Madelaine Ganz - The Psychology Of Alfred Adler: and the Development of the Child

The Psychology of Alfred Adler and the Development of the Child

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

In 21 Volumes

MADELAINE GANZ

Introduction by Pierre Bovet

First published in 1953 by

Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd

Reprinted 1999, 2000, 2001 by

Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2006

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

1953 Madelaine Ganz, Translated by Philip Mairet

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Psychology of Alfred Adler and the Development of the Child

ISBN 978-0415-21056-0

Individual Differences: 21 Volumes

ISBN 0415-21130-1

The International Library of Psychology: 204 Volumes

ISBN 0415-19132-7

Printed and bound by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne

ISBN 9781136331497

DOI: 10.4324/9781315010175

It matters little what we bring into the world, everything depends on what we make of it.

A. Adler

MADEMOISELLE MADELAINE GANZ asks me for a preface to a book which, after being awarded the Lucien Cellrier prize by the University of Geneva, has gained for her the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. I have no qualification for introducing the work beyond having been its instigator and first reader. Having no personal knowledge of the institutions to which she has devoted her study, I will limit myself to saying why I am happy to welcome it into ourCollection d'Actualits Pda-gogiques and to place this monograph beside those which have so far attained that distinction.

Mlle. Ganz's intelligent and attentive description of the Adlerian schools and consultative methods comes as a timely addition to the accounts which Mr. Anderson and Mme. Loosli have given us of the Healy psychological clinic, and of the medico-psychological consultations at the Institut J. J. Rousseau. Far from rendering each other redundant, these monographs will arouse in their readers a desire for information about other social services of the same kind. Why should we not also be told of the procedure at Leipzig and at Paris, at Guy's Hospital in London and at the observational station at Moll? Is it not encouraging to see that this work is proceeding on every hand, and singularly instructive to compare the methods employed?

What at first sight chiefly distinguishes psychological-pedagogical consultations from one another is the positionthat they accord respectively to methods of gaining information; interrogation, clinical examination, experimentation or, to name only the two most controversial procedures, tests on the one hand, and, on the other, investigation into the subconscious. We have seen in Healy's work the considerable place assigned to tests of the most varied kinds; Mme. Loosli, who has acquired eminent competence in the application of the Rorschach test to children, has shown us how serviceable she has found this method, of a psychoanalytic tendency, in conjunction with others that seek to measure the aptitudes and the level of intelligence. With Adler, it is the interpretation of behaviour, as a function of desires for the most part unconscious, to which the greatest importance is attached.

May I state, briefly, from my personal experience, the present position in relation to concrete cases of this recourse to the psychology of deeper levelsto what the Germans call Depth-psychology. It was a great satisfaction to me, at the Congress of the New Education held in South Africa in 1934, to see my experience exactly confirmed by the far wider experience of Boyd from Glasgow.

People send us children whose school records are wholly deplorable: their orthography, arithmetic, their German or Latin, or what you willare so poor that we are asked whether some exercises in concentration, some kind of orthophrenic gymnastics are not indicated. We begin by simply measuring the intellectual capacity of the child according to the classic scale of Binet (and I do not yet understand how informed practitioners, those of Vienna for example, can voluntarily deprive themselves of such information as this affords). Frequently we find that the child's mental level is perfectly normal, that its intelligence quotient exceeds 100: one cannot ascribe its want of success at school to mental backwardness. The intelligence is notin question. Can it be, then, an emotional disequilibrium that is troubling the child's attention to study? The Rorschach test is of service in distinguishing any such instability. Other instruments of research are employed elsewhere. Boyd makes use, with great success, of a list of associations inspired by Jung. We can also tell whether it will be prudent to confide the further interrogation of the child to a psychiatrist, or whether the instability thus betrayed is such as an examination of the child's family and social surroundings can clarify, by placing ourselves at one or another of the points of view recommended by the diverse schools of psychoanalysis.