Else, 372
Freud, Anna, 13, 168, 205, 265
Freud, Sigmund, ii, 42, 44, 54,
55» 5^1 581 59i 60, 61, 65, 76,

Index

39^

Freud, Sigmund {continued')
82,95,133,153,160,164,166,
167, 182, 188, 189, 190, 196,
229, 239, 240, 241, 242, 313,

333

Frigidity, 88, 252
Fromm-Reichmann, Frieda, 14
Frontier, influence of American,
250^ 251

Frustration and aggression, 373

Games, Sioux, 104, 125 ff.
Generosity, Sioux, 112, 113,

121 ff., 128, 130
Genital attitudes
Sioux, 138 flr.

Yurok, 153 ff.

Genital love, 229
Genital maturity, 227,228
Genitality, ideal, 230 tf.

and pregenitality, 87 ff.
German, see under subject
Germans and Jews, 314
GesclL, Arnold, 66
Gorer, Geoffrey, 316, 345
Gorky, Maxim, 316 ff., 326, 335,
342, 350. 35*

Grandmothers
American, 2 50 ff,

Russian, 352 ff.

Grandfathers, Russian, 327 ff.
Gravity and play, 186
Growtli, definition of, 184
Guilt

projection of, Sioux, i34ff.,
138

sense of, 29, 87, 223, 224, 335,

338. 339

Hartmann, Heinz, 91
Hendrick, Ives, 227
Humor, 361, 362

Id, 167, 240

definition of, 166
Identification

as result of loss, 54
national, Russian, 332
of woman and earth, Russian,
335

with conqueror, Sioux, 108
witli dominant race, Negro,
214

with father, 211
with giver, 71

with tormentor, Russian, 328
Identity, 227 ff.

American, 244 ff.

and child training, Sioux, 108 ff.

beginnings of, 207 ff.

child’s right to, 210

collective, Sioux, 137

ideal, Sioux, 113

Jewish, 24, 26, 32, 314

loss of, 38, 40, 212, 242

national, 244

Negro, 213 ff.

sense of

German, 314
Sioux, 116
threats against, 368
Incest taboos, 58, 86, 130, 225
Indian, see Sioux, Yurok; see also
under subject
Indian childhood, 95 ff.

life, recent changes in, 381 ff.
Indian Service, 101, 103, 108
Infantile anger, see Infantile Rage

Index

393

anxiety, 199, 200, 360
compulsions, 222, 360
conscience, 222
depression, 75
fantasy, 51

fears, 12, 171, 360, 362
genitality, 86 £F,
imagery, 297
nostalgia, Yurok, 151
play, 194 ff.
rage, 74, 220, 361, 369
Sioux, 119

schizophrenia, 169 j?F., 220, 255
sexuality, 42 fF., 86, 225
Freud’s theory of, 56
Infantilism, “Morn’s,^ 250
Inferiority, sense of, 227
Initiative, lack of, Sioux, 1x4
Instincts, 89, 90, 92
Integration, 212, 233
Intellect, Freud’s theory of the
primacy of, 241
Interpretation of fear, 54
in psychotherapy, 51 ff.
of play, Freud’s, 191
of rituals, 334

Jewish identity, 24, 26, 32, 314
Jewry, 311 ff.

Jim the Sioux, 104 ff.

John Henry, 256 ff.

Kinsey, Alfred Charles, 230
Kluckhohn, Qyde, 15
Kris, Ernst, 91

Kroeber, Alfred, 13, 96, 97, 143,
144, 146, 147, 158

Latency period, 226
definition of, 82

Lcitch, Mary, 14
Leites, Nathan, 316
Ivcvinson, Daniel J., 372
l^vy, David, 76
Lewis, Alfred H., 2 58
Libido, 42, 54 ff., 63, 89
Freud’s theory of, 58
Lincoln, T. S., 136
Lloyd, Wilma, 14
Loeb, Martin, 13
Lomax, J. A. and Alan, 258
Love, 64

adolescent, 228
genital, 229

between sexes, Sioux, 129
Lowenstein, R., 91

Macfarlane, Jean Walker, 14
MacGregor, Gordon, 102, 381,
384, 386, 387, 388
Magic

among Sioux, 155
among Yurok, 155, 157
Mann, Thomas, 307, 309
Marx, Karl, 313
Masochistic traits, 64, 65, 220
Masturbation, among Sioux, 110
Maternal relationship, 221 ff.; see
also Mother, Motherhood,
Mothers, Parent-child inter¬
action

attachment. Hitler’s, 296
estrangement, 171
favor, contest for, 225
generosity, Sioux, 128
rejection, 181, 247
separation and teething, 74
Maturity, 227, 228, 232
Mead, Margaret, 13, 316, 373

Index

394

Mckccl, H- Sendder, 13* 96, 97,
98, 106, 108, 112, 114, 117
Mciklcjohn, Helen, 14
‘‘Melting pot,'’ 253
Menstruation

Sioux attirude toward, 115
Yurok attitude toward, 143*

154

Minority, American, 216, 217
“Mom,” 247 ff., 254
Montessori touch method, 178
Mother, see also Maternal rela¬
tionship, Mothers
earth as, 334, 335
fixation, prevention of, Russian,

325

substitute, 53

Motherhood, diffusion of, Rus¬
sian, 326
Mothers

American, 247 ff.

Russian, 323 ff,

Sioux, 251 ff.

Yurok, 251 ff.

Murphy, Gardner, 14
Murphy, Lois, 14
Murray, Henry A., 13, 14, 15
Music, 180

Mutuality, heterosexual, 230
Myth, German, 308

National Feeling, lack of,
Yurok, 155

National identity, 244, 314
Negro, see also under subject
Negro identity, 213 ff.

Neurosis, 24, 29,87, 196, 210, 213,
250

“causes” of, 19

chUcTs, Yurok, 147
compensation, 103
lack of, Sioux, 115
location of, 19, 36
origin of, 30, 39,40, 239
overcompensation, 40
transference, 196
war, 34 ff.

Neurotic anxiety, 20
Nostalgia, infantile, Yurok, 151
Nurses, role of, 53, 170
Nursing, see Breast feeding

Obsession, origin of, 365
Oedipus complex, 46, 82, 86, 255,

367

Orality, 67 ff.
and trust, 118

training, Yurok, 150, 151, 152
Organ repudiation, 172
Overcompensation, 40, 168, 226

Paranoiac fears, 224
Parent-child interaction
and autoerotism, 64
and control, 64

and mutuality, 64, 65, 70, 71,
75, 78, 207, 226, 268, 272,
376

and psychotherapy, 197
and rage, 75

and tension, emotional, 251,252
and trust, 80, 175, 176, 220
as source of schizophrenia, 181
breast feeding, 70
fatlier identification, 211, 293
fraternal pattern, 273
identity of neurosis, 26
maternal attachment, 296

Index

estrangement, 171
favor, contest for, 225
relationship, 221 ff.
separation, 202
Oedipus relation, 46
parental attachment, 367
paternal rejection, 169
role of nurses in, 53, 170
Sioux, 109
weaning, 75

Farrington, Vernon, 246, 283
Passive resistance, Sioux, 109, 115
Paternal violence, Russian, 329
Patients

Ann (aged 4), 14, 44flF^ 196,
206

boy (aged 5), son of bombar¬
dier, 2ioff.

Jean (aged 6), 14, 169 ff.
the Marine, 14, 34 ff., 168
Mary (aged 3), 14, 197 ff.

Peter (aged 4), 49 ff., 79
Sam (aged 3), 14, 21 ff., 168,
196

Patliogenic trends, convergence
of, 30, 39

Patricide, taboo, 238
Play, 182 ff.
and body drives, 186
and gravity, 186
and surplus energy, 187
autocosmic, 193
concentration, 203
definition of, 185
disruption, 194, 196, 205
function of, 187, 188
infanrile, 194, 195
satiation, 205
definition of, 202

395

self-curative trend in, 205 ff.
Sioux, 125 ff.
solitary, 194

therapy, episodes of, 23, 25, 45,
50 ff., 195 ff., 202
*naying it out,** 195
Pregenitality, 87 ff.

Charts of, 65, 69, 73, 79, 84, 85
Pregnancy

among Sioux, 117
among Yurok, 150
infantile fantasy of, 51, 52,
54

Prejudices

cultural, 108, 109, III ff.

Sioux, 107

Primitive child training, 95,96
cultural system, 139 ff.
Property, and bowel training, 124
Sioux attitude toward, 112,123,
124

Yurok attitude toward, 142,146
Psychoanalysis, ii, 12, 27, 55, 60,
62,64,65, 83, 87,97, 149,153,
164, 166, 187, 196, 205, 215,
221, 223, 229, 230, 237, 239,
241, 242, 243, 253, 255, 312,

357. 359. 3 < 5 «, 369, 371. 372 »
373 . 377 . 378. 379
Psyclioscxua] stages, 57, 69, 70,

7 *. 73. 75. 76 ff-

Ps)xhosomatic disturbance, 226,

255

Psychotherapy with children, 27,
33.42.51.197 ff.

•Tsychotic character,** 211
Puberty rites, 228
Puritanism, American, 245, 251
Purity, among Yurok, 143

Index

396

Racial TRAITS, 113
Rage, infantile, 75, zip, 220, 361,
369; see also Anger
Sioux, 119, 120, 132
Rape, fear of, 367
among Sioux, 127
Read, Dr. Grantly D., 375
Regression, 53,57, 63, 78, 79, 194,
215, 225
Negro, 215
Rejection

maternal, 181, 247
paternal, 169
Religious observance
Sioux, 131 ff., 165
Yurok, 143, 156
Repetition compulsion, 189
Repression, 58, 226, 240
Retentiveness, 77
Yurok, 158

Rickman, John, 188, 345
Tlooming-in,” 376
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 246, 363
Roskin, 326, 349
Russian, see under subject

Sadistic traits, 63, 64, 65
Salmon, in Yurok life, 146 d., 156,

253

Sandburg, Carl, 99
Sanford, R. Nevitt, 372
Santayana, George, 193
Schaffner, Bertram, 316
Schiller, Friedrich, 185
Schizoid personality, 247
Schizophrenia, infantile,

220, 255

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 167
Security, sense of, Yurok, 155

Self “blame, 29, 255
Self“Coercion, 364, 365
Self-curative trend in play, 205
Self-punishment, 175, 179, 180
Self-reliance, 2175.
Self-restriction, i68, 221
Self-torture, 220; Sioux, 132, 165
Sex differences, awareness of, 82,
201

habits, Sioux, 106
play, 87

relations, satisfactory, 230
Sexual activity, Sioux, 109
Sexuality, 87, 367
infantile, 42 ff., 225
Freud’s theory of, 56
study of, 242

Shakespeare, William, 333
Shame, 80, 81, 362
definition of, 223
Siblings, rivalry among, 224, 367
Sioux taboos regarding, 125
Sin, sense of, 237
Russian, 325
Sioux, 131
Sioux

cultural pattern, 99 ff., 137 ff.
dances, 128

Slogans, American, 245
Somatic tension and anxiety, 32
Son murder, Russian, 331, 332
Sophocles, 333
Speech, repudiation of, 172
Spencer, Herbert, 187
Spengler, Oswald, 311
Spitz, Rend, 75
Status, American, 246
Stealing, among Sioux, 109
Stewart, George, 60

Index

397

Stinginess, Yurok, 144
Scockard, C H., 61
Stubbornness, 77, 197
Sublimation, 179
definition of, 58
Sullivan, Henry S., 12
Sun Dance, Sioux, 131 ff*, 143,156
Superego, 167, 223, 225
definition of, 166
Supernatural, among Sioux,
131 ff.

Surplus energy and play, 187
Suspicion, Yurok, 144, 154
Swaddling, Russian, 344 C
Szarek, Stanislaus, 14

Taboos

incest, 58, 86, 130, 225
Yurok, 155
patricide, 238
Sioux, 1255.

Yurok, 150

*nralking it out,” 195, 196
Teeth clicking, Sioux, 122
Teething, 74, 220
Tension

emotional, 251, 251
ncurodc, 58
somatic, 32

Thumb sucking, 44, 122,

Time and play, 186
Tom Sawyer, 182 fL
*Trraits,” 113, 121
Yurok, 158

Transference neurosis, 196
Trotsky, Leon, 329
Truancy, among Sioux, 109
Trust

and child therapy, 220, 221

and oraEty, Sioux, 118
definition of, 233
loss of, 220, 221, 222, 226, 325
Russian, 324, 325
sense of, 75, 80, 237
Twain, Mark, 182 ff*, 361

Underhill, Ruth, 208, 209
United States Indian Service, see
Indian Service

Unity, need for, Russian, 356

Virginity, among Sioux, 129
Visions, Sioux, 134 ff.

Waelder, Robert, 160
War neurosis, case of, 34 ff.

loss of ego identity in, 38, 40
Waterman, T. T., 141
Weaning, 75
Self-weaning, Sioux, 119
Yurok, 150

Weber, Max, 303, 304, 308, 356
Wellman, P. I., 99, 100
•Will,” Schopenhauer’s, 167
Windholz, Emanuel, 14
Wissler, C, 100, 135, 136
Woman
and war, 366

emancipated American, 254

Youth, 236 ff.

American, 267 ff., 355 ff.
German, 298 ff.

Yurok, see also under subject
cultural pattern, 141 ff., 155 ff.
dances, 159

ZiEMER, G., 300
2 U)nes, see Body zones

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