War and Children, Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham: The War Nurseries.

Keeping these considerations in mind, nursery staff were continuously monitored by A. Freud and D. Burlingham and assisted in their activities with the children. At first, the staff consisted of refugees who had fled Germany and Austria, such as Anna Freud herself, and who had psychological and psychoanalytic interests at their origin. Many of them became well-known names in the field of psychoanalysis such as Ilse Hellman, who had been a student of Charlotte Buhler and was thus able to bring her empirical research experience to the kindergartens (Kennedy, H., 2009). They were young and keenly involved people who had gone through the experience of “evacuation” from their home country. Other prominent people included Mr. and Mrs. Robertson, who later continued their work with J. Bowlby, to whom they provided much of the clinical data on which Bowlby documented his theory of attachment. A general practice, which continued in the Hampstead Clinic after the war, was that any person in the kindergartens with whatever job description had to have psychoanalytic developmental psychology as a theoretical basis and work accordingly in contact with children. For example, James Robertson operated as a social worker and, in particular, had to hold relations with parents; at the same time, he also had to act as a “handyman” who maintained the building and, in particular, its plumbing.

Constant attention must be devoted to children because the price the child pays for being removed from the dangers of war is steep. Indeed, children in this context face the trauma of being separated from their mother which, says A. Freud, is a far more dramatic experience than what they may experience when they see their home destroyed by bombs.

“Children have only one kind of punishment to use against everyone who hurts them: the person should leave and not return. In the child’s mind, this means they must die …. These negative feelings probably produce, in this period, the separation response. The father and the mother whom, at a certain point, the child wishes to be dead, immediately after are returned to their children’s love…. In this period the negative feelings towards the parents are only transitory…It does not appear to the child to be dangerous to kill a parent in fantasy if, at the same time, he or she can see that their parent is alive and in good health…. Conversely, the separation results in an unbearable proof of all these negative feelings if … the natural pain linked to the separation thus turns into a tense waiting for their coming back which is  difficult to bear. When the parents are absent the orders and prohibitions, which were previously resisted, are now thoroughly carried out. In this situation children are particularly good”.(p.30)

But what happens in the face of death when the parent is truly gone:

The case of Bertie (pp. 68-69).

“Bertie, .. was four years old at the time when he still refused to admit the truth of his father’s death. He was ill in bed at the time of the spring air raids, had a whole tray full of paper houses on his bed and played indefatigably. He would build the house up, cover them with their roofs, and then throw them down with small marbles which were his bombs. Whereas in the other children’s game any number of people were “killed” and in the end everything was left in bits and pieces, the point in Bertie’s play was that all his people were always saved in time and all his houses were invariably built up again. The other children repeated incidents of a more impersonal kind in their games: they played active and embellished versions of events which had actually happened. This served the purpose of relief and abreaction. Bertie’s play, on the other hand, had the opposite intention- he wanted to deny the reality of what had happened- since the denial was never completely successful the play had to be repeated incessantly- it became compulsive. The game of the other children remained transitory.

Bertie stopped playing in this way when half a year later, he, at last, gave up his denial and was able to tell his story: “My father has been killed and my mother has gone to the hospital. She will come back at the end of the war but he will not return”.

One of the tasks of the kindergarten staff was to observe and keep note of child behaviors using “free-floating” attention, similar to the mental disposition of the analyst. Observations were to be written down promptly using non-theoretical language, detailing the observed behaviors as thoroughly as possible. There was no interpretation, but rather interventions defined by Anna Freud as “educational” that considered the noted observations. For example, in this case, letting the child have time to accommodate, if possible, the burden of enormous grief as his surroundings seemed capable of accommodating him and giving him a chance to feel safe; that they would not destroy him. No one intervened to interrupt his compulsive play, but he was helped out of his shell by, for example, being taken for a group walk when he wanted to participate.

It seems that to comment further on this vignette would be to intrude on the reader’s reflections and feelings. We can better understand Bertie by taking him with us into our lives to learn that the world of children can be deeply painful and fragile, even if this is not strictly psychoanalytic theory.