Children Who Hate
Fritz Redl & David Wineman
Chapter III- The Ego That Cannot Perform (Part 2)

10. The Evaporation of Self-Contributed Links in the Causal Chain

     When children are accused of being poor in reality testing, we usually don't bother to specify just which phase of the total reality they are liable to ignore or misinterpret. For practical purposes, however, it seems to us that just what they leave out makes quite a difference. The young child, for instance, who hits his head against the corner of a table because of a jerky uncoordinated movement, and subsequently becomes angry at the table that hurt him, does make the mistake of animistic projection. However, was his reality perception entirely wrong? There is no doubt about the involvedness of that table corner with the pain perceived. His mistake, besides animism, seems to be that he ignores the contribution his own behavior made to the total end result rather than that he misses the reality factors outside him entirely.
      We think that this is a story quite different from the usually described inability of children to size up reality at all, and therefore try to give it a name and place of its own. For in the lives of our children, this inability of the ego to remember and single out their own contribution to a total causal chain seems to be at least as tragic as the much-mentioned reality blindness and projection of the fully psychotic state. For a while we confused this item with the well-known purposeful denial which such children are capable of, when trying to ward off punishment or guilt. Such clear-cut defenses are strong, and shall be described at a later point. We are convinced, however, that even long before actual organized reality distortion sets in, there is, in many of them, a real "simple forgetting" or non-perception of their own share in life events.
     We have innumerable illustrations in mind of how children would really not remember, even after a short time, what share they had in the production of a fight or an aggressive or destructive scene, and how it usually took hard work and fast interview pick-up to bring such items back to mind. Since a challenge to a child to change is meaningless if the very reality situation is only partly perceived, and especially as long as that part which is most obviously the challenging one is missing, namely, the one related to the child's own behavior, this "fast evaporation rate" for his own contributions to the causal chain becomes a most serious item in all therapeutic plans.
     The things they forget so fast usually lie on either of two different levels. The first is their own feelings and motivation and the intent and intensity of what they did. Thus, a youngster may furiously accuse his pal of hitting him for no reason, may quickly admit, on being reminded, that he did call the other one a son-of-a-bitch first, is unable, however, to remember how furious and aggressive he himself was when doing so and that it was this fury and threatening aggression rather than the simple words to which his partner really reacted. The other level, even more disturbing, occurs when the youngster even forgets surface behavior which was obviously involved. In spite of the barrage of lies and alibi defenses our children had available, we think we may safely state that sometimes they were not lying. Unless reminded immediately afterwards, the recollection of what they had done a short time ago was actually totally obliterated in the deluge of the incident that followed. A child involved in an exciting free-for-all with sticks and stones, may really not know any more that he was the one who threw the first one to begin with. The child who is unconsolable about a toy that broke is often really unable to recall the greedy fury with which he mishandled the toy to begin with but perceives the event as "just an accident."

On many occasions Mike would taunt and torment Larry into a wild attack upon him. We early began to interfere in this pattern by calling to Mike's attention each time he would start out on such a spree that sooner or later Larry would counterattack and there would "be trouble." Yet, each time after the inevitable happened, he would accuse us of not protecting him, even forgetting that we had warned him of what was to happen and insisting that he hadn't done anything to provoke Larry. Everything in his tone, facial expression, and other manifestations differed sharply from his really deceitful moments which we had come to know so well in other situations. There was no doubt that so far as his own difficulties with Larry were concerned, he actually would forget what his own contribution was and that we had tried to interfere.

    In fact, it is the existence of this very ego disturbance, it is this unusually fast evaporation rate of self-contributed behavior, which makes the usual "Monday afternoon" or "twice a week" style of interview technique unusable with these children. The proximity of the therapist to the daily behavioral scene is essential so that he may catch up with the speed of events and counteract the fast evaporation rate of such incidents through special strategy. More about that later.

11. Spontaneous Establishment of Substitute Controls

     Even in normal children, the control system of the ego does not always have to stay switched on to its full volume just to keep things from getting disorganized. Much of the time, ego vigilance and ego control can be switched back to low, just because there are adequate outside control forces at work. In those cases, the ego gets its flow of support from the presence of authority figures, the soothing awareness of a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, the perception of existing routines or well-oiled rules and regulations, the actual in­accessibility of otherwise tempting toys, gadgets, and tools, or the fascination of ongoing game and activity structures which "bind" loose energies of the children as efficiently as any supervising adult might, or any and all those factors together.
      Sometimes, especially when impulsivity runs high, even well­adjusted children have trouble keeping to the level on which they were performing when such "outside controls" suddenly drop out. Thus, the end of a game and transition to the next one may produce more confusion and horseplay than expected, the teacher leaving the room may find noise rising in the classroom in spite of the warnings or pleas she left behind, the change over from a more highly pressured classroom to one with a wider range of permissiveness may cost ten minutes of temporary disorganization.
     The normal child is supposed to have some reserves to institute inside controls quickly after the outside ones have petered out. He has something like an emergency reservoir which he can draw upon, when greater inside ego vigilance against onrushing impulses is made necessary in transitional moments.
     The problem becomes severe when this special job of the ego, to substitute inside controls for outside ones in a hurry, isn't working as it should. We know that what we might call the "organizational maturity" of a group depends on this function, and it seems now that the same is true for the individual child. In fact, we could think of no better test for the emergency vigilance of ego functions than just such moments of withdrawal or breakdown of outside struc­tures or controls. The children we speak about seem to have special trouble along that line. Even after some amount of ego control had been established with the direct support to the ego along the lines described above, the temporary dropping out of whatever outside control support had been instituted would throw them all out of gear and quickly lead to total disorganization. It also seems that this special capacity of the ego spontaneously to produce substitute cotrols from within when needed is one of the last ego gains to be made in treatment. Even after we had the children so far advanced that only mild structural supports were needed some of the time to keep them well functioning in a game, the end of that game or any interruption of structure would usually find them incapable of deal­ing with whatever submerged impulsivity had been kept in check. This means that an unusual amount of planning for adequate pro­gram structure was needed, that, even when things were going well, the presence and relatedness to adult figures directly on the scene was indispensable. For a long time careful arrangements for other substitute controls had to be mapped out strategically to avoid total ego breakdown in transitional moments of their lives.

On the way home from school in the station wagon, there was some incipient scapegoating of Larry and also a good deal of aggressive throw­ing. This forced us to stop the wagon several times. After treats, fol­lowing our arrival home, the counselors suggested a game of dodge ball in the backyard. The group is quite keen about this game, only they call it "murder ball." The game went well. Larry was forgotten and they did not select him unnecessarily as a target. The few rules which this game has--such as waiting until the "target" knows you are going to throw and admitting when you are hit, etc.--were well kept. There was obvious keen enjoyment of all the throwing. Their ability to stick to rules was especially amazing in view of the ugly mood they were in before the game. Just before dinner we stopped, and, as though by magic, the offensive pre-game disposition returned and Larry again became a target for group attack. He was accused of doing things wrong in the game which while it was going on were completely ignored--if they were not even being manufactured now. Even his "baby" behavior at school was hauled out as an issue; they started calling him "piss­willie" though he is one of the few who do not wet. Mike climbed up on the garage roof and started heaving debris at him and then fanned out to a more generalized "bombing," and Danny began lumberingly to chase Larry around, calling him "Larry, the berry," a phrase which for some reason infuriates him and by this token is relished by the group as an insult. (Entry: 2/13/47, David Wineman)

12. Remaining "Reasonable" Under the Impact of Unexpected Gratification Offerings

     The European saying that, if you offer the devil your little finger, he will soon want the whole hand, didn't impress us too much at the beginning. We felt we rather noticed plenty of evidence that they didn't even want our outstretched finger. We were dearly reaching out toward these children with signs of acceptance and love only to harvest hatred, insult, and attack. We inserted many, for other children most desirable, offerings of activity, gifts, toys into their life, only to have them thrown at us in disgust, wrecked, destroyed. In the beginning, certainly, the adage didn't seem to hold much truth. Rather than becoming too demanding, except when it served the purpose of proving us wrong, most of the time our Pioneers wouldn't have any of it, and refused the little finger, or even the readily outstretched whole hand.
      We soon learned better, though. For not long after the impact of the "treatment shock" period petered out somewhat, the problem to which this point is dedicated began to show itself in many moments of their lives with us. It became obvious what was going on some of the time. When they finally were at a point where they would admit the granting nature of our attitude toward them, and trust the forthcoming gestures of acceptance for what they were, a host of earlier desires, frustrated over the years or partially denied and repressed, suddenly welled up behind the immediate gratification front. The onrush of such demand intensity, released by us all of a sudden, made the really offered grant seem insignificant, which ended up in a most bizarre and seemingly contradictory situation. At the very moment when we were offering affection and gratification of one kind, we would often be attacked and accused of being hostile and cruel withholders of fun, much more so than when we actually had to limit and interfere. This phenomenon seemed to go in either of two directions, depending on the child or momentary mood involved. Sometimes they would become afraid of their own onrush of frustrated desires, and out of this fear refuse the acceptance of the granting gesture altogether, at other times they would increase their demands to such absurdity that no one could or should live up to them, and then, asking for the im­possible and unreasonable, would fall back upon their usual hostility and displayed disappointment.
     The implications of this for treatment practice are immense and are to be discussed in detail at other points. It certainly taught us to realize that the dosage of love, permission, and gratification offerings has to be clinically weighed as carefully, and measured out as thoughtfully, in relationship to their ego-intactness along that line as anything else is. It is this item which makes the average child­loving but professionally naive volunteer entirely ineligible for this type of work. Later on we felt that the ability to remain reasonable even under the impact of love and gratification offerings could be considered one of our most evident progress criteria for total ego recovery.

Over the period of the first month, Larry lost some of the shyness and detachedness that he showed initially. Along with this, he switched from his cringing fear of the adult, inspired by the vicissitudes of his cruel life experience prior to placement with us, especially the sadism of the stepfather. This converted to a rather claiming attitude which at points revealed a real form of infantile demandingness. He would say, rising grandiosely at his chair at the table, "I command that somebody bring me the salt," or "I command that we have pumpkin pie." In these moods, fired by his narcissistic zeal, he was difficult to manage. He actually tried to back up his "commands" by having a type of temper reaction if one did not cooperate with him. The tantrum was marked not so much by open show of violence as by a sudden mulishness. Thus, he wouldn't sit down again, or he might not eat because the "pumpkin pie" was not magically materialized. All along he would maintain a hilarious insistence on getting his own way.

During the first week of the Home's existence, we attempted a group interview in which some of the policies of the Home were reviewed with the boys. Each of these policies had previously received some individual handling with each boy. Thus, the various points raised were not entirely new to them. Still, it was felt there might be some value in having a group interview around these policies. In this way, the smoking policies of the Home, the money arrangements, etc., were discussed. Joe, especially, was the picture of snarling defiance all the way through. When the director indicated that the allowance would be fifty-five cents per week, Joe bargained for one dollar, saying, "Fritz, you bastard, it's a buck or nothing." Sam, sitting there quite meek and sanctimonious, shushed Joe, saying that he ought to be glad to be in a place like this where they treated you so "good" and even let you smoke. Where he came from (a Detention Home), he said, they never let you do anything. We were not so surprised at Joe's attempts at exploitation since he knew us all from camp and had some preview of the design offered by the Home. Thus he started off by being more initially unreasonable than Sam. However, a swift metamorphosis took place in Sam within the next ten days. Inch by inch, his "gratitude" began to wear out. Within two weeks, he was openly imperious in his demands and expected to be exempt from all limiting rules. In connection with smoking alone he openly broke all of the rules in rotation. At the same time he bargained with us fiercely for full franchisement as far as keeping privileges were concerned. For example, after being caught by the director in possession of stolen cigarettes, he was asked to give them up. Knowing full well that he had broken our original "deal" in which he was guaranteed cigarettes if he stuck to the rules, one of which was "no swiping cigarettes," he accused the director of being cruel, called him filthy names, vowed vengeance, etc. On another occasion, after being taken by the director for a ride together with Joe, as a special Christmas gesture, and after having received a box of candy, he and Joe both insisted on smoking in the car. When the director insisted on waiting until they got home, both boys exploded against him, calling him a "filthy mother fucker" and again accusing him of numerous cruelties.

I had some candy ready for treats when the boys came home from school. It so happened that they were nut bars which most of the boys enjoyed on a previous occasion. Unpredictably, however, they were not receptive toward nut bars today and there was intense and vehement griping, especially from Andy, who literally went into a rage and smashed his on the floor. "Yeah, yeah, we never git what kind we want" he yelled. I reminded him that, aside from my treat, they were given candy every day by Dave (Exec. Dir.) and there was certainly plenty of variety. This infuriated Andy even further and he picked up the pieces and threw them at me, calling me "a dirty whore," asking "what did I know?" Interference from the executive ended the scene with Andy continuing his hysterical harangue in his office. (Entry: 2/18/47, Emily Kener, Housemother)

13. Using Previous Satisfaction Images as Resource

      It seems that normal children have a variety of possibilities to fall back upon spontaneously when confronted with moments of boredom, confusion, excitement, unhappiness, moodiness, or when­ever the outside world fails to come through with adequate equip­ment or structural aid. If left to their own devices, most of them will simply "remember" something that had been fun before, or else a word, a piece of rope, an item of toy equipment, will remind them of something that could be done in a new combination right now. They may remember, when a rainy day spoils their plans, that a book may offer the fun it had granted once before, they may dream up fantasy games out of pictures or stories they used to like, they may pull out an old abandoned toy and keep happy, varying old pleasurable themes with a new twist.
      Our children seemed to be utterly destitute in situations like this. And it soon dawned on us that not all the chaos and destruction we saw around us was simply their real pathology of impulses coming to the fore. Much of it was rather "incidental" in content, arising simply on the basis that they could not think of anything to do when left helpless for even a short time. We first thought that maybe these children had never been exposed to toys, games, activi­ties, and so forth, a hypothesis which was good enough in some of the cases. But the pauperization of their lives was not that great, not that uninterrupted, to account for all we saw. It finally became clear that, besides everything else, these children lacked the ability to make use even of experiences they had enjoyed before in moments in which their ego was in difficulty.
      This fact became especially clear after we had had them with us for a while. For we knew what games they had played, what toys they had had, what activities they could enjoy. For a while it was as though everything we had exposed them to before had been thrown into an empty hole in which it had simply disappeared. They couldn't even remember. After a while they began to remember all right, but it took a lot of prodding, a lot of arguing, before we could assure them that this game would be fun. Didn't they remember when we played it last week, how much fun it was? 'We never done nothing like that, fuck you" would be the invariable retort, until in the middle of the game recollection would return, often with a flash. Still later, they were able to remember previous gratification situations--but that was all. An admission these had happened, a grin about how much fun it was--they still could not remember spontaneously and make use of such memory as a re­source in a moment of anxiety, boredom, or loneliness. We felt like marking in red ink the day in our life with them when, for the first time, they would exclaim, "Say, let's play that game again, what's its name? Remember, that was fun . . ."
     Resourcefulness in terms of the ability to revive and utilize previous satisfaction images when needed does not loom large on the agenda of clinical conferences or in the lists of case history outlines. It certainly seems to us, however, to be one of the most vital tasks for survival an ego can count on, and one of the most important ones to repair when damaged.
     The chapters on programming and our records quoted there will contain numerous bits of evidence for the phenomenon described here. We don't want to repeat. May one specific incident serve instead of many to illustrate what had been disturbed, even though this became evident only just about when this disturbance began to clear up:

After dinner, there was a considerable degree of disorganized boredom with no one quite able to find a place for himself. This fanned out quickly into a mild, diffused aggressiveness against the adults as well as each other. Bill and Danny began to bicker over a yo-yo, while Mike and Andy used the occasion to tease Larry about something that happened in school. Andy then began to throw some checkers at Larry and this was quickly picked up by both Bill and Danny, diverting them from their own quarrel with each other. The general excitement was added to when they began throwing around an indoor ball at each other. Joel, counselor on duty, diverted them into a regular style baseball game in the backyard which seemed to work like magic once he made the suggestion. He galvanized them into action by picking up the ball and tearing upstairs to get a bat, saying he'd meet them outside in a minute. Although they have played baseball so many times, here again we see their inability to divert themselves on their own through an activity structure which, once the group-identified adult offers it, they are able to use. Earlier in our experience with them, however, they would have been unable to move this quickly into an activity pattern, even with an adult. (Entry: 5/17/47, David Wineman)

A short while before the above incident the counselor's game suggestion would have fallen on infertile ground, and their ability to make use of an image of a game to promise such fun couldn't have been counted on. Yet, they still had a far way to go after May 17, 1947, for it still took the counselor's action to give the signal and "rub the image." For later life, they will need to be able to make use spontaneously of such resources of past experiences.

14. Realism about Rules and Routines

     All children can be expected to develop a somewhat persecutional attitude toward rules and routines, from time to time, considering them as an especially vicious invention by nasty adults, primarily designed to make life miserable for them, rather than as unavoidable parts of the relentless reality of life. Normal children will show such persecutional interpretation of rules and routines especially under four conditions: One, if this is actually true. In that case, no comment is needed. They simply are right, are too smart for us, and have "caught on" to what is really wrong in the picture to begin with. And it does happen at times that adults design rules and routines out of their own needs rather than in line with reality demands and in awareness of the children's age, needs, rights, etc. The second case is the one where rules are basically justified but their design is developmentally out of focus. This may be the fault of the rules, as in the too strict demands for keeping certain hours made upon a really very reliable young adolescent boy, who needs some rule defiance for reasons of pride of emancipation, or it may be simply the case that developmental need and reality limitation are in a hopeless conflict which at the time is not interpretable to the child. This would be the case where a somewhat impulsive and incautious but status-eager twelve year old may have to be told he cannot use his rifle unless an adult is around. The third case where even ego-intact children develop acutely persecutional misinter­pretations of regulations and rules is the one where the way the adult reacts in the handling of such rules is psychologically confusing to the child. Thus, a normally mobility-hungry adolescent boy may accept curfew limitations by a father who grants him budding emancipation in all other areas and shares his pride in his new status as a young adult. He would rebel by distortional misinterpretation of such rules, however, were they imposed by a stern autocrat with all the accompanying display of obedience demanded of an infantile inferior. The fourth case where rule misinterpretation by any child would be considered normal would be the one where the reality because of which the rule has to be developed is too complex for the child to comprehend, or where adequate at­tempts to solicit cooperative understanding of a rule or routine have not been made. This is often the case in institutions, where certain routines like waiting in line and sharing equipment and other materials are unavoidable because of the size of the group or limi­tation in space, but where such reality-demanded routines are never worked over with the children, so that they must seem to them as though they were simply devilish inventions of the adult world.
      Needless to say, we are aware of all that, and have none of these situations in mind when we complain that our Pioneers lacked in "realism about rules and routines." We would expect them to show all the troubles mentioned above in connection with normal children to the nth degree, of course. What we have in mind here, however, is this: Even in such areas where their ego was cognitively clear enough to understand and accept the issue as such, even then rules or routines, because limiting, would be interpreted in a per­secutional way, no matter how skillfully such rule situations had been handled by the staff. The ability of the ego to separate unavoidable, reality-conditioned displeasure from personal attack seemed to be especially underdeveloped in our children. In consequence, we would also claim that the ability to show more realism about rules and routines is one of the measuring sticks for ego recovery that are tangible enough.

Clothing administration was one of the most irksome and chronic problems that plagued us with our group. Everybody had at least one or two items that were his favorite things to wear from among all the things he owned. When he could have them, well and good. But on those days that these items might be in the laundry we literally had "hell to pay." Very carefully and patiently and with great detail, we tried to show them that no matter what any of us wanted, our laundry simply couldn't be moved any faster. Also we stressed that no laundry in the city would deliver clothes any faster than ours which took them on Monday and would bring all the things back on Wednesday. It made no difference at all. We were still "mean bastards" because we didn't "have my pants whenever I want them." Many of Danny's morning blow-ups, for example, involved this inability to see the reality basis for this routine.

Bill persisted in throwing things at me while I was driving and also opening the rear window to heave things at passing cars. When I asked him to stop, it was as though I were doing something to him, not he to me and to other people. He was furious and rebellious and kept threatening me that he would run away. He didn't have to ride in this "son­of-a-bitch" wagon where they never let you do "anything." I said, "What do you mean `anything' . . . Do you call what you are doing just anything'? This could end in a serious accident or get the police after us . . ." His reply, "Sure, doncha like it?" (Entry: 10/5/47, Bob Case)

15. Warfare with Time

     We know that the concept and the experience of "time" is one of the most complex and subtle problems of psychology, that much has been written on it, and that more is yet to be learned. We are also impressed with the fact that whole nations, and maybe the whole human race, seem to have problems of weighing past, pres­ent, and future against each other realistically, and so maybe we shouldn't be too hard on our Pioneers for being not less mixed up about the phenomenon of "time" than everybody else. We also know that some specific disturbances in the sense of time belong to the chapter on neuroses, others some place else, and that this is the last place to deal with them or their causation. But one thing we would like to make clear is that there are certain partial ego func­tions related to the phenomenon of time which, if disturbed, have a disastrous effect on a child's life and on the chances for education and therapy to take hold of him. This is what we have in mind when we say that our children were constantly "at war" with time, and that much of our clinical work with them was complicated by that very time element.
      Most distinctly, we could point to two major disturbances of their ego functioning as far as time elements are concerned: One is their great difficulty in making any distinction between what we might crudely term the "subjective experience" and the "objective measurement" of time. Some of the reasons for this are simple: Several of our children never acquired any concept of objective time, couldn't read a watch, confused yesterday with tomorrow, allowed weeks, days, months, years to slide into one another with the abandon usually limited to the very little child. We are not concerned with the reasons for this. We are concerned with what it did to our attempt to help them get de-confused. We would be tempted to rate this seeming "little" disturbance as one of the most plaguing blocks in our treatment plans. For this very reliance--even of those youngsters who could, theoretically, tell time and had their calendar concepts of time straight--on subjective time as the only "real" thing caused innumerable confusions and fights and much unhap­piness, and seemed to feed straight into their pathology of a "para­noid interpretation of life." For of course, they experienced, as everybody does, that the time one is happily busy with what one enjoys seems short, the time we watch others enjoy it while waiting our turn seems unduly long, etc. The result was that even mild irregularities in time distribution would cause endless squabbling and would always tend to put us in the wrong. Consequently, even a normal game would breed the germ of sibling rivalry, because it seemed to them that A was allowed to have the ball so much longer or so much more often than B, that everybody else was getting what he wanted right away, while "only I always have to wait so long," etc. The details of this daily warfare with time need not be described: some of them will emerge more clearly later when we describe our countertechniques.
      The other basic problem revolving around time was the severe disturbance of these children's relation to the future, including their own. Now, this again is an item in connection with which perhaps no adult living today ought to throw too many stones first. However, our Pioneers were even more deficient in this respect than the average member of the population seems to be. This came out in two ways primarily. One, that all reference to the future of any request was, for a long time, simply identical with outright refusal. When one of them got something, like a haircut, today, the suggestion that the other one would get his tomorrow was met in the same way as though we had refused him that privilege for the rest of his life. Or, if we tried to point out "future consequences" of anything they were about to do, we might as well have saved our breath. For what is trouble that may be brewing for tomorrow, no matter how fatal, compared with even mild fun right now?
     The other trouble related to the concept of the future was, of course, that these children had not developed much of a realistic concept of "themselves in the future" so that there was little to appeal to, one way or another. What "ego ideals" they were swaggering around with, if existent at all, were totally delusionary and mostly borrowed from radio, movie, or comic book, and even then only on a flighty "enjoyment of present illusions" basis. They didn't even have a good delinquent ego ideal, which, as we know from other cases, would require rather strong time realism.
     We hasten to add that this seemingly minor part of their pathology constituted one of our major technical hazards, as becomes clear when we remember that promise as well as threat, punishment as well as reward, encouragement as well as criticism, have a rather healthy relationship to time as a conditio sine qua non, as a prerequisite without which they make no sense at all or are even doomed to make things worse. But more about that later. Just as an illustration of some of the more fantastic time problems, not even mentioning the host of daily troubles along that line, here are two excerpts from records

We have finally worked out a haircut schedule. It was Joe's turn to go with me today to get his hair cut. This produced quite a reaction in Larry, who burst into my quarters today after learning from Joe that he was going with me to the barber. He demanded that he be taken today and that's all there was to it. I reminded him that we had all sat down and worked out the schedule and that he had agreed to come after Joe because his shopping trip came before Joe's. He was blind to this reasoning, however, completely swept away by his involvement in this particular need of the moment. "Yeah," he whined and screamed at the same time, "Now I'll never git one. I'll never have one, never, never." Again I remonstrated, "But, Larry, you know you'll go tomorrow, we worked it out that way, and I've always done what we planned to do, you know that." "No," he screamed, "I'll never git mine." (Entry: 2/7/47, Emily Kener)

Fantastically enough, tonight, just before bedtime, Bill demanded that we go canoeing. I said "We have that planned for tomorrow after school; you know, we planned that." No, he insisted he wanted to go right now. I tried humor. "Yeah, sure, in the dark, we're going to go and bump each other under those bridges. That would be funny, wouldn't it? Besides we'd have to wake up the guy who runs the place because he's home sleeping now." "You'll never take us," he threatened me, completely unimpressed by my attempt to cajole him out of it. "How can you say that when we were already there week before last and we're going tomorrow?" I asked. Adamantly, he insisted, "Yeah, we know, we know, you counselors never want to do what we want to do." (Entry: 4/6/47, Barbara Smith)

16. Assessing Social Reality

     The most obvious deficiency of the classical concept of the "ego" as the agent for keeping "contact with reality" lies in the lack of differentiation between physical and social reality. We think that there are two functions here which are not identical and that we may frequently find the one quite well intact, while the other one may be seriously impaired. This means, of course, that this term actually covers a wide range of much more specific jobs to be done by the "ego" than the general term "reality testing" would indicate. We have all seen children who are perfectly capable of figuring out how much weight a skating pond might carry and how far it is wise to venture onto it and are yet unable to figure out at all "what goes and what doesn't go" in a group in which they find themselves. And we also know how often even egos with an enormous I.Q., able to master the complex logical tasks of academic issues, may be helpless and insensitive when it comes to knowing how people around them really feel. And vice versa, of course. With the enormous develop­ment of social psychology, sociology, group psychology, and cultural anthropology during the last decade or so, the need to specify the various ego tasks which fall under the term "social sensitivity" has become more obvious than ever, and even the records of our rela­tively short life with the Pioneers would contain material for quite an ample dissertation on this point. For reasons of brevity it may suffice to list the following areas of main concern to the practitioner, into which the general concept of "assessment of social reality" can be broken down.

Interpersonal sensitivities -- by this we refer to the skill of figuring out how another person may feel about us, what is going on within him, what motivates his behavior toward us, and of predicting how he might act and react toward what we do. This may refer to another child in the group, or an adult.
Sensitivity to Group Code -- by this we mean the skill of sizing up what "goes" and what "doesn't go" in a group of contemporaries, on which basis the group will judge one's behavior, what makes one popular, disliked, respected, scapegoated in a certain group under certain conditions. All groups have some "unoutspoken" principles which underlie their behavior toward particular members in particular situations. The effects of such codes can be easily demonstrated, even though the basis and detailed workings of them are still one of the hardest phenomena for research to touch.
Assessment of collective mores -- by this we refer to the underlying behavior code of larger social situations in which children may find themselves, and we think of items like the awareness of a child as to what a specific neighborhood or environmental setting expects him to do when a visitor comes, when he is visiting somebody else's house, when he finds himself at a public theater performance, along with the larger issues of mores and customs of various segments of society as such.

     In a nutshell, the following observations seem to be most important for an understanding of the children we talk about: 1. It would be all wrong to expect them to show generally disturbed functioning of their ego in terms of assessing social reality. We find, rather, that most of these children show an amazingly wide range of contrasting behavior along this line. Most of them show, in some areas, not disturbance but hyperthropic development of this function. We shall discuss their amazing "acuity of social perception in battle-relevant areas" later on. At the same time, they also show most severe disturbances of this same function in certain other areas, toward certain people, and under specific conditions. Something like a "geographical map" of their distribution of social acuity versus total insensitivity would be a fascinating task for research to tackle, and enormously helpful to the practitioner on all levels. 2. It remains quite important to differentiate sharply between whether the children, in a specific incident, do not see "social reality" or whether they are very well aware of it but simply "don't give a damn" or even enjoy the irrational effect of their behavior with gusto. Only the first case belongs here and the mere reporting of an incident would not allow us to be sure. We would have to know much about what else was in the picture to be certain. The incidents reported below are of that sort. The way they stand they might just as well belong in the other two categories. But we happen to know from living with those children so intensively which was the case when a particular incident occurred. 3. The causes for lack of realism in the assessment of social reality, again, may vary tremendously from case to case and don't really concern us here. However, it might be well to keep in mind that they are basically of three varieties. (a) Some of their "social blindness" is simply part of their basic pathology; their ego is all tied up with it. The child, for instance, who is beset by a delusion of persecution could not afford to see too clearly how people really feel toward him. (b) Some of it is actually more or less the "fault" of the reaction of the world toward them. As long as they are engaged in warfare against adults who really distrust and dislike them, they can't afford to become too sensitive to their surroundings, just as a soldier on the battlefield had better restrict his attention to battle­relevant issues. That part, by the way, begins to clear up as soon as the therapeutic milieu and treatment takes its first effects. When they relax and begin to relate to people, they also begin to "pick up clues" from the adults around them and become more interested in what other children think and feel about them. (c) Some of their social blindness, however, is simply a result of fixation on the basis of neglect. This part can be corrected simply by education, or, let us say, by exposure to interpreted experience. At camp, for instance, we have met many children who were simply stuck on a naive, narcissistic level of earlier childhood, of enjoying reciting a poem or a song with total abandon, with not the slightest awareness of the infantilism of their behavior, which might have brought applause from auntie, but was poison for an audience of tough contemporaries. Such children, exposed to such experience in a protective atmosphere, could be shown easily in a sequence of marginal interviews what was going on, and could then actually become more "sensitive" toward group mood, group code, and a variety of issues involved. 4. The reason why we are so eager to draw attention to this phenomenon of "realism in the assessment of social reality" is that, for the straight psychiatric clinician, it would seem primarily an "educational" issue rather than a clinical one. We think, however, that this would be a mistake. We are convinced that in the job of rehabilitating such children any attack, on any level, upon this phenomenon is of primary importance. For, as long as their social sensitivity is too narrow or disturbed, these children cannot even be exposed to life experiences which otherwise might prove salutary. The very disturbance of their sense of social reality will bring chaos and rejection down on them. In order that the child may live outside the treatment home, and even in order to make use of some of the very experiences which become important ingredients in the total course of treatment, some of this disturbed ability to "assess social reality realistically" has to be tackled very soon after the first chaotic reaction of treatment shock is over. This is what makes these children, for the therapist, so different from the common garden variety neurotic. With the youngster who has a classical anxiety neurosis, for instance, and little else, we don't have to bother much. Freed from the clutches of his neurotic conflict, his ego will breathe "freely" and soon be able to amend on its own whatever it may have missed in terms of social sensitivity experiences in the meantime, though supportive group therapy is often indicated even for him. With the children we have in mind, here, a strengthening of this and other ego functions has to precede and run concomitant with the rest of their treatment, or else the very media of treatment influences are restricted beyond hope.
      Most of the disturbance of our children in the line of "realistic assessment of social reality" is obvious all through our recordings, even where we quote anecdotes to illustrate another point. We can easily limit ourselves, therefore, to a very few illustrations at this time.

On the afternoon that he was scheduled to go with me to have his hair cut, Larry was in a transport of joy. He was going around gaily chanting and bragging, "My haircut, my haircut, Emmy's goin' to take me for a haircut." This incensed the group against him and caused a flurry of attacks on him by the others. Joe punished him viciously, calling him "baby" and "bastard," and had to be pulled off him by the counselor. As usual, the sibling hatred of the group was stinted up into open rage by his injudicious bragging. He has been in the same situation innumerable times. So far we have been unable to make him aware of what he was letting himself in for. (Entry: 12/15/46, Emily Kener)

Danny's infantile greediness for adult affection completely blinded him for a long time to the code-prescribed rules for toughness and unity against the adult world carefully observed by the rest of the group with the exception of Larry, who suffered from a similar code blindness. Thus, while capable of extreme primitivity and violence against the adult when he himself ran into frustration-loaded moments with them, whenever there was a group incident involving serious rule breakage or theft of some article, this was almost a signal for Danny to become glucose sweet in his attitude toward the adult, with a smirking virtue that turned the rest against him. It was obvious that Danny saw these moments as an opening for a sudden "affection blitz," which we tried to neutralize as best we could. But we could never operate fast enough to save him from group rejection and scapegoating in these moments. On an occasion when we were having a group meeting about a station wagon incident that Danny was not involved in, in the middle of the meeting suddenly, in dulcet sweet tones, he asked our housemother who was sitting in, "Emmy, do you think we could have our meeting on my special diet now?" (he had a diet for his obesity), thus demonstrating unmistakably, again, his extreme code tactlessness. For here, while the others were on the carpet, so to speak, and angry at the adult, he took the chance to make a virtue bid toward the housemother. The group reaction was instantaneous, "lard ass, fat ass, fat bastard--yeah, Danny, thinks he's big shit, etc., etc."

After a rather wild canoe ride at Belle Isle, a large public recreation area, in which, although safely supervised by Pearl, co-counselor, Mike still managed to get soaking wet, we finally disembarked and made ready to go to the station wagon. Mike suddenly began to wriggle out of his wet pants, right out there in broad daylight. He was about half-way through when I wheeled and saw him and I said, "Hey, Mike, what are you doing?" Spectators were incredulously looking at this spectacle, and I said to Mike, "C'mon, pull up your trousers and come to the station wagon." "The hell with you, you goddam bastard," he said, "These damn pants itch me and I'm gonna take 'em off." I insisted, and, cursing me prodigiously, he pulled up his trousers and tore over to the wagon. (Entry: 5/3/47, Vera Kare)

17. Learning from Experience

     If anything can be said to be clearly recognizable as belonging in the chapter of "ego psychology," it is the function of learning, whose main domain is so obviously the cognitive mastery of reality. In view of this, it is amazing and most unfortunate that psychiatry and the psychology of learning have taken such a long time really to try to get together. For even most of the straight psychoanalytic studies of learning disturbances were primarily interested, not in the function of the learning process itself, but in the question as to just what happens to this function under the impact of emotional blocks, neurosis, etc. Much is to be hoped from recent attempts to lure learning theory and psychoanalysis into closer cooperation. 4 At this moment, we are primarily interested in a broader implication of this problem.
      Our children had, of course, numerous "learning difficulties" which would easily fit into the whole gamut of functional disturb­ances described in literature. Their description and analysis would be of interest. Here we want to focus, however, not on the problem of academic learning in any sense, but on one of the most basic ingredients of all learning--the ability to make use of valid inferences from previous experiences. This faculty seems to be "taken for granted" for all but moronic children and adults, and yet it is anything but matter of course. In fact, the proverbial story of a man who sails all around the globe without gaining anything in real insight or understanding ought to warn us how complex and disturbable are the functions we have before us.
     With our children, it was quite noticeable that, aside from "having learned too well" the lessons of their traumatic life experiences, they had wide gaps in their ability to learn from what happened to them before. Most children are able to remember an incident in which their behavior was followed by inconvenient consequences without being too bothered by it. Yet, when a reasonably similar situation presents itself, the image of the previous incident somehow turns up, offers a mild danger signal sufficient to modify behavior, at least in parts, in the situation at hand. With the Pioneers, we seem to be stuck in an unhappy alternative with little in between. Previous experiences either have been so traumatic that only their thoughtless repetition occurs as the result of even mild similarities between a present situation and one before, or else no signal of similarities is being given at all, no inferences are drawn for the present from what happened in the past. It seems that these children consume all of their psychic energies so much in the present that little is left for an evaluative process to be used for later on--if such a simple quantity simile is permissible at all. The same is true for pleasant experiences--they, too, seem to be soaked up so greedily when they occur that little trace is left for later reality assessment. Thus, it took our youngsters an exceedingly long time before the harmlessness of some adults, the pleasure promise of some program possibility, would "sink in," and it took an equally laboriously built-up chain of well-interpreted situations of "cause and consequence" before the idea that certain kinds of fun had better be forfeited would even begin to make sense. The implications of this for treatment practice are enormous. But even when they are exposed to friendly adults and happy life experiences, treatment for these children needs the presence of a constant obstetrician of the learning process for anything to "sink in." The necessity for strategic pick-up of learning potentials will be described more in detail among our "techniques."
     The following illustration may give the flavor of what we were all up against in our daily tasks.

Our children would inevitably insist on taking their favorite toy or gadget to school with them. With monotonous regularity these things would be broken or totally destroyed in battles with other children or would be lost in the melee of playground activities. Yet they never showed a flicker of concern that anything would happen to those toys as day after day they carted them along with them. Many children will have a hard time not to take their favorite gadget to school and most of them will succumb. We would expect them however at least to verbalize some doubt or show some hesitation. It was this inability of our youngsters to work up even a little anticipatory anxiety which was so impressive as evidence of their inability to learn from experience.

18. Drawing Inferences from What Happens to Others

     If it is hard enough to help our children make sense out of what directly happens to them, our job is intensified in difficulty when it comes to making them learn from what happens to others. Not that adults don't have trouble with that, too. The denial of reality danger by the argument "It can't happen here" ought to be well enough known to all of us. However, in those cases we usually can assume that the basic ability to draw such inferences is pretty well established--special reasons of anxiety have to be valid to make some life area or other taboo for the functioning of logic. With our children, there were whole areas within which the process of "learning from what happened to others" never was practiced at all. And, where there was any interest in "what happened to others," it was usually stuck on a totally narcissistic, magic, wish-fulfillment level on the basis of fatalistic theories of exceptionalism. Thus, for instance, the fact that one person or twenty others got in trouble for what they did would be waved away as having no implication for their lives, while the luck with which somebody once went scot-free in a delinquent enterprise or a dangerous act would be considered proof of personal tax exemption from the laws of nature or society obliging the rest of the world. Of course, there are instances where there is purpose behind this madness, as we shall point out later--what seems like a disturbance of an ego function may sometimes assume the proportions of a hyperthropic ego skill in argumentation for the wrong cause. Here we have in mind the subjugation of logic under impulsivity and narcissism to such a degree that even skillfully raised arguments fall on reality-deaf ears. And this is the worst of it--if the ability to draw realistic in­ferences from what happens to others is seriously impaired, not only will such children not learn from what they hear about life and what they see happen to others, but it is even difficult to make use of such incidents to argue with their own "worser" self. For, how do we do "ego supportive therapy" with merely neurotic children? One of our safest standbys is obviously the use of logical argument, skillfully applied by a well-related person. If such argu­ment holds no binding power, we lose one of the most effective tools in our battle against delusional magics.

Sam, an inveterate thief, was describing to the group one day a kid who lived in his neighborhood up north where he was before he came to Pioneer House. This boy apparently was the community thief par excellence and Sam described his exploits with relish. He told how he broke into this store and that house and how he used to treat all the smaller guys to candy which he bought from his nefarious gains. Then, as an anti-climax, he brought out that this guy was now in Jackson prison. From here, he went on to sketch, unable to resist his bravado mood, some of the "jobs" he had pulled, not with this other fellow, who was much older and served apparently as a delinquent ego ideal, but on his own. He made no attempt to conceal anything even though the director was around within earshot. In a subsequent lull in the activities, the director called over to Sam and chatted with him about the story he had just told. He said, "So this guy is in prison now," and Sam nodded agreement. Then the director said, "How about you, how do you figure you can get away with it?" His reply was classic: "I'm smarter than he is, that's all." He apparently had no hard feelings about the challenge but acted as though it were a piece of naivete on the director's part even to believe for a minute that he would get into serious trouble.

One day, the boys were quite excited about an accident that happened to one of the kids in their class. He had been skating in the street and was hit by a car, suffering concussion and broken ribs. They talked about it almost exclusively on the way home and gave the impression that they were in some way quite threatened by it. It was thus quite surprising to us when both Andy and Bill, in defiance of rules, started to skate in heavy traffic in front of the Home just before dinner. The Executive Director called them both into the office and, attempting to make propaganda on the basis of the accident to the boy in their room, a pure parallel, brought it to their attention, saying, "Here, a guy in your class is seriously hurt doing just what you guys are doing tonight and yet it doesn't seem to make any sense for you at all." "Oh, that dumb jerk." Andy said, "He don't know what's going on anyway." The Executive Director argued the point even further, "What do you mean, he doesn't know what's going on?" So they tried to prove he couldn't skate "good" but, when asked how did they know how "good" he could skate, they were unable to submit evidence for their argument. Still they insisted that nothing would happen to them and that we were just "mean bastards" because we never wanted them to do anything that was "fun."

19. Reaction to Failure, Success and Mistakes

     Even normal adults do not always find it easy to react reason­ably and realistically to failures, successes, and the mistakes they make. Failure either seems to discourage the ego or to seduce it into a variety of compensatory mechanisms, many of which are anything but desirable in a total pattern of life. Success has a tendency toward the production of characterological changes in terms of snobbishness, over-confidence, etc., or may lead to a variety of exploitative behavior trends which do serious damage to the acceptedness of a person within his own group. And it is well known that the ability to see, face, admit, and react reasonably to mistakes, and the ability to risk mistakes without having to use compensatory displacement mechanisms afterwards constitute one of the most difficult tasks and one of the most coveted maturity signals for anybody, even in his own realm of professional competence. No wonder that children as disorganized as ours have special problems when confronted with success, failure, or the admission of a mistake. Many of our children are so fatalistically afraid and convinced of the unavoidability of failure that they withdraw from some fields entirely, or develop terrific resistance against even "trying" under the most favorable circumstances. This can get so bad that even the visualization of an otherwise pleasant task, say a game, may call forth the image of failure first, and therefore makes it impossible for them even to want to try. This is often accompanied by a variety of defense mechanisms such as depreciation of the activity as such, pretense at disinterest, proclamation of total inability in this area, etc. Exposure to success situations, however, is no unmitigated blessing either. Sometimes our children, when successful with what they tried, become entirely intolerable for those who are supposed to survive with them. Their egos are so success-hungry that even a mild experience of that sort throws them off all restraint and they begin to act like a conceited, aggressive, reckless mob, eager to seek somebody less successful to mirror their own achievement, with no restraints of tact left. The admission of a "mistake" in turn, is usually met by one of two reactions--either it is considered just more evidence that "I'm no good at that anyway, so what's the use in trying," or the person who administers criticism immediately is pushed into the role of a hostile, mutilating, depreciating adult. But even the overlooking or "tactful ignoring" of mistakes later recognized as such by the child backfires more often than not. It is turned into its opposite, and interpreted as lack of interest in the child's progress, lack of helpfulness, or sheer stupidity on our side. This total breakdown of ego functions when confronted with failures, successes, or the assessment of mistakes, seems to us to constitute one of the greatest hazards of all for the educator, as well as the clinician, who tries to survive with or rehabilitate children of this type. It makes even "good" programs established for more normal children entirely unusable for ours; it is one of the main reasons why the moneyed layman does not enjoy contributing time or financial support toward their rehabilitation, and why even the professional often throws up his hands in despair. Techniques to get at this special angle of ego disturbance seem to be more important than anything else, even though this item does not rank high on the customary lists of clinical priorities.

The boys all had their swimming tests at the Boys' Club to determine whether they could be permitted to swim in deep water or not. The instructor, well briefed in our program, had carefully arranged for no one else to be present at the pool except our own group and even then each boy was taken in one at a time by him while the counselor diverted the others by activities in other parts of the club. For example, while one boy was being tested, the counselor was with the others playing pool, basketball, etc. In this way, we hoped to protect the pride of each group member, not only from the observation of outsiders, but even from criticism from members of our own group. The swimming instructor, in addition, was a trained worker with boys and handled the fellows very skillfully. He reported to us after the tests that Henry was unable to swim at all and would have to start in the beginners' section. He assured Henry that he would teach him to swim and that in a matter of weeks he would be in the intermediate group. Still, on the way home, Henry was in a blue sulk. To reclaim his prestige, he did at least two things--he insisted on smoking in the wagon and began to scape­goat Larry viciously. In addition, he propagandized against the Boys' Club--"who wants to belong to that old dump anyway?"--and tried to talk the boys out of ever going back there. It was obvious to the group that he was sore because of his poor showing but because he was top man on the totem pole they didn't take it out on him, which in this case turned out to be quite a blessing, for Henry could have been even more difficult. Even after we got home, he refused to eat, staying in his room. After dinner, he deliberately "knifed" every activity in the back by luring the others into chasing around and finally engineered a real bedtime riot (Entry: 12/17/46, Joel Vernick)

During the crafts program, Andy painted very carefully, using a brush, and his first design was quite formal. It was a picture of a flower with some clouds floating in the sky. However, when he pressed down the paper the design came off messily because the paint hadn't been moist enough. He became violently upset and with tears of rage he threw it on the floor and stamped out of the room into the adjoining playroom where he sat down in a chair. He sat in depressed fury. This is all the more amazing because Andy is one of the most advanced children in the group in this area. When he does something well we have the reverse problem with him; he infuriates the others with his crowing. Yet, if he fails, he blows up every time. I reminded him how many really good things he had made and put this one to one side, saying that it too would look better after it dried. This didn't help and he would not reenter the activity, finally going downstairs, and I didn't see him until dinner at which time he still appeared gloomy and detached, but recovered from the acute intensity of his reaction. (Entry: 3/13/47, Barbara Smith)

20. Exposure to Competitive Challenge

      The ability to react well to a competitive challenge is not at all one of the "primary" and simple ego functions. It is, in itself, a highly complex syndrome of ego functions, each one of which can be separately well developed or disturbed. An analysis of the ingredients of an ego's ability to react well to competitive life situations would, among others, show the following ingredients:

Ability to accept temporary frustration in view of later possible, if doubtful, gain.
Identification with a team (in some cases at least).
Submission of momentary personal needs in favor of long range goals. Ability to accept the facts of battle without interpreting the adversary's fighting as "hostile," or even the ability to accept some actual hostility in good grace.
Ability to produce aggression in varying sublimation levels without al­lowing hostility generated toward the persons involved to become ram­pant.
Skill in the manipulation of pride as a stimulant-without developing superiority feelings or snobbish complacency on the one hand, displaced scapegoat formation on the other.
Ability to manipulate the complex and ambivalent relationships toward one's own team and team members.
Ability to take defeat without disorganization, of enjoying victory with­out triumphant exploitation, of bearing doubt and insecurity without ego-decay­.
Ability to enter the content area of competitive enterprise with ade­quate sublimation, enjoyment, and actual skill.
Ability to accept the role distribution necessary for competitive task without interference by sibling rivalries, status conflicts, etc.
Ability to accept limits and umpire decisions without delusional pathol­ogy.

     This is only a sample of some of the ingredients involved in "competitive" life situations, and even their special mixture in content and quantity will depend, of course, on the type, style, level, and other specific circumstances of the competitive challenge involved.
      The foregoing analysis might raise the question as to just why a function as clearly composite as this is listed here at all, since it seems that its ingredients should be covered in other points mentioned in this same list. The answer to this is that, psychologically speaking, there is little justification for making this a separate item. It so happens, however, that the societal culture within which we operate puts such a premium on the ability to take competition. with grace that the functioning or disturbance of this very process becomes a crucial issue in this culture of ours. It is from the point of view of the cultural anthropologist, therefore, that we would rather see this item elevated to a point in its own right than disolved into its ingredients. And, besides, since most attempts at therapy are afflicted by the same cultural determinants, the aware­ness that the "use of competition" in education, group work, or therapy is predicated upon certain very specific ego functions to be taken for granted is of paramount importance.
     In a nutshell, how much and what type of "competition" can be afforded or used in life and programming in a treatment home also becomes a clinical issue, not one of cultural custom or even pride.

Picked up the kids after school. They were enthusiastic about baseball at Belle Isle. It was a beautiful, fresh spring afternoon and, although Belle Isle was a little windy, it was nice early baseball weather. Since this was the first game, the kids were rather tense, out of practice, and there was a lot of wrangling about sides. Of course, nobody wanted Larry or Danny, the former because of his sprawling uncoordinated movements which hamper him in all athletics, the latter because of his bulk and slowness. The way it wound up with Mike, Andy, and Bill on one side, fleet and agile as they are, and Larry and Danny on the other, it would have been murder. I suggested that I play on Larry's and Danny's team to even up the sides and that threw the balance way out, too, because then they were afraid of my prowess. Mike began to curse and said he'd be bitched if he'd play, Bill began to look for rocks to throw around, and Andy sneered with his usual "Jeezus." I then quite firmly suggested, "O.K., guys, what about a practice session today? No score." This took hold, especially when I began to bat high flies and fast grounders for them, and the afternoon didn't go half badly. After fooling around like this for about forty-five minutes, they got interested in a sandlot team that came over for a practice workout and we watched this for about twenty-five minutes. Danny got very friendly with a mounted cop and his horse and, when he began to bother him a little with his questions about the horse's private life, I lured him away. (Entry: 4/11/47, Joel Vernick)

21. Ego Integrity under the Impact of Group Exposure

Our culture makes two conflicting demands upon children, so far as their role as members of groups is concerned. They can be briefly abstracted in the following statements:
      Resignation to adaptational modesty.
      Renunciation of exploitational temptations.
     Educators have described at length what a "chore" group life is for children, since they have to accept many "sacrifices" for the sake of others for the attainment of a decent group role and the achievement of common group goals. We know how even the nursery school child is expected to "share," to surrender some of his demand for total possession of the adult, to make concessions by accepting a less coveted game now so that the group can have its decision realized, with a dim chance of getting one's special wish later. There is much more to it than that, of course, but may it suffice to mention that much "group adjustment" does mean a certain sacrifice in egotistic and narcissistic impulsivity, with some subtler rewards dangling somewhere in the future.
     Educators have described less dramatically the other side of this same picture: adjustment also means renunciation of the special chances and temptations with which group life confronts the individual. It is not true that you need only "cooperate and share." You also have to learn how not to exploit a chance to dominate which a confused or weak group throws into your path, how not to use others to gratify your own pathology, ready though they may be to make you do just that, how you must not try to manipulate groups so that they become just another means in your life sphere, no matter what the other members need them for. In short, after group exposure, the renunciation of group psychological temptations becomes as vital a point as the much more publicized virtues of the "share and cooperate" philosophy of life.
     We consider both features--the "adaptive modesty" of the individual as well as his readiness to "renounce exploitational temptations"--to be basic conditions for what we call "integrity" of the ego when exposed to group life.

Harry has an extreme oppositionalism, a kind of innate narcissism that flares in moments when adult controls are aimed at a given item of behavior that is important for him to carry out. In these moments, as a part of the pattern of rebellion, he involves the group very neatly in rioting and raids simply as a special tool in his warfare against the adult. Thus, one evening when interfered with in a scapegoat issue against Larry, for whom he developed a special hatred, he deliberately lured the group into a mass walk-out at the moment when the evening counselor was trying to work out a program for the evening. His tactics were amazingly skillful. First he aped boredom. When the counselor suggested this or that, he lolled in his chair, looked up at the ceiling, mimicked a man going to sleep and made them all laugh. Suddenly he jumped up out of his chair, and, agile as a monkey, leaped across the room, saying "follow me, guys" and, without even a backward glance over his shoulder, he ran out into the street and around into the backyard. They followed him at once, excited by his daring, and he exultantly led them to the top of the garage roof where he had them throwing bricks down into the yard in a tremendous state of intoxication with their destructiveness. The garage, which was on its last legs anyway and had several loose bricks, was subjected to many such raids through his leadership and, within three weeks after Harry came to the Home, looked as if it had been bombed.

This, however is only half the picture. For a healthy "group role," something else has to be added, namely:

Assertion of one's own personality structure; resistance against becom­ing a mere "ingredient" in the group psychological scene.

     With all due credit to the importance of the adjustment of individuals to the groups they are part of, a democratic philosophy of life has equal interest in the fact that the members of its group still remain individuals. It would not want to gain any type of group psychological strength at the price of having the structure of the individuals who constitute those groups wiped out in the process. This side of the picture hasn't been promulgated quite as much as the other one but is equally obviously implied. An individual who would allow himself to be "used for anything" just because of his helpless emotional dependence on a group he is in, or members of it, would, obviously, have lost his "integrity" as a person. In short, we do not want children to become mere "tools," either of another group member, of the temporary group leader, or even for "somebody else's cause." We want them to be able to "assert" their personality structure, even under the impact of group emotion and group loyalty demands and orgies, and we want them to remain able to resist dissolution of their judgment, their self-directed goal awareness, their thinking ability, etc., under the impact of any "mob psychological" device.
      Applied to our children specifically, this means the "ego" must be as eager not to lose its basic functions under the impact of group atmosphere as we know it has to be to make certain sacrifices along the impulsive-demand line.
     The danger of this "loss of integrity" by the ego under the impact of group psychological processes has become especially clear to us in the course of our studies in group contagions.5 What we said before about the impact of "Group Psychological Intoxication" as well as "contagibility" belongs here, too.
     Translated into the life sphere of our children, this means specifically that we want the following ego functions maintained:

Ability to stand up under the impact of sheer group status ("Johnny cannot make me do this, even though he is the big shot in the gang").
| Ability to retain reasoning powers even under the impact of group emotional stir-up ("I still think this is a dopey thing to do, even though the whole group yelled with enthusiasm about what that dopey counselor suggested").
Ability to maintain one's own need rights even in the face of group emotional propaganda ("I don't like to go on no overnight, I am too scared. The hell with all that baloney that we will have a wonderful time").
Ability to set limits to contagibility where one's own personality structure would be impaired (The whole group starts on a wild destructive orgy. Member A, who is otherwise a good sport but does not see any sense in this, is capable of withdrawing from it or making attempts to stop it).
Ability for intelligent rebellion against overdependence ("She always tells us what to do. We want to have a chance to decide for ourselves, even though she is O.K. and usually has good ideas").

     There are many more where these come from. What we are trying to point out here, having to forfeit the chance for an anywhere near adequate discussion of group psychology for the time being, is simply this:
      Some of the trouble our children get into is due to the fact that their egos do not have sufficient control over their own impulsivity, and do not have sufficient scope to encompass group values and goals into the orbit of their jobs. At the same time, however, some other trouble they may get into is due to the fact that their egos do not have sufficient resistance against the impact of group influence, atmosphere, dependence, and so forth, to maintain their personal integrity against the temporary group current.

Bill comes from a family background which is closer to typical middle class than that of the other Pioneers. He is the only one, for example, whose family unit has stayed intact and who has never been in a foster home previous to placement at the Home. While he has terrific impulsivity problems along hyper-aggressive lines like many of the others, he has, as we might expect, more deeply introjected superego values. Some of the crude sex behavior such as open masturbation and erotic play between the other children, whom it does not bother, really evokes guilt feelings in him and still he is incapable of defending himself against surrender to any prevailing group behavioral sex pattern of the moment, whatever its shock value may be. Dramatic testimony for this occurred one day in the playroom when there was a piece of highly erotic exhibitionism between Andy and Mike going on, which Bill fell into as usual. Suddenly, in the middle of a crude piece of behavior in which he was acting out the fantasy that he was "screwing this corner in the wall--hey watch me guys," he stopped and cried out "Gee, my ass is going to fall to pieces," an obvious castration anxiety suddenly liberated from deep level unconscious regions. But not even this stopped him and, spurred on by the group excitement, he kept right on until stopped by the executive director.

     We mean both problems here, not only the much more publicized one of "group adjustment" but also the equally important one of "self-defense of the ego against group Psychological impacts." Though of composite nature, either one of those ego functions is of tremendous importance for the purpose of a good adjustment to life, and the educator as well as the clinician must become inter­ested in a more specific analysis of just at which place in which respect a child's ego is unable to do that job. All too long have we propagandized the task of "group adjustment" in general, without specific reference as to just where the specific disturbance may sit.

22. The Wisdom of Tool-Appraisal

     There is another most typical ego weakness, which our youngsters seem to share with a large number of adults, especially where these find themselves in parental roles. Since this item is easier to clarify with an illustration out of the psychology of parental behavior, let us remember the frequency with which even parents who are perfectly realistic in deciding that Johnny's behavior now should be interfered with are often at a total loss as to how to do any realistic speculating about just what specific ways of interfer­ing would do to Johnny and the purpose they have in mind. We find that some adults may show quite adequate realism in the decision as to when to act. They neither get unduly punitive nor sentimentally soft. But when it comes to assessing just which tool would serve them best, their egos seem to be totally void of any cognitive curiosities at all.
      This same complaint can easily be levelled against our Pioneers. Sometimes they acted as an impulsive and not too bright child would act in a workshop. In his eagerness to get the lid of a watch open, he may grope for the most inappropriate tool, which greedily applied finally wrecks the watch for the improvement of which it was originally employed. Of course, we have in mind, here, primarily wrong tool thinking in connection with our Pioneers' reaction to human behavior. That means that often, even though their ego gives them some realistic insight about the problem to be tackled, it leaves them in great trouble by not adding to that any cognitive awareness of the multiplicity of possible approaches, of the adequacy of the approach tried to the situation in hand, of the less visible subsurface results. This phenomenon becomes especially irking where it extends into a certain rigidity of defense mechanisms, so that new situations cannot be appraised as to the modifications in behavior they would require, even where the general direction of response may be adequately sized up.

For weeks after coming to Pioneer House, Mike's chief defense against his insecurity in the new group was a kind of aimless and naive surrender of all of his personal possessions. In this "casting bread upon the waters" approach he apparently assumed that he would be rewarded by affection and acceptance from the others. While we might have expected this for the first few days, the length of time that it went on, even after it became obvious to Mike that it wasn't working, indicates that in some way or other this had been established as a pretty deeply ingrained response to outer insecurities and threats. Evidently, in the rather primitive institution in which he had lived between the ages of three and eight, this technique of chronic bribery had been the only one which had protected him against older and tougher children, and having learned this, and this alone, as a survival technique, he used it far past the point of diminishing returns.

Sam, who had chronic difficulties in school all of his life, was a confirmed truant prior to coming to Pioneer House. We openly sympathized with him about his many unpleasant school experiences. Still, he had to pretend he had stomach pains and a variety of physical complaints to avoid going, which we knew had been the kind of excuses he had used in previous home placements where he had attended schools in which he had been mistreated. This was so even when he must have realized that we saw through his defense, since we called in our consultant pediatrician who cleared him medically. This was done dliberately so that he could not accuse us of being "mean" and callous to his complaints. He still refused to go and in interview situations we promised him every immunity against reprisal for anything he might have to say against our present school arrangement. Wouldn't he tell us what he didn't like, what he was scared of, what was wrong? "No," he would say, "Dave, it isn't that. It's just that my belly hurts so." And then, after school was over, he would suddenly convert to good health and want to join the play activities, etc. It didn't even seem to bother him that this alone would undermine the position which he would take again the next morning--that he was "sick" and couldn't go, his "belly hurt" or his "head ached," etc.

Summary

     In looking over this assortment of twenty-two different "functions" of the ego, we are again impressed with the enormous task that still lies ahead of us. For it is painfully obvious that our twenty-two points are a sundry and ill-assorted lot. Some of them clearly are composites to be broken down into many more details; many of them have more inherent tendency toward syndrome formation with some of the rest than with others. All of this leads us into a task which can be tackled only by organized and large scale research, for which this presentation is no more than a prelude.
      One statement, however, we would want to emphasize heavily before we leave this point: No matter how imperfect any given assortment of ego disturbances may be, it is important to begin to break down the vague concept of a "weak" or "poorly functioning" ego into many more specific parts than has ever been done before. For our work with disturbed children, as well as for daily ego support for the normal ones, we have to know all the jobs an ego may be summoned to perform in a twenty-four hour day. The traditional descriptions of "ego functions" view this concept primarily in terms of "basic attitudes toward reality," as seen in fantasy produced on the couch, daydreams observed in the playroom, and "defense mechanisms" toward life situations as such. We think it is important to follow the ego into the scene of daily behavior control, and to get a detailed inventory of all the prerequisites which go even into seemingly "simple" tasks.
     We hold this because, to find ways of ego support, we first have to know just what jobs the ego needs to be supported to do. There is no path to a more efficient instrumentology of ego support except the one that leads over a more specific knowledge of just what ego functions are to begin with, and what they look like when disturbed.

Notes

1 Fritz Redl, "Group Emotion and Leadership," Psychiatry II, No. 4 (Nov., 1942).

2 Norman Polansky, Ronald Lippitt, and Fritz Redl, "An Investigation of Behavioral Contagion in Groups," Human Relations, III, No. 4, (1950).

2a For an interesting and acute description of some examples of such phenomena see Selma H. Fraiberg, "Studies in Group Symptom Formation," Am. Orthopsychiatry, 17, No. 2, (1947), 278-289.

2b Fritz Redl, "The Phenomenon of Contagion and `Shock Effect' on Group Therapy," in Kurt R. Eissler, Searchlights in Delinquency (New York: International Universities Press, Inc., 1949).

3 The term "treatment shock" refers to the intense reaction to the total impact of the clinical milieu which we observed in our children during the first three months at the Home. Their whole adaptation system, geared as it was to cruelty, deprivation, and neglect could not cope with an adult world that was benign and gratifying. The disturbed behavior that resulted is discussed in detail in chapter VI, "The Phenomenon of Treatment Shock."

4 A most promising effort at such a synthesis of the two approaches may be found in John Dollard and Neal E. Miller, Personality and Psychotherapy (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1950). See also, O. H. Mowrer, "Learning Theory and the Neurotic Paradox," American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, XVIII, No. 4 (October, 1948) p. 571-610.

5 Norman Polansky, Ronald Lippitt and Fritz Redl, op. cit.