Individual psychology and the child / Leonhard Seif [and others].

Date:
1933
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Individual psychology and the child / Leonhard Seif [and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHILDREN’S -CLINIC Miss DORIS RAYNER A Paper read before the Medical Society of Individual Psychology, London, on June gth, 1932. A class of village children in Germany wrote essays on punish- ment. One girl of nine wrote briefly: ‘““The mother who beats is bad: how then shall the child be good?” This child saw the main principle of child guidance: how the child shall be good depends on the education and re-education of the educators—of parents, nurses, teachers, social workers, physicians, judges, etc. ‘The change in attitude in the last hundred years or less, from suppressing the child and beating original sin and the devil out of him to the idea of guidance, is remarkable—the progress in this time seems almost greater than in all the ages preceding. The increase in delinquency and nervous disorders, and such a world catastrophe as the War, might have strengthened the previous pessimistic attitude that “there 1s no health in us,” but they seem instead to have driven people to realise what such leaders as Confucius and Jesus maintained—that the necessary social feeling is innate in everyone, that if it is allowed to develop these individual and national catastrophes can be avoided, and that ifits development has been warped the child may be guided back from the useless to the useful side of life. Child Guidance Clinics originated with Dr. Healy’s work in Chicago twenty-three years ago; and since the incorporation of the Judge Baker Foundation in Boston, in 1917, two hundred and thirty-two clinics have been formed in America with the full staff of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker; thirty of these give full-time service. The report of the Commonwealth Fund says of the Clinics: “When they began their work they offered something new and unfamiliar; some harried teachers and parents thought of them as convenient doorsteps where bad children could be made good. As time went on it became evident that the psychiatrist was no more a demi-god than the teacher or social worker; and that even the team of psychiatrist, psychologist, and social worker could 29