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IN THE EARLY YEARS OF CHILD psychiatry, preventive mental health was scarcely conceived of. Not until a child presented a florid symptomatology was he of any potential concern to the specialist. Today, on the other hand, a major effort of childhood mental health workers is prevention. This change in emphasis is traceable ultimately to Freud's formulation of the theory of psychoanalysis.
Before Freud, the usual way of thinking about childhood development, insofar as it was thought about at all, was teleological and moralistic. The child was not so much something as he was in a state of becoming something—namely, an adult. Morally and intellectually, the child was unformed, "primitive," and the primary goal of child-rearing was to civilize him. Under these conditions, there was little reason to study the child's way of thinking or even developmental changes in behavior, for these were not phenomena that had value in their own right. They were merely stages in the passage to adulthood.
Such an attitude could not long survive Freud's discovery of the crucial formative function of the first six years of life. The situation was now reversed. Previously, child behavior had always been measured against adult behavior. Now, in the wake of Freud, adult behavior was being referred back to its childhood roots. The key to adult personality lay in the logic of childhood.
This reversal gave rise, in turn, to a second critical development: the scientific study of child behavior outside the clinical context. Instead of simply following received truths on the subject of how children think and act, psychiatrists began, in earnest, to observe child behavior.
By way of illustration, let us take just one significant childhood experience: separation from the mother or primary caretaker (Mohacsy, 1976). Not many years ago, the seriousness of this experience