The rights culture

There has been a growing acceptance that children have fundamental rights. This was enshrined in the UN Declaration on the Rights of the Child and forms the basis of key legislation (The Children Acts England and Wales & Scotland) and is central to the declared ethos of many childcare agencies. I should maybe state that I think this is "a good thing". However, it is also a very complex thing which generates enormous feeling, as I know from the debates in which I have been involved amongst childcare professionals. It is an issue that quickly pushes people into fundamentalist positions.

Why is this? It is impossible to discuss children's rights without talking about children's needs, but my experience is that it is easier to talk about rights than needs. Although there is often overt hostility to the idea that children have rights, I believe that we are actually less threatened by that idea than we are by the idea of children's needs.

 The individualisation of society is the context for the developing rights culture, with the right to individual fulfilment, "self actualisation" becoming the ultimate right. This, of course, includes the right to have children, whatever your age or circumstances . It is inevitable that there will be clashes between different individual's rights, including those of adults and children in the family. However, when these are viewed as only being about rights, then the argument or contradiction or discussion can take place at an objective level. If we have to address needs, particularly the needs of children in relation to adults, then we enter a world of unconscious as well as conscious feeling where love, dependence resentment, guilt, our own experiences of attachment, separation and loss are unavoidable.

Boundaries

As a society we have become much more consciously preoccupied with protecting our children. Five years ago, social work and child care professionals talked about child abuse, today we talk about child protection. The overt intention behind this was to focus more on prevention and less on crisis intervention. However, the concept of child protection has entered the mainstream, without there being any clear sense of what we want to protect children from. The media inspired panic about paedophiles generates a fantasy that in order for our children to be safe we need to literally drive out "the monsters" from our communities. At the same time, a high profile and popular advertising campaign for a supermarket chain portrays two toddlers with superimposed adult voices talking about having "a snog". The past few years has seen a glut of films and adverts which are solely based on superimposing adult voices and thoughts (including sexual thoughts) on children too young to have developed speech. On the one hand, this trend might be an indication of our acknowledgement that even very young children have their individual perception of the world. On the other hand, we only seem able to deal with this through the projection of adult thoughts and interpretations and for our entertainment and amusement. Our wish to attribute adult understanding and motivation to children, even in "fun" is one way of denying the need children have for a safe and contained space where they can psychically grow and develop their own sense of the world and their place in it. Little girls have always dressed up in mummy's clothes and smeared her lipstick over their faces in playful and innocent (in the real meaning of the word) experiments with being grown up. Now, they can buy cropped tops, tight skirts and real cosmetics with the clear intention that 7 year olds will consciously wish to be sexually attractive.

Parents seem to feel unable to control or manage the range of influences their child is now open to. With an increasing number of children having access to their own TV, video and computer (if not their own then one of their friends), it is becoming impossible for parents to have any serious control over the information, images, values that their child receives. Parents who have blocked access to Internet porn sites, or censor video games cannot control what their child may see at a friend's house, If parents cannot control these boundaries, they can at least mediate and help their children to think about the meaning and impact of these influences, but with family members leading increasingly individualised lives, opportunities for this kind of exchange do not necessarily happen unless consciously arranged. Adults and children, particularly as they reach adolescence, lead increasingly separate lives.(The Denver shootings were an extreme act, but one of the striking aspects was the gulf between the lives of the children and adults concerned. The children lived in a bullying and cliquish culture, of which adults were either unaware or where they did not see that they had a responsibility. The two boys who carried out the killings were known to be strange and disturbed to other pupils and had evidence of that disturbance in their bedrooms but this was either not known by their parents or ignored).

It is probably not surprising that we project our anxieties of danger onto identified abusive individuals who we can at least drive away from our children.

The complex boundaries that children have to negotiate are reflected in the erosion of the boundary around the family and the rest of society. One manifestation of this is the hostility social workers face either for intervening too soon and too much or too late and too little. Maybe it has never been that clear when family business becomes society's business., but parenting has become part of the public domain in a way that is new. Parenting education has become a growth area in the social care and "helping professions" world.

Some thoughts about parenting education.

In November 1998 the government launched a consultation exercise on "Supporting Families", which included a suggestion for a Parenting Institute. Compulsory parenting classes are in the pipeline for parents of children who commit criminal offences, there has been an enormous growth in parenting education initiatives. This would seem to indicate that there is a general societal view that we are in some kind of parenting crisis. Social workers, family welfare services, health visitors have always offered advice and support to parents who were struggling in bringing up their children but it never acquired the label of parenting education or became such a distinctive strand of family support.

Parenting education is congruent with the performance management /measurable outcome culture now dominating social welfare and therapeutic institutions, with the implication that all behaviour is conscious, and can therefore be changed with the right incentive, or is the result of a deficit which can be filled by increasing the appropriate "competence".

At the same time we have seen a number of TV programmes featuring dysfunctional families and "problem children", where family secrets are revealed and tensions acted out for the viewing public. Why do people want to watch such intrusive, painful and often embarrassing programmes? On the one hand it may help us to feel superior, relieved that at least our family is not as bad as that. It is interesting that in most cases, the professional workers involved with the families have, at best, limited success. These programmes would seem to contradict the underlying belief of parenting education that these problems can be easily sorted out. Does presenting other people's damage and pain, including children's pain, as entertainment allow us to split ourselves off, blur the line between fantasy and reality, believe it has come to an end when the credits have rolled?

 

Turning a blind eye and a deaf ear; the assault on psychoanalytic therapeutic space for the treatment of children

Miranda Feuchtwang April 2000

I want to argue here that at a societal level we are turning a blind eye to the destruction of childhood, and that the maintenance of this blind eye entails that those of us who attempt to treat damaged children should not blow the whistle on the systematic and societal production of such damage. Particularly psychoanalytic practitioners who allow their patients to discover their own truth's about themselves should remain silent. Society cannot bear the guilt of these truths, or the implications that follow for social policy in a democracy of civil rights and individual freedoms. Political speech is not free unless it is 'on message', according to the not entirely ironic perception by UK citizens of Tony Blair's government and its centralised control by cabinet. Psychoanalytic truths with their inevitable load of depressive pain are not 'on message' and always resisted whether by the patient, or by society as a whole. In a society where things are clearly seen to be going wrong, what is wanted is not psychoanalytic truth, but better management, quick fixes, solution based therapy, symptom relieving therapy, or as increasingly for children, a drug based therapy to still the challenging out of control behaviour that mutely betrays the signs that a social disaster has occurred.

The assault on therapeutic space is multifaceted. It is also quite specific. The current emphasis on evidenced based practice and clinical governance ensure that only those therapies that have been able to demonstrate clinical outcomes will be purchased. Psychiatry and Clinical psychology can offer drug treatments and cognitive behavioural treatments within an empiricist deductive model of science. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy is not good at producing 'evidence' within the terms set for the model, and has yet to formulate its own terms of reference for a model appropriate to the study of the inner world of mind and emotions, as opposed to the field of brain functioning.

The relations between clinicians and patients are increasingly managed by extra-clinical pressures; waiting lists, management directives, purchaser's imperatives, Trust policy and the internal market in the NHS, government policy, and the demands of other major players in social provision, education and social services. Psychoanalytic Psychotherapists tend to retreat into the consulting room, where at least they feel they have some control over the setting and the treatment they are offering. But this is increasingly difficult. Boundaries are broken. Consulting rooms for children are turned into administrative offices. Patients are sent quality questionnaires by a management out of touch with the reality of the clinical encounter, and without the knowledge of the clinician. Health and safety regulations take precedence over the use of clinical space. Clinicians can no longer manage the boundary in which clinical work can take place. Increasingly they are asked to perform in ways, which satisfy a remote bureaucracy.

Psychotherapeutic containment is a luxury. A battlefield model of assessment by triage, 'sorting the quick from the dead', is offered instead of a therapeutic encounter between patient and clinician. Clinicians do not trust the Trusts they are working within. Employers are not seen as reliable containers; clinical sessions are lost to what is euphemistically called CIP, a cost improvement pressure. Translated this means a cut. Those who can fight strategically may influence the CIP not to improve their service with a cut. But these are political skills not clinical ones.

These pressures in the workplace, the distrust, the stress, and the infighting between different departments and disciplines for decreasing resources generates a climate of paranoia in which we appear to be operating in a world more dominated by extreme splitting and paranoid schizoid anxiety rather than by depressive concern. And I suggest that society at large is operating under this aegis; one of dog eat dog, or the survival of the fittest. The weak are excluded in this dynamic. What is happening under this aegis in the dynamics of society to children and their parents, and to mental health teams who are the providers of help to children and parents?

Erlich and Ginor (in a paper, Mental Health under Fire, in Group Relations Management and Organisation, ed. French and Vince.), argue that the mental health system is a container that assumes the maternal role on behalf of society, containing the violent, aggressive and destructive projections, feelings and fantasies aimed at it, and through it at society as a whole. It is charged by society with containing its rejected madness and insanity, and the measure of violence and aggression associated with them. It contains in the deepest and most primary sense, the murderous violent and mad fantasies and impulses that exist in everybody's unconscious regardless of external circumstances". If that is so, what then is to be contained by Child and Adolescent Mental Health systems on behalf of society?

Mental Health teams for children and adolescents, no longer mention parents in their title and are I think like social services and education, unconsciously seen as receptacles for the unparented. CAMHS teams are the junior partner to Adult Mental Health Services. It seems that in the transition from childhood to adulthood, the notion of parents gets lost. You are either a child and later an adolescent or you are an adult. The two services do not easily cross-link. I think the unconscious primary task of CAMHS teams is to receive society's projections and unconscious knowledge about the damage done to children, but to keep quiet, and maintain that it is possible to repair the symptoms of a societal disaster. The children and adolescents who are referred to us are unconsciously recognised as essentially orphaned. That is to say they are without parents able to provide reliable containment themselves, and the conditions for the emotional growth of the dependent and vulnerable young. Government emphasis is on parenting education. But this is to miss the essential point. Damaged and unparented children grow up to orphan their own children in turn but we should keep quiet about that too. Education is not a simple matter when the structures for learning from experience, and internalisation of this learning have not been formed in early development. With 'not good enough', but 'bad' parenting as an internal model, children grow up to become 'not good enough, but bad' parents in their own right.

Since the trial in 1992 of the two ten year old Liverpool children who killed a two year old, the law has increasingly criminalised children; those children now adolescents are still detained for fear of the retributive violence of adult society that wishes to demonise them as evil, rather than examine what kind of environment had produced them. Children are seen as victims at the hands of the adult world, but are also seen as monsters when they act out the violence they have been exposed to.

There have been more and worse disclosures of our societal failure in our parental roles, to protect and nurture our children. We can no longer turn a blind eye to the widespread abuse of children in children's homes, or not witness the uncovering of nests of perverse organisations often located most horrifyingly in family systems. The West family (a married couple who tortured and killed and buried in their basement some of their own children, and several young girls lured to the house for the sexual gratification of the couple and their ring of friends), is an iconic exemplar for the many family systems in which the perverse and sustained emotional, physical and sexual abuse of children continues. I do not use the word perversion loosely. Perversion is a defence against, and a turning away from the mental pain associated with vulnerability and growth and development; psychoanalytically, this is a defence of the ego to contain overwhelming psychotic anxiety. The perverse mechanism installed as an internal structure, denies reality and abolishes two essential categories, the difference between the generations, parents and children, and the difference between the genders, male and female and their complimentarity. In other words perverse solutions bypass the necessary negotiation of the Oedipus conflict. Chasseguet Smirgel suggests that "perversion and perverse behaviour are particularly present at those times in the history of mankind which precede or accompany major social and political upheavals". I think we are living in one such time. Millennial anxiety which at its most primitive and paranoid signifies the end of the world, Armageddon, and the day of Judgement, unconsciously permeates our inner worlds and our outer worlds; it is fuelled by our knowledge that our technology and globalisation is beyond our human and individual encompassment. Globalisation means amongst other things the interpenetration of international markets. Capitalism is not just an economic system but is a guiding principle of conduct: the survival of the fittest, in which the weak are dehumanised. There is now a market for guns, drugs, pornography, internal organs, blood, spare parts, sperm, and consumption of all kinds, and they can all be purchased on the Internet. These may be considered as part objects, not related to whole persons.

Anxiety about the destruction of individuality and identity no longer securely held in the known boundaries of family, or neighbourhood, or community is defended against with fundamental solutions, racialism, nationalism, or civil war. One recourse as a defence against the anxiety of unimaginable futures, is to inhabit a perverse universe, which denies reality and celebrates the dissolution of essential categories of human existence. I argue that we live now quite contentedly with perversions. Like Oedipus himself we are blinded to the destruction of relations between children and parents. We deny our knowledge of the necessary conditions for children's emotional growth and children are the first victims of this blind eye.

For instance, there is the seven year old who unconfidently admitted to his mother in my presence, that he did not mind her gay male friends sharing her bed now that father had left, but when the gay male friend comes to fetch him from school in a frock and high heels he feels embarrassed. His mother protested. Surely he (aged seven) shared her liberal and libertarian worldview of the theatre and dance and friendships? He was trying to, he said manfully. This was a warm and concerned parent. She loved her son; she wanted him not to mind that father had left the family after a prolonged period of argument and fighting. She wanted him to celebrate and enjoy her adult sexuality, and her authority as a sexually exciting theatre performer, but she could not see that he might need his own space for his own authority as a sexual being to develop. This rather mild example illustrates an assault on childhood mental space to explore the sexual development proper to childhood; instead there was an apparent wish for the child to tolerate the complexity of adult sexual life, as if he himself was a young sexual adult. In this example the period of latency is bypassed by mother's need to turn a blind eye to her child's need for protection. This was a minor perversity on mother's part, a perverse blindness to her son's distress. It is at a far other end of the spectrum of the West family, but it is the same spectrum, the spectrum of perversion as a societal temptation, and one confusingly given legitimisation by current civil rights. The right to celebrate adult sexuality in all its infantile polymorphous forms is not seen as problematic. The spectrum is wide; where stands in vitro fertilisation, parenthood beyond the menopause, homosexual couples bearing children by donor, a medicine devoted to the problems of infertility, and a society in which children are systemically abandoned and psychologically orphaned? How do we make up our minds on these issues, or what are our minds made of? What kind of splitting and blindness do we have to operate to contemplate these complexities?

A perverse wish, often unconsciously, but sometimes ideologically rationalised, to destroy the differences between the generations and the genders must necessarily attack the institutions (in the mind) and the organisations (bricks and mortar) that enable children to be born and take their place in the world. (I am indebted to a colleague, Wesley Carr for this useful distinction between institution and organisation). Following Freud, psychoanalytic practitioners know that for the adult to come into being, the Oedipus complex, must be negotiated and worked through; that is the child has to come to terms psychically with the essential relation between his parents in a triangular relationship, in which the child discovers that he is a child and not yet an adult sexual being. The sexual abuse of children denies that relation and its discovery, and sexualises children as objects of desire rather than subjects of their own desires meeting up with the exigencies of the reality principle. Infants are properly polymorphously perverse creatures, not yet disillusioned from the omnipotent narcissism of early infancy. All desires are possible, all satisfactions and stimulations sought out. A prey to oral, anal and phallic impulses with their admixture of sadism and violence and violent splitting processes, parents are containers for the very primitive anxieties that beset infants and small children. If the containment is good enough and disillusion both robust and sensitive enough, paranoid schizoid functioning as an early mode of infantile defence can give way to depressive position functioning. Of course the former, the paranoid schizoid position is never lost, but depressive position functioning, and an internal state of balance between the two, ushers in repression and defences in the ordinary way, and lays down the foundations for later development. But what if Oedipus is never traversed, what if repression fails? If persons have not developed personalities sufficient to contain their own paranoid anxieties and to manage the bits that leak out, then acting out of the sudden explosive return of the repressed, or even as I am suggesting acting out the never repressed, may become a norm. What psychic state of mind can have produced the two late adolescent killers in the Denver High school last year, or the slayer of school children in the Scottish school the year before. Why did unconscious phantasy erupt into murderous action?

Why is it now increasingly possible not just to have a perverse phantasy but to make it a perverse reality?

The polymorphous perverse sexuality of infancy is supposed to give way with the resolution of the oedipal conflict, at about five years of age, to latency. In this period as psychoanalytical observers have noted, it is not that there is an absence of sexuality, but more that sexual life is not the uppermost aspect of latency. Boys get interested in mastering the world, in games, and football and space rockets, sublimated forms of sexuality. Girls equally master the outside world and their inner anxieties; they tend their dolls and play house, and play at being grownups, dressing up, borrowing their mothers' high heels and make up to explore the identity of being a little girl. Boys and Girls even if at school together lead rather separate lives. Latency is a time for consolidating identity in the world and the first separations from parents while in fact remaining dependent on them; it is the time for school learning, the time for the first contact with social rules outside the family, the time for a certain ego development which if strong enough or well integrated enough will serve to allow for the disintegration of the adolescent process, and its later re-integration into adult life.

But what happens if this process is invaded by adult sexuality rather than by containment for the working through of latency conflicts?

Adolescence can be scuppered by the failures of the latency period and the even earlier vicissitudes of pre-oedipal life? How the pubescent child negotiates adolescence and ultimately adulthood is patterned on earlier pre- oedipal positioning and psychic structures. Children need containment for their imaginative inner life if they are to grow and develop.

What kind of container for the imagination is a book as opposed to a film, a video, a computer game, the internet, or a football match, a game played under adult supervision, a playground game, a street game? How do we understand the shift from ringing on doorbells to shop lifting, and then to a 'child stealing game' in a supermarket, and a 'child killing game' on a railway line, as enacted by the children in Liverpool, or 'the student killing game' enacted in the Denver High school?

Without good enough adult authority to mediate the world, and its increasing complexity and divorce from individual responsibility, television, film, video, the internet and computer games offer an instant unbounded, unmediated world of passive identifications and part objects and an introjection of violence and hatred, death, killing, torture and maiming. This is a turning away from reality. Instead there is an immersion in a private solipsistic (masturbatory) space, with the illusion of others present as part objects for projection into, with all the attendant paranoid anxiety which fears retaliation from these sadistically attacked and deformed objects. External relations are thereby deformed when an inner world of sadistic introjection is re-projected into hated and feared others in the outside world. Was this the state of mind of the killers of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager killed by white youths animated by racial hatred and a love of violence, a crime that went un-investigated by the police who initially denied that there was any racial motivation in the crime. What had been projected into these murderers, and what had been introjected by them?

Latency children are no longer sequestered by a safe adult world. Family breakdown, domestic violence, the unsafety of street life, the lack of neighbourhood, the fear of strangers, hitherto known as neighbours, commits children to their own solipsistic devices, parented by the television or the computer. Testing out their fears and anxieties, their aggression, their skills and competencies and their capacities for reparation, is not easily available in social group life. They cannot form their own allegiances and alliances in privacy from, but guarded over by the adult world. They cannot learn from their own experience about risk taking, giving and taking, getting hurt and recovering. Instead the failed adult world of unrepressed aggression and sexuality invades the hitherto protected space of childhood development.

Perhaps as a society we are unable to provide containment, both institution (internal relations in the mind) and organisation, (the external bricks and mortar of the family, school, work) for the development of a citizenry. I think we might understand child abuse and the sexualisation of childhood as a projection of the unrepressed narcissism and deformity of adult sexuality into children. There is then an exploitation, and deformation of children's capacity to learn from experience through imitation and play; their latent sexuality is transformed unmediated by emotional learning, into a precocious sexuality . Little girls are dominated by the cult of Barbie, by the Spice Girls, and by Princess Diana., boys with superheroes. But the quality of these essential mythic trial narratives is no longer contained in fairy tales with a moral ending in which bad is put to rout by good, but is enacted by school children in the playground in a daily travesty of the violent and sexualised phantasies of a disturbed adult world. 'Suck my cock', 'lick my arse', 'sex me', is the contemporary language of what used to be enacted in kiss chase, or earlier explorations called doctors and nurses. Actual sexual abuse is at one end of the socially perverse spectrum of abuse and neglect; at the other is the seven year old embarrassed by his mother's gay friend at the school gate.

I suppose I am saying no more than what Christopher Lasch drew to our attention in the Culture of Narcissism. We live in and are producing a culture of narcissism, a culture dominated by individualistic, self-seeking wishes, which finds it hard to contemplate depressive concerns and the protection of childhood. And in a narcissistic and perverse culture where the adolescent passage to the developmental norms of adulthood has not been achieved, it seems easy to understand how a population of adults who have not grown up, enact their lost childhood narcissism in the regressive pull of paedophilia. Such a society damages children, often irreparably.

 As I have argued above psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a public social provision is under attack. There is a break down in civil society, and collectively we are unable to face and imagine the extent of this breakdown and cannot tolerate the guilt that would ensue if this was recognised. I would hypothesise that a recent grudging report by outside inspectors on the teaching of a major psychoanalytic psychotherapy organisation, was not so much motivated by envy, though no doubt that was part of it, but by an unconscious recognition that psychoanalytic truths are dangerous. They have to be resisted.

We know that children and adults are showing increasing signs of mental illness, but If they can be psychiatrically diagnosed as suffering from an innate biological condition then they can be treated as medical patients with drugs. There may be a social cost, but there is no blame attached. Psychotherapists are not to say that this damage is a long-term social sickness, deeply inflicted, and not amenable to quick cure. What we see in CAMHS is society's fall out of the vulnerable, and society's potential future fall out. We live in a society where children are often emotionally neglected and ignored, and often hated, and abused. I think we live in a society that has abdicated collective responsibility for providing containment for our fragile senses of self, and identity in which selfhood and personhood can mature. Some but not all of this, given time and patience and a properly protected therapeutic space, can be repaired, or at least a new purchase on reality can be acquired, but not for all children and not for all damage. We are unable to repair society from the bottom up. But we should keep silent on this. Society wishes to remain not only blind, but deaf.