On Adult Empathy with Children

In discussing the adult's capacity to empathize with children I shall consider primarily preschool children and children in their early latency. For although empathizing with preadolescents and adolescents may present equal difficulties, they are difficulties of a different order and often occur among different people. Among those who can empathize with young children may be many who cannot deal with adolescents, and vice versa.

I remember an incident with August Aichhorn who was famous for his capacity to establish contact with preadolescents and adolescents in the very first moment. One day a little five-year-old was brought to his office; he tried to talk to her, but very soon, with a look of complete helplessness, he turned appealingly to his students and said, "Isn't there anybody who could take over? I don't know what to do with something like that."1

We may generalize that the adult's capacity to empathize with children is rarer than the capacity to empathize with other adults.

Among the obvious obstacles to adult empathy with children is the great difference in the ego structure of the two generations. On the one hand is the consolidated ego of the adult, which, whether strong or weak, functions consistently within the pattern of its neurotic and normal limitations. The adult can in a way even rely on the unreliability of his ego. And on the other hand is the growing ego of the child, constantly shifting, progressing and regressing again, constantly transformed in the struggle against his impulses (Bornstein, 1945), (1949).

The child's ego confronts us with no reliable pattern and thereby repeatedly bewilders us. The adult's achievement of the reality principle, which the child is yet unable to grasp, produces the vast differences between him and the adult in emotional reactions, logic, behavior, fantasy, etc.

In the adult's life with the child, the child's different concepts make themselves felt throughout the day. Children need at least twice as much