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The greatest revolutionary impact in the field of child training and education since the days of Pestalozzi and Montessori is still going on, and it has been primarily fired by the effect of Freud's work. The whole field, being new, is riven and agitated by conflicting emphasis and pro and con practices. Parents, teachers, educators, and psychiatrists are struggling manfully to keep abreast of each changing wave. The past decade saw the period of “permissiveness and blame the mother”. Guilt-ridden parents and bewildered therapists have flocked to clinics and offices; public officials and educators dealing with “delinquents” have raised a storm of clamor and heat in the public press crying to heaven for a quick and easy solution.
Within the last few years the newer theoretical advances of ego and super-ego psychology (Hartmann, Loewenstein, Kris, Jacobson, Anna Freud, etc.) are beginning to bring some order out of this chaos. Practices, therapy, and counseling have begun to feel the impact of the implications for child training and education of this new evaluation. In her Freud Memorial Lecture of 1954, Anna Freud baldly stated, “To put the blame for infantile neurosis on the mother's shortcomings in the oral phase is no more than a facile and misleading generalization.” She went further and noted that “No conclusions can be drawn concerning prevention of neurosis. On the author's part, there is no belief that even the most revolutionary changes in infant care can do away with the tendency to ambivalence or with the division of the human personality into an id and an ego with conflicting aims.” The simple-simon notion that the millenium in education had opened with the indiscriminate adoption or application of Freudian psychology to child training and education is beginning to break up with a resounding whimper.
Dr. Pearson is a child analyst with long experience as consultant to educational institutions. He has always been well aware of the difficulties and pitfalls i