The Child's Discovery of Death

A study in child psychology

Sylvia Anthony, Anthony, Sylvia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415864381
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136311949
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such as C.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set.

CHAPTER I

THE PROBLEM TO-DAY AND ALWAYS

THIS study, first undertaken as a piece of research into the mental development of children, has gained deeper topical significance from events occurring as its last words are written. In this and other countries millions of young children have been separated from their parents and taken away to other billets. As the imminence of danger fluctuates, families in each country are separated or re-united. In many countries of Europe now, young children’s fathers are under arms, and the shadow of death hangs over the families they come from. The problem of allaying or not arousing childish anxiety used to be mainly the mother’s, but now it is shared by many teachers, who are placed more fully in charge of children than they have formerly been. They will have the task of handling psychological situations which cannot but be new to them. For some of the children there will inevitably be grief that has objective cause. There will be individual anxieties, and also those permeations of individual reactions among a group that may issue in panic, or (as sometimes among the Basque refugees) in wild aggressions. There will also be (more subtle to understand, and far more difficult to handle) those griefs, anxieties and irrational aggressions which have no apparent objective cause, but may be signs or precursors of psychoneurotic trouble, hysterical illness, or of anti-social behaviour such as leads to the criminal court.

Such indications of grief and anxiety will occur, and will be recognized by those who have learnt how to recognize them. There will also be children who display an apparent lack of “natural” emotional reaction to situations which the adult thinks should normally arouse deep feeling. The child may be considered heartless, or in some other way deficient. In handling such cases, perhaps more than with any others, an understanding of the normal psychological development of children, going somewhat deeper than that usually required of the classroom teacher, is essential. At some stages of child-development, and in some personalities still within the range of the emotionally normal, it is probable that such reactions need not be a source of anxiety to those in charge of the child. At a different stage of development, or in a different personality, they may indicate the beginning of dissociative processes in mental experience—the refusal to accept the bitter thing into the emotional life—which may later culminate in serious disintegration of the mind. Psychiatry is at present almost helpless when certain forms of mental illness have developed so far as to produce typically psychotic behaviour. It may be that schizophrenia, for instance, is preventable or curable, at a stage which is scarcely to be recognized as yet as its incipient form. The present research suggests that closer study of the development of the concept of death in the individual may help to elucidate the origins of certain forms of mental disorder. And, in more immediately practical terms, that if a child with a tendency to react dissociatively (with peculiar lack of “emotional” behaviour) to experiences of death, is handled with psychological insight, or given immediate and suitable psychotherapy when the trouble occurs, a slow process of mental disintegration which might date from that period may be averted.

When psychogenic factors are sought as causes of later mental disorder, stress has mainly been laid on thought-patterns of which sexual impulses are the central activating nucleus (unconscious processes being included in the term thought). This view is not necessarily opposed to an interpretation which lays special stress on the reactions to the idea of death, for these reactions have a very close connection with the sexual life of the child (in the sense in which the word sexual is used by Freud), and derive their own pattern largely from it. But there is some difference involved in viewing the death-idea as having a form of its own, as well as a place in the total pattern ; in supposing it to be, as it were, a functional entity or sub-growth, like a limb or a lung, which may become diseased or malformed separately from the rest of the personality, in accordance with separable laws of its own nature, and which if it does this, may then gradually affect the whole in a morbid way.

To speak of an idea as functional is a convenient but somewhat misleading manner of speech. Ideas are not considered, by modern psychologists, to be functioning, motivating entities. It is better to say that when a person’s emotional development has reached a certain stage of complexity, then certain aspects of “external reality” lead him to conceive of an idea, such as the idea or the description “dead,” “death.” The idea is gradually assimilated more and more closely and completely into the memory-patterns (or we may call them complexes, traces, or conditioned-reflex systems) by which each person’s impulses are typically directed. During this assimilative process there develops around the concept, as though it were a biological nucleus, a growth or complex of its own, distinguishable from the main system. This sub-complex pursues distinctive processes of development and functions in a distinctive way.

I shall attempt to show that after this particular sub-complex relating to the “dead” idea, has taken distinctive shape, its form and functioning become very important in determining the total emotional and intellectual development of the individual. The functional relationship envisaged between the part and the whole may best be understood by comparing it with processes in other aspects of organic life. Thus, in the constitutional history of England, the development of the courts of Exchequer or of Parliament might be compared with the development of a particular sub-complex in the mental constitution of the individual ; each develops in the closest association with the whole, but in distinctive form, exercising distinctive function, and influencing the development of the whole through its manner of functioning, so deeply that malfunctioning of the minor body may bring about complete disintegration of the major one. Parallels in the development of man’s physical body are equally obvious.

In this sense, the idea of death may be said to function. Like Parliament or the eye or the lung, it does not begin functioning in a full and distinctive manner in the earliest periods of the organism’s development. The fœtus does not see nor breathe ; nor has the baby made discovery of death. But that does not make the function of seeing or breathing any less important for the man. Eye or lung may function and malfunction distinctively and separably from the rest of the organism, in its physiological aspect; and in something the same way, the complex which grows up and begins to function around the idea of death may behave and misbehave distinctively and to some extent separably, for the person in his psychological aspect.

To return to the general question : it is of special importance to us at the present time to know what death means to children. But it is really important to know this at all times, and actually we know very little about it, and nothing systematic. Questions about death that are not easily answered and anxieties not easily allayed, occur often in children’s nurseries in ordinary times. The grown-up wants to know what the child’s questions really mean to the child himself; what psychological processes lie behind his anxieties ; behind his fears, of the dark or of ghosts, perhaps, or actually of dying. Even the quiet, matter-of-fact questions may be not easy to answer ; and the help and insight that psycho-analysis has given us into the nature and origins of childish anxieties (and that is much) is not always available or sufficient for the parent who is wanting to help an ordinarily-happy child in an immediate crisis of unhappiness.

Yet we must not overrate the importance of understanding the child, as educators have perhaps been inclined to do ever since Rousseau. To understand the child is not the only need, and I would say not the essential need of the adult in his function of rearing the human young. The essential is for the adult to provide something from his own resources ; to transmit sustenance, whether in the form of food, knowledge, wisdom, or cultural tradition. To understand the child is to be aware (consciously or unconsciously) how much the sustenance needs to be predigested. But whether the milk is suitable for the infant is, however important, secondary to ensuring that the infant is fed at all.

Essentially, what the adult gives the child, in the way of suggestion or response, in connection with this subject of death, will depend very largely upon his own resources, his own attitude, and the social culture and traditions to which he has reacted. If he is deeply imbued with a culture that is rich and well adapted to individual and social needs he may, by handing it on to the child, help to build in him a mental structure strong to withstand the inevitable strains of life. If he fails to do this, it may be because of the poverty of the culture, or its inflexibility relative to a changing social environment, or the fact that he has not deeply experienced a single cultural influence, but, under influences very complex or conflicting, has himself found no stable or stabilizing attitude to life or death. And to-day this may easily happen, for our European culture is not poor nor inflexible, but its richness and flexibility are gained at the cost of including much that seems quite irreconcilable, and the individual, offered so many and such various patterns for life, may attempt to accommodate himself to many, and fully accept none.

The social organization of human reactions to the fact and the thought of death has always been a function of religion. Religion socializes individual attitudes to death. It provides a definite pattern for them, and makes that pattern to be considered sane. It is the name given to traditionally tested ways of mental acceptance of death.

For the idea is not easy to accept. The fact is deeply written into the records of mankind. It can be seen to underlie the most diverse beliefs and social reactions. Some primitive peoples deny the necessity of physical death, and attribute all death to individual accidents. Others who do not deny that it is inevitable, react to it with elaborate funeral ceremonies, sometimes of a very violent nature, in which customary restraints on behaviour and particularly on sexual intercourse are loosened, and obscenities and jests are encouraged which mock dying and the dead. Many people, including many of the most highly civilized, deny the completeness of death for the individual, and in their creeds and rituals express a belief in personal immortality either of the soul, or of soul and body, too. Socrates refused to grieve at his own death, saying it would set his soul free, but he could not keep his friends from weeping.

The idea is not easy to accept. Many of the greatest thinkers have not accepted the idea that when the body decays there is also a complete dissolution of the personality. Yet others have (consciously, at least) accepted that idea. In the face of death, religion may still perform functions for those who do not believe in personal immortality. European religion has for so many centuries been bound up with beliefs in personal immortality that this is seldom realized. There was a period, in ancient Rome, when the living said farewell for ever to the dead, as Catullus did to his brother ; and yet Catullus journeyed far over land and sea to pay to his brother the last funeral tributes. Religion still offers its rites and consolations even when farewell is felt as final, and if those rites bring death into a grand and positive relation with life, they must have social value.

What death means and may mean to children cannot really be considered fully, apart from what it means to the adults who rear the children and to the whole society and tradition in contact with which they live. But the larger questions may be considered for a time as the background, and attention may be focused meanwhile on the children’s actual, momentary reactions to this subject, when those reactions are, as it were, isolated and put under the microscope. In the last chapter I shall try to relate the findings to some of these larger aspects of the question which, all through, will be visibly looming in the background. Also I shall try to show what the observations imply in terms of practical life, for those concerned with the day-to-day handling of young children, and further, what contribution they may offer to the science of child psychology.

CHAPTER II

THE PRESENT APPROACH

THREE methods were used to collect material directly from children about their own ways of thinking about death. These were, firstly, records taken at home by parents ; secondly, a Story-Completion Test; thirdly, the giving of a well-known intelligence test, with certain additions in what was given and in the keeping of special records of some of the responses.

CONSIDERATIONS GOVERNING THE CHOICE OF METHODS

The aim was to obtain material over a wide age-range, and at different levels of thought. The word “levels” is here used metaphorically in the usual way, the “deeper” mental processes being considered as the unconscious, autistic or dream-like modes of mental functioning, and the “upper” being distinguished by having more distinct aims, of which the thinker is aware all through the process itself; this is called conscious or directive thought.

The choice of method was determined mainly by three considerations. (1) There should be a large proportion of relevant material, in proportion to the total gathered. (2) It should be possible to treat it objectively (so that, for instance, it would not be possible for behaviour to be classed as illuminating by one observer, of which another observer might say : “The child had no idea of death when he did that, any more than a dog when he kills a fly on the window-pane ”) ; to record it objectively in manageable compass ; to classify results, and to arrange for some degree of quantitative treatment of them. (3) Lastly, it was very important to find a way to circumvent happily the reserves and resistances which prevent access to others’ minds, falsify what is given, or limit the levels of thought from which it is drawn.

The first consideration led to the rejection of several methods which have already, in other researches with somewhat different aims, brought in material relevant to this research.¹

Because of the second consideration, and especially the need to avoid subjective interpretations as much as possible, and to collect material which could be easily presented, verbal material has been relied upon more than any other kind. This is not from an opinion that the individual significance of ideas is solely or most truthfully expressed in words. It is because of the difficulty of determining objectively what ideas are being expressed by behaviour which is not verbal, nor accompanied by words, nor subsequently referred to in words. General behaviour, such as play, or specific behaviour; such as closing the eyes or sucking a finger when speaking about death, have not passed unnoticed, but they have only been used as direct material when there was also some verbal reference to the idea.

As regards circumvention of resistance, it has been taken as axiomatic that a stranger does not obtain reliable responses from a child about his most recently achieved integrations of conscious thought, and an intimate does not obtain reliable responses to questions that touch upon feelings and fantasies, unless the child is provided with a substitute for the defences that normally guard the core of personality. Resistance is a protective shell which fulfils a necessary function. Direct attack upon it is an unwarrantable aggression and tactically ineffective. The child so approached may close up, like a sea-anemone or a wood-louse ; or he may display himself, like the lapwing when her nest is approached, who, of course, does not display her nest but cleverly conceals it. The child who does not show the resistance normal to its age and social environment is not a normal child. There are instances in these records of responses from such children (see Edna K., p. 37). A method of direct personal approach overweights the importance of this type.

Circumvention of resistance, however, can be a friendly act. It may actually strengthen the defences, by recognizing their existence and yet at the same time offering social contact.

On these grounds, therefore, direct questions with personal implications were ruled out from the routine procedure. For the same reason the responses obtained in other researches based on a routine of direct questions have not been used.

Two main lines of approach remained. The first : to record children’s spontaneous remarks, questions, and behaviour. This (the recording of questions) was the method suggested by Professor Piaget (in a personal interview). His own use of it, as described in his work, The Language and Thought of the Child, was scientifically systematized, and produced some very interesting material relevant to the subject of the conception of death in children. In that form, however, it could not be used for this research ; to apply it to a sufficient number of children for a sufficient time, a large team of workers would be needed. For this research...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• The International Library of Psychology
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• INTRODUCTION BY PROFESSOR J. C. FLUGEL
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER I. THE PROBLEM TO-DAY AND ALWAYS
• CHAPTER II. THE PRESENT APPROACH
• CHAPTER III. DEATH IN CHILDREN’S FANTASIES
• CHAPTER IV. THE ADULT AND THE CHILD
• CHAPTER V. DEATH IN THE CHILD’S DIRECTIVE THOUGHT
• CHAPTER VI. HOME RECORDS: DISCOVERY OF DEATH AND THE PREPARATION FOR DISCOVERY
• CHAPTER VII. DEATH, BIRTH AND HOSTILITY
• CHAPTER VIII. DEATH AND LOGIC
• CHAPTER IX. DEATH AND MAGIC
• CHAPTER X. THE ASSERTION OF IMMORTALITY
• CHAPTER XI. THE PROBLEM IN PRACTICE AND THEORY
• APPENDIX TO CHAPTER I, STORY-COMPLETION RESPONSES FROM CHILDREN WHOSE MENTAL CONDITION APPEARS TO BE PATHOLOGICAL
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX