No More Learning

Therefore, although expressed towards the partner, such anger acts to promote, and not to disrupt, the bond.
Angry coercive behaviour, acting in the service of an affectional bond, is not uncommon. It is seen when a mother, whose child has run foolishly across the road, berates and punishes him with an anger born of fear. It is seen whenever a sexual partner berates the other for being or seeming to be disloyal. It is seen, again, in some families when a member becomes angry whenever his approaches to another member are met by an unresponsive silence ( Heard 1973). It occurs also in nonhuman primates. For example, when he sights a predator a dominant male baboon may behave aggressively towards any wandering members of his own group who may be at risk. Frightened thereby, their attachment behaviour is aroused and they quickly come closer to him, so obtaining the protection inherent in proximity ( Hall & DeVore 1965).
Dysfunctional Anger
Angry behaviour that has coercion as its function and is compatible with a close tie has tended to be neglected by clinicians. Very probably this is because it can so readily become dysfunctional and it is the dysfunctional forms that are usually met with clinically.
Dysfunctional anger occurs whenever a person, child or adult, becomes so intensely and/or persistently angry with his partner that the bond between them is weakened, instead of strength-
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ened, and the partner is alienated. Anger with a partner becomes dysfunctional also whenever aggressive thoughts or acts cross the narrow boundary between being deterrent and being revengeful. It is at this point, too, that feeling ceases to be the 'hot displeasure' of anger and may become, instead, the 'malice' of hatred. 1
Clinical experience suggests that the situations of separation and loss with which this work is concerned are especially liable to result in anger with an attachment figure that crosses the threshold of intensity and becomes dysfunctional. Separations, especially when prolonged or repeated, have a double effect. On the one hand, anger is aroused; on the other, love is attenuated. Thus not only may angry discontented behaviour alienate the attachment figure but, within the attached, a shift can occur in the balance of feeling. Instead of a strongly rooted affection laced occasionally with 'hot displeasure', such as develops in a child brought up by affectionate parents, there grows a deep-running resentment, held in check only partially by an anxious uncertain affection.
The most violently angry and dysfunctional responses of all, it seems probable, are elicited in children and adolescents who not only experience repeated separations but are constantly subjected to the threat of being abandoned. In Chapter 15 descriptions are given of the intense distress produced in young children by such threats, especially when the threats are given a cloak of verisimilitude. During the treatment of Mrs Q it seemed that nothing had caused her greater pain and distress than her mother's realistic threats either to abandon the family or to commit suicide. From experiencing such intense pain it is only a short step to feeling furiously angry with the person who inflicts it. It was in this light that the intensity of anger that Mrs Q felt at times towards her mother seemed most readily understood.
A similar conclusion was reached some years ago by Stott ( 1950), a British psychologist who lived for four years in an approved school studying the personalities and home backgrounds of 102 youths aged fifteen to eighteen years who had been sent there because of repeated offences. The information he gathered was derived from long interviews with the boys themselves and with their parents, and also from many informal contacts he had with the boys during their stay in the school. The boys, he found, were deeply insecure and their delinquencies
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1 Definitions given in the Oxford English Dictionary.
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in many cases seemed to have been acts of bravado. Adverse parental attitudes and disrupted relationships were found to have been common, as is usual in such studies, and were thought to account for much of the boys' sense of insecurity. Nevertheless, what impressed Stott more than anything else was evidence that in many cases mother, and in a few cases father, had used threats to desert as a means of discipline and how intensely anxious and angry these threats had made the boys. Although Stott gives particulars of some typical cases, he expresses himself reluctant to give numbers, partly because it was only late in the inquiry that he realized how immensely important such threats probably are and partly because there were a number of cases in which he felt fairly confident that threats had played an important role despite the fact that their use in these cases had been strenuously denied by both boy and parents.
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Stott draws attention to the combination of intense anxiety and intense conflict inevitably aroused by threats of this kind. For, while on the one hand a child is made furiously angry by a parent's threat to desert, on the other he dare not express that anger in case it makes the parent actually do so. This is a main reason, Stott suggests, why in these cases anger at a parent usually becomes repressed and is then directed at other targets. It is a reason also why a child or adolescent who is terrified of being deserted tends instead to complain of being afraid of something else, perhaps of the dark or of thunder or of an accident. In the next two chapters a shift of exactly this kind as regards the situation allegedly feared is held to explain the symptomatology of a large proportion of patients at present diagnosed as phobic.
It seems not unlikely that a number of individuals who become literally murderous towards a parent are to be understood as having become so in reaction to threats of desertion that have been repeated relentlessly over many years. For example, in an early paper that calls attention to the traumatic effects of separation, Kestenberg ( 1943) describes a girl of thirteen who had been deserted by her parents and who had been cared for by a succession of other people. She trusted no one and responded to any disappointment by some vengeful action. During the course of treatment this girl pictured herself as grown up and so able to revenge herself on her mother by killing her. Many analysts who have treated patients with this type of background could give similar examples.
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In another paper that also relates anger to separation, Burnham ( 1965) makes brief reference to two patients who actually engaged in matricide. One, an adolescent who murdered his mother, exclaimed afterwards 'I couldn't stand to have her leave me'. Another, a youth who placed a bomb in his mother's luggage as she boarded an airliner, explained 'I decided that she would never leave me again'. The hypothesis proposed makes these statements less paradoxical than they appear.
These admittedly are no more than clinical anecdotes, and no adequate history of previous family relationships is given for any case. Furthermore, so far as is known, no researcher since Stott has made a systematic study to test a possible causal link between violent anger directed towards an attachment figure and a history of being subjected by that figure to repeated threats of being abandoned. At present, therefore, the suggested link is hardly more than a conjecture; but as a lead for research it seems promising.
A Test for Appraising Responses to Separation
Psychoanalysts and others who adopt an object-relations approach have for many years regarded the balance of a persons's disposition to love, to become angry with, and to hate his attachment figure as a principal criterion in making a clinical assessment. In recent years Hansburg ( 1972), by taking as his starting-point certain measures of how a person responds to separation, has begun to put this onto a more systematic footing.
The clinical test Hansburg is developing comprises a dozen pictures, all but three of which depict a situation in which either a child is leaving his parents or a parent is leaving his child. Some of the situations, such as a child leaving to go to school or mother leaving her child at bedtime, are of a kind that any child of over six would be expected to take in his stride. Others are of a more disturbing character. They include a picture in which the child's mother is being taken by ambulance to hospital, and another in which the child is going off to live
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permanently with his grandmother. Under each picture is written a title making explicit what the picture represents.
In its present form the test is suitable for children and young adolescents in the age-range ten to fifteen years. Hansburg reports that, despite the upsetting nature of some of the scenes, administering the test has not created difficulties. Should the test prove as useful as it promises to be, versions suitable for
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younger children and also for older adolescents and adults could readily be designed.
In presenting each picture the clinician asks the child being tested, first, 'Did this ever happen to you? ' and then, if the answer is no, 'Can you imagine how it would feel if it did happen? ' The child is then presented with a series of seventeen statements of how a child might be expected to feel in such a situation, and is invited to tick as many of them as he thinks would fit. Although for each picture the seventeen statements are phrased a little differently, the range of feelings described is similar. The following selection of eight statements illustrates part of the range of feeling covered:
'feeling alone and miserable' 'feeling sorry for his parents' 'feeling that he doesn't care what happens' 'feeling he will do his best to get along' 'feeling angry at somebody' 'feeling that, if he had been a good child, it would not have happened' 'feeling that his house will now be a scary place to live in' 'feeling that it is not really happening, it's only a dream'.
Preliminary findings show, among other things, that children growing up in stable families give two or three times as many responses that express distress and concern at what is happening as responses that express anger and blame. By contrast, disturbed children who have experienced long and/or repeated separations, many of whom come from rejecting families, give at least as many angry and fault-finding responses as they do responses expressing distress and concern. This very marked difference in the balance of responses is especially evident in respect of pictures that represent a major disruption of a child's bond with his parents; in respect of pictures that represent only a routine and transient separation the difference in balance is less evident.
Another interesting difference of balance, also seen especially in response to pictures representing a major disruption, is in the proportion of responses that indicate that the child will do his best to get along on his own or that he will be happier as a result of the event. While these form only a small minority of the responses given by children from stable homes, they are much in evidence in the responses of children who have experienced long and repeated separations or who come from
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unhappy homes. There is reason to believe that most such responses are expressions of a forced and premature attempt at autonomy that will prove brittle, a condition described by Winnicott ( 1955a) as a 'false self'. Some characteristics of persons who, by contrast, show a stable autonomy, and the conditions in which such autonomy develops, are the subject of Chapter 21.
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Anger, ambivalence, and anxiety
In the schema proposed, a period of separation, and also threats of separation and other forms of rejection, are seen as arousing, in a child or adult, both anxious and angry behaviour. Each is directed towards the attachment figure: anxious attachment is to retain maximum accessibility to the attachment figure; anger is both a reproach at what has happened and a deterrent against its happening again. Thus, love, anxiety, and anger, and sometimes hatred, come to be aroused by one and the same person. As a result painful conflicts are inevitable.
That a single type of experience should arouse both anxiety and anger need cause no surprise. At the end of Chapter 8 it is pointed out that students of animal behaviour have observed that in certain situations either form of behaviour may be aroused and that whether an animal responds with attack or withdrawal, or with a combination of both, depends on a variety of factors that have the effect of tipping the balance either one way or the other. Between anxious attachment and angry attachment an analogous type of balance appears to obtain. A child who at one moment is furiously angry with a parent may at the next be seeking reassurance and comfort from that same parent. A similar sequence may be seen in lovers' quarrels. It is not by chance that the words 'anxiety' and 'anger' stem from the same root ( Lewis 1967). 1
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1 It is of interest that in one of the reports of an infant chimpanzee brought up by humans
this same mixture of anger and anxiety is described as occurring when separation threatens ( Kellogg & Kellogg 1933). The authors, who adopted a female chimpanzee, Gua, at the age of seven months, discuss the nature of what are commonly described as 'temper tantrums', and the situations that elicit them. 'By far the most frequent occasion for the appearance of a tantrum', they report, 'was when she was left alone or when . . . it was momentarily impossible for her to get into the protecting arms of one of the experimenters. . . . In the more violent type of tantrum, such as that which resulted when we
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Psychoanalysts have for long been especially interested in the interrelationships of love, fear, and hate, since in clinical work it is common to find patients whose emotional problems seem to spring from a tendency to respond towards their attachment figure with a turbulent combination of all three: intense possessiveness, intense anxiety, and intense anger. Not infrequently vicious circles develop. An incident of separation or rejection arouses a person's hostility and leads to hostile thoughts and acts; while hostile thoughts and acts directed towards his attachment figure greatly increase his fear of being further rejected or even of losing his loved figure altogether.
To account for the intimate connections found between attachment, anxiety, and anger, a number of hypotheses have been advanced. Some are based on an assumption that the aggressive component is reactive to frustration of some kind; others hold that aggressive impulses well up within and find expression almost irrespective of what an individual's experience may be. Among leading analysts who have regarded ambivalence to a loved figure as a key issue in psychopathology and have proposed solutions, Fairbairn ( 1952) advocates a frustration-aggression type of hypothesis; while Melanie Klein ( 1932; 1948b) holds that all aggressive feeling and behaviour is an expression of a death instinct that wells up within and must be directed outwards.
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Because of the great influence that Melanie Klein has had on many psychoanalysts and child psychotherapists we consider her views first.
The clinical phenomenon to which Klein drew especial attention during the 1920s and 1930s is that some children who are attached to mother with unusual intensity are, paradoxically, possessed of strong unconscious hostility also directed towards her. In their play they may express much violence towards a mother figure and then become concerned and anxious lest they have destroyed or alienated mother herself. Often after an outburst a child runs from the analytic room, not only for fear
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ran away faster than Gua could follow, she seemed to become "blind with fear" and would utter a series of shrill vibrant screams. . . . ' She would then run almost at random and occasionally bump headlong into bushes or other obstacles. Ultimately she would fall to the ground, and grovel in the sand. In their discussion, the Kelloggs are in doubt whether to regard the tantrum as expressing rage or fear. Their account suggests that it contains elements of both.
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of consequences from the analyst, but also, it is suggested, to assure himself that mother is still alive and loving. Observations of this kind are now amply confirmed; and much other evidence demonstrates without doubt that the presence of hostile impulses, whether conscious or unconscious, directed towards a loved figure can greatly increase anxiety. (Witness Mrs Q's acute anxiety for her son's safety arising from her own impulses to throw the child out of the window, recounted in Chapter 15. ) Thus the value of many of Klein's observations remains intact whether or not we accept her ideas in regard to the origin of anger and aggression.
It must, however, be remembered that just as hostility directed towards a loved figure can increase anxiety, so can being anxious, especially that an attachment figure may be inaccessible or unresponsive when wanted, increase hostility. It is of both great theoretical and great practical importance to determine how these vicious circles begin. Does increased anxiety precede increased hostility, is it the other way round, or do they spring from a common source? When looking backwards from data provided by a patient in analysis it is notoriously difficult to unravel the sequence, as Ernest Jones noted many years ago ( Jones 1929); and this difficulty holds no less during the treatment of young children than it does for older patients. Neglect of this methodological difficulty and insufficient attention to family relationships have, it is held, led Klein to one-sided conclusions.
Logically it is clearly possible for intense anxiety to precede intense hostility in some cases, for the sequence to be reversed in others, and for them to spring from a single source and so be coincidental in yet a third group. Such possibilities, however, are not allowed for by Klein's formulation. Instead, her basic tenet is that increased anxiety is always both preceded by and caused by increased hostility; that anxiety may sometimes be independent of, sometimes itself provoke, and often be aroused by the same situation as, increased hostility is not conceded.
Fairbairn addresses himself to the same clinical problem as Klein but proposes a very different solution. In the absence of frustration, he holds, an infant would not direct
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aggression against his loved object. What leads him to do so is 'deprivation and frustration in his libidinal relationships--and more particularly . . . the trauma of separation from his mother' ( Fairbairn 1952).
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The position consistently adopted by the present writer (e. g. Bowlby 1944; 1951; 1958a), and, as will already be apparent, adopted also in this work, is close to Fairbairn's. 1 Anger and hostility directed towards an attachment figure, whether by a child or an adult, can be understood best, it is held, as being in response to frustration. Frustration, it is true, can affect motivational systems of any kind. But there is reason to believe that the motivational systems with which this work is concerned, namely those mediating attachment behaviour, are those affected in a very large proportion of the most severe and persisting cases of frustration, especially when the agent of frustration is, wittingly or unwittingly, the attachment figure himself/herself.
The reason that anxiety about and hostility towards an attachment figure are so habitually found together, it is therefore concluded, is because both types of response are aroused by the same class of situation; and, to a lesser degree, because, once intensely aroused, each response tends to aggravate the other. As a result, following experiences of repeated separation or threats of separation, it is common for a person to develop intensely anxious and possessive attachment behaviour simultaneously with bitter anger directed against the attachment figure,. and often to combine both with much anxious concern about the safety of that figure. 2
Because of the tendency for anger and hostility directed towards a loved person to be repressed and/or redirected elsewhere (displaced), and also for anger to be attributed to others instead of to the self (projected), and for other reasons too, the pattern and balance of responses directed towards an attachment figure can become greatly distorted and tangled. Furthermore, because models of attachment figures and expectations about their behaviour are built up during the years of childhood and tend thenceforward to remain unchanged, the behaviour of a person today may be explicable in terms, not of his present situation, but of his experiences many years earlier.
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1 A principal point of difference is that in much of his work Fairbairn tends to identify
attachment with feeding and orality and so to attribute proportionally greater significance
to a child's first year or two than is attributed by the present writer.
2 Frustrations of another kind that can engender much anger towards a parent occur when a
parent demands that his (or her) child act as a caretaker to him (or her), thus, as noted above (p. 244 ), inverting the usual parent and child roles.
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It is, indeed, because of these complexities that the nature and origin of our feeling and behaviour are often so obscure, not only to others but to ourselves as well. These are all matters to be considered further in the third volume.
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Chapter 18
Anxious Attachment and the 'Phobias' of Childhood
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told any one how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
RUDYARD KIPLING, Something of Myself
Phobia, pseudophobia, and anxiety state
It is argued earlier (Chapter 14) that an individual's susceptibility to respond with fear whenever he meets a potentially alarming situation is determined in very large part by the type of forecast he makes of the probable availability of attachment figures, and that these forecasts derive from the structure of the working models of attachment figures and of self with which he is operating. In the same chapter it is argued, further, that these models are probably built up throughout the years of childhood and adolescence and that they tend thereafter to remain comparatively stable; and, finally, that the particular forms that a person's working models take are a fair reflection of the types of experience he has had in his relationships with attachment figures during those years, and may perhaps be having still. Evidence regarding the nature of the experiences that lead to increased susceptibility to fear is considered in Chapters 15 and 16.
In this chapter and the next the potential usefulness of the theory is illustrated by applying it to certain clinical syndromes in which overt anxiety and fear are prominent. The conditions selected are those commonly grouped under the label 'phobia', a label which, as currently used by psychiatrists and psychologists (e. g. Andrews 1966; Marks 1969), includes a broad range of conditions in which anxiety and fear are the main symptoms. Principal instances to be examined are 'school phobia' and 'agoraphobia'.
Although when the condition is of recent onset some patients
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so labelled respond to fairly simple therapy (e. g. Friedman 1950; Kennedy 1965), others pose a much greater problem. A majority of those whose condition has been present for a long time, it is now agreed, suffer also from a wide variety of other emotional troubles. Most are timid individuals prone not only to fear situations of many kinds but to become depressed, and apt to develop various psychosomatic symptoms as well. In all such cases the feature to which the term phobia is applied, for example fear of school (school phobia) and of crowded places (agoraphobia), is found to be only a small, and sometimes even negligible, part of a deep-seated disturbance of personality that has been present for many years.
There is, however, a small minority of long-standing cases of phobia that appear to be very different. The individuals concerned, to whom Marks ( 1969) has drawn attention, are intensely afraid of some particular animal but, in all other respects, are stable personalities not given to psychological disturbance. Marks presents evidence that, in regard to personality functioning and psychophysiological responses, these individuals not only resemble people
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who are psychiatrically healthy but differ markedly from those diagnosed agoraphobic. They differ from agoraphobics also in the age when difficulty begins. Whereas agoraphobic symptoms usually appear after the age of ten years, a specific and limited animal phobia has usually been present since before the age of seven years. The specific phobia appears to be due to the persistence into later life of the tendency to fear animals that is found commonly during the early years of childhood but usually diminishes to moderate or negligible proportions before or during adolescence.
Discussion here concentrates on the majority group, namely people who suffer from deep- seated disturbances of personality. The minority group, comprising people who suffer from specific animal phobias, probably present a different type of problem and are touched on only briefly.
In what follows the term phobia is used only because so much of the descriptive material with which we are concerned is to be found in the literature under that head. It is placed in quotation marks in the chapter title in order to indicate a belief that, when applied to patients in the majority group, it is being misapplied.
Others also have held that many of the cases commonly labelled phobic are mislabelled. Brun ( 1946) distinguishes a group that he terms 'pseudophobic', and includes in it all cases of agoraphobia. Snaith ( 1968) similarly argues that agoraphobia
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is best regarded as a pseudophobia (although he uses the term in a way different from Brun). In the present work it is argued that not only is agoraphobia best regarded as a pseudophobia but so also is school phobia. By contrast, intense fear of a specific animal or of some other discrete situation in a person of otherwise healthy personality can sometimes be regarded as a case of true phobia.
The distinction between the two conditions is readily defined in terms of the present theory. In the case of a phobic person, what is most feared is the presence of some situation that other people find much less frightening but that he either takes great pains to avoid or else urgently withdraws from. In the case of a pseudophobic person, what is most feared is the absence or loss of an attachment figure, or some other secure base, towards which he would normally retreat. Whereas in the case of phobia the clinician identifies the feared situation correctly, in the case of pseudophobia the true nature of the feared situation often goes unrecognized and the case is misdiagnosed as one of phobia.
Although the label pseudophobia helps to draw attention both to the problem itself and to the tangled misconceptions about underlying psychopathology that abound in the literature, it is hardly suitable for regular use. A far better way to deal with the pseudophobias is to classify them simply as anxiety states and thereby to combine them with the many cases in which anxiety is said to be 'free-floating'. For cases of pseudophobia and anxiety state not only have in common the same age-range of onset but 'overlap considerably in their clinical features' ( Marks 1969). Indeed, once the role that anxious attachment plays in these conditions is firmly grasped, it becomes clear that patients said to be suffering from free-floating anxiety, no less than those labelled here as pseudophobic, are in an acute or chronic state of anxiety about the availability of their attachment figure(s). ?
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In support of our thesis we devote most of this chapter to an examination of school phobia, about which there is a large and revealing literature; subsequently we consider afresh two cases of childhood phobia that have long been classics in the literature of psychoanalysis and of learning theory respectively. Special attention is given to the patterns of interaction that appear to have characterized the children's families. In the chapter following we examine agoraphobia in the light of our discussion of school phobia.
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'School phobia' or school refusal
During the past fifteen years there has grown up an extensive literature on a condition known usually as school phobia ( Johnson et al. 1941) or, and better, school refusal ( Warren 1948). These terms apply when children not only refuse to attend school but express much anxiety when pressed to go. Their non-attendance is well known to their parents, and a majority of the children remain at home during school hours. Not infrequently the condition is accompanied by, or masked by, psychosomatic symptoms of one kind or another -- for example, anorexia, nausea, abdominal pain, feeling faint. Fears of many kinds are expressed -- of animals, of the dark, of being bullied, of mother coming to harm, of being deserted. Occasionally a child seems to panic. Tearfulness and general misery are common. As a rule, the children are well behaved, anxious, and inhibited. Most come from intact families, have not experienced long or frequent separations from home, and have parents who express great concern about their child and his refusal to attend school. Relations between child and parents are close, sometimes to the point of suffocation.
In all these respects the condition differs from truancy. Truants from school do not express anxiety about attending, do not go home during school hours, and usually pretend to their parents that they are attending. Often they steal or are otherwise delinquent. Commonly they come from unstable or broken homes, and have experienced long and/or frequent separations or changes of mother figure. Relations between a truant and his parents are likely to be quarrelsome or distant.
The validity of the distinction between school phobia and truancy is well attested, notably by the study of Hersov ( 1960a), who compares a series of fifty cases of school refusal with a matched series of fifty truants and with another contrast group, also drawn from a clinic population. Although several other studies are based on a series of cases seen in clinical practice, in none of them are results treated statistically.
Instead, observations are presented descriptively and interwoven with a greater or less measure of theoretical interpretation. Among such studies, each based on a series of between twenty and thirty cases, are those by Talbot ( 1957), Coolidge and his colleagues ( 1957; 1962), Eisenberg ( 1958), and Davidson ( 1961). For her two papers Sperling ( 1961; 1967) draws on experiences with fifty-eight children, some of whom had long analytic treatment.
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Kennedy ( 1965) reports on fifty cases of recent and acute onset dealt with by simple brisk methods. Weiss reports the treatment and follow-up some years later of fourteen children and adolescents treated as inpatients ( Weiss & Cain 1964; Weiss & Burke 1970). A number of empirically based articles on the family background of school refusers are published in the Smith College Studies in Social Work and reviewed by Malmquist ( 1965). A book by Clyne (
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1966), based on fifty-five cases seen in general practice, gives a vivid description of the many and varied clinical pictures encountered. Among other publications are early papers by Broadwin ( 1932) and E. Klein ( 1945), a book by Kahn & Nursten ( 1968), reviews by Frick ( 1964), Andrews ( 1966), and Berecz ( 1968), and several papers reporting on small numbers of cases that have been treated by one or another method, including some by behaviour therapy (e. g. Lazarus 1960; Montenegro 1968).
At an empirical level there is substantial agreement among these many authors, both in regard to the personalities, behaviour, and symptoms presented by the children and in regard to the personalities, behaviour, and symptoms presented by the parents. Furthermore, there is widespread agreement that what a child fears is not what will happen at school, but leaving home. With the exception of Frick ( 1964), who expresses doubt, almost all students of the problem conclude that disagreeable features of school, for example a strict teacher or teasing or bullying from other children, are little more than rationalizations. In keeping with this view, Hersov ( 1960b) found that only a minority of his fifty school-refusing children made any complaint about teacher or schoolmates. Many of the children he studied stated that once in school they felt quite secure. Thus, unlike what occurs in genuine phobias, exposure to the alleged phobic situation does not exacerbate the sufferer's fear. Several other authors confirm this finding, and also that fear is often at its height either just before leaving home or on the journey to school. The subjects of a follow-up study by Weiss & Burke ( 1970), looking back on their problem, confirm that it arose from difficulties in family relations.
Because the situation feared is that of leaving home, the term school phobia is an obvious misnomer. 1 In order to
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1 In the early 1920s the term school phobia was applied by Burt, and applied appropriately,
to a very different condition, namely to children who were afraid of going to school because of having gone there for shelter during air-raids (referred to by Tyerman 1968).
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emphasize the family dynamic which she, like others, holds to be all-important, Johnson abandoned the term school phobia, which she herself had advocated in 1941, and replaced it with that of 'separation anxiety' ( Estes, Haylett & Johnson 1956). As a name for a clinical syndrome, however, separation anxiety is ill fitted. Of the terms at present in use 'school refusal' is probably the best, by virtue of its being at once the most descriptive and the least laden with theory.
In the course of these empirical studies a considerable body of theory has been elaborated. Three main influences are apparent.
One, that stems from Freud's classical paper on the analysis of a phobia in a five-year-old boy known as Little Hans ( Freud 1909), is couched in terms of the child's individual psychopathology and gives a central role to the process of projection. In that tradition concepts frequently drawn upon include those of dependency and overdependency, over- gratification and spoiling, linked as a rule to a theory of fixation at, or regression to, one or another level of psychological development. Sperling ( 1967), for example, points to the anal erotic (especially anal sadistic) stage of libidinal development, and Clyne ( 1966) to Winnicott's concept of an infantile transitional stage in the development of object relations.
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The second main influence on theory stems from a seminal paper by Johnson and her colleagues ( 1941). Basing their views on experience gained in the practice of child and family psychiatry, they lay especial emphasis on family interactions and the role that one or other parent is playing in instigating and maintaining the condition. They describe parents who, for emotional reasons, cling to their child and, in effect, stop him from going school.
The third main influence is learning theory which, like traditional psychoanalysis, is conceived in terms of individual psychopathology. Nevertheless, as Andrews ( 1966) points out, the practitioners of behaviour therapy are often far more alive to the importance of interpersonal relations and family dynamics than their theory would lead us to expect.
Four Patterns of Family Interaction
A reading of the clinical literature shows that, although workers may approach the problem of school refusal from very different theoretical standpoints, when they come to assess actual cases the features to which they draw attention tend to be much the
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same. It is therefore possible to treat the array of clinical findings as reasonably well authenticated and to proceed to consider how they can be understood in terms of the theory of anxious attachment outlined in earlier chapters. When viewed in that light a large majority of cases of school refusal can be understood as the products of one or more of four main patterns of family interaction:
Pattern A -- mother, or more rarely father, is a sufferer from chronic anxiety regarding attachment figures and retains the child at home to be a companion
Pattern B -- the child fears that something dreadful may happen to mother, or possibly father, while he is at school and so remains at home to prevent it happening
Pattern C -- the child fears that something dreadful may happen to himself if he is away from home and so remains at home to prevent that happening
Pattern D -- mother, or more rarely father, fears that something dreadful will happen to the child while he is at school and so keeps him at home.
Though in most cases one or another of these four interaction patterns is dominant, the patterns are not incompatible and mixed cases occur. Pattern A is the commonest and may be combined with any of the other three.
Family Interaction of Pattern A
A family pattern in which a mother or father suffers from anxiety over attachment figures and retains the child at home to be a companion is now widely recognized. In a majority of cases mother is the principal agent and for that reason, and to simplify exposition, it is mothers who are referred to in what follows. Yet it must not be forgotten that a father can also be a principal agent in the condition: Eisenberg ( 1958), Choi ( 1961), Clyne ( 1966), and Sperling ( 1967) are among those who describe illustrative cases.
A mother who retains her child at home to act as a companion for herself may do so deliberately and consciously or may be unaware of what she is doing and why.
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An example of the former is the mother of a ten-year-old boy who had been kept at home for more than a year when the family was referred to a clinic. Although initially mother claimed that she pressed her son to return to school, after the
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family had been in treatment for some months she admitted frankly that she did not want him to go. In a burst of candour she explained how for many years during her childhood she had been away in an institution and had had no one to love, how her son was the first person she had ever had to love in her life, and how she could not be expected to relinquish him now. The boy's father was aware of what was happening but preferred to stay inactive to avoid upsetting his wife. The boy also, it emerged, was well aware of the situation. 1
More often a mother is unaware, or only partly aware, of the pressures she is putting on her child and believes more or less sincerely that she is doing everything possible for his benefit. In some cases the train of events begins when the child contracts some minor ailment, and mother treats the condition as of much more consequence than it really is. The child is kept at home, ostensibly to convalesce, but is gradually presented with a picture of himself as being unfitted for the rough world of school and as being, therefore, in constant need of his mother's care. Unkind teachers, bullying boys, and chronic ill health are inculpated as the villains of the piece. This pattern and its many variants, in which a mother exploits some temporary upset or anxiety of her child, are described in almost every paper on the topic. Eisenberg ( 1958) gives vignettes of mothers who, on arrival at school with their child, exhibit intense reluctance to relinquish him and behave in such a way that he is made anxious about school and perhaps guilty at enjoying the company of anyone but mother. Weiss & Cain ( 1964) describe mothers who, while claiming to protect their children from the horrors of the world, not only burden them with their personal and marital worries but seek their undivided support. Clyne ( 1966) describes cases in which a mother develops psychosomatic symptoms herself after her child has returned to school. Others ( Estes, Haylett & Johnson 1956) have noted how, after one child has been released from his parent's grip, another child is sometimes fastened on and held.
Whenever a family pattern of this kind is present, the parent concerned is found to be intensely anxious about the availability of her own attachment figures and unconsciously to be inverting the normal parent-child relationship by requiring the child to be the parent figure and adopting the role of child herself. Thus the child is expected to care for the parent and the parent seeks
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1 I am grateful to my colleague, Dr Marion Mackenzie, for information about this family.
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to be cared for and comforted by the child. As a rule the inversion is camouflaged. Mother claims that the person who is in special need of care and protection, and who is receiving it, is the child; and a clinician inexperienced in family work may even come to believe that the trouble arises because the child is being 'spoiled' by having his 'every whim gratified'. In effect what is happening is very different and much sadder. Unknown to herself, mother (or father) is seeking belated satisfaction of her desire for the loving care she either never had as a child or perhaps lost, and, simultaneously, is preventing the child from taking part in play or
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school activities with his peers. So far from being 'over-indulged', such children are chronically frustrated and, because allegedly given everything, are not even free to expostulate. During treatment one nine-year-old boy illustrated how he felt by repeatedly winding the window cord around himself and explaining, 'See, I'm in a spider's web and can't get out' ( Talbot 1957). Another boy, aged eleven, drew a dog on a tight leash led by a lady and made clear he felt the dog was himself, furious at being tied to his mother ( Colm 1959). 1
To present the picture thus may seem one-sided and to be unfairly biased against parents. Yet, once the parents' own difficulties are examined and the origins of these difficulties traced to the very troubled childhoods that they too have experienced, not only does their behaviour as parents become intelligible but our sympathy is enlisted. Time and again it is found that the pathological behaviour of a parent is a reaction against, or a reflection or residue of, a deeply disturbed relationship that she has had, and is perhaps still having, with her own parents. Recognition of this quickly dispels any disposition to see the parent as a villain, even though the way she is treating her child may be patently pathogenic. Instead, she is seen as the unhappy product of an unhappy home and, as such, a person fully as much sinned against as sinning.
For an adequate understanding of the dynamics and historical origins of families in which a parent inverts the relationship with the child by requiring him to care for her we should need
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1 Sometimes the term 'symbiosis' is used to describe these suffocatingly close relationships
between mother and child. The term is not happily chosen, however, since in biology it is used to denote an adaptive partnership between two organisms in which each contributes to the other's survival; whereas the relationship with which we are concerned here is certainly not to the child's advantage and often is not to the parent's either.
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to have far more systematic data than are yet available regarding the personalities and childhood histories of the parents and grandparents concerned. On grandparents no data appear to be on record, except anecdotally. As regards parents, not only are systematic data on representative samples of the parents of school-refusing children scarce, but in so far as there are any they do not distinguish between parents in terms of the four patterns of family interaction considered here. Such systematic data as are available are presented therefore only after all four patterns have been considered (see p. 282 ).
Nevertheless it is not too difficult, in the light of the theory outlined, to discern the main features of the psychopathology of parents in families showing pattern A. Once again it must be remembered that, although reference continues to be made to mothers and maternal grandmothers, almost exactly the same dynamics can occur with a father and a paternal grandmother in the principal roles, and also with one or other grandfather.
Very commonly a mother who inverts the relationship with her child has had, and may still be having, a close but intensely anxious and ambivalent relationship with her own mother. In such cases a mother believes, often with good reason, that she was unwanted or at least less wanted than one of her siblings. As a result she has felt that she has always had to fight for such affection and recognition as she has got. Yet in only a few cases in which pattern A obtains has she been wholly rejected. Far more often the maternal grandmother's feeling for
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her daughter is ambivalent; and not infrequently the older woman seems to be making strong, insistent, and unjustified demands upon her daughter. Thus, while on the one hand mother has never had the spontaneous care and affection a child desires, and usually receives, on the other she has often been put under duress to provide care for her own dominating and demanding mother. Responding to these pressures, mother may meet her mother's demands but only at the price of feeling bitter with suppressed resentment against her.
It will perhaps be noticed that the intensely ambivalent relationship between mother and grandmother, of the kind sketched above, is likely itself to be an example of an inverted parent-child relationship. For in many cases maternal grandmother is demanding from her daughter just that same parentaltype care and affection that mother, in her turn, is demanding from her school-refusing child. That this is truly so in some instances is shown by the fact that, in every series studied, there
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are cases reported of mothers (or fathers) who, when children, had themselves been school refusers. For example, in a study by Goldberg ( 1953) of seventeen cases, about half the parents are reported to have had symptoms during their childhood identical with those shown by their children. In Davidson study ( 1961) of thirty cases, mother had herself been a school refuser in three, and three other mothers had had to remain at home to look after their own sick mother or younger siblings. Sperling ( 1967) reports the case of a father who was in analysis for phobic anxieties when his son began refusing to go to school. Although at first it appeared that John was clinging to his father, it soon became clear that father was demanding that the boy keep him company. During analysis father began to recognize that his own father had treated him in exactly the same way that he was now treating his son, using him thus, presumably, in an attempt to deal with his own anxieties. Whenever possible, then, it is desirable that in future studies the childhood histories and psychopathology of grandparents should be explored.
Not unexpectedly, the marital relations of the parents of school-refusing children are usually very disturbed. Forms of disturbance vary greatly and it would take us too far from our theme adequately to discuss their variety. One form frequently described is of a wife locked in mutually ambivalent relationships both with her own mother and with her school-refusing child, and having a rather passive husband who tends to opt out of his roles as husband and father. The way this relationship comes into being is not accidental. Few men other than passive ones are willing to marry and stay married to a woman who not only consistently gives preference to the never-ending demands of her own mother but may also try to dominate her husband in the same way that her mother dominates her. As it was put by Mrs Q, who had evidently had many admirers as a girl, only her husband among them had been willing to tolerate the extent to which she was daily entangled with her own very disturbed mother and to put up with the hysterical outbursts that, engendered in her relationship with her mother, she had been wont to vent on each of her boyfriends successively.
No doubt the mirror-image of this relationship, in which the husband is entangled with his mother and the wife is the passive one, also occurs. In either case sexual relations are likely to be sparse or absent.
Let us return to our main theme, the relationship of one or
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other parent, usually mother, to the school-refusing child. When that is examined it is found, time and again, that mother treats the child as though he were a replica of her own mother, the child's maternal grandmother. Not only does mother seek from her child the care and comfort she had sought, perhaps in vain, from maternal grandmother, but she may behave towards him as though he were the dominant figure. While at one moment she may be smouldering with resentment at what she feels to be her child's rebuff, as she does at those from her mother, at the next she may be treating him with the same anxious deference that she shows an elderly mother who rules the family by means of invalidism.
Examples of parents who are part of a family showing one or another variant of pattern A are to be found throughout the literature. Talbot ( 1957) calls attention to the mother who allows her child to dominate her in exactly the same way that she has always allowed her own mother to. In their account of the case of a boy of nine, Johnsonet al. ( 1941) describe a mother whose own mother had been in bed for years with a hysterical disorder and had demanded her daughter's constant attention. The boy's mother was hypochondriacal about him, on the one hand, insisting on endless medical examinations, and, on the other, under the guise of believing that he was in greater need of love from her than were her other children, she made extreme demands upon him. During a late phase of her treatment, however, this mother was able to describe how she had always longed for love herself, how she felt she was unable to give it, and how she even competed with her son for attention. In describing another variant of the pattern Davidson ( 1961) reports how a mother referred to her school-refusing daughter protectively as 'small and white like Grandma'. Weiss & Cain ( 1964) observe that a mother is inclined to treat her child as her confidant in regard to her difficult family relationships and that the child is apt to respond by adopting an inappropriately grown-up manner, both to his parents and to strangers.
Although in such cases it may appear at first sight that a mother's attitude to her school- refusing child is one of undiluted loving care, greater knowledge of the family may show another side. Clyne ( 1966), who writes from experience in general practice, notes that, whereas the mother's 'need for dependence' remains fairly constant, her child's response alternates: at times he is clinging, at others he is obviously striving towards independence. To the latter, mother can respond
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in various ways, by clinging to him more intensely, by inducing him to feel guilty, or by becoming angry with him or even rejecting him. When the facts become known it is sometimes found not only that a mother's relationship to her child is intensely ambivalent, but that she is treating him far more violently than anyone had imagined. Talbot ( 1957) describes how a mother may be observed to swing from one extreme to the other in her way of treating her child, kissing him one moment and beating him the next. In fact, as we shall see when we consider family patterns B and C, which often coexist with pattern A, many school-refusing children are being subjected to great duress. Before considering these other patterns it may be useful to list some of the processes that, singly or together, account for the hostile treatment that many a school-refusing child receives from an emotionally disturbed parent. A mother's hostile treatment of her school-refusing child can be understood as a product of one or more of at least three closely related processes:
a. redirecting (displacing) anger, engendered initially by own mother, against the child;
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b. misattributing to child the rejecting characteristics and/ or the demanding characteristics of own mother, and being angry with the child accordingly;
c. modelling angry behaviour towards child on the angry behaviour exhibited by own mother.
Let us consider each of these processes in turn.
a. Inevitably, a mother brought up and caught in a disturbed family network keenly resents
her own mother's meagre affection for her and also the intense demands that are made upon her. At the same time, however, she feels unable to express her anger openly, either because she is terrified of how her parent will respond or else because she fears making her ill. Either way, mother boils with unexpressed resentment and sooner or later finds a figure on whom to vent it. Not infrequently it is her school-refusing child who becomes the target.
b. In some cases it is apparent that the charges a mother levels against her child are replicas of those she levels, overtly or covertly, at grandmother. For example, a mother may first attribute dreadfully unreasonable demands to her child and then lash out at him for the demands he is alleged to make; when to an
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external observer the child is behaving little differently from any other child of the same age who is placed in similar circumstances. Similarly, a mother may misattribute rejection or ingratitude to her child. Such misattributions can be understood as the result of the parent's treating her child as an attachment figure, and, in so doing, assimilating the child to the model she has of how attachment figures can be expected to behave. This process is identical to what happens in the transference relationship during psychoanalytic treatment (see Chapter 14).
3. In Chapter 15 the process is described by which a mother may come unwittingly to model her behaviour towards her child on the way her own mother has treated her. As an illustration the case was described of Mrs Q who, during hysterical outbursts, was apt to threaten her son, Stephen, with the same dire threats she had herself suffered from her mother. In the literature on school refusal several writers, and notably Estes, Haylett & Johnson ( 1956), invoke that process as an explanation of why a mother's angry behaviour takes the particular form it does.
In the families of school-refusing children, threats by a parent against a child, or perhaps against members of the family in general, are common. Indeed, once their frequency and effects are appreciated, threats are found to be the key to an understanding of most of the clinical problems presented by families showing patterns B and C.
Family Interaction of Pattern B
In families showing pattern B a child fears that something dreadful may happen to mother, or possibly father, while he is at school and remains at home in order to prevent it. The pattern is probably the second most frequent of the four; and it occurs fairly often in conjunction with pattern A.
Empirical studies show that it is common for school-refusing children to state that the reason they do not go to school is a fear of what may happen to mother while they are away from home. Talbot ( 1957) in her study of twenty-four children writes: 'Over and over again we are told by every child studied, whether five years old or fifteen, that he is afraid something dreadful will happen to mother or other close relative, such as grandmother or father. ' Hersov ( 1960b), in his careful study of children aged from seven to sixteen years, reports that fear of
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some harm befalling mother was the commonest single explanation given by children of why they did not attend school;
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it was given by seventeen out of fifty children. Among others. to describe such cases are E. Klein ( 1945), Lazarus ( 1960), Kennedy ( 1965), Clyne ( 1966), and Sperling ( 1961; 1967).
Though the finding is no longer in question, there remains much disagreement as to why a child should come to fear such happenings. Explanations are of two main types. Though the processes each type invokes are very different, they are not incompatible, so that it is possible that in some cases both types of explanation are applicable.
The first type of explanation, and one habitually advanced by psychoanalysts, of why a child should become afraid of harm befalling his mother is that he harbours unconscious hostile wishes against her and is afraid lest his wishes come true. This is the explanation explicitly favoured by Broadwin ( 1932), E. Klein ( 1945), Waldfogel, Coolidge & Hahn ( 1957), Davidson ( 1961), Clyne ( 1966), and Sperling ( 1967), and also by those holding the views of Melanie Klein.
A second type of explanation is more mundane: it attributes what a child fears to his real experiences. For example, a child may come to fear that his mother may become seriously ill or die after seeing or hearing about the illness or death of a relative or neighbour, especially when mother is herself in ill health. Alternatively, a child may come to fear some disaster after hearing his mother make alarming threats about what may happen to her in certain circumstances. For example, if her child does not do what is asked of him, she will become ill; or, because 'things at home are so awful', she will desert the family or commit suicide.
Much of the scanty evidence available is open to an interpretation of either of these principal types; but it seems most unwise to adopt an explanation solely in terms of unconscious wishes before an explanation in terms of experience has been thoroughly investigated and shown to be inadequate. In point of fact, evidence suggests that in an overwhelming proportion of cases the eventualities a child fears can be understood wholly, or at least in part, in terms of his actual experiences. The extent to which unconscious hostile wishes may or may not also be making a contribution becomes then a matter for investigation in each individual case.
Experiences that can lead a child to fear that something dreadful may happen to mother are of two main kinds: first, actual events, such as illnesses or deaths, and, second, threats. Not infrequently the effects of the two are interlaced.
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As regards actual events, many workers have reported that an episode of school-refusing often begins at a time when, or soon after, mother herself has been ill or a close relative or friend has died. Talbot ( 1957) cites the case of an adolescent girl who, on going to kiss her grandmother goodbye before leaving for school, suddenly realized her grandmother was dead. Sperling ( 1961) reports a rather similar case. Lazarus ( 1960), writing from the viewpoint of a behaviour therapist, describes as typical the case of a girl of nine whose 'central fear was the possibility of losing her mother through death' and whose refusal had been preceded by no fewer than three deaths, that of a schoolfriend by drowning, of a neighbouring friend by
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meningitis, and of a man killed in a car accident before her eyes. Hersov ( 1960b) reports 'the death, departure or illness of a parent, most often the mother', as the precipitating factor in nine out of his fifty cases. Davidson ( 1961), who gave especial attention to this factor, reports that, in her series of thirty cases, mother herself had been dangerously ill in six, and, in another nine, a close relative or friend had died within a few months of the child's refusal to attend school. Thus half her cases were preceded by an event of this kind. 1
Davidson is one of those who adopt the wish-fulfilment theory of the child's fears and she draws on her own findings to support it. Mother's actual illness or a friend's death, she argues, heightens the child's fear that his unconscious hostile wishes are coming true or might come true. Yet it will be seen that the facts are no less compatible with a theory of the second type. For example, when mother herself is ill, it is not unnatural for a child to be afraid that she may become worse. When a grandmother or neighbour dies suddenly, it is not unnatural for a child to fear that mother may die equally suddenly. Therefore factors external to the child as well as factors internal to him must always be considered.
Although it is natural enough for a child to feel some measure of fear when mother is ill or a relative dies suddenly, especially when the two events occur together, it must be recognized that not all children exposed to such conditions
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1 Davidson strongly emphasizes how easy it is for a clinician inexperienced in the field to
overlook vital information. Not only do parents often fail to volunteer information about illness or death that may later seem highly relevant, but they may even deny such occurrences when first asked about them.
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develop intense or prolonged fear that mother will come to harm; nor do they often remain at home to make sure that she does not. Clearly, then, further factors are operative. Though in some cases they may be internal to the child, there is good evidence that in a great many cases these further factors that make for intense and prolonged fear that mother will come to harm derive also from the child's actual experience.
One such factor may be misplaced attempts to conceal from a child the seriousness of a parent's illness or the truth about the death of a relative or friend. The more concealment the more a child is likely to worry. Both Talbot ( 1957) and Weiss & Cain ( 1964) remark on the extent to which the parents of schoolrefusing children are apt to dissemble and evade. As one of the patients in the latter study put it, 'I never know who to believe in my family. There are too many white lies told. I have to watch and listen when they don't know I'm around. '
Another factor, and one likely to enhance to a much higher degree a child's anxiety about harm befalling his mother, is his having been threatened that, if he is not good, she will fall ill or die. In such a case, mother's illness seems to show the child all too clearly that what mother has always said would happen is in fact coming to pass; and a friend's death is taken as a lesson that mother's predictions are not idle ones: illness and death are real and may strike mother at any time.
It is already argued in Chapter 15 that the high incidence and intensely frightening effects of parental threats have hitherto been gravely neglected as likely explanations of children's fears;
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and the case of Stephen Q, himself a school refuser for a time, is reported to show how easy it is for parents and children to hide from clinicians information of the greatest relevance. On this issue the perspective adopted by Talbot ( 1957) and by Weiss & Cain ( 1964), who are among the very few to refer to the role of threats in cases of school refusal, is nearest that adopted here. Talbot in particular describes the many and varied threats to which some of these children are subjected-that mother will beat the child, kill him, desert him; or, alternatively, that the child by his inconsiderate and wicked ways will be the death of his mother. 'My mother wants me to stay home but she tells me I'm killing her,' was the way one little girl described her predicament.
A case of protracted school refusal in which threats of several kinds were being used, including mother's threats to desert her children, has been reported recently by two of my colleagues
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at the Tavistock, Paul Argles & Marion Mackenzie ( 1970). By identifying the problem as one of disturbed family relationships and treating it as such, not only were the clinicians able to help the family to reorganize its way of living but they were able also to gain access to crucial information about the pathological interactions that were current in the family.