No More Learning

As regards the childhood experiences of these women, the results, as reported in interview and qiestionnaire, supported some of the initial hypo- theses but did not support others. For example, in view of previous reports DeLozier had expec- ted to find a significantly higher incidence of sep- arations from parents in the childhoods of the ab- usive mothers but this was not found. By con- trast, her expectation that a high proportion of these women would have experienced their par- ents as having repeatedly threatened to abandon them was fulfilled, a finding in keeping with the view that repeated threats to abandon are as pathogenic as actual separations and probably more so (Bowlby, 1973). In a similiar way, al- though actual violence from a parent had appar- ently not been common, many of the abusing mothers had suffered repeated threats of being beaten, maimed, or even killed.
Another striking feature of the childhoods of the abusing mothers, also in keeping with expect- ations, was that only a minority of them (seven) had felt they could turn to mother for help when in distress. Amongst those who could not were
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? ? ? some who described someone else, a relative or neighbour, who would have been helpful; but four of the 18 had known of absolutely no one. Amongst the controls, by contrast, all but three had felt they could turn to mother, and each of the others had at least known of someone else.
Thus, unlike a girl who grows up in an ordinary reasonably happy home who can rely on her mother in an emergency, a majority of these wo- men could never do so. Indeed, and again as pre- dicted, for many of them the relationship of daughter to mother had been reversed and it was they who had been expected to care for the par- ent. 2
Given the childhood experiences these women had had, it is not difficult to understand why they had grown up as they had. Threats to abandon a child make her (or him) intensely anxious about any separation, however routine it might appear to others, and also intensely angry with her par- ent for threatening her so. Moreover failures to respond helpfully when a child is in distress, combined with repeated and impatient rejec- tions, lead her to be deeply suspicious of every- one else. Thus, whilst constantly yearning for the love and care she has never had, she has no
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? ? ? confidence she will ever receive it; and she will mistrust any offer she may receive. Small wonder therefore, if when a woman with this background becomes a mother, that there are times when, in- stead of being ready to mother her child, she looks to her child to mother her. Small wonder too if when her child fails to oblige and starts cry- ing, demanding care and attention, that she gets impatient and angry with it.
It is against this background, I believe, that a mother's violent assaults on a child can be under- stood. Although I have never treated a woman who actually assaulted her child physically, I have treated one who came perilously close to doing so.
The reason I began seeing this woman, whom I will call Mrs Q, was that the doctor at the well- baby clinic she attended was concerned about her son, aged 18 months; he was refusing to eat and was losing weight. When I saw them both, it was at once apparent that Mrs Q was intensely anxious and depressed and had been so since the boy's birth. On enquiry I found that she was terri- fied lest her son die and was therefore pestering him to eat. She also told me that she had some- times had impulses to throw the baby out of the
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? ? ? window. Only much later did she tell me that on occasion she became hysterical, smashed the dishes, and battered the baby's pram. She was in- tensely anxious talking to me and fully expected me to turn on her angrily. On my suggestion she came to see me for psychotherapy once a week.
The picture she gave me of her childhood, told reluctantly in fragments but always consistently, was one I now know to be typical. She recalled bitter quarrels between her parents in which they assaulted one another and threatened murder, and how her mother would repeatedly bring pres- sure on the family by threatening to desert. On two occasions Mrs Q had returned from school to find her mother with her head in the gas oven, and at other times her mother would pretend to have deserted by disappearing for half a day. Nat- urally Mrs Q grew up terrified that if she did any- thing wrong her mother would go. Moreover things were made even worse by her mother in- sisting that she breathe not a word about these terrifying events to anyone outside the home.
Mrs Q, who had been a skilled technician be- fore marriage, was known as a very helpful neigh- bour and did all she could to be a good wife and mother--in which for the most part she
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? ? ? succeeded. Yet she was subject to these violent and destructive outbursts which frightened and puzzled her and about which she felt intense shame.
After some time I had little doubt that the angry outbursts were to be understood as the ex- pression of intense anger which, generated ini- tially and over many years by her mother's re- peated threats to abandon the family, had early in her life become directed away from her mother and towards less dangerous targets. Terrified then and later of ever expressing her anger dir- ectly, she redirected3 it towards something which, or someone who, could not retaliate. As a child, Mrs Q recalled, she had sometimes re- treated to her room and attacked her dolls. Now it was her crockery, the pram, and almost but not quite the baby. Each current outburst, I suspec- ted, was triggered by her mother who, dominat- ing and interfering as ever, still visited her daughter every day.
This explanation fits what facts we have and has the merit, not always appreciated in clinical circles, of being simple. Not surprisingly, other workers in the field have also proposed it (e. g. Feinstein, Paul, and Pettison, 1964). In other
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? ? ? cases, it is clear, a husband has violently abused his wife and she, violently angry in return, has re- directed it against their child.
In turning next to the effects on the personality development of children who are assaulted, we have to bear in mind that the physical assaults are not the only episodes of hostility from parents that these children have experienced. In very many cases indeed the physical assaults are but the tip of an iceberg--the manifest signs of what have been repeated episodes of angry rejection, verbal as well as physical. In most cases therefore the psychological effects can be regarded as the outcome of prolonged hostile rejection and neg- lect. Nevertheless the experiences of individual children can vary greatly. A few, for example, may receive reasonably good care and only very occasionally suffer an outburst of parental viol- ence. For these reasons it is no surprise that the socio-emotional development of the children var- ies also. Here I describe findings that appear to be fairly typical.
Those who have observed such children in their homes or elsewhere describe them variously as depressed, passive, and inhibited, as 'depend- ent' and anxious, and also as angry and
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? ? ? aggressive (Martin and Rodeheffer, 1980). Gaensbauer and Sands (1979), in endorsing this picture, emphasize how disturbing to a caregiver such behaviour can be. The children fail to parti- cipate in play and show little or no enjoyment. Expression of feeling is often so low key that it is easy to overlook, or else is ambiguous and con- trary. Crying may be prolonged and unresponsive to comforting; anger is easily aroused, intense, and not readily resolved. Once established, these patterns tend to persist.
An issue much discussed in the literature is the degree to which an infant's prematurity, ill- health, or difficult temperament may have con- tributed to a mother's problems and so ultimately to its having been ill-treated. In some cases these factors play a part, but they do so only when a mother reacts unfavourably to the baby and thereby sets up a vicious circle. 4 Such a sequence, of course, is all too likely to occur when a mother has herself had a difficult childhood, has grown up emotionally disturbed, and has little or no emotional support or help after her baby is born.
Towards his or her parent an abused toddler often shows a striking picture of frozen watchfulness, hyper-alert for what might happen.
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? ? ? But some show also an unusual sensitivity to the needs of their parents (Malone, 1966). There are, in fact, good reasons for thinking that some chil- dren learn early that it is possible to placate a dis- turbed and potentially violent mother by constant attention to her wishes. 5
In a nursery setting battered infants and tod- dlers have a reputation for finding it difficult to make relationships, either with caregivers or with other children, and also for being very aggressive. In recent years these observations have been con- firmed and extended by more systematic research which has focused attention both on the particu- lar patterns of behaviour shown and on details of the situations in which each occurs. The findings that follow stem from a study being conducted at Berkeley by Main and George (George and Main, 1979; Main and George, 1985).
Their aim was to compare the behaviour in a day-nursery setting of two groups of children in the age-range 1 to 3 years. One group of ten were known to have been physically assaulted by a par- ent. The other group of ten were matched for all relevant variables but had not been assaulted; they were, however, in nurseries set up to care for children from families known to be under stress.
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? ? ? To obtain data each child was observed for four periods each of 30 minutes on four different days spread over three weeks. Observers were instruc- ted to record all socially relevant behaviour, in- cluding such small movements as head-turning or stepping backwards.
In analysing the data, the children's social be- haviour was divided into four categories: ap- proach, avoidance, approach-avoid, and aggres- sion. It was also divided according to whom the behaviour was directed--another child or a care- giver. Another distinction was between behaviour initiated by the observed child and behaviour which occurred in response to a friendly ap- proach by another child or adult. Results are ex- pressed in terms of the mean number of incidents of a particular type of behaviour of the children in each group or else of the number of children in each group who showed that type of behaviour.
As regards occasions when a child initiated so- cial contact, either with another child or a care- giver, no appreciable differences were observed between the children in each group. By contrast, very striking differences were observed in the ways the children responded to a friendly ap- proach from the other. Characteristic responses
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? ? ? of the abused children were either to take straight avoiding action or else to show both approach and avoidance behaviour, either in quick succes- sion or in some combination of the two. Examples are: 'she creeps towards him but sud- denly veers away', and 'she crawls towards the caregiver but with head averted'. Thus, when the overtures come from a caregiver, the abused tod- dlers were three times more likely than the con- trols to take avoiding action; whilst seven of them, compared to only one, showed the curious combination of alternation of approach and avoidance. When the overtures came from other children, the differences were even more marked. For example, whereas none of the controls showed approach-avoidance, all ten of the abused toddlers did so.
Aggressive behaviour was fairly common in both groups of toddlers, though, as predicted, it was significantly more so in the abused group. Not only did the abused toddlers assault other children twice as often as the controls, but five of them assaulted or threatened to assault an adult, behaviour seen in none of the controls. In addi- tion the abused toddlers were notable for a par- ticularly disagreeable type of aggression, termed
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? ? ? 'harassment' (Manning, Heron, and Marshall, 1978). This consists of malicious behaviour which appears to have the sole intent of making the vic- tim show distress. Almost always it occurs sud- denly without any evident cause and so contrasts with hostility which occurs in reaction to a pro- vocation. Such attacks, coming unpredictably out of the blue, are frightening and invite retaliation. Clinical studies, referred to later, report them to be directed especially towards an adult to whom the child is becoming attached.
In view of the behaviour so far described it is not surprising to find that abused toddlers are singularly unsympathetic to age-mates in dis- tress. The studies of Zahn-Waxler and Radke- Yarrow have shown that infants and pre-school children who have affectionate and caring par- ents commonly express concern when another child is distressed and often make moves to com- fort him or her (Zahn-Waxler, Radke-Yarrow, and King, 1979). This type of behaviour was also seen at least once in five of the control children in the Main and George study; but on no occasion did any of the abused toddlers show the slightest hint of it. Instead, and unlike the controls, they reacted with some combination of fear, distress,
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? ? ? or anger; and three behaved hostilely to the cry- ing child. For example, one small boy of 2 years 8 months slapped a little girl who was crying, ex- claiming repeatedly 'Cut it out, cut it out'. He pro- ceeded then to pat her back and next to hiss at her with bared teeth; before anyone could inter- vene, his patting had turned to beating.
My reasons for giving so much attention to these observations of young children will, I am sure, be apparent. They show with unmistakable clarity how early in life certain characteristic pat- terns of social behaviour--some hopeful for the future, others ominous--become established. They leave no doubts either about what types of family experience influence development in one direction or another. Again and again we see de- tails in the behaviour of a toddler, or in what he says, that are plainly straight replicas of how that toddler has himself been treated. Indeed the tendency to treat others in the same way that we ourselves have been treated is deep in human nature; and at no time is it more evident than in the earliest years. All parents please note!
Firm evidence of how these children develop must await an appropriately designed longitudin- al study. There is evidence that, if conditions of
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? ? ? care improve, some recover sufficiently to pass for normal (Lynch and Roberts, 1982); others do not. Some have suffered serious brain damage and become diagnosed as mentally handicapped (e. g. Martin and Rodeheffer, 1980). For many others adverse conditions of care continue. Fur- thermore, once a child has developed the types of disagreeable behaviour described, it is not easy for an adult, whether parent, foster-parent, or professional, to give him the continuous affec- tionate care he needs, whilst treating such chil- dren by psychotherapy is extremely taxing. The sudden unprovoked attacks, which in older chil- dren can easily be damaging, are especially hard to take.
Some of these emotionally disturbed children, we know, reach psychiatric clinics where the ori- gin of their condition, I suspect, more often than not goes unrecognized. Amongst those who have treated these children, some of them psychotic, and who have traced the source of their troubles are Stroh (1974), Bloch (1978), and Hopkins (1984). Each notes the extreme degree of ambi- valence to be expected: one moment the child is hugging the therapist, the next he is kicking her. During adolescence and early adult life, some,
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? ? ? mostly male, become diagnosed as aggressive psychopaths and/or violent delinquents (e. g. Far- rington, 1978). Others, especially females per- haps, are found to be suffering from multiple per- sonality (Bliss, 1980). Once psychiatrists become aware of the profound and far-reaching effects of childhood abuse and rejection, and the extent to which relevant information is suppressed and falsified by parents and overlooked by clinicians, many more cases are sure to be identified.
A significant proportion of rejected and abused children grow up to perpetuate the cycle of family violence by continuing to respond in social situ- ations with the very same patterns of behaviour that they had developed during early childhood.
A type of response found to be characteristic of many abusive parents, and of a kind which we have already seen to be characteristic of abused toddlers, is reported, for example, by Frodi and Lamb (1980). In a laboratory study, in which videotapes of crying infants were shown, abusive mothers were found to respond to a crying infant with less sympathy than did a group of non-abus- ive mothers and also with more annoyance and anger. Furthermore these same adverse re- sponses were shown by the abusive mothers even
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? ? ? when they were shown video tapes of smiling in- fants, which suggested they disliked any form of interaction with an infant.
Let us turn now, rather belatedly, to the beha- viour of men who ill-treat girlfriend or wife.
Two of my social work colleagues at the Tavis- tock, Janet Mattinson and Ian Sinclair (1979), de- scribe a man, Mr S, who was apt, inexplicably and unpredictably, to attack his wife. At the time when he asked for an interview his wife had re- cently left him; she had just had their first baby. Although hesitant at first, Mr S fairly soon began telling the social worker how much he feared his own violence. He loved his wife, he said, and felt his violent behaviour to be quite unwarranted, akin to madness. Subsequently, speaking of his childhood, he described how he had been a mem- ber of a large working-class family in which he had received little more than harsh and unsym- pathetic treatment. His parents, he said, were constantly engaged in violent quarrels. Exploring in later interviews how he had felt as a child, struggling for the love he never got, he was struck by the suggestion that it was probably a mixture of anger and despair. This made sense to him, he said: it relieved him of his fear that his violence
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? ? ? was inexplicable. The outbreaks that had led to his wife's departure, it was noted, had occurred soon after the baby's birth. Since we know from other studies, e. g. Marsden and Owens (1975), that intense jealousy of a wife's attention to the children is a common precipitant of a husband's violence, Mr S's outbursts were in all likelihood triggered by the baby's arrival.
Sudden and on the surface inexplicable out- bursts of violence, similar to those of Mr S, are found to be characteristic of a significant propor- tion of men who batter wives; for example, they occurred in five out of the 19 cases investigated by Marsden and Owens (1975). The hypothesis that most of such men are ill-treated and battered children now grown up is supported by several findings. In one study (Gayford, 1975) informa- tion from the wives was that 51 out of a 100 viol- ent men had themselves been battered as chil- dren. Moreover 33 of the 100 had already been convicted of other violent offences and, as already noted, studies show that most violent offenders come from homes in which they were subjected to cruel and brutal treatment (Farrington, 1978).
Finally we find that many of the wives who are battered have come from disturbed and rejecting
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? ? ? homes, in which a significant minority were themselves battered as children (Gayford, 1975). These experiences had led them to leave home in their teens, to link up with almost the first man they met, all too often from a similar background, and quickly to become pregnant. For the unpre- pared and anxiously attached girl, having to care for a baby creates a thousand problems; moreover her attention to the baby provokes in- tense jealousy in her partner. These are some of the processes by which an inter-generational cycle of violence becomes perpetuated.
Let us return now to the study of Mattinson and Sinclair (1979) who describe patterns of in- teraction that they found were common in certain families.
The interviews with Mr S were part of a study undertaken in order to find out more of what is happening in the kind of intensely disturbed fam- ily that creates endless problems for the medical and social services and which is known to be ex- traordinarily difficult to help. In these families, it seemed, violence or threats of violence occurred almost daily. Time and again the couple had sep- arated only to come together again after a few days or weeks. Sometimes, after hard words from
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? ? ? his wife, a husband would go off on his own, only to hive back again a short time later. Or a wife, physically assaulted by her husband, would leave with the children but return within days to the very same situation. What seemed so extraordin- ary to the workers was the length of time some of these marriages had lasted. One question they asked themselves therefore was what was keeping the partners together.
What they found was that, whilst the violence of a husband and the angry threatening remarks of a wife seemed to dominate the scene, each partner was deeply, if anxiously, attached to the other and had developed a strategy designed to control the other and to keep him or her from de- parting. Various techniques were in use, mainly coercive, and many of them of a kind that to an outsider would appear not only extreme but counterproductive.
For example, threats to desert or to commit suicide were common, and suicidal gestures not infrequent. These were usually ef- fective in the short term by ensuring the partner's concerned attention, though they also aroused his or her guilt and anger. Most of the suicide at- tempts, it was found, were reactions to specific
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? ? ? events, particularly desertions either actual or threatened.
A coercive technique, used especially by the men, was to 'imprison' the wife by such means as locking her in the house, or padlocking her clothes, or else retaining all the money and doing the shopping so as to prevent her from seeing anyone else. The intensely ambivalent attach- ment of one man who adopted this technique was such that he not only locked his wife in but he also locked her out. He would throw her out of the house telling her never to return but, after she had got to the street, would run after her and pull her back to their flat.
A third coercive technique was battering. As one man put it, in his family asking for something was always done with fists. No wife enjoyed this treatment, but some got a wry satisfaction from it. For example, one woman, when explaining why she did not wish for a separation, announced with a note of triumph in her voice that her hus- band had threatened he would come to 'get her' if she moved out. He needed her too, she insisted. In most of these marriages, it was found, each party was apt to stress how much the other needed them, whilst disclaiming their own need
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? ? ? for the partner. By need, of course, they meant what I am calling their desire for a caregiving fig- ure. What they dreaded most was loneliness.
PREVENTIVE MEASURES
This ends my description of the problems met with in violent families and the theoretical per- spective in which I believe it useful to approach them. What actions then are called for?
Much skilled and devoted work has gone into helping families in which abuse has already oc- curred, and much thought given to problems of management (Helfer and Kempe, 1976; Lynch and Roberts, 1982). Since every study has shown how very difficult and time-consuming all such work is, we ask about prospects for prevention. Here lies hope. In what follows I describe a type of service which has been pioneered in the United Kingdom and which is now spreading steadily with encouragement from government. No doubt similar services are to be found in various parts of the United States also, but naturally I know less about them.
The service pattern which is so promising, at least for some families, is one known as Home- Start (which was begun in Leicester) (Harrison,
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? ? ? 1981). 6 It is an independently organized home- visiting scheme which offers support, friendship, and practical assistance to young families experi- encing difficulties. It is staffed by volunteers who work in close liaison with the related statutory services and who also receive support and guid- ance from a professional. All visits are by invita- tion of the family and on their terms. There are no contracts and no time limits.
Each volunteer is a mother who undertakes to make regular visits to one or, at most, two famil- ies with the aim of establishing a relationship in which time and understanding can be shared. Every effort is made to encourage the parents' strengths and to reassure them that difficulties in caring for children are not unusual, and also that it is possible for family life to be enjoyable. New volunteers, who are mainly between the ages of 30 and 45, attend a preparatory course, one day a week for ten weeks, and receive regular ongoing training afterwards.
There are many advantages in the visitors be- ing volunteers. First a volunteer has time: in practice it was found in the pioneer scheme that the average time each volunteer was spending with her family in its own home was six hours a
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? ? ? week. Secondly she meets the mother on a level of equality and feels free to contribute to house- hold activities in any way that seems appropriate. Thirdly she can compare notes and talk about ex- periences with her own children. Fourthly, and very important, she can sometimes make herself available to be contacted during an evening or at a weekend.
The families visited are, of course, ones in which difficulties are either already present or appear imminent. Since the service is not aimed specifically at abusing families, a family particip- ating need not feel labelled in any way. Neverthe- less the service deals with a fair number of famil- ies who have one or more children on a register of children at risk of abuse. In the first eight years of the pioneer scheme no less than a quarter of the families visited were in that category.
Often visiting is started whilst a mother is still pregnant. Most of those visited are young, im- pulsive, and dreadfully isolated and have never experienced affection, care, or security. In such cases the principal role of the volunteer is to mother the mother and so, by example, to en- courage her to mother her own child. She will also talk and play with the children, again
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? ? ? providing the mother with an example she has never had. Perhaps later, once confidence has grown, the volunteer may assist by helping the mother acquire basic household skills she has never learned. The key to the relationship is that the volunteer is herself a mother who knows all the problems from the inside.
There are many cases which are recognized to be unsuited for inclusion in a service of this sort. 7 For those suitable the degree of success reported is most encouraging, as shown by an evaluation of the first four years' work of the pioneer service, carried out by an independent researcher whose monograph (van der Eyken, 1982) gives a full ac- count of the project. Taking a random sample of one in five of the 288 families visited, he asked those concerned how they assessed the outcome at the end of the volunteer's visiting, using a three-point scale: no change, some change, con- siderable change. The results showed that the vo- lunteers were the most pessimistic, rating only half the families as showing considerable change and one in ten as failures. The social workers who had referred cases were more hopeful, rating rather more than half as showing considerable change and the remainder as showing at least
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? ? ? some. Those most enthusiastic for the work were the health visitors (public health nurses) and the families themselves. Of the 58 families who as- sessed themselves, 47 (85 per cent) claimed a considerable change had occurred, six claimed some change and only two believed there had been none.
In a field that is both deeply troubling and no- toriously difficult these findings give hope.
1 In a study by Baldwin (1977) of 38 children who had been physically abused to an exceptionally severe degree, two-fifths of the parents had suffered physical abuse as children and more than half severe or pro- longed mental abuse. Baldwin calls attention to the marked tendency of many of these parents, when inter- viewed, to make broad generalizations about their child-hood in which an idealized picture is presented, a picture that stands in stark contrast to the grim epis- odes described when detailed questions are asked. In this field inexperienced clinicians and interviewers are likely to be gravely misled.
2 DeLozier's study has now been repeated by Mitchell (in preparation) on samples of Mexican-American mothers with closely similar results.
3 Because it is less ambiguous, I find the ethologist's term 'redirection' preferable to its clinical equivalent 'displacement'. The redirection of hostile behaviour
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? ? ? away from a more dominant animal is well known in other species.
4 There is now good evidence that, given sensitive mothering, difficult infants develop favourably, with only few exceptions (Sameroff and Chandler, 1975) and, conversely, that a potentially easy baby is likely to develop unfavourably if given insensitive care (Sroufe, 1983).
5 I am indebted for this point to Pat Crittenden (per- sonal communication) who has observed such appar- ently placatory behaviour in young abused children, some less than two years old. Similar behaviour has been observed also in young children whose mothers are seriously depressed (Pound, 1982).
6 Another initiative, serving a severely deprived area in inner London and known as Newpin, is also promising (Pound and Mills, 1985).
7 Harrison (1981) lists the following: where a parent is known to be chronically ill mentally, is suffering from a serious degenerative illness, is a recidivist, or is intent on the children being admitted to care. Also excluded are families in which the children are at risk of abuse by a mother's cohabitee.
6
ON KNOWING WHAT YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW AND FEELING WHAT YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO FEEL
Early in 1979 I was invited to contribute to a special number of the Canadian Journal of Psy- chiatry to honour Emeritus Professor Eric Wit- tkower who had held a chair of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal from 1952 to 1964 and was then celebrating his eightieth birthday. This I was very glad to do. The resulting paper, with the above title, also formed the basis of lec- tures that I gave on various occasions during subsequent years. On one such occasion, in Rome, I met with two cognitive therapists, Gio- vanni Liotti and Vittorio Guidano, and was sur- prised and delighted to find how much we had in common. One consequence of our meeting was an invitation to contribute to a volume on
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? ? ? Cognition and Psychotherapy being edited by Mi- chael Mahoney and Arthur Freeman. This provided an opportunity to expand the original brief paper and led to the version that follows.
The evidence that adverse experiences with par- ents during childhood, such as those described in the previous lecture, play a large part in causing cognitive disturbance is now substantial. For ex- ample, at least some cases in which perceptions and attributions are distorted and some states of amnesia, both minor and major, including cases of multiple personality, can be shown with con- siderable confidence to be the outcome of such experiences. Yet systematic research into these causal sequences is still scarce, and it is clearly a field calling urgently for a major research effort. Why then has it been so woefully neglected?
One adverse influence, referred to in the pre- ceding lecture, is the strong tradition within the psychoanalytic school of thought of focusing at- tention on fantasy and away from the real-life ex- periences a person may have had during child- hood. Another is the undoubted difficulty of do- ing systematic research in the field. For example, those engaged in seeing only adult patients are
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? ? ? usually ill-placed to investigate events alleged to have occurred many years earlier. Those whose childhoods have been spent amongst reasonably stable families and who, like all too many psychi- atrists and psychotherapists, are ignorant of the recent family and child development literature have no norms against which to match their pa- tients' stories. Above all clinicians are often faced with a blanket of silence, from patient and family alike, which neither their training nor their ex- perience has qualified them to penetrate. It is little wonder therefore that the likelihood that many cases of psychiatric disorder, both mild and grave, have had their origins in adverse events of childhood has been discounted or else completely ignored--not only by general psychiatrists but by psychotherapists as well. Even the fact that some children are physically or sexually assaulted by their own parents, often repeatedly and over long periods, has been missing from discussions of casual factors in psychiatry.
At long last the scene is changing. First, know- ledge of parent-child interactions in general, in- cluding a wide range of potentially pathogenic re- lationships and events, is increasing in both qual- ity and quantity as systematic research is applied.
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? ? ? Secondly, the psychological consequences for the children exposed to these relationships and events are becoming much better understood and documented. As a result there are now many oc- casions when a clinician is on reasonably firm ground in drawing aetiological conclusions. This is so especially when (a) his patient presents problems and symptoms which resemble the known consequences of certain types of experi- ence and (b) when in the course of skilled history-taking, or perhaps much later during therapy, he is told of experiences of these same types. In reaching his conclusion the reasoning a psychiatrist uses differs in no way from that of a physician who, having diagnosed a patient as suf- fering from mitral stenosis, proceeds unhesitat- ingly to attribute the condition to an attack of rheumatic fever suffered by the patient many years earlier.
When considering childhood antecedents of cog- nitive disorders a good place to start is with amnesia.
In one of his classical papers on analytic tech- nique Freud (1914) made an important generaliz- ation the truth of which probably every psycho- therapist would endorse:
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? ? ? Forgetting impressions, scenes or experiences nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off. When the patient talks about these 'forgotten' things he seldom fails to add: 'As a matter of fact I've always known it; only I've never thought of it. ' (1914, 148)
Such observations call for explanations of at least three kinds. First, are there special features that characterize the impressions, scenes, and experi- ences that tend to become shut off? Secondly, how do we best conceive of the processes by which memories become shut off and apparently forgotten? Thirdly, what are the causal condi- tions, internal and external to the personality, that activate the shutting-off process?
The scenes and experiences that tend to be- come shut off, though often continuing to be ex- tremely influential in affecting thought, feeling, and behaviour, fall into at least three distinct cat- egories: (a) those that parents wish their children not to know about; (b) those in which parents have treated children in ways the children find too unbearable to think about; (c) those in which children have done, or perhaps thought, things about which they feel unbearably guilty or ashamed.
Since a great deal of attention has for long been given to the third category, here I discuss only the first two. We start with the first.
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? ? ? Children not infrequently observe scenes that parents would prefer they did not observe; they form impressions that parents would prefer they did not form; and they have experiences that par- ents would like to believe they have not had. Evidence shows that many of these children, aware of how their parents feel, proceed then to conform to their parents' wishes by excluding from further processing such information as they already have; and that, having done so, they cease consciously to be aware that they have ever ob- served such scenes, formed such impressions, or had such experiences. Here, I believe, is a source of cognitive disturbance as common as it is neglected.
Yet evidence that parents sometimes press their children to shut off from further, conscious processing information the children already have about events that the parents wish they had never observed comes from several sources. Perhaps the most vivid concerns the efforts made by a surviving parent to obliterate his or her child's knowledge of the (other) parent's suicide.
Cain and Fast (1972) report findings from their study of a series of 14 children, aged between 4 and 14, all of whom had lost a parent by suicide
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? ? ? and all of whom had become psychiatrically dis- turbed, many of them severely so. In reviewing their data the authors were struck by the very large roles played in the children's symptomato- logy by their having been exposed to pathogenic situations of two types, namely situations in which intense guilt is likely to be engendered (not discussed here) and situations in which commu- nications between parent and child are gravely distorted.
About one quarter of the children studied had personally witnessed some aspect of the parent's death and had subsequently been subjected to pressure from the surviving parent to believe that they were mistaken in what they had seen or heard, and that the death had not been due to suicide but to some illness or accident. 'A boy who watched his father kill himself with a shot- gun . . . was told later that night by his mother that his father died of a heart attack; a girl who dis- covered her father's body hanging in a closet was told he had died in a car accident; and two broth- ers who had found their mother with her wrists slit were told she had drowned while swimming' (Cain and Fast, 1972, 102). When a child de- scribed what he had seen, the surviving parent
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? ? ? had sought to discredit it either by ridicule or by insisting that he was confused by what he had seen on television or by some bad dream he had had. Such confusion was sometimes compoun- ded, moreover, by the child hearing several dif- ferent stories about the death from different people or even from his surviving parent.
Many of the children's psychological problems seemed directly traceable to their having been ex- posed to situations of these kinds. Their prob- lems included chronic distrust of other people, inhibition of their curiosity, distrust of their own senses, and a tendency to find everything unreal.
Rosen (1955) describes an adult patient, a man of 27, who developed acute symptoms after his fiance? e had jilted him, because she had found him too moody and unpredictable. The patient began to feel that the world about him and also his own being were fragmenting, and that everything was unreal. He became depressed and suicidal; and he experienced a variety of peculiar bodily sensations, which included a feeling that he was choking. His thoughts, he said, felt like cotton-wool. Sometime during the second year of therapy the analyst, struck by a series of associ- ations the patient gave, and bearing in mind the
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? ? ? life history, ventured a reconstruction, namely that the patient's mother may have made a sui- cidal attempt during the patient's childhood that he (the patient) had witnessed. No sooner had this suggestion been offered than the patient be- came racked with convulsive sobbing. The ses- sion proved a turning point. Subsequently the pa- tient described how it had seemed to him that, when the analyst made his suggestion, it was not so much that he was restoring a memory as giv- ing him (the patient) permission to talk about something he had always in some way known about.
The authenticity of the memory was vouched for by the patient's father who admitted, when pressed, that the patient's mother had made sev- eral suicide attempts during the patient's child- hood. The one the patient had witnessed oc- curred some time during his third year. His nurse had heard sounds in the bathroom and had ar- rived in time to prevent his mother from strangling herself. It was not clear just how much the little boy had seen. But whenever later he had mentioned the event both father and nurse had disconfirmed his memories by alleging that it was something he must have imagined or had simply
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? ? ? been a bad dream. The father now claimed that he had felt it would have been harmful to his son to have remembered such an incident; but he also admitted that his attitude was dictated partly by his wish that the incident be kept secret from friends and neighbours. A year or so later the nurse had been discharged because the mother had found her presence too painful a reminder of the incident.
During one of the sessions before the vital re- construction was offered the patient had recalled the discharge of his beloved nurse as an event which he had always felt had been in some way his fault. Among many associations to it were re- current references to his having been, as a child, witness to something that had changed his life, though he did not know what. He also had the notion that his nurse had been the one witness on his behalf. Thus, although the memory had been shut away from conscious processing, it contin- ued to influence both what he thought and how he felt.
Elsewhere (Bowlby, 1973) I have drawn atten- tion to the far from negligible incidence of suicid- al attempts made by parents, and perhaps the even higher incidence of their threatening
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? ? ? suicide, and have remarked how little attention has been given to either attempts or threats in the psychiatric and psychotherapeutic literature. Per- haps there are many more cases similar to Rosen's than has yet been realized.
Among the many other situations that parents may wish a child had not observed, and that they may press him to suppose he never did, are those concerning their sexual activities. An example of this was told to me by a speech therapist who was trying to help an extremely disturbed little girl who hardly spoke at all. That she was well able to speak was, however, shown on certain dramatic occasions. She would sit a teddybear on a chair in a corner, then go over and, shaking her finger at him, would scold him in tones of extreme sever- ity: 'You're naughty--naughty Teddy--you didn't see that--you didn't see that, I tell you! ' This she repeated again and again with increasing vehe- mence. What the scenes were that Teddy was be- ing instructed he never saw was not difficult to guess: the little girl's mother was a teenage prostitute.
Clearly the purpose of these pressures by par- ents is to ensure that their children develop and maintain a wholly favourable picture of them. In
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? ? ? the examples thus far given the form of pressure exerted is crude. More frequent perhaps and just as damaging are instances in which the pressures are more subtle.
During the past two decades renewed attention has been paid to incest, both to its unrecognized high incidence and to its pathogenic effects on children. Much the commonest forms are between father and daughter or step-father and step-daughter.