A Brief Communication on Children's Reactions to the Assassination of the President

These notes are based on excerpts from therapeutic sessions as reported in supervision, and cover one boy aged four and a half, twin boys aged five and a half, and another boy aged six and a half.1 On the basis of age one would expect at least three of these boys to be in the oedipal phase and one in early latency, but their psychosexual development shows them to be at various substages in the phallic-oedipal phase.

The double tragedy of the killing of President Kennedy, the "father-of-his country," and of his assassin was a concrete and dramatic demonstration of the law of talion which characterizes the superego of this development stage. We should expect, therefore, that the anxiety and guilt of these boys would be heavily reinforced by this event. On the other hand, the fact that they became aware of the event, with one exception, in their home and in the presence of mother (and father), would tend to have an attenuating effect on their anxiety. The parents of the exception, the four-and-a-half-year-old, were out of town attending a wedding. A further fact to keep in mind is that the first therapeutic sessions with these children were held after a long week end of viewing, in the midst of the family, the full pageantry of the event, with ample time in which to assimilate, elaborate, and repress what they had seen and heard. Notwithstanding all this, the marked shift in defenses seen in the therapeutic sessions leaves no doubt as to the anxiety-arousing effect of the event.