Genesis of Hostility in Children*

After 14 years of trying to understand 7,000 to 8,000 of New York City's problem children, or children with-a-problem, who come to the children's ward of the psychiatric division of Bellevue Hospital, I cannot accept Freud's11 earliest concept that aggression is hostile and is a primordial reaction to frustration, nor his later12 concept that aggression is an instinctual drive equated with the death instinct. Many (Sullivan,19 Ferenzi,8, French,9 Horney,15 Hendrick,14 Schilder18) have questioned and refuted this theory. However, Anna Freud10 and Melanie Klein16 have used this concept in their work with children. They view the child as instinctively destructive and aggressively hostile against the mother, her insides, her unborn children, her subsequently born children and all other related reality. They also see children as turning these primary impulses against themselves with an expanding sense of guilt and anxiety, and therefore postulate a primary educational need for inhibition, restriction, discipline, and sublimation against the inborn infantile hostility and death wishes.