You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Ralph Bridgman, in an introduction to the Symposium, remarks upon
the influence that psycho-analysis is having on parent education workers. The articles which follow discuss and criticize this influence.
With a view to estimating the value of psycho-analytic findings in the teaching of parents, Helen Leland Witmer (Psychoanalytic Psychology in Parent Education) sums up the process of normal development (basing her summary on Freudian literature) and relates this development to the rôle of the parent and to ways in which psychical growth can be facilitated or hindered.
In a contribution entitled 'Psychoanalysis and Parent Learning', Lewis Brown Hill discusses some of the difficulties of parent education due to the parents' own conflicts and attitudes towards the teacher. He points out that insight into the learning process has been developed by psycho-analysis and warns teachers against the indiscriminate use of psychological knowledge in dealing with parents lest their sense of guilt should be over-stimulated.
Elizabeth Healy Ross (Some Effects of Psycho-Analysis on Counselling) shows professional counselling to be a development of ordinary human readiness to give on the one hand, and, on the other, to take help and advice. She refers to the "annoyance, pique, antagonism, interest, and deep conviction" aroused by Freud's discoveries concerning the unconscious and to the inappropriate and unsuccessful application some counsellors have tried to make of them, but lays stress on the advantage to the counsellor of some knowledge of unconscious functioning, provided that this does not lead to incursions into the provinces of psychiatry or psycho-analysis. She gives some practical advice on the handling of the complex emotional relationship of counsellor to parent counsellee.
Franz Alexander, in a concluding article, 'The Social Problem and the Individual, ' maintains that social adjustment to the economic structure and to new ways of living inaugurated by the advance in