Holds Plane of Life Is Fixed in First 5 Years
Child Is Set Then Toward Success or Failure.
BY GENEVIEVE FORBES HERRICK.
"We are born with a feeling of inferiority which is, normally, stimulus. We all have the same goal, the goal of superiority. The first 3, 4, possibly 5 years of life "style" our life into pursuit of the useful side of the goal, or the useless side of it. If that early period, for any one of three fundamental reasons, wrongly "styles" us, we hesitate, stop, escape, from the good part of the goal and slip over into the bad.
And the useless segment of the goal leads to cowardice, to pessimism, to suicide, to crime, to invalidism as a neurotic.
This was the chain of sequences which Dr. Alfred Adler, widely known Viennese psychiatrist, forged last night when he spoke on "The Discouraged Life" to many hundreds of psychologists, judges, teachers, doctors, social workers and just plain parents and citizens who crowded into the main dining room at the Union League club to hear him.
Then he swung the chain around again to the first five years of a child's life and declared that experts, or careful school teachers, trained by expert psychologists, could take an older child and retrace his steps back to this important early period, and swing him away from the black side of the goal to the white side, and start him forward again.
The three hazards in the early period are these, Dr. Adler pointed out: Physiological imperfections; being spoiled with too much care; being neglected with too little love.
The first type, the child who is born with imperfect organs of sight or sound or speech or the like, immediately feels inferior, feels always in danger, hesitates to meet any new situation and is anti-social. For him, the speaker declared, there isn't the same hope as for the other two classes.
"For it would be swindle to try to talk him out of his ideas."
The second type is the spoiled child. "You can always tell him," Dr. Adler explained, "because the moment he enters the room where his mother is he rushes, as if hypnotized, to her and leans against her."
The spoiled child is usually disorderly. In rare cases he is exceedingly tidy, but this is a bribe, so that he may be more spoiled.
"The third type," he concluded, "is the hated child, the child who is born ugly, who grows up without love or kindness, either at home or at school, or elsewhere. How can he help becoming discouraged and pessimistic?"
These last two groups, the children who have been so sheltered and protected they are afraid of new situations, and the child who has been so ignored he battles every new thing, still have the goal of superiority. But, fearful that they can't realize the useful part of it, they switch over to the useless side and determine to be lazy, or bad, or to commit murder, or to kill themselves.
"And when they commit murder or other evils," said the psychiatrist, "they go to elaborate means, and logical, to justify themselves. They blame their actions on bad health, on the other fellow's good clothes, on society. Never in all history of crime have I ever heard of a criminal who said, 'I have done that because I am a criminal.'"
The cure for the discouraged life, as worked out in 22 clinics in Vienna, supervised by Dr. Adler and supplemented by the public school teachers, is to trace the individual child back to his early life, and then to convince him that he'll be much more of a here [¿hero?] to swing his line back toward the useful side of the goal of superiority.
"The teachers are our only hope. They are the only ones who can make the students courageous. And they must break with the superstition that a child's intelligence and power are limited.
"Every man in the world can accomplish more than he now is. He doesn't need to be in a hurry about it. But the only limits to his accomplishment are the limits he set about himself, and those that his environment try to set about him."
Last night's meeting was held under the joint auspices of the Illinois Society for Mental Hygiene and the Chicago Association for Child Study and Parent Education.
Fuente: Chicago Daily Tribune (Chicago), miércoles 16 de febrero de 1927, p. 33; crónica firmada por Genevieve Forbes Herrick. Transcripción hecha sobre la imagen de la página (fultonhistory.com, «Chicago IL Daily Tribune 1927-02-16_86_40_33.pdf»); el OCR de la plataforma, que altera el orden de las palabras dentro de muchas líneas, solo sirvió de apoyo. El titular completo de la pieza es «Holds Plane of Life Is Fixed in First 5 Years» (el inventario lo abreviaba). Las comillas que abren el primer párrafo no se cierran en el original; en la cita del criminal el periódico usa comillas dobles dentro de las dobles, que se cambian por simples. Se respetan «would be swindle», «the limits he set», «his environment try», y la espaciada «being» (tercera línea del párrafo de los tres peligros), que se da en cursiva. En «more of a here» la letra final está mal impresa; probablemente «hero».