Child’s Discovery of Death
- Author:
Mrs. Sylvia
Anthony. Kegan Paul. lis. 6d.
The writer of this book is to be congratulated ?n having undertaken an original piece of ^search, one which needed a most careful Planning of approach to the groups of children observed in order to get as spontaneous a resPonse as possible to the tests used, i.e. story completion test and an intelligence test with modifications. In addition, “home records” were made by parents and others with due safeguards.
Mrs. Anthony shows that reference to death appears in children’s fantasies, even though no mention of the subject may have been made by the parents or others. In certain children the death of a member of the family or of a near relative may cause emotional upset resulting from death-wishes and such children will need careful handling, all the more so in that few adults can consider the idea of death with equanimity.
Passing on to the idea of death in the child’s directive thought, results of a test as to the meaning of the word ” dead ” fell into five categories which had a significant correlation with both chronological and mental age, the majority showing application to humanity and elaboration of cultural-symbolic aspects of death.
From the home records, Mrs. Anthony concludes that the child can attach no meaning to the word ” dead ” until it reaches the ” why ” stage, but this conclusion takes no account of the fact that even the young child may ” feel ” that someone is dead. Early ideas are limited and erroneous; primitive ideas with regard to the dead are manifest in some children who abhor the idea of touching anything dead. The killing of insects may satisfy a desire for power in some children?but this is not necessarily cognate with a desire to kill.
In discussing the development of emotion with the idea of death in the mind of the child, Mrs. Anthony follows closely the school of psycho- analytic theory as to birth anxiety and aggressive impulses, and this leads us to the idea of magical thinking about death. With the development of conscious logic, however, the child learns that natural law prevails over human will and he may now pass through a stage when he will seek to allay anxiety aroused by the association of death with the self by denying that he will die. This attitude may help the child to assimilate the painful idea of death into his consciousness. It will be seen that Mrs. Anthony’s book develops a most interesting theme and in a short review it is impossible either to do full justice to the material provided or to raise the many points that will without doubt cause much discussion.
The importance of research in this subject cannot be doubted since it is already known that the child’s uncertainty as to the implications of death and the frequently obscure rationalizations which he forms on the subject are responsible for subsequent emotional maladjustments.
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