NUMBER 274• 22 MAY 2003 • MEANING OF BEHAVIOUR
INDEX OF QUOTES

	Current-day interest in painstaking efforts to understand the meaning of a person’s experience or verbal account for its ethnic situational circumstance coincides with Redl’s intense exploration into the manifold potential meanings of a single verbal statement. Oliver Wendell Holmes said it succinctly as reported by Jerome Kagan: “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and in content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used” (Kagan, 1989, p. iii). Today’s disenchantment with digging into a child’s past history and scrupulous searching for early childhood trauma are supple­mented by the desire to learn more fully the spectrum of the child’s or youth’s ongoing life experience. This kind of perusal would in­clude the family and beyond; the peers, school, neighborhood, and possibly the community at large (Tracy, 1990). Such a perspective was continuously voiced in Redl lectures and writings. His vivid lectures while on the circuit (always well prepared but frequently merely laid out on the back of an envelope) were full of the myriad of ingredients underpinning any one situation. Nowadays the attention to the specifics, the ingredients of human experience, are also referred to as the “minutiae” of life events (Maier, 1990, pp. 19-20). Fritz Redl once used an example of mi­nutiae: the child who hammered a screw into place. If the youngster had chosen the screw driver, one could infer a different indicator of frustration tolerance. At another time he describes a child interrupt­ing a teacher’s talk. He points out the array of possibilities: This child didn’t understand, or s/he was eager for gaining teacher or peer good will, or s/he was all excited, anticipating a significant community event coming up, or many other possibilities (1975). All merit significance, because each one gives “the interrupting behavior” its specific tinge. The same dynamics hold for interven­tive attempts. A caregiver’s wink with an eye or a firm hand on a youngster’s shoulder can be powerful, minute ingredients to alter an anticipated unwanted behavior of the child. We are looking here in detail at what Fritz meant with his dictum: “What people really do to one another counts as much as how they feel” (1966, p. 86). This concept appears commonly accepted today as a valid psychological, almost a commonsense, perspective. Years back, however, for persons with his psychoanalytic training and his professional alignments, it was a revolutionary pronounce­ment! Redl’s kaleidoscopic understanding of child and youth behavior requires empathic attention to the impact of environmental (milieu) factors. These include psychological and also cultural values (only recently recognized in our actual practice). He would include, as well, factors of which we are just becoming fully aware such as ongoing interpersonal experiences and the controlling and/or allow­ing aspects of the physical and social settings.
	HENRY MAIER Maier, H. W. (1991) What's old — is new: Fritz Redl's teaching reaches into the present. In W. C. Morse (Eds.) Crisis intervention in residential treatment: The clinical innovations of Fritz Redl. New York: The Haworth Press, pp. 20-21

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 References
Kagan, J. (1989).  Unstable ideas, temperament, and self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Maier, H. W. (1990). A developmental perspective in child and youth care work. In J. P. Anglin, C. J. Denholm, R. J. Ferguson, & A. R. Pence (Eds.) Perspectives in professional child and youth care (pp 7-24). New York: The Haworth Press.
Redl, F. (1966). When we deal with children. New York: The Free Press.
Redl, F. (1975). Disruptive behaviour in the classroom. School review, 83, 561-594.
Tracy, E. M. (1990).  Identifying social support resources of at-risk families. Social Work, 35, 252-258.

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