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“The view that most of our children in their development pass through a neurotic phase bears in it the nucleus of hygienic responsibility.”
Mental hygiene seeks to maintain and promote mental health; psychoanalytically emphasis is laid upon educational insight into the possibilties and limitations of mental plasticity. Analysis is aware “that the child in a short period of time must appropriate to himself the results of a cultural development that extends over tens of thousands of years” (1). It demands of the educator that he aid the child from the beginning of his life to as great a consistency as possible in the sense of a genuine character; that is, one formed according to the particular nature of each child as well as to the requirements of the world about him.
Analysis emphasizes the necessity of educational understanding of the particular nature of each child and desires—its modesty in this demand is only apparent—to avoid as much as possible mistakes in training: “Education must … seek its way between the Scylla of noninterference and the Charybdis of denial. If the task is not altogether impossible, an optimum must be found for education by which it can accomplish the most and do the least injury. It will have to be determined how much shall be forbidden, at what times and by what means. Then it must still be taken into consideration that the objects to be influenced by training differ greatly in constitutional disposition, so that the same procedure of the educator cannot be equally valid for all children” (1).
The psychoanalytic-hygienic ideal is, on the one hand, the analyzed educator; on the other, the growing personality guarded from spoiling by neglect (Triebverwahrlosung) as well as from dwarfing of his instincts (Triebver-kümmerung): “If one considers … the difficult