The family health maintenance demonstration : a controlled long term investigation of family health. Proceedings of a round table at the 1953 Annual Conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund.

  • Milbank Memorial Fund.
Date:
1954
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: The family health maintenance demonstration : a controlled long term investigation of family health. Proceedings of a round table at the 1953 Annual Conference of the Milbank Memorial Fund. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    not directed against the program as a whole. It springs, of course, from anxiety about having revealed too much of the self and there fore having rendered oneself vulnerable. It may be that some of this anxiety and hostility might be avoided by dividing the interview into several sessions, but I feel that since there is no motivation originally, few would return at this initial stage for more than one interview. Resistance to the interview is frequently met with, but this can sometimes be broken down by encouraging an open expression of hostility towards the worker, or by starting the interview at a point which seems most comfortable for the person and encouraging the discussion of less threatening material until the individual feels more secure. What of the information desired in this initial interview? Infor mation on the person’s own childhood is elicited. What was his relationship to his parents? Did he perceive them as interested, supportive, sympathetic, harsh, remote or preoccupied? Is he able now to see his relationship to parents and siblings with some per spective or do the old wounds rankle and the old ties bind. What is his relationship to his own children in terms of his childhood experiences and how much awareness is there of the parallel between the two. On the whole there would appear to be less clarity, more confusion, less resolution of feelings in this area than in any other. Education and Work History. What were the goals and interests in securing an education? How did this correspond with interest, help, and encouragement from the family or other key adults? Of the 194 adults about whom we already have this information, seventy-three were graduated from high school and/or had some college training, while sixty-eight were graduated from college and/or had some graduate work. It would seem then that the emphasis on securing an education was strong, particularly among the Jewish and Protestant families, less so among those of Catholic faith. Many of them secured their education with great hardship through part time attendance or night school over a period of years. When, however, we come to an analysis of work history we find that sixty-seven of the ninety-seven men hold civil service jobs. Acknowl-