Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik.
- Date:
- [1974]
Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Credit: Children at psychiatric risk / edited by E. James Anthony and Cyrille Koupernik. Source: Wellcome Collection.
56/584 page 28
![28 Theory for a New Field of breaks; ^ at 12 and 13 years, Berthe and Paulette began to participate in the delusions of their mothers and one might predict that a few adverse circumstances would lead to the development of an adult psychosis. These children could have been considered invulnerable; no one would have thought of bringing them for psychiatric consultation, and an anamnesis taken at an adult age would not have disclosed a disturbed childhood. It was the chance participation in the longitudinal study that brought them to clinical notice.^ The identification and full recognition of the parent's peculiar behavior as an illness undoubtedly helps the child to come to terms with it and protect himself from it, this being as true here as in other family difficulties in which secrets and skeletons in the closet operate harmfully. Some children become psychotic because they have been compelled to live in a network of ambiguous family relationships. Lebovici has reported a case (unpublished) in which the child calls her unwed mother, who nurses her, sister and her maternal grandmother mother. We have encountered cases in our practice in which massive learning difficulties resistant to remedial teaching and psychotherapy, and inexplicable by any psychometric, linguistic, or organic findings, have appeared to be significantly related to the father's analphabetism, experienced as extremely shameful and kept successfully hidden from the children. CASE OF A A Parisian, who had failed to learn to read at school, was the father of 12 children, 9 boys and 3 girls. The mother had attended secondary school. The 3 girls had no school problems, but all the boys were dyslexia. It suggested a sex- linked genetic problem, but careful investigation disclosed that identification with the father was at the root of the situation. The parents then decided to reveal the father's secret and after this was done, the children (with the exception of one child) made dramatic progress and succeeded in achieving their professional apprenticeship. The matter was, of course, more complex than this brief resumé would indicate: for example, the mother's choice of marital partner was also involved. 1 Anthony has described these micropsychotic episodes, as well as childhood folie à deux, in some detail [2]. 2 Anthony has referred to the curious fact that the disturbances of these high risk chil¬ dren are often undetected during childhood and attributes this to the camouflaging by the environment. He has also pointed to the child's need to know about the illness [2].](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0057.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
