The Difficult Child in Industry
- Author:
Auden, M.D., M.A., Ph.D., F.R.C.P.,
School Medical Officer, Birmingham
Throughout the ages man has recognized that there is in some way or ther an association between physical deformity and a twisted outlook on life. When the Greeks fought under die walls of Troy, the one chieftain whom Homer described as ill-tempered and of unbridled tongue, hateful to his colleagues, and especially to Achilles, was ” Thersites, whose mind was full great store of evil words?evil favoured was he beyond all men that came to Ilios: bandy-legged and lame of one foot; rounded were his shoulders, stooping on to his chest with his mis-shapen head and a stubbly growth of hair.” (Iliad II, 211.)
Again, the one of our English kings, whose reputation the Chroniclers ave passed down to us as the worst, most cruel and most treacherous of char- acter, Richard the Hunchback, is well known to us from the self-portrait which akespeare puts into his mouth : ?
- ” Cheated of feature by dissembling Nature,
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time Into this breathing world, scarce half made up, And that so lamely and unfashionable That dogs bark at me as I halt by them, And therefore I am determined to prove a villain.” (Richard III, Act 1, Sc. 1.)
These are not mere idle figments of a poet’s imagination, but the result of the human observation that very often a deformed body houses a perverted mind. The problem that confronts us to-day is the underlying cause and nature of this association. Andre Maurois, in his fascinating lectures on Aspects of Biography, defines biography as the story of the evolution of the human soul, and remarks that our attitude towards biography is undergoing a change in the light of our new orientation in the study of character. He quotes thus from Harold Nicholson: ?
” There will be biographies in which development will be traced in all its intricacies and in a manner comprehensible only to the experts; there will be biographies examining the influence of heredity?biographies founded on Galton, on Lombroso, on Havelock Ellis, on Freud; there will be medical biographies?studies of the influence on character of the endocrine glands, studies of internal secretions and so on.” (Maurois? ” Aspects of Biography,” Ch. Ill, p. 69).
This is indeed true and one of the first fruits of this orientation of the new psychology is Emil Ludwig’s study of the ex-Emperor William. Does he not therein provide us with material which suggests that the ultimate basis of the attitude of the All Highest Emperor to his environment may be found in his withered sword arm? If this analysis is a valid one, and had he not, like Richard III, suffered from an early injury to his limb?-an Erbs palsy, or an infantile paralysis?the history of this kingdom might have been different and civilization might perhaps never have been shaken to its foundations by the Great War.
Whatever degree of truth may ultimately be brought out by this new avenue of approach, we can no longer believe that ” man is man and master of his fate,” but rather that from the earliest days of his childhood his outlook on life is being shaped by all those moulding forces which press upon him? the preamble of the life-long conflict between the pursuit of his own personal ends and desires and the imperative demands of the society into which he has been born, the struggle for a freedom which is unattainable. Character is but the resultant of the impress of these forces on mental constitution. It is this organic and mental constitution which determines the temperament, which, in the words of Professor Hoffding, ” as a background given from the beginning, determines the mode in which all experiences are received by the individual, and consequently the mode in which the individual reacts upon the external world.” (Hoffding, ” Outlines of Psychology,” p. 349.) We are thus compelled to the conclusion that all conduct, all behaviour, is but the reaction of the individual to the stresses of the external environment and is the product of mental processes, of mental life.
More than this, it is becoming recognized, chiefly from the observations of Kretschmer (” Korperbau und Character,” Berlin, 1921), that there is a biological affinity between certain bodily conformations and the general attitude of mind, with the behaviour reactions towards external circumstances. The fact is reflected very distinctly by the type of behaviour which results in the case of a mental breakdown in these different bodily types. Without committing ourselves to a full acceptance of this type-categorization, put forward by some continental writers, notably Kretschmer, Jung and Lazar, we can all recognize the validity of the more extreme types, illustrated by Don Quixote, the lean and lanky idealist, and Sancho Panza, the stout, full-bodied exponent of animal spirits. Shakespeare puts into the mouth of Caesar a clear-cut ex- pression of this contrast: ?
” Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek headed men and such as sleep at nights. Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look; such men are dangerous; He reads much.
He is a great observer and he looks Quite through the deeds of men; he loves no plays, He hears no music … seldom he smiles.” Julius Caesar I, 2, line 191.
In the early dawn of self-consciousness the infant begins to recognize that in addition to itself there is a non-self world about it, and with this recog- nition comes the desire to dominate that world. This desire in a limited sense may be described as the ” lust to power,” i.e., the wish to rise superior to the environment and to make it serve our ends. The feeling of helplessness to accomplish this desire is the forerunner of a struggle which is life-long, and if, in the growing child this feeling of helplessness is reinforced by a real, organic handicap, or by a thwarting of its attempt to assert its own individuality, a feeling of inferiority will root itself deeply and colour the whole subsequent reaction to its environment.
Hence our endeavour should be directed towards the prevention of the growth of this feeling of failure and to its replacement by a courageous recog- nition of reality. If we fail in this endeavour the child may solve its own conflict in its own way by learning to livd in a fantasy world of its own making, and thus win its way to a fancied freedom with results that may be disastrous. Yet the essence of all social life is the surrender of freedom and man is essen- tially a social animal.* It is when most deeply steeped in the sense of com- munity that he feels most content. Remove him from the society, the converse, ?r the respect of his fellows and he becomes the prey of mental discomfort, but grant him the possession of any quality which confers a feeling of social excellence, then his emotional self-regard is satisfied. Man-kind is strangely ?pen to suggestion, and a child quickly senses the slightest suspicion of con- tempt, which is almost inseparable from being an object of pity, which runs counter to his schema of self, i.e., the conception which he forms of his own Aristotle. Politics 1. 2. personality and its demands for domination over the other personalities who form his social environment. Hence a child having some physical peculiarity, or detriment, readily reacts to the feeling of inferiority and of deprivation of that which he feels to be his own inherent right, with results which may show themselves in all kinds of behaviour, which at first sight appear to be quite unconnected with the actual cause.
May we not attribute some of the venom of the pen of Alexander Pope to the fact that he was ” little and crooked “? Here is a more recent example. A man, aged 36, who had always been ” somewhat difficult,” was transferred to a new branch of his employment. He soon began to be late and irregular in his attendance and occasionally failed to put in an appearance. He complained that the reason of his irregularity was severe pain in the back, which prevented him from getting out of bed until 10 o’clock, when it passed away. ” Sharp, shooting, burning pain, it saps my strength, my vitality, I feel as if I could sink in a heap on the floor.”
Repeated physical examination revealed no organic cause for the pain. During one of these examinations I noticed that he never showed his left hand, which proved to be congenitally deformed. He admitted at once that this deformity had always given rise to a sense of shame, especially in his school and appren- ticeship days. The whole difficulty thus proved to be the outcome of a mal- adjustment with his new surroundings and it was clear that the pain which, it will be noticed, disappeared as soon as it was too late to go to work, solved his mental conflict, the protean basis of which was this sense of shame, assoc- iated with the deformity of his hand, an emotional conflict of childhood, which had cast its shadow over his own personality and raised its head once more in the circumstances of a new conflict. His excuses for his irregularity were clearly rationalizations of the real and underlying cause, whereby he attempted uncon- sciously to satisfy the demands of his schema of self and to mask the real cause. We have been strangely slow in understanding the import of these observations in relation to education. Education is in itself a matter of utilit- arian expediency, in that it is to the benefit of the community that every member should be able in the fullest degree to meet all the demands which membership of that community connotes. This can only be compassed com- pletely by the establishment of an adjustment and a harmony between the developing human organism and its surroundings. In the past the physically handicapped individual has been alternately an object of fear and derision, pity and charity, but only in recent years has he been recognized as coming within the compass of the declaration of the tripartite right of every citizen, ” liberty, equality and fraternity.” Whether the cripple is the object of fear, neglect, or pity, the psychological reaction of the individual has been untoward.
The fear of the cripple as a malign creature, which was prevalent in the middle ages, was doubtless in part due to his own behaviour reaction to the treatment with which he met, but was also the result of that deep-seated and primitive sense of shame and disappointment which all parents feel, disguised and permuted as it may be by love and tenderness, in having brought into the world a being who is in some degree imperfect. This primitive feeling is the same whether the condition is congenital or acquired. This feeling was, how- ever, greatly intensified, when a perversion of theology taught that the bearing of such a child was a retribution of divine justice, and a punishment for some moral failure on the part of the parents, whereby the sins of the fathers were visited upon the children.
” Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.” (Lucretius, Book I, line 10.) It was inevitable that with such living evidence ever before them and their neighbours, they should treat with harshness and contumely the innocent scapeg?at which was to them a clear and visible sign of their unworthiness, which would otherwise have been hidden from the knowledge of men.
Pity, on the other hand, cannot fail to destroy self-confidence and to pro- duce a sense of inferiority, and, therefore, will not bring into action the right kind of resistance and determination to overcome the difficulty caused by the physical handicap and to rise superior to it. One of the disadvantages of the Special Schools, in which cripple children are aggregated together, without the stimulus of school contact with their normal fellows, is that the aggrega- tion may have the same result. The earlier Elementary Education Acts com- pletely ignored the rights of the crippled child, indeed, it was not till 1918 that the obligation of all Local Authorities to provide for such children was specifically laid down by statute. Hence it came about that this neglect and failure to recognize a national duty was remedied by pity, and all honour to Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Mrs. Pilcher and those other pioneers who helped to rouse the community to a realization of this duty by the establishment of voluntary schools for crippled children in London. But it is to one pioneer above all others that we owe a fuller recognition of the only sound method of approach to this social problem. Dame Agnes Hunt has taught us to realize that not in charity, but in an adequate curative and corrective treatment, coupled with a complete training for industrial employment and citizenship, he the means whereby a normal healthy outlook on life can best be assured. The real value of the Special Schools lies in the scope which they offer for giving a thorough and sound industrial training in some employment for which each child is physically suited, for a child suffering from a physical handicap must be so well trained and become so skilled and adept at his work that he can find a market for his skill, despite the possibility that his output ^ay be less in amount, or in regularity than that of his able-bodied com- petitors. Otherwise, under the stress of competition he will fail.
But there are other categories of children suffering from physical handi- cap besides that of the cripple. Improved conditions of life, better and more adequate facilities for continued treatment and supervision and all those factors which have operated in the reduction of child mortality, have allowed many handicapped children to survive to adult life, who formerly would have perished. Diseases of the heart, renal and intestinal systems all add their quota to the sum total of those children whose subsequent entrance into the world of industry presents special difficulties. It is not, however, with the difficulties of obtaining employment suitable to their physical needs with which we are dealing to-day, but rather with the psychological background. Let us take the instance of a young person who suffers from epilepsy. I have no hesitation in saying that there is no more disastrous rule-of-thumb measure than that of excluding from school a child who has developed attacks of an epileptic nature. Apart from the fact that a regularly ordered life, such as that gained by the demands of school attendance, is of the utmost value in improving the general mental stability, the peculiar egocentric attitude of the psychopath is greatly intensified by deprivation of normal social intercourse with other children, and the inevitable loss of education entailed by exclusion from school further increases the already great difficulty in choosing suitable employment when the child passes beyond the age of compulsory school attendance. Hence there is established a vicious circle, out of which the subject all too soon ceases to attempt to raise himself. Our experience in Birmingham (where we have for twenty years kept a special register of such children with epileptic manifestations who attend the ordinary elementary schools and are medically examined at regular intervals) has shown that the great majority pass through their school life and join their normal fellows in industry without detriment. With other forms of psychopathic personality we need not deal, beyond stating that the above remark applies equally to them. In some of these the psychopathic condition is familial and too deep- seated to allow them ever to adapt themselves to meet the storm and stress of competitive life. They are, in fact, the ” spoilt work ” of the human work- shop, the burden of which will have to be borne by the community as the price it must pay for its advances. The more complex the organization of society, the greater will be the demands that society makes upon its members and the greater will be the amount of human flotsam and jetsam cast up on the shores of civilization.
There are others who show those remarkable character-changes as the after-result of an attack of epidemic encephalitis, which render them too emotionally unstable to be employable. In these cases it appears that there is what is known in psychology as regression, i.e., a return back to that indiv- idualist period of childhood, in which the child is, to use Professor Lloyd Morgan’s term, ” a self of enjoyment,” i.e., before ” the years that bring the inevitable yoke ” of subordination of his own individual desires to the dictates and inhibitions of the social world in which he lives and moves and has his being. Hence such an individual loses his power of self-criticism and shows an increased suggestibility to emotional stress. He thus becomes the creature of his own passions. Stealing, lying, violence and indifference to the conveni- ence of others make such patients quite impossible in the home, or workshop. Moreover, a very large number of these patients show some physical defect such as a partial paralysis with contractures, or an inability to move the limbs quickly, or, more frequently still, the progressive loss of the power of volun- tary movement, to which the term Parkinsonism is applied. Thus, in the less advanced stages of the disease, the patients can be placed with equal propriety in the category of the physically, or that of the mentally disabled.
But much more commonly met than this class is the young person who has passed through his school life without attracting special attention, yet throws up with apparent indifference job after job, or is repeatedly dismissed, as unsatisfactory. It is in cases of this kind that a psychological examination may be of the greatest value, for this wayward behaviour is always to be traced to some maladjustment, in the home, the social, or the industrial relations. The term ” adolescent instability ” is sometimes used in connection with these cases, but a descriptive label of this kind should only be used after detailed examination into the whole social orientation of the subject and the exclusion of other causative factors, such as may most conveniently be included in the continental term ” ElternonflictenAdolescence is above all the time when youth is seeking to break down the bond of dependence which has been forged in infancy and childhood, yet this is the bond which, above all, parents strive to keep unbroken. It is generally true that we parents are ambitious for the success of our children, because we hope to see in them surrogates for ourselves, untrammelled by the failures and weaknesses of which we ourselves are conscious. Hence we try to mould them with the same impress with which we have been stamped and too often look with dismay and even with dread at any attempt for freedom and independence.
Another cause of difficulty may arise, when a child from a sheltered and indulgent home, in which he, or she, is the centre of a little solar system round which everything seems to revolve, goes into employment. He suddenly finds himself in circumstances in which his personality is of no account. It is a rude awakening and he finds himself pitted against a reality with which his own pleasure principle is in harsh conflict. Moreover, with such a psychological background, the attempt to guide a young person against the stream of his ?wn emotional trends, inevitably arouses unconscious resistance and thus makes still wider the breach and hinders rather than helps.
A few years ago I saw a young woman of 17, whose work as a domestic servant was said to be careless and unsatisfactory. She was an orphan who had been living in an Orphanage, maintained in all kindness and pity under the auspices of a Religious Community. Her personal appearance, with short skirts, stylishly bobbed hair and a suspicion of lip salve, gave at once the key to the situation. She was film struck and her fantasy was that of emulating Mary Pickford on the screens. This attitude of mind, quite natural to a girl growing to womanhood from a somewhat sombre childhood, was wholly foreign to her surroundings in the Home and was wholly misunderstood.
The result was that she came to be regarded as a lost sheep and was repeatedly J?ld that sue was ” a naughty girl.” I suggested that she should be transferred t()r a holit iy to a place of less exacting piety, but unfortunately, mistaking the object of the transfer and regarding it as a probable means of further attempts to reform her, she tried to escape through a window on the night of her arrival and fell some thirty feet. No serious damage, however, was done, but on recovering consciousness in the Hospital, her first words were, ” Will my photograph be in the papers? She was afterwards placed in another situa- tion and subsequently married. To-day there is no happier home and no more model housewife and mother in the country than this once film-struck ” naughty girl.” Yet at that time she stood at the parting of the ways, a station fraught with all the possibilities of a life tragedy.
Again, cases are met with in which some handicap of a physical or mental character exists, which may cause difficulty in industrial life. A lad of 18 came to me in great anxiety lest he should be discharged from his employ- ment. His work was of a highly skilled character, that of making and repairing pneumatic pumps for motor tyres. He exhibited a condition of complete word-blindness, being quite unable to read, with the result that when the work was passed to him by the foreman he was not able to read the tally with the instructions which was affixed thereto. Apart from this not infrequent defect he was exceptionally intelligent. An interview with his employer, who was quite ignorant of the existence of this defect, proved that this lad’s fears were groundless, for his employer stated that so far from dismissing him he was one of the best workers in his employ. To a less discerning employer this defect might have appeared to be evidence of mental deficiency. It will be easily understood that the existence of such a handicap might cause acute distress, especially if it became known to his fellow workers, and the sense of inferiority thus induced may show itself in all kinds of bizarre ways. One boy who suffered from this defect, goaded by the gibes of his companions, attempted to set fire to the workshop and was sent to a Colony for the Feeble- minded. He was, however, subsequently discharged to the care of his parents. This sense of inferiority is now becoming recognized as the underlying cause of much of the anti-social action which brings the perpetrators within the arm of the Law, and we are beginning to understand that the delinquency, which has been attributed to feeble-mindedness is in truth the result of the inferiority which the label of feeblemindedness has produced.
A few weeks ago I examined a lad who was charged with stealing. Though only 13 ^ years old he stood 5 ft. 9^ ins. in height and weighed 9 st. 3^4 lbs. ” I was so big and awkward at school and I’ve got to take drill and walk along the street with little chaps and it worried me. They call me ” lanky ” and ” lardy,” because I used to put brilliantine on my hair. I never used to mix with the other boys, they are rowdy and I am very reserved. I used to walk in the fields. I was never out late. I’d like to get something in the chemistry line; I like experiments and finding out things. I read adventure and mystery books. I thought I was big enough to get away and go to work, so I took a bike.” He rode nearly to London, but having no money went to the police station. Fourteen days later he saw his mother’s purse and took enough money to go to London, where twenty-four hours of hunger and ex- haustion once more caused him to go to the police.
It is abundantly clear that the giant growth of this lad and the conse- quent maladjustment with his school, as well as his home surroundings, were the direct cause of his misdemeanour, which shows the characteristic impul- siveness and failure to weigh the consequences which so generally accompany these conflicts. The boy was in no sense a misdemeanant, and for my part I am convinced that it would have been a much better solution of his mal- adjustment, and would have offered a better prospect for the future, if, instead of committing him to an industrial school, a free place had been found for him in a secondary school.
A defect which at first showing would seem to render the sufferer almost unemployable?that of deaf mutism?has somewhat surprising results. In certain factories these girls are welcomed because of necessity they cannot waste their time and distract one another’s attention by chattering. Conse- quently, their output is good, with the result that the girls settle down with a sense of superiority and happiness in their surroundings. Possibly a contribu- tory factor in this content is the fact that the noise of the factory does not disturb and bewilder them as it does a girl of normal hearing.
How far a psychological examination of children about to leave school to enter employment will aid in a solution of our problems it is at present early to judge, even if such an examination were possible, except in a few selected cases. On broad lines it is, of course, not difficult to classify these young persons into somewhat ill-defined categories (the placid, the excitable, the keen, the apathetic, the extrovert, the introvert, and so on), and to choose work likely to satisfy their interests, but the real difficulty lies in the absence of any real test of temperament, except that of trial and error. Yet it is, as we have already said, the temperament which determines the individual reaction to the individual stress.
That the child who has some physical or mental handicap should feel acutely the sense of discouragement which the knowledge of an unfavourable comparison with its compeers engenders, is perhaps inevitable, and the res- ponsibility of those who have to deal with them, whether parents or teachers, ls a great one. All too readily the breeze of depreciation scatters the grain of diffidence and self-mistrust from which in later life is gathered ” after full flower a harvest all of tears.”
The difficulty really lies in large part in the false values in life which the competitive struggle of the world to-day does so much to foster. In the mech- anization of our modern life the demand for ” efficiency,” so called, tends to a disregard of the infinite variety in human personality, and, struggle as we may for our individual freedom, we are in danger of becoming more and ttiore the slaves of the Frankenstein which we have created. ” The true Civilization,” wrote Baudelaire, ” has nothing to do with gas, or steam. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.” (Baudelaire, ” Mon eur mis a nu.”)
Dante gives us the remedy: ? “No Creator, or creature, my son, was ever without love, either natural, or rational, and this thou knowest. The natural is alway without error, but the other may err through an evil object… . Hence thou mayest understand that love must be the seed of every virtue and of every deed that deserves punishment.”
Purgatorio, XVII, 91-96.
This discourse of Virgil to Dante contains the gist of the whole matter, for it is only in so far as we are able to project ourselves into and identify our- selves with those who depend upon us for help, encouragement and guidance, that we can understand them, and without understanding we cannot serve them. This self-projection and identification is most fittingly expressed in the one word ” Love ” and Love is a fulfilment of the Law. (Rom. XIII, 10.)
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