MENTAL HEALTH AND SICKNESS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 941, 23 August 1957, Page 11

MENTAL HEALTH AND SICKNESS

Sir,-Whenever I suggest to an adult audience in New Zealand that it is possible to bring up children successfully without subjecting them to much in the way of physical assault, my comment is greeted by gasps of incredulity. In pained amazement my audience express their horror at yet another of the crazy theories held by psychiatrists, I was not surprised, therefore, to read Barbara Brewer’s attack on the views of a colleague. May I defend him by pointing out that in the time allowed he could not possibly detail all the evidence available to support his moderate plea for permissive child rearing? Her demand for studies of "the whole population" shows a complete lack of any appreciation of the time and effort re-

quired for even a limited study of human personality, and is certainly not "appropriate behaviour" by anyone’s standards, Her philosophical speculations about the nature of life are important and interesting, but quite irrelevant to the question of "adaptation to life as it is," which is a matter of getting along with one’s fellow human beings. Ideas about causation vary, but although a significant number of children showered with infected sputum do not develop overt T.B., this does not disprove the theory that tubercle bacilli are a cause of tuberculosis. If she is interested in this problem may I suggest that she read the report of the Mid-Century White House Conference on Personality in the

Making?

ANOTHER OF THEM

(Dunedin)