Psychology and parenthood

by H. Addington Bruce

But on his next visit, when the child chanced to be asleep, Doctor Hecht noticed that there was then no contracture of the arm, and that he could move it without disturbing the boy in the slightest. So soon, however, as he awoke, the contracture returned, and he wailed and shrieked when his arm was touched. To the astonished mother, the doctor said:

“I see what the trouble is. Your son needs a certain kind of treatment that I can administer only at my office. Bring him there as soon as possible.”

The treatment in question consisted in the application of a succession of slight electrical shocks, just painful enough to be felt. These, the doctor assured the boy, would cure him completely.

“If they do not,” said he, “your mother must bring you back, and I will give you a stronger treatment next time. I don’t think, though, that that will be necessary, do you?”

And, in point of fact, no second treatment was needed. From that moment the boy ceased complaining of his arm, the contracture and paralysis entirely disappeared, and he was like any normal, healthy child.

I have cited these three cases, not because of their singularity, but because they afford concrete illustration of some little known facts with which every parent ought to be acquainted. In each case, it will be observed, an element of deception was present; and, moreover, in each case the deception was seemingly motiveless. The child who pretended that she had been operated upon had apparently nothing to gain from the deceit practised by her; neither had the little girl who played the part of a “poltergeist,” nor the boy with the sham contracture and paralysis. Besides which, in two of the three cases the children subjected themselves to considerable inconvenience and even pain; and, in all three cases, they ran the risk of severe punishment. None the less, they systematically and persistently kept up their deceptions until discovery ensued.

Now, why did they do it?

They did it, as recent medical and psychological investigation into the inner life of childhood has conclusively demonstrated, because they were so constituted that they could not help doing it. And for the same reason, hundreds—nay, thousands—of children, before and since, have been doing much the same thing. It is not that they are merely “naughty.” The ordinary naughty child will, to be sure, lie and cheat and otherwise deceive; but only from readily ascertainable motives, and never in the way of an elaborately sustained deception. When a child’s “naughtiness” takes this latter form, medical authorities are to-day agreed, it is in reality indicative of the presence of a really serious disease—hysteria.

Than this disease—of which most people, unfortunately, have next to no exact knowledge, mistakenly confusing it with, and confining it to, uncontrollable attacks of weeping or laughing—there is no malady more insidious, peculiar, or dangerous in the variety of its possible consequences. Its peculiarity lies in the fact—discovered only within recent years—that it is always rooted in an extreme “suggestibility” on the part of its victims; and that the symptoms it develops are invariably conditioned by the character of the suggestions received from the environment. Hysteria is, to put the case briefly, pre-eminently a mental trouble; and this although, not infrequently, its only outward manifestations are wholly physical.