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In an earlier article, 'War Trauma in Children, Real or Imaginary' (1951), the author set out her view that reactions of terror in children are less a response to war circumstances than to uncontrolled adult behaviour. In a child of three who fully understood the threat of bombing in a realistic sense, it nevertheless served as a condensed representation of his own and his mother's unrestrained impulses. Disturbed children showed both an understanding and a misconception of the war experiences, preconditioned by earlier infantile conflicts in which faulty object relationships and distorted superego functioning, or both, played a part.
A young girl's publication in a London paper of her wartime memories of taking shelter with her parents now affords an opportunity to study the mechanisms by which she identified in her ego-ideal with the self-mastery of the adults. Analysis of the denials, omissions, and displacements evident in her idealized story reveals an underlying clear perception of the dangerous events and of the hidden though benign motivation of the parents' simulated assurance.
The two sets of material are presented as indicative of differentiating features in the formation of superego and ego-ideal. In the more recent material, 'the adult evinces a power which does not bear upon invidious comparisons or upon threats, but upon the child's desire for empathy. … In so far as the child can emulate the adult in this, its narcissism obtains conflict-free gratification. … Another differentiating feature between these two psychic systems is that whereas in superego systems the element of imposed veto is never missing, direct gratification of the individual's own narcissism always is'.