Case V. ‘Robert’ aet 9 Years

Here is a very simple case. We will call the boy Robert. He belongs to a family which is very much a ‘going concern’. At the time of the consultation, fifteen years ago, Robert was 9; he had a sister of 7 and a sister of 5. There is a very definite sense of responsibility in the parents, and they are both able to tolerate bad times if there is the hope of a satisfactory outcome.

I interviewed the father first; he seemed to want this so I acquiesced. Usually I see the child first. He said to me: ‘The trouble is this boy is too much like me.’ The father said he himself was a late developer. Robert always hated school. He refused to work or to reach out for things. At home, for instance, with his Meccano set he would not read the book of instructions although he very much wanted to be able to make something described in the book. Instead of working from the book he would ask his father, and then get angry. In fact he hated reading. Or he would not learn the names of things. He had been expected to do well at school but he was becoming a disappointment. He was at the local primary school with fifty in a class. The parents were perturbed because the school reported that Robert had ‘got stuck at the stage of being a baby’.

The paternal grandfather was constantly testing the boy's scholastic achievements and the father himself did this occasionally, being horrified to find that the boy could not subtract 9 (his age) from 1953 (the year). His mother had said she would like to have a routine Intelligence Test because ‘either he must be allowed to be a dunce or we must chase him’. The Educational Psychologist's test report was: ‘Taking an average of tests of wide range given in two interviews, the I.Q. works out at about 130.’

The father told me about the boy's early history. The child was born when the father was away in the army. He was breast-fed, but at the time the mother was at the mercy of everyone. An airraid at the time of the birth caused delay in the arrival of the do