A Dangerous Possibility
Michael Trout
Dear Elliott,
...As research is increasingly done by those who were raised in a substitute-care society, in which intense and painful separations become normative, and shame (at "...being such a baby") is added to the anger and sorrow felt by children, then very few will even grow up with memory of their own feelings. But because the feelings will be so very much alive, I suspect more and more clinicians will attempt to "guide" their patients away from such explorations, more and more researchers will find unempathic group care to be utterly innocuous, and more and more academics will teach the new line (that separation doesn't hurt) as if it is scientific fact...
...I suspect a tremendous amount of quite personal repression will be at work, and this is only going to get worse, as I see it...
Michael
Michael Trout is Director of the Infant-Parent Institute, Champaigne, Illinois