Handicaps of ChildhoodBruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Science
Handicaps of Childhood
Bruce, H. Addington (Henry Addington)
Child development; Education
"You are soon leaving town for the summer, I understand," he said. "What
are you going to do with your daughter?"
"Why, take her with us, of course."
"You must do nothing of the sort. Instead, send her to a girls' camp. She
needs contact with other girls; she needs the discipline such contact will
give her. It is far and away the best medicine she can have. Her recovery
depends solely on her developing a new point of view, a mental outlook
that will extend beyond herself. This is what a good camp for girls can
give her."
The outcome vindicated his words. That fall the nervously depressed girl
came back from a summer in camp radiantly happy and with a vastly altered
disposition. Since then her parents have had no trouble with her.
Please, however, understand clearly that she was really a sick girl
when her mother took her to my neurological friend. It was not simply a
question of dealing with a "naughty" girl. The depression, the tears, the
attacks of irritability were not deliberately put on to excite sympathy
and to play on the mother's affections. This assuredly was their basic
purpose, but they were the product of subconscious, not conscious, mental
action. They were the resultant of an emotional stress, the responsibility
for which rested not with the girl herself but with her mother's unwise
treatment of her. If she had become neurotic, it was because her mother
had made her so. What she needed, and all she needed, was psychic
re-education, and this she obtained through the neurologist's common-sense
method of cure.
The fact that such cases are indicative, not of mere naughtiness, but
of the action of an inner force operating independently of the victim's
conscious volition, will become more apparent when I add that sometimes
the symptoms causing medical aid to be invoked are physical instead of
mental. In one typical case of this sort a neurologist was summoned to
examine a small boy who had been attacked by a peculiar weakness of the
legs. To all appearance, he was in perfect bodily health, but when he
attempted to walk his legs gave way, and he would fall, unless quickly
supported. The most careful testing failed to reveal any organic cause
for this condition, and a diagnosis of juvenile hysteria was made. It was
learned that the boy's trouble began soon after he had met in the street a
badly crippled, semi-paralysed man, whose appearance had evidently made a
deep impression on his mind, as he spoke of it, when he got home, in terms
partly of astonishment and partly of fear. There could be no doubt that
the sight of this man had acted as a "suggestion" to cause the development
of a somewhat similar condition in the boy himself. The question remained,
why should the mere seeing of a crippled man have sufficient suggestive
force to bring on an hysterical crippling? For undoubtedly the boy must
have had not a few equally distressing experiences long before this one.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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