Word: childrene
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim, 66, who is best known for his innovative studies of children's emotional development, has turned his protean mind to student radicals. He sees some in his private therapeutic practice, and observes others on the campus of the University of Chicago, where he teaches and directs the Sonia Shankman School for psychotic children. His considered conclusion is that American parents and American society have not given today's youth the emotional equipment for engaging in rational and constructive protest. In the September issue of the British magazine Encounter, Bettelheim spells out his ideas, which have...
...face them," Bettelheim writes. "But we were only expected to face them in thought, and only in the safely structured treatment situation. This has been misapplied by large numbers of the educated middle classes to mean that aggression should always be expressed, and not just in thought. Accordingly, many children today do not learn to repress aggression enough...
...same overpermissive parents more often than not make irrational demands for high marks in school and insist on superhygienic cleanliness so that their children reflect well on them in public. Such families, says Bettelheim, exploit their children to fulfill their own "narcissistic needs"; they choose to follow Freud where it suits their convenience, and are as demanding of conformity as "the worst Victorian parent" where it does not. For the children, Bettelheim says, the result has been a "senseless" uncertainty about their own identities that turns to self-hate and later to resentment of the world at large...
Bettelheim does not deny the existence of injustices within U.S. life. But he insists that the underlying causes of campus unrest lie as much in the way American children are raised and educated as in the Vietnamese war or widespread poverty. His advice is for universities to act like firm but understanding parents. While gladly adopting worthy suggestions, administrators should stop being so "anxious to look progressive" that they shrink from upholding the reasoned guidelines that students need to cope with their inner conflicts. For adolescents who lack a commitment to study and research, Bettelheim proposes a new educational system...
...mind. He could be depended upon to rush in where pedants feared to tread. At the drop of a bourgeois top hat, he would discourse on Moses or municipal drains, on Marx or Michelangelo. Browbeating the Church of England for paganism or instructing mothers on how they should train children-it was all one to Shaw...