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“Children Who Cheat at Games” was the first paper that I wrote long ago in the late 1960s. I summoned all my courage and submitted it to the Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry hoping I would at least get some editorial feedback to improve my professional writing. To my surprise I soon received a personal letter from Dr. Rexford, the editor, that was primarily positive. She actually liked my paper! However, in the final paragraph she told me that my ideas were controversial and the paper would be published only if I would allow Dr. Helen Beiser to add a discussion (read rebuttal). Dr. Beiser—a psychoanalyst—disagreed with my child-psychiatrist approach to cheating, feeling that a much firmer and limit-setting approach was necessary. To my knowledge this paper was the only one ever published with a “discussion” in the Academy journal before or since.
Perhaps the subject stirs a lot of feelings in people. There must be some reason why so little has been written about a behavior that is so common. When I presented the paper to our grand rounds at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, my adult psychologist friend Bob Brown summed it up as follows: “I suppose if you sit in a small room and get shellacked by small children all day you have to do something to get it off your chest.”
Actually I think the dynamics are more complex. I believe I might have understood both the children and the therapeutic reaction to their cheating more fully in the '60s if I had been more familiar with Kernberg and Kohut. In the later editions of The Fragile Alliance I wrote about “atypical alliances” in the treatment of youngsters whose development did not lead to emotional competence. My main point was that these youngsters could not form a traditional therapeutic alliance, insisting instead on using the therapist as a self-object. This role is somewhat uncharted territory for many therapists and can lead to considerable anxiety. Some readers may remember