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Recollections and Reflections
Bettelheim, Bruno. Recollections and Reflections. First British edition. London, Thames and Hudson, 1990. 16 cm x 24 cm. XII, 282, (3) pages. Original Hardcover with dustjacket in protective Mylar. Very good condition with some minor signs of external wear. From the library of swiss - american - irish poet Chuck Kruger. With his name to front free endpaper. Occasional markings in the text. Contains among others the following Freud's Vienna; Berggasse; How I Learned About Psychoanalysis; Two Views of Freud (Jones's and Fromm's); A Secret Asymmetry; Lionel Trilling on Literature and Psychoanalysis; Essential Books of One's Life; The Art of Motion Pictures; The Child's Perception of the City; Children and Museums etc.
- GenresPsychology
282 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
25 people want to read
About the author
Bruno Bettelheim
116 books140 followersBruno Bettelheim (1903-1990) was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his views on autism and for his claimed success in treating emotionally disturbed children.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
December 14, 2024
6 stars. Incredible book. Deeply philosophical and psychological . Here are the best bits:
I wrote a book on the question which I called The Informed Heart, in part to indicate that while many people have warm hearts, they can, unfortunately, be poorly informed hearts.
Of the consequences of ignorance, Hillel said two thousand years ago: "He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it; he who does not learn is worthy of death."
Nothing can better illustrate the difference in the mentality of Eastern and Western Jewry than the fact that under Hitler about 350,000 Jews fled Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands fled from Belgium and Paris, and the majority of Jews in Communist Russia fled or were evacuated when the Germans invaded, but in Poland, by contrast, though there was an unguarded escape route through the Pripet Marshes, only a few thousand Jews availed themselves of this opportunity. In the main ghetto, Jews looked upon flight with a sense of futility. They had long since lost the active leadership that a victimized population needs for staging any successful resistance or revolt.
"I kiss the children with my eyes, with my thoughts, as I ask myself the question: Who are you, you who are such a wonderful secret to me? What are the questions you dare not ask? I kiss them through my arduous desire to discover in which way, in which manner, in regard to what problems I can help you. I embrace children in my mind as the astronomer tries to embrace in his mind the star which is, which has been, and which will be." And children were indeed the stars he tried to reach, by which he guided his life.
Korczak had learned to do this, and he made it possible for his children to do the same. On the last pages of his ghetto diary, he wrote this confession: "I am angry with nobody. I do not wish anybody evil. I am unable to do so. I do not know how one can do it." Up to the last, he lived according to what the rabbinical fathers once wrote. When asked, "When everyone acts inhuman, what should a man do?" their answer was, "He should act more human." This is what Korczak did to the
very end.
When we watch a film, we regress and lose our critical faculties. The darkness of the room suggests a return into the womb, but our regression is much more than the result of the fact that we have become entirely passive. By identifying with the viewpoint of the camera, we experience pure perception. We lose awareness of our body position, we no longer orient ourselves within the world of our experience— we are being oriented by the camera, forced now to look this way and now that way. Experiences are inflicted on us, and short of shutting our eyes or looking away from the screen, we are powerless to condition what we experience, just as when we were in the womb, or when we were very small children.
This, then, has been the differential between my experience of moving pictures and that of other art forms. The more significant my experience with some other arts has been, the more I responded to a work of art, the deeper it carried me into myself. The more I responded to a movie, the more it carried me away into its world, and the less of myself was left in the experience.
As a young man I was convinced that one had to create something worthwhile to believe that one's life had not been wasted; but as an old man I knew that the best one can hope for in one's life, and what is sufficient for one's salvation, is contained in the statement justifying Faust's apotheosis, as the angels sing: "Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen" ("He who always strains and strives with all his power, him we are able to redeem").
And psychoanalysis was but one of the major intellectual developments of a time when a pervasive awareness of political decline led Vienna's cultural elites to abandon politics as a subject to take seriously, to withdraw their attention from the wider world and turn inward instead.
One way to cope with these losses which presaged the doom of the empire was to use denial as a kind of defense. Thus the Viennese intelligentsia might say, "While the situation is desperate, it is not serious." In this mind-set, which was very common for many years in Vienna, external reality is discounted and all mental energy is turned inward: only the inner life of the individual is allowed to matter.
Emperor Franz Joseph's marriage to Elizabeth, a very young and very beautiful Bavarian princess, was one of great love and devotion on his part, and this love continued all through his life. However, despite the emperor's efforts to please Elizabeth and make her happy, she soon distanced herself from him and from the court, a process which became ever more extreme until she spent hardly any time with him, or in Vienna. We can now see Elizabeth as hysterical, narcissistic, and anorexic. At the time, however, she was acclaimed, with much justification, as the most beautiful woman in Europe. To retain her distinctive beauty, the attribute responsible for her rise to empress, she starved herself on various extreme diets, such as having nothing except six glasses of milk in a day, for days on end. On frequent walking tours, she marched at such a brisk pace that her companions fell behind her in exhaustion, as She continued on for seven, eight, even ten hours.
self-analysis must precede the analysis of others; in order to understand the unconscious fully, one must study one's own unconscious first.
The choice of his home's location may also have reflected Freud's belief in the relative un-importance of surface appearances-his perception that behind commonplace externals, much more important secret meanings may be hidden; and the more ordinary the surface, the more successfully so.
If these objects were important for Freud as symbols of his life's work, then we can understand why they were so crowded together in small spaces, in a seemingly disorganized jumble, just as repressed events are jumbled and crowded in the unconscious. We can also then comprehend why their aesthetic merits did not matter to Freud. For the psychoanalyst, beauty lies in the complete and undistorted recovery of what has long been buried in the unconscious, and not in whether what has been "unearthed" has any particular artistry. The deeper and longer something has been buried, the more carefully it has been made inaccessible (like objects in Egyptian graves), the greater the psychoanalytic achievement in its complete recovery.
Maybe the popular American view of the psychoanalyst as a "head-shrinker" highlights best the difference between how things are done today in America and how they were done then in Vienna. The reason this headshrinker image is so widely accepted in America (although it is always recognized as a funny and ironic image that puts the psychoanalyst down a few pegs) is, I believe, that it represents the patient's reaction to the psychoanalyst's belief that he is superior to the patient.
For example, in a flash Johnny had taught me how inclined we are to believe that the wellspring of our action is concern for the other, rather than self-involvement; and how much we can learn about ourselves from others, provided we accept that what they say or do may reveal things not only about them, but also about us.
Jonny taught me that the magnitude of one’s misery alters the meaning of all experiences.
I had believed that I had truly learned —if not from Freud, even earlier from Terence's "Humani nil a me alienum puto"— that to be truly human means not being alienated from anything human. Still, I had permitted myself to be alienated by Johnny's behavior. Realizing my insensitivity to his suffering, which prevented me from understanding why he acted as he did, taught me from then on always to believe that whatever the behavior, it would seem the most natural thing for me to do were I in the other's situation.
My experiences with psychoanalysis, of which I have recounted only two early and crucial events, have convinced me that it is not the theoretical mastery of a problem which permits its deepest understanding. It is one's inner experiences that permit gaining a full grasp of what is involved in the inner experiences of others, a knowledge which then can become the basis for theoretical studies.
Great Masters need great disciples: it is prerequisite of greatness among those who found movements.
Only one of many anecdotes may be quoted to show how revealing of Freud these volumes can be as source material. Jones tells how, during meals, Freud would not talk to his family because he enjoyed his food so much that he concentrated on eating instead. If one of his children was absent, Freud "would point mutely at the vacant chair with his knife or fork and look inquiringly to his wife at the other end of the table. She would explain that the child was not coming in to dinner or that something or other had detained him, whereupon Freud, with his curiosity satisfied, would nod silently and proceed with his meal."
Man is basically a machine, driven by libido and regulating itself by the need to reduce painful tension to a certain minimal threshold. This reduction of tension constitutes the nature of pleasure.
both men, each in his own way, agreed that the main issue of contention was Jung's refusal to accept the central role of sexuality in human affairs, on which Freud insisted. It is important to note that for Jung, what had originally been a personal need to deny the importance of sexuality became a theoretical issue. As so often in psychological matters, highly personal matters eventually determined theoretical positions, something the psychoanalyst should be the first to recognize.
I can hardly bear to listen when you continue to enthuse about your old love and past dreams, and [I] count on an ally in the marvelous little stranger. I am, as you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause, and would like to take it that if the child turns out to be a boy, he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. ... We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us.
The first thing that occurs to me to say about literature, as I consider it in the relation in which Freud stands to it, is that literature is dedicated to the conception of the self... At the behest of literature, and with its help [we are] able to imagine the selfhood of others, no doubt through the process of identification..
Scott Fitzgerald's sentence "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." And one may think that the sentence from Howards End, "Death destroys a man but the idea of death is what saves him," which Trilling quotes, represents his idea of what makes for the truly moral and artistic life.
One of the best-known tags of literary criticism is Coleridge's phrase "the willing suspension of disbelief." Coleridge says that the willing suspension of disbelief constitutes "poetic faith."... This Freud was able to do in a most extraordinary way, and not by the mere impulse of his tem-perament, but systematically, as an element of his science.... [When his patients told him stories they invented,] he did not blame them, he did not say they were lying—he willingly suspended his disbelief in their fantasies, which they themselves believed, and taught himself how to find the truth that was really in them.
One of the best ways to see how much we have changed and, we hope, grown over the years is to reread books that at one time were very meaningful to us. This experience was so valuable in understanding my own development that, in teaching psychology to university students, I encouraged them to reread books they had loved at one time. Their task was to try to understand why this had been so, and why it often no longer was, or not to the same degree. They were usually amazed that in this way they were able to recognize change in themselves and to speculate about its causes. Thus how we react to what we read is always a function more of what is going on in us at the time than of a book's content.
From my reading of Freud I had learned how great a role in man's life is played by the irrational element of his mind.
And as people used to go to church on Sundays (and still do), so many today go to the movies on weekends. But while in the past most people attended church only on some days, they now watch moving images every day.
Now catharsis, as the discharge of emotions and not their refinement, at best provides temporary relief. It doesn't lead to a solution of what oppresses us. In fact, catharsis leaves the problem unchanged, soon pressing for the next discharge.
Because the facts available about our past are insufficient, because the future is inscrutable and the present too confusing, man needs the assurance that myths, and predominantly religion, used to offer: the conviction that his society will survive him and his work, thus transcending his all too limited existence, and extending it beyond his days, so that he will not have lived in vain.
What our society suffers from most today is that absence of consensus about what it and life in it ought to be. Such consensus cannot be gained from society's present stage, or from fantasies about what it ought to be. A consensus in the present can be achieved only through a shared understanding of the past, as Homer's epics informed those who lived centuries later what it meant to be Greek, and by what images and ideals they were to live their lives and organize their societies.
Most societies derive consensus from a long history, a language all their own, a common religion, common ancestry. The myths by which they live are based on all of these. But the United States is a country of immigrant peoples, coming from a great variety of nations. Lately it has been posited that an asocial, narcissistic personality has become characteristic of Americans, and that this prevents us from achieving a consensus that would counteract a tendency to withdraw into private worlds.
Past and future are the lasting dimensions of our lives; the present is but a fleeting moment. So these visions about the future also contain our past; in George Lucas's Star Wars and its sequels, battles are fought around issues that also motivated man in the past. There is good reason for Yoda's appearance in the first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back: he is but a reincarnation of the teddy bear of infancy, to which we turn for solace; and the Jedi Knight is the wise old man, or the helpful animal, of the fairy tale, the promise from our distant past that we shall be able to rise to meet the most difficult tasks life can present us with. Thus, any vision about the future is really based on visions of the past, because that is all we can know for certain.
Shakespeare wrote his plays not in Stratford but in London, one of the largest cities of the Western world. Only with the creation of a large city and a permanent capital in Kyoto in the eighth century did Japanese literature begin to bloom. At the beginning of the present technological civilization, after having spent most of his long life in a small town, Goethe said that Germany's cultural life was mediocre because men of culture and talent were scattered, rather than living in one large city, such as Paris, "where the highest talents of a great kingdom are all assembled on one spot and, by daily intercourse, strife, and emulation mutually instruct and emulate each other," conditions which permit or at the least greatly facilitate the creation of high literature.
I believe Erwin Panofsky is right when he says in Meaning in the Visual Arts, "I do not believe that a child or adolescent should be taught only that which he can fully understand. It is, on the contrary, the half-digested phrase, the half-placed proper name, the half-understood verse, remembered for sound and rhythm rather than meaning, which persists in the memory, and captures the imagination.
Only the child whose emotional life is very barren or whose conditions of life are extremely destructive will "live" in the world of television programs. In his case, doing so may be preferable to facing his actual life, which could lead him to give up all hope, or to explode into violence against those who make his life miserable.
We ought to remember how restricted children's lives have become. It used to be possible to let children roam all by themselves for much of the day, or in the chance company of other children. They used to play somewhere in the neighborhood, or in an empty shack, or wander the woods and fields. There they could dream their own daydreams, without parents nearby demanding that they use their time more constructively.
Even in a psychiatric hospital she could remain only a month because it, too, was not equipped to handle such a wild child. There she had to be kept in a maximum-security room, without any furniture, where she spent her days naked because she tore off all clothes that were put on her. Most of the time Anna crouched in a corner in total withdrawal; from this she emerged for short periods of wild screaming, running, jumping, and pounding on walls and door.
Korczak's method of teaching his students at the Institute for Pedagogy in Warsaw, where he taught for many years, may be illustrated by his taking them to observe the workings of a child's heart as it could be seen on the screen of an X-ray machine. The child had to stand in front of a screen in a darkened room and was naturally apprehensive about the darkness, the unaccustomed surroundings, and the strange machinery. Speaking very softly, so as not to add to the child's fears, and deeply moved by what could be seen on the screen, Korczak enjoined his students to take a good look and never forget what they saw: "How stormily a child's heart beats when he is frightened, and this it does even more when his heart reacts to an adult's annoyance with him, not to mention when he fears to be punished."
Korczak himself knew very well that self-control was a most necessary ingredient for being able to live a good life. He asserted that when everything is permissible, then no willpower can develop; but willpower is most necessary if the child is to meet the rigors of life successfully.
I wrote a book on the question which I called The Informed Heart, in part to indicate that while many people have warm hearts, they can, unfortunately, be poorly informed hearts.
Of the consequences of ignorance, Hillel said two thousand years ago: "He who does not increase his knowledge decreases it; he who does not learn is worthy of death."
Nothing can better illustrate the difference in the mentality of Eastern and Western Jewry than the fact that under Hitler about 350,000 Jews fled Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, tens of thousands fled from Belgium and Paris, and the majority of Jews in Communist Russia fled or were evacuated when the Germans invaded, but in Poland, by contrast, though there was an unguarded escape route through the Pripet Marshes, only a few thousand Jews availed themselves of this opportunity. In the main ghetto, Jews looked upon flight with a sense of futility. They had long since lost the active leadership that a victimized population needs for staging any successful resistance or revolt.
"I kiss the children with my eyes, with my thoughts, as I ask myself the question: Who are you, you who are such a wonderful secret to me? What are the questions you dare not ask? I kiss them through my arduous desire to discover in which way, in which manner, in regard to what problems I can help you. I embrace children in my mind as the astronomer tries to embrace in his mind the star which is, which has been, and which will be." And children were indeed the stars he tried to reach, by which he guided his life.
Korczak had learned to do this, and he made it possible for his children to do the same. On the last pages of his ghetto diary, he wrote this confession: "I am angry with nobody. I do not wish anybody evil. I am unable to do so. I do not know how one can do it." Up to the last, he lived according to what the rabbinical fathers once wrote. When asked, "When everyone acts inhuman, what should a man do?" their answer was, "He should act more human." This is what Korczak did to the
very end.
When we watch a film, we regress and lose our critical faculties. The darkness of the room suggests a return into the womb, but our regression is much more than the result of the fact that we have become entirely passive. By identifying with the viewpoint of the camera, we experience pure perception. We lose awareness of our body position, we no longer orient ourselves within the world of our experience— we are being oriented by the camera, forced now to look this way and now that way. Experiences are inflicted on us, and short of shutting our eyes or looking away from the screen, we are powerless to condition what we experience, just as when we were in the womb, or when we were very small children.
This, then, has been the differential between my experience of moving pictures and that of other art forms. The more significant my experience with some other arts has been, the more I responded to a work of art, the deeper it carried me into myself. The more I responded to a movie, the more it carried me away into its world, and the less of myself was left in the experience.
As a young man I was convinced that one had to create something worthwhile to believe that one's life had not been wasted; but as an old man I knew that the best one can hope for in one's life, and what is sufficient for one's salvation, is contained in the statement justifying Faust's apotheosis, as the angels sing: "Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen" ("He who always strains and strives with all his power, him we are able to redeem").
And psychoanalysis was but one of the major intellectual developments of a time when a pervasive awareness of political decline led Vienna's cultural elites to abandon politics as a subject to take seriously, to withdraw their attention from the wider world and turn inward instead.
One way to cope with these losses which presaged the doom of the empire was to use denial as a kind of defense. Thus the Viennese intelligentsia might say, "While the situation is desperate, it is not serious." In this mind-set, which was very common for many years in Vienna, external reality is discounted and all mental energy is turned inward: only the inner life of the individual is allowed to matter.
Emperor Franz Joseph's marriage to Elizabeth, a very young and very beautiful Bavarian princess, was one of great love and devotion on his part, and this love continued all through his life. However, despite the emperor's efforts to please Elizabeth and make her happy, she soon distanced herself from him and from the court, a process which became ever more extreme until she spent hardly any time with him, or in Vienna. We can now see Elizabeth as hysterical, narcissistic, and anorexic. At the time, however, she was acclaimed, with much justification, as the most beautiful woman in Europe. To retain her distinctive beauty, the attribute responsible for her rise to empress, she starved herself on various extreme diets, such as having nothing except six glasses of milk in a day, for days on end. On frequent walking tours, she marched at such a brisk pace that her companions fell behind her in exhaustion, as She continued on for seven, eight, even ten hours.
self-analysis must precede the analysis of others; in order to understand the unconscious fully, one must study one's own unconscious first.
The choice of his home's location may also have reflected Freud's belief in the relative un-importance of surface appearances-his perception that behind commonplace externals, much more important secret meanings may be hidden; and the more ordinary the surface, the more successfully so.
If these objects were important for Freud as symbols of his life's work, then we can understand why they were so crowded together in small spaces, in a seemingly disorganized jumble, just as repressed events are jumbled and crowded in the unconscious. We can also then comprehend why their aesthetic merits did not matter to Freud. For the psychoanalyst, beauty lies in the complete and undistorted recovery of what has long been buried in the unconscious, and not in whether what has been "unearthed" has any particular artistry. The deeper and longer something has been buried, the more carefully it has been made inaccessible (like objects in Egyptian graves), the greater the psychoanalytic achievement in its complete recovery.
Maybe the popular American view of the psychoanalyst as a "head-shrinker" highlights best the difference between how things are done today in America and how they were done then in Vienna. The reason this headshrinker image is so widely accepted in America (although it is always recognized as a funny and ironic image that puts the psychoanalyst down a few pegs) is, I believe, that it represents the patient's reaction to the psychoanalyst's belief that he is superior to the patient.
For example, in a flash Johnny had taught me how inclined we are to believe that the wellspring of our action is concern for the other, rather than self-involvement; and how much we can learn about ourselves from others, provided we accept that what they say or do may reveal things not only about them, but also about us.
Jonny taught me that the magnitude of one’s misery alters the meaning of all experiences.
I had believed that I had truly learned —if not from Freud, even earlier from Terence's "Humani nil a me alienum puto"— that to be truly human means not being alienated from anything human. Still, I had permitted myself to be alienated by Johnny's behavior. Realizing my insensitivity to his suffering, which prevented me from understanding why he acted as he did, taught me from then on always to believe that whatever the behavior, it would seem the most natural thing for me to do were I in the other's situation.
My experiences with psychoanalysis, of which I have recounted only two early and crucial events, have convinced me that it is not the theoretical mastery of a problem which permits its deepest understanding. It is one's inner experiences that permit gaining a full grasp of what is involved in the inner experiences of others, a knowledge which then can become the basis for theoretical studies.
Great Masters need great disciples: it is prerequisite of greatness among those who found movements.
Only one of many anecdotes may be quoted to show how revealing of Freud these volumes can be as source material. Jones tells how, during meals, Freud would not talk to his family because he enjoyed his food so much that he concentrated on eating instead. If one of his children was absent, Freud "would point mutely at the vacant chair with his knife or fork and look inquiringly to his wife at the other end of the table. She would explain that the child was not coming in to dinner or that something or other had detained him, whereupon Freud, with his curiosity satisfied, would nod silently and proceed with his meal."
Man is basically a machine, driven by libido and regulating itself by the need to reduce painful tension to a certain minimal threshold. This reduction of tension constitutes the nature of pleasure.
both men, each in his own way, agreed that the main issue of contention was Jung's refusal to accept the central role of sexuality in human affairs, on which Freud insisted. It is important to note that for Jung, what had originally been a personal need to deny the importance of sexuality became a theoretical issue. As so often in psychological matters, highly personal matters eventually determined theoretical positions, something the psychoanalyst should be the first to recognize.
I can hardly bear to listen when you continue to enthuse about your old love and past dreams, and [I] count on an ally in the marvelous little stranger. I am, as you know, cured of the last shred of my predilection for the Aryan cause, and would like to take it that if the child turns out to be a boy, he will develop into a stalwart Zionist. ... We are and remain Jews. The others will only exploit us and will never understand or appreciate us.
The first thing that occurs to me to say about literature, as I consider it in the relation in which Freud stands to it, is that literature is dedicated to the conception of the self... At the behest of literature, and with its help [we are] able to imagine the selfhood of others, no doubt through the process of identification..
Scott Fitzgerald's sentence "The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposite ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." And one may think that the sentence from Howards End, "Death destroys a man but the idea of death is what saves him," which Trilling quotes, represents his idea of what makes for the truly moral and artistic life.
One of the best-known tags of literary criticism is Coleridge's phrase "the willing suspension of disbelief." Coleridge says that the willing suspension of disbelief constitutes "poetic faith."... This Freud was able to do in a most extraordinary way, and not by the mere impulse of his tem-perament, but systematically, as an element of his science.... [When his patients told him stories they invented,] he did not blame them, he did not say they were lying—he willingly suspended his disbelief in their fantasies, which they themselves believed, and taught himself how to find the truth that was really in them.
One of the best ways to see how much we have changed and, we hope, grown over the years is to reread books that at one time were very meaningful to us. This experience was so valuable in understanding my own development that, in teaching psychology to university students, I encouraged them to reread books they had loved at one time. Their task was to try to understand why this had been so, and why it often no longer was, or not to the same degree. They were usually amazed that in this way they were able to recognize change in themselves and to speculate about its causes. Thus how we react to what we read is always a function more of what is going on in us at the time than of a book's content.
From my reading of Freud I had learned how great a role in man's life is played by the irrational element of his mind.
And as people used to go to church on Sundays (and still do), so many today go to the movies on weekends. But while in the past most people attended church only on some days, they now watch moving images every day.
Now catharsis, as the discharge of emotions and not their refinement, at best provides temporary relief. It doesn't lead to a solution of what oppresses us. In fact, catharsis leaves the problem unchanged, soon pressing for the next discharge.
Because the facts available about our past are insufficient, because the future is inscrutable and the present too confusing, man needs the assurance that myths, and predominantly religion, used to offer: the conviction that his society will survive him and his work, thus transcending his all too limited existence, and extending it beyond his days, so that he will not have lived in vain.
What our society suffers from most today is that absence of consensus about what it and life in it ought to be. Such consensus cannot be gained from society's present stage, or from fantasies about what it ought to be. A consensus in the present can be achieved only through a shared understanding of the past, as Homer's epics informed those who lived centuries later what it meant to be Greek, and by what images and ideals they were to live their lives and organize their societies.
Most societies derive consensus from a long history, a language all their own, a common religion, common ancestry. The myths by which they live are based on all of these. But the United States is a country of immigrant peoples, coming from a great variety of nations. Lately it has been posited that an asocial, narcissistic personality has become characteristic of Americans, and that this prevents us from achieving a consensus that would counteract a tendency to withdraw into private worlds.
Past and future are the lasting dimensions of our lives; the present is but a fleeting moment. So these visions about the future also contain our past; in George Lucas's Star Wars and its sequels, battles are fought around issues that also motivated man in the past. There is good reason for Yoda's appearance in the first sequel, The Empire Strikes Back: he is but a reincarnation of the teddy bear of infancy, to which we turn for solace; and the Jedi Knight is the wise old man, or the helpful animal, of the fairy tale, the promise from our distant past that we shall be able to rise to meet the most difficult tasks life can present us with. Thus, any vision about the future is really based on visions of the past, because that is all we can know for certain.
Shakespeare wrote his plays not in Stratford but in London, one of the largest cities of the Western world. Only with the creation of a large city and a permanent capital in Kyoto in the eighth century did Japanese literature begin to bloom. At the beginning of the present technological civilization, after having spent most of his long life in a small town, Goethe said that Germany's cultural life was mediocre because men of culture and talent were scattered, rather than living in one large city, such as Paris, "where the highest talents of a great kingdom are all assembled on one spot and, by daily intercourse, strife, and emulation mutually instruct and emulate each other," conditions which permit or at the least greatly facilitate the creation of high literature.
I believe Erwin Panofsky is right when he says in Meaning in the Visual Arts, "I do not believe that a child or adolescent should be taught only that which he can fully understand. It is, on the contrary, the half-digested phrase, the half-placed proper name, the half-understood verse, remembered for sound and rhythm rather than meaning, which persists in the memory, and captures the imagination.
Only the child whose emotional life is very barren or whose conditions of life are extremely destructive will "live" in the world of television programs. In his case, doing so may be preferable to facing his actual life, which could lead him to give up all hope, or to explode into violence against those who make his life miserable.
We ought to remember how restricted children's lives have become. It used to be possible to let children roam all by themselves for much of the day, or in the chance company of other children. They used to play somewhere in the neighborhood, or in an empty shack, or wander the woods and fields. There they could dream their own daydreams, without parents nearby demanding that they use their time more constructively.
Even in a psychiatric hospital she could remain only a month because it, too, was not equipped to handle such a wild child. There she had to be kept in a maximum-security room, without any furniture, where she spent her days naked because she tore off all clothes that were put on her. Most of the time Anna crouched in a corner in total withdrawal; from this she emerged for short periods of wild screaming, running, jumping, and pounding on walls and door.
Korczak's method of teaching his students at the Institute for Pedagogy in Warsaw, where he taught for many years, may be illustrated by his taking them to observe the workings of a child's heart as it could be seen on the screen of an X-ray machine. The child had to stand in front of a screen in a darkened room and was naturally apprehensive about the darkness, the unaccustomed surroundings, and the strange machinery. Speaking very softly, so as not to add to the child's fears, and deeply moved by what could be seen on the screen, Korczak enjoined his students to take a good look and never forget what they saw: "How stormily a child's heart beats when he is frightened, and this it does even more when his heart reacts to an adult's annoyance with him, not to mention when he fears to be punished."
Korczak himself knew very well that self-control was a most necessary ingredient for being able to live a good life. He asserted that when everything is permissible, then no willpower can develop; but willpower is most necessary if the child is to meet the rigors of life successfully.
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