Observations on the Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Children in a Therapeutic Center1

This paper is based on the writer's experience with therapeutic education in the Nursery of Council Child Development Center, an agency set up for the treatment of disturbed preschool children and their families.2 These children are brought for treatment by their parents for a variety of problems such as excessive anxiety, fears, impulsivity, aggression or shyness with adults and/or children, difficulties in eating, sleeping, and toilet training. Diagnostically, the children could be described as suffering more from disturbance in developmental balance than from neurotic conflict, though an unsatisfying mother-child relationship, in a primary or secondary sense, is typical for both groups.

The chronic shortage of trained psychotherapists for children in prelatency provided the impetus for assaying the therapeutic potentialities of a regular nursery program. The normal dependency of the prelatency child on the mother, pathologically exaggerated or distorted in our children, was utilized for therapeutic re-education. Once their dependent needs were transferred to the teacher, a corrective identification with her was used as the starting point and foundation for healthier relationships with other adults, with children, singly and in groups, and for sublimation. In all these areas the children showed marked pathology. The therapeutic-educational techniques employed— guided regression, persistent stimulation, dosing and structuring of new experiences —were already discussed in a previous publication in their application to the therapeutic education of a child with severe ego disturbance (Alpert and Krown, 1953). In