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Just a short piece ...

3 SEPTEMBER 2008

NO 1343

Giving ego support

This is where the greatest shock hit us, when we were scrambling so frantically for techniques to survive with the children who hate. Even though our children were obviously seriously disturbed, we thought that maybe as far as the handling of daily behavior and the offering of ego support were concerned we might learn something from the way in which we would give ego support to the normal child. We soon had to see how desperately wrong we were in this assumption. For, we don't know how to give ego support to the normal child either. Far from learning from "education" how to handle the clinical task with the disturbed child, it seems that we have to collect our clinical findings in order to create even the rudiments of a science of ego support for the normal child, to be applied by the teacher and parent in their daily tasks.

For a while, we didn't trust our eyes. We thought it couldn't be as bad as that. Only, it is. With all the libraries full of books in which people quarrel about principles of education, values, and ways to "inculcate them" into children, the parent who looks for leads to a question as simple as, "How do I get Johnny upstairs to bed without making a mess of things in other places?" will still vainly look for concrete and scientifically sincere guidance. He will find plenty of suggestions as to how to help the neurotic child over nightmares (after somebody got him into bed) or how to "discipline" the recalcitrant child into more obedience (without reference to the conflict produced in other places by force techniques). He will have no trouble finding hundreds of studies as to why children would like to stay up longer, or why they would avoid transition from the waking state into the land of their dreams. The question of actual support to the ego of the normal child in moments of ego confusion is still left either to philosophical beliefs "in general," or to repetition or compulsive avoidance of whatever techniques the adult had used on him as a child, or to general preferences for child care-styles, or to issues of personal comfort and taste.

FRITZ REDL and DAVID WINEMAN

Redl, F. and Wineman, D. Controls from Within: Techniques fo the Treatment of the Aggressive Child. New York: The Free Press. p.35

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