This issue of Reclaiming Children and Youth celebrates the 50th anniversary of the publication of Children Who Hate (1951) by Fritz Redi and David Wineman. These authors were intensely involved with the children and youth whom others were determined to "throw away". From the descriptions of their experiences found in this classic text, we can derive a prototype based on a humanistic orientation toward aggressive children that contains psychoeducational attitudes and techniques with which to effectively work with these children.

Children Who Hate is about young boys whose lives had been shattered and frayed. The initial challenge facing Redl and Wineman was to try to understand that which had eluded helping professionals for decades: how to help alienated children lessen their distorted views of life and develop self-control. From 1942 through 1946, ten aggressive boys who had been expelled from their communities for delinquent acts lived in an experimental residence in Detroit, Michigan. Aptly named Pioneer House, it was the place where Redl and Wineman "minded" the ten boys and observed the nuances of their behaviors, from each boy’s entrance into the house to his exit from it. Redl and Wineman soon discovered that it was not aggressive and destructive behavior that needed to be understood but "the problem of control ... and solidification of hatred into an organized department of shrewdly developed defenses (1951, p. 31). They shifted the emphasis of their inquiry from finding explanations for the boys’ behavior to studying the failure of the boys’ "control systems." Redl and Wineman learned by a trial-and-error life among these boys rather than from traditional scientific inquiries. They gained insights concerning the breakdown of the ego and defense mechanisms used by antisocial youth who could not live effectively in an adult-dominated society. During the four years at Pioneer House, shape was given to the concepts of the therapeutic milieu and the Life Space Interview. Anecdotes about and interpretations of the behaviors of the boys are revealing, and they parallel those behaviors of disenfranchised youth we continue to hear about today. Redl had the unique ability to turn every crisis into a learning event. He listened to the most challenging children rather than demanding that they listen to him. He reversed the typical adult command to children to "mind"; instead, he "minded" the children. Instead of following the old adage that children should be seen and not heard, he believed they must be seen, heard, and listened to. Indeed, Redl believed that each of these troubled children had "a butterfly inside," and it was his mission to help children and youth shed their "fuzzy worms."

Although much has changed in the last 50 years, many things have stayed exactly the same. In 1996, Long and Morse reminded us that our knowledge far exceeds our practices. Today the hatred of children and youth results from many of the same conditions as those surrounding the boys whose behaviors were chronicled in Children Who Hate. In the year 2001, children and youth are disconnected from caring and influential adults and from spiritual supports. They are bombarded by violence in both fact and media-concocted fantasies and threatened by society’s increasing "boot camp" mentality concerning the "best" remedy for their egregious behaviors.

Redi devoted his professional life to finding solutions — rather than punishments — for children who became victims of their early and pervasively destructive life circumstances. Menninger (1989) has indicated that rehabilitation is not about treatment per se, because recovery of individuals depends upon professionals’ attitudes about developing the person’s capacities. Redl would have agreed with Menninger. Moving beyond professionals’ preoccupations with the negative and focusing upon the psychological well-being of individuals was at the heart of the lessons offered in Children Who Hate.

Redl and Wineman brought to the attention of educators and psychiatrists that interventions for these children and youth who were being expelled from their communities had to be different from society’s overly traditional sentimental or harsh responses. These children were "beyond the reach of education and below the grip of psychiatric interview technique" (Redl & Wineman, 1951, p. 277). In Children Who Hate, Redl and Wineman expounded upon a unique perspective — that occasional and mild expressions of hatred are typical in the normal course of development. However, they noted that the typical youth they had studied was a boy "who had been reeling under the impact of cruelty and neglect to such a degree that the acid of counteraggression had eaten itself by now in the every linings of his adaptational system" (p. 26). These children who hated had their primitive expressions of hatred and aggression "hard-wired." There were no options for behaving otherwise, even when well-meaning helpers tried to provide support. Although these behaviors were acquired through no fault of the boys, the families, teachers, mental health professionals, and people in their communities soon gave up on them.

Redl and Wineman described the symptoms of hate: "No matter how their specific pathology of ‘hatred’ looks in the beginning, or which part of their personality has been most severely affected by it, the children who hate become an insoluble problem for the communities in which they live" (p. 28). Today we glibly refer to these troubled youth as children without consciences — those youth who do not feel remorse—or as sociopaths or superpredators. Gillogy (1997) defined a child who cannot care about self or others as someone whose soul has been murdered; that is, there has been a systematic destruction of his or her personal identity. The sense of anomie that results from the loss of personal identity was as acute for the youth about whom Redl and Wineman wrote so instructively in 1951 as it is for troubled youth today. Redl’s theories about recovering youth who seem beyond the grasp of anyone are timeless. Redl reminds us that in today’s fast-paced solution-oriented world, listening to children and youth is the only chance that communities have to recover them.

In 1966, Redl said,