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.
64/584 page 36
![36 Theory for a New Field reasons we have yet to learn, sustain these risks without significant impairment or personality development. In other words, knowing the child-rearing practices of parents, and knowing that events potentially disruptive or traumatic have occurred, does not predict the developmental outcome for the child. This discrepancy between results obtained from retrospective and prospective investigations is not limited to environmental and specifically psychiatric risks. For instance, prematurity, minor neurological deviations, and paranatal complications are widely recognized as high risk factors in relation to cognitive and overall development. Yet when such high risk babies are longitudinally studied and examined at later school age, they do not differ significantly from normal control groups either in intelligence or in the incidence of pathology [1]. The work of Bowlby [2] and Bowlby and Ainsworth [3] on the effect upon young children of abrupt separation from the mother is a good example. Bowlby, Spitz, and many others showed that such separation nearly always leads to massive disruption, regression, failure to learn, and symptoms akin to those of depression—the symptomatology observed is so severe that lasting and irreversible damage to personality development was assumed. Yet when school-age children who had in common the experience of early separation / hospitalization were examined, these children fimctioned well both cognitively and socially. There was a slightly greater incidence of minor adjustment problems in this group as compared to the control, but severe psychopathology had not occurred as the result of early separation. In other words, manifest psychopathology in early childhood does not necessarily predict later maladjustment. Anna Freud, on the basis of rich clinical experience, came to the same conclusion and specified the manner in which the unforeseeable events during important later phases of development will determine the resolution of earlier conflicts and imbalances, or the failure of such resolution [4, 5] The term high risk implies the expectation that the presence of specific identifiable attributes of the environment or the organism greatly increases the probability that psychopathology will occur. In the psychiatric and psychological domain such an expectation is contradicted by all available research data. Yet there is one relationship between early life conditions and](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b18021876_0065.JP2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
