Child Treatment and the Therapy of Play [antikvár]

INTRODUCTIONFEW people will quarrel with the contention that no community can rest on sound foundations unless the well-being of the child is the first charge upon the legislator.To-day we do not regard health as limited to bodily well-being alone. The Good Society is not built on bricks and mortar, nor will equitable wages and the just distribution of opportunities in themselves establish happiness though they may do much to help towards that end. The enjoyment of happiness is made possible in a large measure where economic security and opportunity are made available to all who are capable of profiting from them. But there are irreducible mental requirements without which the capacity to enjoy is seriously curtailed. Enjoyment is a creative process only to those who are liberated from the thraldom to emotional conflicts which have their origin in the early and formative years of life.Modem psychology, particularly in its medical aspects, can claim to have demonstrated that much unhappiness which clogs the growth of normal mental life in its individual and social aspects is the consequence of poor adaptation in the years of childhood. This poverty in adaptation arises maybe from certain inborn dispositions, but nevertheless the stresses of the child in relation to its early family environment incubate any tendencies which may exist at birth.The human infant is from the first handicapped by its long dependence upon parental care and goodwill. It does not articulate in infancy its sense of frustration and longing, and for a considerable period before it has the gift of the language to express to itself and to others the causes of its discontents, it constructs in fantasy a world of notions having both a real and an imaginary representation in its play. To the child the parent is both good and bad at once, and the child's subsequent capacity for objectivity will depend to a large degree upon the way in which its testing of reality with the parents' assistance helps it to makes good working adjustments to the world of things and persons. The parents eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Thus the generations breed the seed of ill-will and unhappiness in their children. This is the very core of the human tragi-comedy, at least on the psychological level.