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15 JULY 2009

NO 1461

Conflicts of theory

Finally, a word about a most unusual event on the terrain of psychological theorization and its use that has occurred in the writing of this book, so subtly that it may escape the reader. Psychoanalytic ego psychology has for a long time recognized that creative thinking is long overdue on the implications of learning theory for the development and functioning of the ego.

Not untypically the worry about the problem outstripped by far any intellectually and pragmatically responsible approaches to its solution. I use the term "responsible" advisedly. For what we have seen and is still occurring is a kind of holy war of the learning theorists against the psychoanalytic model in toto or even the tiniest exhalation of any of its constructs. And on the psychoanalytic side we have seen a panic-rage reaction against territorial invasion of the "clinical rights" to work with disturbed people. Both sides have displayed, ad nauseam, reams and reams of ad hominem argumentation in the place of anything that could even be mistaken for learned discussion.

Such totalistic warfare is not only ridiculous but dangerous. In some clinical settings the wholesale application of totally untested operant conditioning techniques by workers who never saw a disturbed child before has rightfully horrified practitioners and in other pockets of the children's practice world psychoanalytic practitioners have only dived deeper into the bomb shelters of the realitydetached 5o-minute interview. How refreshing then to witness the folksy, undramatic way in which the authors have injected their model with carefully controlled doses of both frames of reference, reflecting their basic allegiance all the way to kids' needs and not to the war of ideas and intellectual or professional narcissism.

The Other 23 Hours is a book that badly needed to be written. And read. Most urgently, it needs to be applied. For the field of child care in America, especially for thousands of Nobody's Children, away front home, is a sick shambles, a shabby, dried-up skeleton where is needed a giant, healthy and blooming and giving. This book is food for the mind of such a giant. Is it too much to hope that it may also help to make the American public want to build one?

DAVID WINEMAN

Wineman, D. (1969) in his Foreword to Trieschman, A. E., Whittaker, J. K., & Brendtro, L. K. (Eds.). (1969). The other 23 hours: Child care work with emotionally disturbed children in a therapeutic milieu. New York: Aldine Publishing, pp. viii—ix

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