Child Guidance
CHILD GUIDANCE
(Nevelesci Tanacsadasz)
Klara Lazar Geroe 1933
From Freud, Sigmund, et al (1933), Lélekelmemzési tanulmányok: Dolgozatok a pszichoanalízis főbb kérdéseiről, Somló Béla Könyvkiadó, Budapest. https://archive.org/details/1933-lelekelemzesi/page/124/mode/2up
Judy Cassab’s Portrait of Clara Lazar Geroe. Courtesy of the Geroe Family.
Photo: Katrina Rickards
Ever since Freud showed the importance of childhood situations, the parental home, the behaviour of parents and educators in the development of adult neuroses, our healing efforts have been joined by the desire for prophylaxis. It is this desire that has drawn the attention of analysts to childhood. In our imagination it is obvious to try to prevent neuroses in childhood, but in practice this is very difficult. The causes of neuroses are the experiences that the child has been exposed to - through parents, educators, the adult environment - which he or she cannot avoid or process because of his or her vulnerability and biological and psychological structure. These facts point to two paths for prophylaxis:
1. to teach adults how to treat the child in a way that exposes him to the least possible shocks and illnesses;
2. to help the child to overcome the traumas he has suffered with the least possible damage.
We know that it is very difficult to influence the parents' attitude towards the child, because the educational principles and the attitude towards the child (and very often the two do not overlap!) are only apparently arbitrary but are in fact determined by deep causes. To influence the child directly, on the other hand, is very difficult, because of his or her rooted relations with his or her environment. Despite these difficulties, psychoanalysis has embarked on both paths of prophylaxis. The first path led to analytic pedagogy, the second to child analysis.
However, to develop the principles of analytic pedagogy and the analysis of the child as an individual, we first had to learn the language of the child's soul. For about 10 years, we did little more than collect data. From the observation of healthy children, children's dreams, the manifestations of childhood sexuality, the registration of "bad habits", the childhood manifestations of the "unconscious", we see confirmation of everything that was known from the analysis of adults.
Initially, our idea of therapy - when it came to children - included the adult caregiver alongside the child. The reason for this, apart from the real difficulties, was that we ourselves, as adults, find it easier to understand and influence the adult. As psychoanalysis developed, our knowledge of the child's soul increased, its structure and peculiarities became clearer and clearer, and analysts learned to return to childhood through the recollections of their adult patients and their self-analysis, and to dare to deal more and more directly with the child.
Freud ("Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjáhrigen Knaben") and Ferenczi ("A cock-loving boy") were the first to publish cases of child neurosis. Ferenczi has an acquaintance referring to the little "cock-loving" Árpád, Freud only directs the course of treatment of his little patient from the background, the father himself carrying out the treatment. These indirect analyses of children are the first indications that the analytic technique can be transferred to the treatment of children.
Freud even believes that no one else but the father could have succeeded: "the technical difficulties of psychoanalysis would have been insurmountable at such a tender age..." Hug-Hellmuth is the first to open the door to the children's room and, with the intermediaries switched off, to begin to analyse children systematically with a therapeutic aim. She really opens the door to the nursery, visiting the child in his or her home, because she imagines that for the child to express and understand himself or herself honestly, it is necessary to bring the environment into the analysis in a realistic way. Melanie Klein develops a specific analytic technique for younger children (2-5 years old): the play technique. She brings a symbolic miniature world of toys into the analytic room; she observes the child's spontaneous play and uses the symbolism of play to interpret the child's unconscious. His work provides new insights into the earliest manifestations of the Oedipal conflict and the early developmental stages of the little girl's sexuality.
For these child analysts, a number of theoretical works (Freud, Abraham on the development of sexuality and the libido, Ferenczi on the development of the perception of reality) have already provided the basis for their insights into the child's psychological life. Pfister, from Switzerland, is the first to bring analysis to the pedagogical level. As a priest, he has ample opportunity to use his analytical knowledge to gain insight into the spiritual problems of children 'in statu nascendi' and to help them. Bernfeld's theoretical work aims to lay the foundations of analytic pedagogy and he is the first to deal with the phenomena of adolescents' life, group and community formation.
Aichhorn reports in "Verwahrloste Jugend" on what he observed in his knowledge of "Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse" and "Obersel- ich" (Freud) in the group education of depraved children and what he has deduced from these observations as a completely new analytical method of education. He creates homogeneous groups of his pupils according to their symptoms and, adapting to their unconscious, he offers them, without any external constraints, a way of love-relationship, so that the development of their superior self can continue where it has stalled, so that they can make up for their lack of knowledge of how to adapt to reality and thus become social. Zulliger's specific practical work is also characterised by the fact that he is both a teacher and an analyst. He has a keen sense of recognising the unconscious roots of his pupils' learning and character development disorders and, using the teacher's positional advantage in the relationship of impulse and reaction, he usually succeeds in preventing serious problems by means of a short-cut awareness-raising.
Anna Freud’s work marks a new chapter in the development of child analysis. In her work "Einführung in die Technik der Kinderanalyse", she reports on the analysis of neurotic children in their latency period. His technical innovation: abandoning analytical passivity in the introductory phase of child analysis, he seeks to win the child's love and trust by active means, because only through positive emotional contact can he keep the child's ana possible.
Theoretically: the child's higher self is only partly independent of its parents, partly in the process of being formed and working under the influence of their realistic demands. Hence the distinction between child and adult analysis: the child does not develop a real impulse; child analysis is analytical work until we can work with the ready-made parts of the superego, followed by the further shaping of the superego through the environment, i.e. the work of education. If we now look at the development of child analysis, we see that at first the analysis of children could only be imagined through adults, or that later the milieu of the child was realistically (Hug-Hellmuth) or symbolically (Melanie Klein) included in the analysis instead of the real adult person. Then, when we knew enough about the child to deal with him directly, we found the place that the specific structure of the child's psyche dictated for the adult environment, not as a mediator of the analysis, but as a complement to it in its natural nurturing position. We are now in a position, therefore, on the basis of our knowledge of the child's psychic structure, to consciously choose the mode of help - direct treatment of the child, guidance of the nurture, or a combination of the two - which the child's internal and external situation assigns to us.
In Pfister, Aichhorn and Zulliger, the position of priest, educator and teacher also dictated contact with parents, supporting their healing work with educational advice and active influence on the child's external world. Their understanding of the unconscious facilitated their recognition of educational errors and their social position facilitated their insight into these errors. The favourable results of their practical experience encouraged the analysts to set up analytic educational counsellors. Aichhorn, as a consultant to the Jugendamt of the City of Vienna, organised educational counsellors, where he himself and his pupils followed him.
Today, partly under his leadership, educational counselling work is also carried out in the children's clinic of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. The "educational counselling" technique - although it of course offers the widest possibilities for individual work and is the owner of all educational counsellors - is In fact, each case defines its own technique - developed by Aichhorn, the father of psychoanalytic, educational therapy!
In 1928, the first analytic children's ambulance was founded in Budapest under the leadership of Dr. Margit Dubovitz, within the framework of the League for the Protection of Children, which, unfortunately, soon became stateless after the League ceased its activities. With the establishment of the Clinic of the Hungarian Psychoanalytic Association in Budapest, we are also trying our hand at educational counselling in the framework of our new children's clinics. The introduction of these shorter-term treatments has also been justified by the external circumstances of our clinic: we have too few analysts for the many children who need help, and it is important from a social point of view that the children who really need analysis should have access to them.
The possibilities of "educational counselling" are of course determined by the availability of the parents' unconscious and, first and foremost, by the severity of the child's illness. My own experience shows that the applicability is very wide; even of the children who come to us with various complaints, often with symptoms that appear to be severe neurotics, I have found only about 1099 out of about 120 cases to be genuinely neurotically ill. In most cases the difficulties which children present are not deeply anchored neuroses of traumatic origin, nor even rigid forms of reaction, but simple reactions to the behaviour of their educators, and can therefore be corrected in time by the educators; but if this correction is not made, 'gutta cavat lapidem', character anomalies or neuroses will inevitably develop from the above beginnings.
CASE MATERIAL ( There are four cases in all)
I. Bandi, 10 years old. His mother brings him to the order. He is the child of a well-married family of janitorial parents, who also have a 12-year-old daughter, a bourgeois Complaint: she is a bad pupil, although intelligent, she is a failure, and their problem is whether she should go to a bourgeois school. Disobedient, lazy, unambitious, inattentive, gambles, wanders about, unkind at home. The mother is a good-natured, clever, apparently energetic, strict, sword-wielding woman. She resents the child mainly because of his laziness, punishes him a lot, deprives him of his pleasures, beats him up, "Please, for a boy, I can't use him for anything, and he is lazy at school; if I send him to do something or if he needs help, he runs away, useless. I am so miserable with him!
The other one, my little daughter, being a girl, is the first pupil, she helps me at home, she is clever and smart" and proudly adds:" She even plays the violin well!"
"Is Bandi learning music?" I ask.
"No, please, it's a waste of money to learn to play the violin."
"What about the gentleman?"
"He's a good man, but he doesn't care much for children. He's down in the boiler room all day; the housework, all the cleaning, all the running around, is mine."
In response to a few more questions, she explains that from an early age she worked hard under strict parents, competing with men. From the constant complaints that the child was so lazy for a boy, - from the description of their life, the praise of the girl, and the small tone of complaint about her lord, it was obvious:
The mother, in her love for her daughter, compensates in her daughter for her penis envy. In her son, she suppresses the envy of men, and acts out her grievances and aggression against her husband. The child's behaviour is the response to this treatment.
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Talking to they boy, a sensible, nice, open child, my hypothesis was strengthened. The reason for his lack of ambition is that he cannot compete with his “perfect" sister, and the competition is unequal because he does not get his mother's love-reward. He is so full of complaints against his mother and jealousy of his sister that, with a little encouragement, he pours out: "Mama is very strict with him . . . girls in general - have it so much better, they get clothes, they don't get beaten, and they are such bragging monkeys!"
He does not obey, because mama is never satisfied with him.
"And the vagrancy?"
He likes to wander around with his friends, riding his bike, which Mum often forbids as a punishment.
"What about learning?"
Yes, he's a bad student, but he's keen to go to civil school, because if he could only be a coal bum everyone would look down on him. And on top of all that, as a symbol of unattainable desires and dreams, the symbol of nobility: the violin! If only he could play the violin! But he can't, because they can't afford two, and he doesn't deserve it.
Say, if you'll study better?"
An indescribably bright yet doubtful look is the answer.
Now it's Mum's turn again; I tell her that the child has made a good impression on me, that I don't think he's sick. I think his only problem is that he loves his mother very much and is jealous that she thinks the little girl is more talented and more distinguished. The mother acknowledges the jealousy and immediately justifies it with a little episode: "The little girl asks for a sugar cube, that her coffee is bitter, she gets it, and the boy asks for it too. I said, "Your cup is smaller, one is enough," and he reproached me, "You won't give me one because you prefers Irma, and you don’t like me!
Geroe talks to mother…..’I’m just mentioning in passing how much Bandi would like to study music and that there is no money for that, while Ilonka is studying. A lot of little episodes come to the surface, through which I manage to show the mother that she demands more from her son, because he is a boy. She treats him worse because boys have a better fate and she feels sorry for the little girl because she is a girl. She feels sorry for herself too...
She laughs and says that she would prefer to be a man.
When I emphasize to the mother the great love her son has for her, and you can see that she understands this, she is happy. I negotiate for Bandi a free hour every day to wander and ride his bike. The mother promises to try to treat the two children equally and enrol the boy in the civil school in the autumn. This will be communicated to the child together with the mother.
They come back in two weeks, both apparently more satisfied. The mother is happy to report: the child is learning, obedient, and the situation with her sister has eased. The mother spontaneously mentions that they have decided that if the boy passes his exams in the autumn, they will have him learn music.
After the exams, I will see the child again in the autumn as a citizen, he will learn music, which makes him very happy. Of course there are setbacks in his studies, a weak average, but he is improving at home and at school. Mum has visited us a few more times, she remains satisfied, best evidenced by the number of parents she has referred to our practice with complaints.
II. In another case, it was particularly kind of the mother to come to us, a simple working woman, with the ready-made material, having almost single-handedly realised the reasons for her educational failure. She came to me after a popular lecture I had given, in which I spoke about educational mistakes and their unconscious sources, and told me that she had been so self-confident about certain points in the lecture that she hoped that if she told me about them she would get advice on what to do with her younger daughter Erzsi, aged 4, who she could not get on with: she was willful, tyrannical, if she did not want something, or she cried until she vomited, or she said, "I shouted so loudly that the neighbours ran away!" She and her husband give in to her for the sake of peace. The woman still has a 6-year-old daughter, there is no problem with her.
She had to speak about something she had never dared to talk to anyone about, she was ashamed, she thought it impossible, unnatural: that she did not love this little girl when she was born, and not even for a long time afterwards! After the birth of her first child, she was in the throes of a climax, [???] and the doctors advised her not to have any more. When she did become gravid and went in for an operation, her doctors advised her to carry the pregnancy to term, and although she didn't want to, she couldn't help herself. She and her husband had serious financial problems and were anxious. She felt she was a failure, and contemplating the new problems with the child. She was nervous throughout her pregnancy, vomiting all the time. In the meantime, she was somewhat reconciled, and hoped that she would at least have a son.
When she learned that she had a daughter, she hardly looked at her, she was deeply distressed, she did not want to touch her, she could not breast-feed her, and she remembers well that when her husband first came in and took the child in his arms, she shouted angrily, "Leave that child alone!" I didn't love her and I didn't want to see my husband love her." She says, with great shame, that she did not love the child so much that she did not even look at it, it was cared for by neighbours. It was only when it was a few months old, when she bathed and dressed it, that she was suddenly moved by the child's helplessness and neediness. She began to care for it, felt empathy for it, and when it grew up well, she loved it. Today she loves the child very much, she has spoiled her.
The problems continued. The child was always crying, and prone to vomiting and hernias. She took Erszi to the doctors a lot, she was afraid of thee crying and always worrying for her life. It turns out that since her emotional upheaval, she has been over-nurturing Erszi, pushing her violently, tormenting her with loving care. Erszi returns this violence by vomiting, screaming, and shouting at the neighbours. This frightens and shames her mother.
Erszi is what we imagine her to be after all this: thin, well-groomed, intelligent, bullying her sister and her peers, narcissistic and comfortable with it; she is immediately angry and sees it as [her] right.
The mother quickly understood (she herself told me that she didn't dare to let the child cry or punish him, always afraid he would get sick or die) that her great indulgence was compensation for all the hatred she had felt in the past; here fear for the child's life was remorse for her death wishes towards her.
She realized that if her child’s eating was to get better and the vomiting and raging stop, she must not force her to eat - even if she didn't eat for two days - and other bad manners. Excessive care may be as bad, or worse, than excessive severity. We have kept to this agreement, which at home - with the father, with the environment. This was a provocation to the child it was great heroism. ( It appears here that LKG encouraged the parents to not react with anger or give in to the child’s demands CV).
After the first difficult week, the little girl became aware of the changed hand. Her appetite returned. After 2 or 3 rampages, for which she did not receive extras, she stopped rampaging. After two weeks of passivity, I released the mother, for any necessary ‘punishment’ also for punishment, instructing her that If the child really annoys you: tell her, show her.
The rapid impact of our advice would have been like a fairy-tale magic wand had the little girl's measles outbreak not jeopardised the outcome. This illness had almost set the mother's old mechanisms in motion, and her worries came back to haunt her. At that time I urged her not to change her treatment; it would be a win-win situation if the child, after her loss of appetite, spontaneously got the urge to eat (a recent experience) and did not let her tyranny reassert itself during her illness, although she cared for her with much love. The mother has stood this test beautifully, her elder daughter also got measles, after a mild illness they both started to eat, in their mutual misfortune they got on well with each other. She adds to one of the mother's positive accounts: she had actually been given the same advice by paediatricians before, but couldn't take it, and now it worked so well! Since then, I have heard them directly and indirectly often, and the child is fine.
Sanyi III, 12, Citizen III, only child. About 10 days before our investigation, he ran away from home with a friend, they wandered around for 2 days, the police brought them back. There are no complaints about his behaviour, but he failed grade repetition in the first grade of high school and now, in the third grade of civics, he is failing 3 subjects, although he is in good spirits. The reason for his running away, according to his parents: shame because of bad studies, failure.
The mother is a very anxious person, someone who keeps her child close to her in every way, and if a child runs away from home, we might assume more serious symptoms, debauchery, which need to be analysed, and after what we heard, we thought the same here; but the situation was different. This elopement was not a serious one, the boy had set out without money or equipment, as it turned out later: not so much out of fear and shame of punishment, as out of some deep inner desire: to be free to roam free, so that no one is in charge, at least for a while!
The boy sleeps in the same bed with his mother (12 years old!), according to his mother, because he is very restless at night, tosses and turns, curls up. The child complains that his mother won't let him go out with the children, or on outings, or to play football; on Sundays he has to go for a nice walk with his parents. The mother justifies these prohibitions on the grounds that her son is a well-bred, well-behaved child, and that others would spoil him; she fears that he will get warm and catch pneumonia if he is allowed to run around freely, especially as he has had many cases of tonsillitis, and his heart and lungs have been attacked, and another child in their family has already died because his mother has allowed him to run around freely. The principle is that it is best for a child to stay with his parents. Sanyi could now go to Lake Balaton with [a school holiday], but she doesn't dare to let him go, because the child's heart would surely not stand bathing.
At our first meeting, I failed to convince this mother that the child needed more time off, or that it was not good for her 13-year-old son to sleep in the same bed with her. Her castration fears, her stigma and her guilt about her son were not approachable from any angle.
However, she agreed to have the child examined and that if his heart and lungs were found to be intact, he would be released to [the holiday at] Lake Balaton. The tests were negative, of course, and Sanyi left happily. I talked to him once or twice beforehand, it turned out that he was onanizing, with the usual fears (spinal stiffness, impotence as a consequence of onanism), which I tried to dispel . . . He finds it extremely difficult and upsetting that Mama is so stitched up, so anxious, so ashamed of his role as 'mama's boy'. And he can't learn because his thinking is clouded by the many ambivalent feelings towards his tyrannical and nagging mother. He keeps wandering into daydreams. In his fantasies, he talks about his mother, whereupon he declares that he would gladly give her up, that he would be happy to let her sleep in a separate room.
Of course, I tried to make up for it by flattering his masculine self-esteem
Mother and son return in the autumn. He has grown, become big and felt completely changed. His demeanour became open, almost masculine. The parents were delighted to see this, and although this summer and the medical tests were a good trump card, his mother refused to agree to separate living arrangements even at her son's request.
There was nothing left to do but to try to get help from the father's side. The father indeed proved to be understanding and well-meaning, and through him the child's freedom - as far as it was possible for such a mother - was secured from several sides. This was at the beginning of the school year. Around Christmas I saw him again; there was no problem with school or anything else, mum was having a hard time adjusting to the new constellation, but the child and his father had become strong allies and voted her down. I hear from them more often through the teacher who sent them to me, the result is so far permanent.
The boy's seeming debauchery was a healthy attempt to escape from his mother, a documentation of what his mother did not want him to understand, that he wanted to break away from her and that his healthy development wanted this. His mother, on the one hand, gave the boy too much freedom and too much excitement by sleeping in the same bed, and on the other hand, she tyrannically prevented him from venting his excitement and feelings in any way (bans on masturbation, sports, friendships). His emotions become disharmonious, ambivalent, no: he not only loves but also fears and hates his mother, the source and suppressor of his excitement. The only outlet for her growing tensions is fantasy, which distracts her from her studies, and since her fantasies also wander into 'forbidden' territory, she must suppress them and the feelings they bring. This again increases his inner tension and reduces his work capacity. It was this unbearable tension that drove him to wander. When he gets help in a difficult situation, his performance is unleashed, his learning improves, the child blossoms.
H. Józsi IV, 11 years old, student V, father a baker, mother a laundress, only child. His physical development was normal, his cleanliness was easy, he studied well enough until the 3rd elementary school, then he began to decline, went astray, and was sent to school for 2 weeks at a time.
When his parents find out, he swore about "the k . . . . aunts" (sic!) and listen to what they were saying. At the same time, he would secretly sell small objects that he received as gifts, sometimes taking small sums of money at home. On a complaint from the school, he is then sent to patronage and from there to a boys' home, where he gets an ear infection, is operated on and is discharged.
Since then the child's character has been deteriorating, he lies, gets dirty, pisses and talks at home and at school, often wanders and is very bad at school. He is constantly punished at school and at home, and his parents, who used to spoil him, are now rude to him, especially his father. He is beaten a lot; his mother - by her own admission - often bursts out in exasperation: "I wouldn't mind if you died!" "I'll kill you if you lie!" etc. The mother cries a lot for her son, who, seeing this, cries with her. Her mother thinks that the change in the son's character may have been caused by the change of flat and the child being in bad company at school and the fact that there is a public house near their new flat, which excites the child.
The boy is small, neglected-looking, with a very dull expression, closed, secretive, indifferent. He seems to be sub-intelligent, answering with difficulty, quietly, colourlessly. The question, "Are you feeling well?" comes as a surprise. Even more so when I say that I don't think he is feeling very well, because I hear from his parents how bad he is, how much he is getting off, at home and at school. And would it be a good idea to help her to be different? Then the child loses his indifference and starts crying bitterly. I let him cry it out, then I tell him that he has come here to get help, there is no punishment here, this is not a school, a patronage or a court, children come here to get help if they cannot manage something on their own or with their parents. These things will happen to him for sure and we will try to help him!
The child now sniffles more calmly, we talk a little more in his own argos about "football", cinema, "friends", he leaves very thawed. If we meant debauchery in our previous case: Józsi's symptoms - vagrancy, theft, lying, truancy, dullness and dirtiness were suggestive of a much more serious pathology, which of course I did not think could be solved by simple counselling. In spite of this, as in all cases when I start to work with a child, I asked the parents - in front of the child - not to punish or beat the child, if possible, until they had entrusted me with the child, but to wait and see what I could do for them in other ways. My aim with Józsi is twofold: on the one hand to win the child's goodwill, and on the other hand, because the discussion takes place in front of him, he feels the different treatment and this - without my taking his word for it - obliges him to do something different for him too.-
This little boy is scheduled for three sessions a week. When the child came 2-3 times, I was struck by the change in his appearance, facial expressions, behavior. Whereas the first time he gave the impression of a dishevelled, disheveled, dull, defiant, withdrawn, disinterested child, the second time his clothes were in order, his whole appearance was freer, lighter, his features softer, as if a great weight had been lifted from someone. In a short time he seemed like a well-groomed child, well occupied at home, and on good terms with his surroundings. It always amazes me - although I have experienced it several times - when children show such a big change in appearance, manners, appearance, mood after one or two conversations. I have suspected myself of bias, but others who see the children have found the same, and I myself have seen a similar rapid, great change in children with other analysts in our clinic. Even more curiously, this change is often permanent. In this case, I think we've managed to see why the results came about so quickly and have been lasting.
The boy is happy to report that his parents have kept their promise not to hurt him and that he can go to the square. After two hours of learning, he can go and play for the other two. Now he goes home on time, but never before! Dad always sleeps during the day (he works at night) and is always yelling and hitting, and Mum always fights when she comes home in the evening and he's not home. And she - if she goes down to the square "glütyü", "window-shopping" [and is late home there are arguments and a beating].
There are also many complaints about the school; the teacher, a real monster, unfair, mean, rude, teasing and beating the children, especially the poor ones!",
"You too?",
"Uhum, - only, - always teasing, hitting me on the head, that's why I don't like school.
"What does he tease you about?"
"He always calls me by name, and the others laugh."
Why he is teased when his name is called, I did not find out then, but eventually I did. As for the [encopresis] I learned that it had been going on since he was in the [childrens’] home. There, according to his story, they had a joyless life, they were kept strictly and with a lot of beatings, their supervisor only allowed them to go to the toilet three times a day at a set time, and they brought in the fashion of talking and he got used to it. He feels the urge to defecate, but postpones it until it is too late, like a tiny child of one or two. He has no shame about it, he says it doesn't stink, they don't know at school and mum, when she sees it, gets angry, snaps - there's a defiant silence. On these two occasions, I managed to show him that these movements were defiant reactions to school failures: he did it twice in a helpless rage.
He came to see me about a month ago, when one day he drew something, and under his drawing he writes himself T. Joseph instead of H. Joseph.
Is that your name? You used to say: H. Joseph! Or am I mistaken? "
The child is confused, blushes, stammers: "No, my name is T. Joseph!", excited, refuses to explain.
"You have a second father?"
"No, that's my daddy!"
"Name?"
"H. Michael”.
“What's your name at school?"
T. Joseph!" ,
“That's why you said they were mocking you?" ,
“Yes. T. is such an ugly name!",
"Well, maybe that's not the only reason you don't like the name?"
He listens. He keeps repeating, muffled, very depressed:
'My daddy ....'
'Tell me, son, do you know why they call you by your mummy's name?',
'No!',
'When do they call other children by their mummy's name?',
'Teacher said... ...he told me too... ...if it's illegal... That's why you said you were being mocked?" - He nods.
"I knew my name was different when I was a freshman, but I didn't know why, I didn't think about it."
Once, in the second grade, daddy was in the old apartment, shouting at the landlady that coal was missing from the cellar: "The thief ..., the scoundrel ..., he's in a marriage!"
I'm reminded of the ,.k . . aunts", whose "wisecracks" he's curious about: "Then maybe they said something about Mum? Something nasty?" :
NO and NO,
are you sure, Józsi?",
Yes, yes... that's right, you knew what I was saying, not for sure, but I often cursed in that way and I knew: something nasty, bad. Here, in our house, when we came to live here, I already knew."
"Did you go to their house?" .
"No. I was always curious about them, what they were saying, I just wanted to listen, but nothing in particular."
I was unable to find out directly about his fantasies about prostitutes, but from other material we had I could deduce that he wanted to know: the "k" - who he was stalking - his mother; his mother's secrets - the "wild marriage". Her mother has had many abortions; the "k "s have sex but no children, they do something secretly, sinfully.
During that time he wanted to scold the socialists, not to call them by any honourable epithets, and he knew that his parents were socialists; he wanted to make up his parents' secrets from these things, half-conceived, half-eared, - his own shameful, hidden origin, behind which he sought the shameful sins of his parents, if only in revenge for the injuries they had suffered for it. When we point these out, we discuss sending in your parents to see if we can help with the name issue
The parents, with great shame and apology, say that the child is the current father's, but that he was born before and they got married a few years ago, and they were afraid and did not have the child legalized because of lack of time and money. Now the father has promised to make up for this as soon as possible. After this, there is a rapid improvement, which is also noticed at school; a kindly religious teacher gives him a distinction, he gets a poem for his exam, which makes him quite happy, because he was the scorned one, the last one in his class 2 years ago. He passes his exams well, his parents, his whole family celebrate him as a converted lamb, he gets a present. The summer passed well, in a holiday campaign he was considered a well behaved child with few interests. He has almost completely given up soiling, and his mother says the only time he has had trouble is in September, when he has a bout of enteritis.
In the autumn, there are still one or two minor school calamities, and sometimes a few pennies are missing at home.
Complaints against his teacher then revealed: why did he change so suddenly in the third grade?
"The teacher was also rude to mum," he says once.
"How?”
"A boy said to him: 'Pimp!
“ I told mum, she went to school and told the teacher. that he was saying bad words to us’.
It turns out that this argument took place with mutual insults, with some political acrimony, and that the teacher did not look at the child in a good light afterwards, or at least that is how the boy puts it. At this time, his mother always proved him right. The child enjoyed the new situation immensely, and was in a hurry to rebel - instead of his father, against whom he was already boiling - against the teacher, to whom he could transfer his jealousy, anger and contempt for his father . . . And all with the support of his mother!
For him, the situation at school has now become as confusing as the one at home: respect and hatred, contempt for the father-figure side by side. Meanwhile, the school sent admonitions, bad report cards, complaints, until finally the mother turned on the child, began to punish him at home. It was this that finally threw the child off balance. He felt cheated again by his mother, by the adults :
with the father, who is also not his father, does not give his name, and is a thief and a ‘wild house’ keeper,
with the teacher, with whom his mother starts the fight, he sides with his mother against the teacher, and his mother abandons him, sides with the enemy, then punishes the boy for his schoolboyishments, when it is his protest with his mother against the teacher!
The prowling, the stealing, the sniffing around for ucca girls begins. Then, in patronage, he gets even further away from his parents, this feels like even more cheating, then comes the anal regression. In the second grade, when he is on good terms with his parents, he takes it ad acta, suppresses the accusations against his parents; now, after his disappointments, he rebels, wants to investigate the suspicious secrets, and then, in his own little depraved existentialism, shows his parents: you are Pharisees, that's what you are, that's what you deserve!
This child was in treatment for a maximum of 130 hours in total, but I was able to observe him for 2 years with breaks. The symptoms of exposure had completely disappeared; minor cheating, vagrancy, lying, even an unauthenticated lesson in the first year, but he was learning with effort. In the meantime, he was placed with another teacher; he learned German, was promoted to the bourgeoisie, and coped well with a very difficult family situation - father's illness, birth of a little brother. According to his parents, where they knew him, the great metamorphosis of this child is a constant topic of conversation. Characteristic: last year he found a bundle of pearls in the pool and - after a great mental agony - handed it over to the police. Then they moved to a distant suburb, from where it was difficult to get to the treatment; the child said that he is now so sure of himself that he just needs a little help, say once a month.
I include this case - although it undoubtedly happened in one analytical way or another, with the child's awareness - among my cases of educational counselling, not only because we could not clarify the childhood fixation points of anal regression, but also because I am convinced that the success was due primarily to the parents' re-tuning and the role I actively took on in standing by the child. By taking on this role, I gave the child a way, trusting in me, to move from being disconnected from society, which is the society of adults (in whom he was disappointed), from debauchery and defiance to normality. Through my influence, I gave him back his good parents.
What these four cases have in common is that the children's problems could be helped through understanding parents or through parents tuning in. I could cite many other cases; but I could also cite many more cases where, because of parental resistance, well-meaning analyses failed or children could not be treated at all. In such cases, parental analysis could help! The scientific relevance and therapeutic safety of the "parenting advice" outlined here is far behind that of in-depth, systematic child analysis. The significance of this technique is first and foremost that it is a quick help, and it is precisely because of its advantages that it has its shortcomings. Even if we take these shortcomings and the refractory cases into account, we can still conclude that the work of 'Educational Counselling' is absolutely necessary and of great social importance.
NOTES
By Christine Vickers
In the four cases described it is apparent that Geroe is clear about the difference between ‘educational counselling’ and psychoanalysis/psychotherapy. She is not pretending to undertake psychoanalysis, describing children attending the government funded polyclinic at the Hungarian Psychoanalytical Sociey for whom the short-term model was developed. In case four, attending the clinic run by the Social Democrat body: Friends of children of Hungarian Labourers. As a Social Democrat it is likely she embraced the ‘Free Clinic’ movement in Budapest. See Danto, E ( 2012) Freud’s Free Clinics. Columbia University Press
Case III is possibly based on Clara Geroe’s own childhood/adolescent years.
Geroe uses language and descriptions reflecting contemporary attitudes of the day but which are not acceptable today.
I have used a translation APP, ‘Deepl’ which is generally recommended for academic papers. There may be variances in other translations.