Anna Freud: Unpublished and Newly Published Material: The Past Revisited

It was Dr Pollock who discovered that the date of my four lectures, Introduction to Psycho-Analysis 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 has the same meaning for an Institute as for a book. While the former grows in importance, puts out new branches, increases the numbers of staff, students, clients, etc., an introductory book suffers the reverse fate. Assuming its message to have been successful at all, it becomes superfluous, obsolete, and loses its readership. In order simply to survive, 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 who has some personal experience of the mood which dominated the classrooms in that remote past. Even if the curriculum of primary schools had been then what it is now, teacher-pupil relations were vastly different. Teachers knew little of the individual children under their care and failed to find out more. They were concerned above all with each child's intellectual status and with how well or badly this responded to the imparting of new facts. Where the reaction was positive, the child was considered clever, diligent, interested; where it was negative, it earned the pupil the label of lazy, unco-operative, or perhaps even plain stupid. Little was known of where a learning inhibition might stem from and even less 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 the child's attentiveness since physical matters were not supposed to intrude on the functioning of the mind. Such a disregard for obvious bodily needs was, thus, matched qu