11B – Love and the Law (Part 2)

LAW
Anna Freud, in identification with her father’s interest in the law ( Goldstein, 1984 ) spent time at Yale joining in law studies. The three authors collaborated over 20 years to publish three books on Children and the Law. 
In the three books we see her clarity of thinking about the paramount needs of children in the context of their families, particularly different family structures. Anna Freud enjoyed a capacity to move freely back and forth between theoretical constructs and practical applications, something which she considered herself fortunate to be able to do.(Freud, 1967) Goldstein, Freud and Solnit developed a framework which moved from an emphasis on the best interests of the child to focus more specifically on finding the least detrimental solution for children and adolescents. They also laid much emphasis on the vital importance of the psychological parent, not only of the biological tie of the parent to the child and vice versa.
In her address at the Yale Law School in 1968, Anna Freud pointed to the differences between the two disciplines of law and psychoanalysis.
“Legal concepts are time-honoured, clear-cut, concise, well defined, and based on indisputable facts; contrasted with them, psychoanalytic tenets are vague, diffuse, complex and rooted in the revolutionary assumption of a dynamic unconscious mind.”(1968, p 257)
Psychoanalysis lays great emphasis on unravelling motivation whereas legal thinking tends to disregard hidden reasons for behaviour and concerns itself with acts as well as harmful consequences of such acts. 
She pinpoints the common ground shared by these two disciplines, writing:
“What we share, after all, as psychoanalysts on one side and future lawyers and judges in the other, is the fact that all of us deal with human failures. In our psychoanalytic practice we handle people who have not come to terms with themselves and who, consequently, inflict symptomatology and mental suffering on their own persons.”(p 258- 259). And “It seems rather that all of us start out in life in an initial state of utter lawlessness; that the battles with those nearest to us i.e. our parents, educate us gradually toward compliance; and that this compliance with the external world becomes the pre-condition for internal conflict. Seen in this light, our psychoanalytic patients (the neurotics) live on a higher developmental plane of inner strife, while your clients, the lawbreakers, either have never arrived at this or, at some time or other, have regressed from it to the more primitive form of battle with the world around them.”(AF, 1968, p 260.)
In her 1972 paper The Child as a Person in his own Right, Anna Freud lays down her position about children and the law, and then masterfully outlines the differences between the minds of children and of adults, emphasising that children are NOT miniature adults, nor is it in their best interests to be treated as such.

She writes: “Children are presumed by law to be incomplete beings during the whole period of their immaturity. Their utter inability to fulfil their basic needs, or even to maintain life without extraneous help, justifies their being automatically assigned by birth certificate to their biological parents, or, where this natural relationship fails to function, by later Court proceedings to parent substitutes. (p 621)
She provides a number of psychological tenets amongst which are the following which emphasise the primary relationship to a receptive, attuned primary object:
“a child’s mental reliance on the adult world is as long-lived as his physical dependency” And “the child’s emotional, intellectual and moral capacities unfold, not in a void, but within his human relationships”
She then goes on to describe how in many respects the mental makeup of children differs from that of adults. Anna Freud outlines 6 differences. 
Firstly, “unlike adults, whose psychic functioning proceeds on more or less fixed lines, children change constantly: from one state of growth to another; with regard to their understanding of events, their tolerance of frustration, their demands on motherly or fatherly care for stimulation, support, guidance, and restraint, or according to the degree in which their personalities mature, for increasing freedom from control and independence.”(p 622).
So what may be an appropriate response to the developing needs at one stage , may be inappropriate at another.
Secondly, children have their own built-in time sense , based on the urgency of their instinctual and emotional needs, unlike adults who measure the passing of time by clock and calendar. Children have therefore a marked intolerance for postponement of gratification or for frustration, a heightened sensitivity to the length of separations, a shortening of the periods for remaining attached to absent parent figures.
Thirdly, unlike adults whose reasonable mind is able to see occurrences in their true perspective, young children experience events in an egocentric manner ie as happening solely with reference to their own persons. They may therefore experience the mere move from one house or location to another as a grievous loss, imposed on them; the birth of a sibling , as an act of parental hostility; emotional preoccupation or illness of a parent as a rejection; death of a parent as intentional abandonment.
Fourthly, unlike adults who are able to deal with the vagaries of life through reason and intellect, immature children are governed in much of their functioning by the primitive parts of their mind ie the irrational id. Consequently they respond to any threat to their emotional security with fantastic anxieties, denial or distortion of reality, reversal or displacement of feelings i.e. with reactions which are of no help for coping but put them at the mercy of events.
Fifthly, unlike adults who are capable of maintaining positive emotional ties with a number of different individuals, unrelated or even hostile to each other, children are constitutionally unable to do so. They will freely love more than one adult only if the individuals in question feel positively to one another. Failing this they become prey to severe and crippling loyalty conflicts. In cases of divorce, shared custody runs the danger of inducing loyalty conflicts in the child, so that visiting rights need very careful consideration and agreement.
Sixthly, children have no psychological conception of relationship by blood tie, whereas in the adult the fact of having engendered, or given birth to a child produces an understandable sense of proprietorship and possessiveness, which underlies the frequent reconsiderations of consent to adoption, the claiming of offspring after initial abandonment etc. What registers in children’s minds are the day to day interchanges with the adults who take care of them and who, on the strength of these, become the parental figures to whom they are attached.
Anna Freud argues: “It is due to these differences between the adult and the childish mind that children, more often than not, do not react according to expectation. ” (p 623)

Anna Freud argues that it is not only with regards to timing that courts and welfare agencies are out of step with childrens’ own requirements.
She writes: “Following an order for placement, a young child may be removed from a known environment to an unknown one, with the adults oblivious of the hazards this implies for the child’s still shaky sense of orientation. Following adoption , the inevitable change of name, which seems merely incidental to adults, may have repercussions on the child’s sense of identity, which is insecure at best. 
Returned to a biological parent after having been fostered , the child may face the traumatic task, not appreciated by the adults of transferring emotional allegiance from a familiar and trusted adult to an unfamiliar stranger. Following divorce, with custody assigned to one parent, children are expected to concur peacefully with the Court’s decision, disregarding the fact that they are the prey of their own distorting and unsettling interpretations of the breakup. (p 623 )
Anna Freud worked with Solnit and Goldstein to apply a complex theoretical framework of child and adolescent development to formulate a humane policy and set of guidelines for the legal protection of children who do not have healthy family situations. They saw the three primary needs of children as affection, stimulation, and unbroken continuity of care.

The policy they outlined focused on the growing child’s needs. Children were no longer to be regarded as “chattels” of the biological parents but as PERSONS in their own right, and the authors protested against the tendency to subordinate the psychological well-being of the growing child to the adults’ right to assert a biological tie. Starting with the question of what is in the best interests of the child, their work moved to a consideration of what is the least detrimental solution which safeguards the psychological well being of the child, but limits unhelpful intrusive state intervention. 
They recommend that legal processes must be speeded up to avoid lengthy uncertainty for the child. They also recommend that decisions about placement should be final so the child’s relationship to the psychological parent can be free to deepen without threat to its continuity. They stress how important it is for the state to limit its role and remain non-intrusive allowing the child’s new family space and time to develop. Their stress is on the least detrimental alternative not the unquestioned assertion of rights of parents or children.
Anna Freud ends her 1972 paper with a passionate argument and conclusion asserting the need for child-centred rather than adult-centred policy and care plans.

CONCLUSION 
Throughout both papers we see Anna Freud’s emphasis on children and adolescents’ changing developmental conflicts and needs. We see her emphasis on the importance of the environment ie primarily mother, on the infant, then child, then adolescent, who adapts not according to her needs , but according to the speed and rhythm of the growing, changing child. 
We also see how she conceptualises the development from self-centredness and lawlessness in the sense of a baby and young child being a law unto themselves, towards a capacity to relate to the Other, in a way that acknowledges differences. We see how she clarifies the complex subject of why some women struggle to develop and sustain motherliness and also how there are many reasons why parents choose to create children, not always in the child’s best interests but for complicated reasons.
Equally mothers can reject their children for a number of reasons as outlined above. We have also seen how some mothers and their children grow and develop their capacity to love.

Goldstein in his paper on Anna Freud in Law, describes “how she taught us to put childish things before, not behind, us. She taught us to place ourselves in a child’s skin to try to think a child’s thoughts and feel a child’s feelings” and “about change of home environment, about shuttling between two warring parents, or visits to an absent parent on “prescribed days and hours”. ( Goldstein, 1984,p 5).
She helped us see that, the question was not, which parent deserved the child in a custody dispute, but whom does the child need the most, if harm to his development is to be minimised. The parent should be awarded to the child- not the other way around.(Goldstein, p5)
The idea that a child or adolescent can experience an adult who is not a blood relative, as a loved and loving psychological parent is a very important conceptual and empirical finding , which is relevant to our contemporary world.
The importance of mental health professionals and the courts of family law, accepting the reality of the external objects and acknowledging the importance of the psychological relationship to the parent or parenting figure, not merely the biological tie, cannot be overemphasised and constitutes major shifts in the way of thinking about the care of children.

What is implied is the importance of the match or mismatch between mother and child or indeed family and child. The importance of fathering was taken up by other psychoanalysts in the field. Herzog etc.( 1984 )
Goldstein, Freud and Solnit interestingly consider the minimum a child needs to develop a healthy love of the self and the other. They write “only a child who has at least one person whom he can love, and who also feels loved, valued and wanted by that person, will develop a healthy self-esteem.” ( 1973,p 20) 
To my mind, two crucial issues are contained in this important condensed statement, One , the importance of reciprocal affection i.e. the child’s sense of being wanted by the parent and the child’s wanting the parent for the development of a positive self-representation, and secondly, the question of how many parents children need. Interestingly they talk about at least one person rather than two. (Davids, 1999, p 6).
As indicated in the beginning of this lecture, the subject of love and its origins is a complex one ,which has attracted the attention of philosophers, poets, musicians and many psychoanalysts.( e.g. Freud, Green, Klein, Balint, Suttie ) To love and be loved is the one of the essential components of a healthy self-esteem. 
Sadly, some children are unwanted, even by their own parents, and the capacity to love maturely, “warts and all” is not developed by all. Some children, adolescents and adults can only love partly, or have relationships that are shallow, exploitative, cold and callous.
The vital importance of the child’s first environment ie his first relationships with the first people who look after him. The interaction between the growing child’s characteristics and sensitivities i.e. what the child brings to the table, with the particular environment he grows up in is a major emphasis in Anna Freud’s writings.
The sense of being wanted (see Davids,1999) underlies the sense of being loveable and of valuing one’s self in a realistic sense ie not over- or under- valuing oneself or important others. To achieve a robust sense of self and an intact self-esteem requires numerous experiences of consistency, care and appropriate limit setting in the early years. 
The child needs to feel safe and protected and this includes help with dealing with frustration, learning how to restrain oneself, and help in developing a sense of optimism and a capacity to wait.
Rejection, one of the most painful human experiences, has deep and far-reaching consequences. Repeated rejections often lead to a devaluation of the growing self.
Interestingly, the word rejection, derives from the Latin ricere “to throw back”. It is the throwing back of the affection that is the most painful aspect- the sense of being refused, thrown or pushed away. And this usually leads to a sense of not being loved or believing oneself to be unloveable. I believe that children can only hate constructively , a necessary achievement, if they feel a strong foundation of love and trust provided by their primary objects.

REFERENCES
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Davids,J. 1999. The family in the child’s mind 1999 Anna Freud Centre Colloquium paper, and in press.
Davids, J. 2010 The Nursery Age Child. London: Karnacs.
Freud, A. 1955 The concept of rejecting mother vol 4,also in Parenthood Its Psychology and Psychopathology Eds Anthony, E. J.and Benedek, T. Little Brown. 1970 pp 376- 386.
Freud, A. 1967 Residential vs foster care . Writings of Anna Freud,vol 7.
Freud, A.1968 Address at the Commencement Services of the Yale Law School, chapter 16 in Freud, A.The Writings of Anna Freud volume Vll
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Shakespeare,W. 1609 Sonnet 116
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