In conflicts of authority, parents are always the strongest. But the children are the most beaten. Dr. Dreikurs shows the need to avoid such conflicts without giving in to undue demands. This ‘third way’ consists in developing personal experience. Its basic principle: ‘Use natural and logical consequences’.
‘Ruth, three years old, dawdles. She needs to prepare to go out for her usual Saturday night walk. Finally, Dad and Mum climb in the car, and say to her: “Apparently, you do not want to walk; but we do. Good-bye, darling, we’ll be back soon”. The following Saturday, Ruth is ready ahead of time’. Commentary: ‘Mum and Dad make no effort to coerce Ruth, but take responsibility for their own attitude. They maintain their plan, and apply the principle of logical consequence’.
Another example: Eric, seven, refuses to eat stew under the pretext that he does not ‘like it’. The two disastrous solutions are weakness (‘then, what do you want to eat?’) and conflict (‘you’re going to eat like everyone else’). The middle way: ‘We are having stew tonight. If you don’t want any, you can leave the table. You won’t have anything else of course. The choice is yours’.
Again we must remain firm: ‘If after the meal he has refused, Eric comes and asks for milk and bread, do not yield’: “The house is not a restaurant, I only serve at mealtime”.
As a rule, parents talk too much and do not act enough. The child thus learns where the ‘threshold of irritability’ falls, which he can abuse without risk. Trial and error allow him to translate into his personal language expressions such as: ‘wait a little, you’ll see’ (still waiting), ‘now that’s enough’ (implying: before was not enough), ‘speak to your father’ (I am not able to settle the matter by myself), ‘if I get up, you are going to cop a spanking’ (threat not followed by effect). Dr. Dreikurs calls it ‘chasing flies’.
‘The child’, he writes, ‘provokes an annoyance in his parents similar to the sound of a fly. Exasperated by the irritating behaviour, we tend to chase the child around, saying: “don’t do that, stop it, no, no, hurry up, keep quiet”, etc., as if we were getting rid of a blowfly. And in each case, the parents eventually let themselves get caught up in violent reactions’. Hence the classic cycle: irritation, punishment and reprimand, injustice, rebellion.
Dr. Dreikurs points out that it is necessary to have ‘the courage to say no’. Do not give in to blackmail (tears, screams, fear of the dark, anger) or provocations. ‘Oh ! I must be at home at five o’clock’, a mother said to her friend. ‘Why?’ ‘Because I told Elizabeth I’ll be there. She must watch me out the window. When I’m not on time, she’s absolutely terrified. She weeps and puts herself in all sorts of states’.
‘Elizabeth has trained her mother well’, says Dr. Dreikurs. ‘The girl holds the hoop, and her mother jumps right through. Fear is used to dominate the mother’.
Nor is there ‘any reason to buy a child every toy that he sees and thinks he wants. This favours his caprices, and makes him believe that these gifts are owed to him’.
Do not soften needlessly. The phenomenon of the child who only begins to cry after a fall if he knows he has been seen is well-known. Hospital staff know what to expect. ‘Doctors and nurses who work with children with disabilities are amazed at the courage that they have and the cleverness with which they can compensate for or overcome their difficulties. They are very aware of the danger of pity. Fully advanced children collapse because of sympathy or pity given by misguided parents or neighbours’.
Dr. Dreikurs concludes: ‘It is much easier to get the child to respect the order once the firmness of the parents is recognised and respect for the child is proven’.
Despite some unnecessary concessions, especially in vocabulary (the author refers to Adlerian psychology), the work of Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs helps to bridge the generation gap by knowing that lectures will never be as valuable as examples. But also for parents, the education of a child can be a good opportunity — to learn to behave like adults.
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Le défi de l’enfant, by Rudolf Dreikurs. Laffont, 298 pages.528
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Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose book Baby and Child Care (Comment soigner et éduquer son enfant, Laffont, 1957) served as a ‘Bible’ for millions of parents, is recognised today for having advocated ‘anti-authoritarian methods’ that completely deceived them. ‘Because of people like me’, he writes in the New York magazine, Redbook (January 1974), ‘a wealth of parents have been led to believe that only Psychiatrists, psychologists, paediatricians and social workers know how to care for children. It was a mistake’.
‘Obviously’, he adds, ‘I had said all this with a good intention. But it is a fact that children need authority. In America, parents are not firm enough. They imagine that if they show authority, children will be angry with them or will love them less. It is enough to see everything that an unbearable child can obtain simply by shouting: “I hate you!” Parents give in immediately. Generally speaking, parents are guilty: they think that everything the child does wrong is their fault, because they have given them “complexes”, that they have “traumatised” them, that they did not listen to the “specialists”, etc. By accusing them of incompetence and ignorance, we have accentuated this feeling of guilt. And now it is I who repent’.
A no less firm condemnation of ‘libertarian’ pedagogy can be found in Claude Alzon’s book, La Mort de Pygmalion (Maspero, 1974).529 Denouncing both the ‘worship of youthful incompleteness’ and ‘the regression of parents to the infantile stage’, Alzon writes: ‘those who were most difficult to integrate into society were the strongest beings, whose personality was developed by an uncommon education urging them to contest a society in which they did not find a place to their measure. Today, it is the young people who have received the most infantile education who are incapable, by their very childishness, of integrating. And so the protester is no longer the same. Yesterday he was the most sophisticated worker. In our day, young people are the weakest. Yesterday, one could expect everything from a revolt by solid men. Today, all we can fear is the sterile agitation of backward adolescents (...) Once again, the adult will not be changed by creating an immaturity even greater than his own, but by asking him, quite simply, to win back his own maturity’.
Child Behavioural Disorders
A child is not an adult in miniature, but a developing being, a different being whose emotional development and intellectual activity unfold according to particular laws.
This thesis of Jean Piaget, Dr. Pierre Debray-Ritzen (fifty-four years of age, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris), and Dr. Badrig Mélékian (forty-nine years of age, head of the Paediatric Clinic), is illustrated by demonstrating its sound foundations.
Composed in a direct style without concession to the jargon of psychoanalysis or to what Jean Giono calls speculative ‘philosophications’, their study of Les troubles du comportement de l’infant530 forms a useful and precise collection. It describes disorders such as sphincter misconduct, motor function disturbances, sleep and eating disorders, tics, rhythmic disorders, instabilities, and so on. But it also provides clarifications on etiology, that is to say, the causes and the genesis of disorders.
Our ‘Three Brains’
Besides the attacks and disturbances of the environment, the authors bring back the role of the constitution, indeed of heredity.
‘In view of the accumulation of our knowledge concerning the hereditary causes of the different encephalopathies’, they write, ‘it would be absurd to deny the truth of genetics (…) Moreover, who can claim that many behavioural disorders currently attributed exclusively to the ambient environment and to psychogenic causes, are not in fact due to yet-unknown hereditary and biochemical factors’.
They also insist on the lessons to be drawn from the most recent work of cerebral schizophysiology.
Following the British scholar Paul MacLean, the specialists now distinguish ‘three brains’:
1. The palaeocortex or ‘reptilian brain’, some
two hundred million years old, situated in the hypothalamus. It is the seat of our most elementary impulses: control of awareness, sensory stimulation, monitoring of the neuro-vegetative respiratory and cardiovascular centres, aggressive tendencies, etc.
2. The mesocortex, or ‘palaeomammalian brain’, appeared a hundred million years ago and is located in the limbic lobe (which adjoins the brain stem). It is the seat of affective reactions and sexual desires, it monitors the regulation of the olfactory function, emotional behaviour, etc. ‘Unconscious emotional set, like all automatisms whose palaeocephalic seat remains’ (Henri Laborit, L’agressivité détourné. UGE / 10–18, 1970), it is this brain which ‘emotionally colours’ aggressiveness and gives elemental urges their emotional tone: the search for sexual domination, the need to be favoured, admired, or loved.
3. The neocortex, which corresponds to the part of the brain that biologists have always known. Appearing as a distinctive feature among simians and primates, it is, in Homo sapiens, the seat of conceptual intelligence and reason.
Following Debray-Ritzen and Mélékian, many behavioural disorders come from poor coordination between the three ‘stages’:
‘On the one hand, the neocortex speaks with a language that the old brain cannot understand. On the other hand, and to the contrary, the lower, archaic behaviours (sexual, aggressive, gregarious, ecological) remain the masters: they communicate emotions and moods to the neocortex and the latter, even though conscious of these emotional reactions, remains unconscious of their phylogenetic signification as well as of the ancestral purpose that guides them. Thus the neocortex adopts these behaviours, and gives them the appearance of reason by ultimately being their dupe. Man believes that his consciousness has been suddenly given to him as a new nature, whereas it is only a new foam emerging from the depths of the tertiary era. Due to this, many ideologies and philosophies are built on this ignorance’.
Among the ‘external’ annoyances, the lack of authority is not forgotten: ‘Few children are able to bear it. The absence of firmness, of rule, of sanctions puts them in a situation that is ultimately anxiety-provoking for them to constantly have to ask how far they can go in terms of permission and dispute’.
When asked about this in 1974, Konrad Lorenz stated: ‘A social system in which the child is alpha and mother omega is not a normal system. It is an unhealthy system. On the other hand, a German psychologist has demonstrated in a magisterial way how complete frustration and complete absence of frustration produce exactly the same pathological effects on the child. If you give the bottle to a child before it has cried or done anything to get it, you will arrive at the same result as if you give it to him by forcing him to cry to have it. In both cases, the child is unable to practice reaching a goal. Now, in the first months of his life, the child must learn that he must work to obtain something. If he gains the habit of getting what he wants without working, it has the same pathological consequences as if he were working without ever getting anything. The absence of obstacles to overcome is therefore just as dangerous as the existence of insurmountable obstacles. (It suffices to transpose this principle into the adult world to understand the nature of one of the defects of modern societies)’.
‘In addition, the presence of a familial community is necessary, because it allows the transfer of authority to be created. The man of thirty years understands perfectly well that the advice of his fifty-five year-old father is valid, and he respects him. The five-year-old boy cannot yet comprehend the superiority of his grandfather, but he admires the ten-year-old boy who has already been allowed to take on small responsibilities. For the ten-year-old child, these responsibilities are privileges, not duties, and he understands very well that in order to benefit from them, he must submit to a certain discipline. As a result, he can give explanations to his five-year-old brother. This creates a hierarchy of admiration and discipline, with the ancestors at the top’ (interview with Nouvelle école, winter 1974–75).
Unambiguous Process
In Debray-Ritzen and Mélékian’s book, the explanations of a ‘Freudian’ inspiration (Freud, Melanie Klein, Otto Rank, René Spitz, etc.), which ‘model all personalities on a precocious and stereotyped chronology, which follows an unambiguous process based on sexuality alone’, are firmly rejected.
These theories, says Professor Debray-Ritzen, ‘are hardly based on facts, but rather on the singular propensity of a certain language to generalise itself, and a strong tendency to interpret by analogy’.
Freud’s disciples, he continues, artificially dissociate emotional development from intellectual development. They postulate an implausibly premature organisation, to which only emotional dynamics would lead. They affirm, however different individuals may be, that this dynamics is the same for everyone. Finally, they ‘automatically reduce a whole range of symptoms to a single interpretation’ — namely, sexuality.
To Rousseau, Freud, and Marx, Professor Debray-Ritzen opposes Arthur Koestler, Konrad Lorenz, and Robert Ardrey.
‘Philosophies’, he concludes, ‘have still not grasped the explosive importance of that which is provided by anthropology and ethology today’.
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Les troubles du comportement de l’enfant, by Pierre Debray-Ritzen and Badrig Mélékian.531 Fayard, 192 pages.
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In 1976, Pierre Debray-Ritzen published an encyclopaedia of child psychology (La psychologie de l’enfant. Retz).532 Instead of ideologies, he advocates ‘separative eclecticism’, a method of judging problems (behavioural disorders, debilities, aggressiveness, etc.) ‘in their own nature and original singularity’. ‘The word eclecticism’, he says, ‘is taken here in an original sense: the refusal to be informed by a single doctrine and an informed choice of what is good to take from the different branches of knowledge; the word ‘separator’ is used according to the sense that it has in the expression ‘separative power’ (for example of the microscope), that is to say, the quality which makes it possible to distinguish two points which were hitherto confused)’.
The Gifted
On May 29, 1975, Victor Serebriakoff, President of Mensa International, on passage to Johannesburg, declared to the South African Financial Gazette: ‘Western countries waste and neglect their most valuable capital: gray matter’.
He added: ‘while we do not hesitate, for good reason, to spend considerable sums of money on providing better education to mentally handicapped children, there is no provision for children with above average intelligence to flourish to the best of their abilities. This is a scandalous situation’.
Does modem society assassinate its geniuses?
Yes, claims Rémy Chauvin, in a study entitled Les superdoués. ‘Their childhood’, he writes, ‘is a burden. Many commit suicide mentally, in order to regain a world that does not want their talent’.
‘Creatives’ and ‘Savants’
Professor at the Sorbonne, specialist in animal psychology and sociology, Chauvin has published numerous books on biology and ethology. At a Congress held in Monaco from 30 June to 4 July 1975, he was elected Vice-President of the International Association for Psychotronic Research (which deals with parapsychology from a scientific point of view).
‘There are’, he observes, ‘geniuses by right of birth’. For example, the Irish mathematician Hamilton, who at the age of five could read Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; at seven, Italian and French; and at nine, Sanskrit and Arabic. Or the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who at three years old, wrote letters that a cultivated adult would not have disavowed. There are also more recent cases. At twenty-six months, a little girl named Millie could already read 700 words. Madeline’s IQ (intelligence quotient) reached 192 at the age of seven.
Interest in gifted children is old. Plato, in The Republic, recommends a vigorous selection. In the last century, after studying 997 eminent men, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, who was one of the first to apply the teachings of statistics to the study of heredity and individual differences, discovered that the
y had a total of 535 prominent parents, while the same number of ‘average’ men had only four. He also discovered that great men were often elder sons, which corroborates the observation that, on average, the level of intelligence decreases with the rank of birth.
According to Rémy Chauvin, there are two types of gifted children.
First, the brilliant subjects: the ‘strong learners’ of the classical variety. They are essentially characterised by a much higher than normal IQ. Then come the ‘creatives’. These are innovators, ‘originals’. They do not correspond to the traditional idea that we have of the elite. But they are the ones who change the world.
Many great men were ‘creative’: like Goethe, who composed and performed plays at the age of six, or Pascal, who at twelve rediscovered the laws of geometry.
Up to an IQ level of around 120, the correlation between intelligence and creativity is very strong. Above it, it decreases rapidly. For creative children, the difficulties of adapting are obvious. They are often challenging children and difficult to raise. Generally, they bewilder their acquaintances.
Their precocity is especially evident in the domain of reading: they ‘devour’. Endowed with a strong sense of humour, determined to ‘do nothing like the others’, they borrow, in their way of reasoning, surprising ‘shortcuts’, and at any time they can display a ‘mischievousness’ and a frustrating flippancy.
In class, they have excellent grades in what interests them, very bad in what bores them. They are students who are often ‘noticed’. The professors either love them or loathe them with the same vigour. They go to the extreme. They are repelled by the ‘average’. In every sense of the word.
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