NUMBER 1118 • 19 JANUARY •
MAIER ON REDL
INDEX
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Redl’s views are summed up in the succinct subheadings for the first chapter of
his and Wineman’s Control from Within (1952). They interlace all the
basic ingredients he felt were paramount for a sound child or youth care
environment. These principles, submitted in the fifties, are still, toward the
end of the century, true for us but rarely put extensively into operation. A
valid care and treatment program requires:
Contemporary child and youth care is still struggling with the message of these simple key words, while it is stuck with an earlier fundamental issue: whether care services are essentially control-oriented or life and growth-oriented centers. The orientation previously referred to for maximizing the mental health and personal development of children has yet to find a wide audience in North America. An additional concern of his had to do with another realm of treatment. In his original style he alerted us to the fact that “We are so much more comfortable with what we are treating children out of than what we are supposed to treat them into.... We give more thought to what kids are like than [we do] what the world we educate and treat them [for] is really like.... What the ‘reality’ in which we want to immerse them actually holds, in terms of health and supportive health ingredients” (1966, p. 31). These poignant concerns are still very much in the wings as we listen to contemporary papers and symposiums in the human service professions ... Commitment to environmental circumstances brings to mind another Redl twist. It is not merely the impact of the milieu and environmental forces upon the care receivers; also important is what the children do to their environment. A one-dimensional approach becomes multi-dimensional. Child care practice is assuming a new venue. Youngsters in care are seen today, in the words of Lerner and Busch-Rossnagel as “individuals, the producers of their development” (1981). Fritz Redl’s challenge is still very much before us in the framework of thinking: What do children do with and to their milieu? In which way can we influence children in our care by assisting them to have an impact on their environments? In other words, can we influence children and youth to discover themselves as partners with their intervening environments? One potential step to accelerate such a progress is reflected in Red’s observation that “we have ways [to observe and] to describe behavior but not yet the setting and the conditions in which it takes place” (1966, p. 124). |
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HENRY MAIER
Maier, H.W. (1991). What’s old — is new: Fritz Redl’s teaching reaches into the present. In. Morse, W.C. (ed.) Crisis intervention in residential treatment: The clinical innovations of Fritz Redl. New York: Haworth, pp. 15-30 |
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