The Past Revisited

It was Dr. George H. Pollock who discovered that the date of my Introduction to Psychoanalysis for Teachers coincides with that of the opening of the Chicago Institute, and it was he who thought it appropriate to link the two events within this celebration. Not that existence for half a century means the same for an Institute as for a book. While the former grows in importance, sprouts new branches, increases the numbers of staff, students, clients, etc., an introductory book has the opposite fate. Provided its message has been successful at all, it becomes superfluous, obsolete, and loses its readership. To survive at all, it needs to be changed, updated.

Among the people gathered here, I am probably the only one who was actively engaged in education fifty years ago and has personal experience of the mood which dominated the classrooms in that remote past. Even if the curriculum of primary schools was then what it is now, teacher/pupil relations were vastly different. Teachers knew little of the individual children under their care and failed to look out for more. They were concerned above all with each child's intellectual status and with how well or badly this responded to being improved by the imparting of new facts. Where the reaction was positive, the child was considered clever, diligent, interested; where it was negative, the pupil earned the label of being lazy, uncooperative, or perhaps even plain stupid. There was little knowledge of where a learning inhibition might stem from and even less knowledge of how to turn a bad scholar into a good one. Intellect, considered as an independent function, was not linked to other areas of the child's personality. There was even a time when teachers in the poorer districts were surprised to learn that lack of sleep or insufficient nourishment lowered