he has will depend not on him alone but on the entire background to which his behavior has been a response.

If the boy has been under a strongly repressive discipline, if all of his attempts have been discouraged or subject to ridicule, if environment has limited too greatly his opportunities, if health has prevented aggressive or effective action, if some inferiority, real or imagined, physical, mental, or social, has developed a habit of nonaggressiveness, a fear of attacking a new project, a hesitancy to go over into positive action, a tendency to evade responsibility because of fear of failure or exposure of weakness, then we may expect to find adolescence producing the most critical problems. With adolescence comes a point when life looms up and even the family cannot continue to protect the child from his growing years. He must begin to get the comeback from his habits of poor adjustment. The patterns he has been using will not work in a world outside family protection. If he has not been accustomed to finding active concrete expression for his interests, the sudden flood of new energy, the widening of the horizon, the social impetus that youth receives, will swamp the motor apparatus. He has no techniques developed and has not the habit of trying to develop them for every new interest.

A particular girl whom we will call Alice illustrates the adolescent conflict when there is too great a pull-back, too many obstacles on the side of normal growth. Her early home life turned her against men and sex because her father was an abusive drunkard unable to support the family. Her mother put all of her love and desire into the indulging and spoiling of Alice. Alice was taught to dress above her station and feel herself better than others. She was the petted, adored, only child. Then the mother died leaving Alice to an unsympathetic, overworked old grandmother, whom Alice has never ceased to blame for her lost childhood and its pleasures. Alice submitted, but never accepted this change of living. She never ceased to long for the mother and the delights of adoration and dress and pleasure obtained without effort. The grandmother died leaving Alice without anyone, penniless and with not even a common school education. She goes to work without skill or training, hating the grandmother and even her mother for dying and leaving her to such a fate. She has never developed the kind of initiative and persistence that will enable her to get education by night work. She is not strong. She craves pleasure, she blames other people and fate for every misfortune. She develops an evasive way of meeting every unpleasantness, every failure of hers on a job. She is often late to work, she resents correction childishly, she is unreliable, stays away if she has the slightest pain, wants a lot of attention, has no idea of business etiquette. When she loses a job, the employer or a fellow-employee is to blame.

Adolescence increases the yearnings for a home, for a mother to fall back upon. The only other outlet she can see leads to the pleasures which mean sex: cabaret, movie, dance hall. Alice is afraid of sex. She resists the idea of marriage. What does she want with children! Look how her mother suffered and in the end had herself and baby to support.

So Alice is caught with no developed interests, no techni or inhibit the regressive impulses. When one talks with be of the adolescent yearnings. She wants to be somebody, to superior. In her good moods, she is overwhelmed with dream She pines to use good English, to be a real lady. There is pathos

what you say when a boy introduces you to his mother and how to behave in a stylish hotel dining-room. Such questions have an importance that is almost greater than the problem of how to keep straight sexually. Winning of social approval is an ever-present burning desire, but she has no patterns, no habits, no control over the daily details of the process whereby this is gained. When one tries to place her in a good environment with girls of a better class, she reacts with a deepened sense of inferiority, expressed in more open, boastful wildness. She invents adventures with men to dazzle these virtuous, superior maidens. The craving for pleasures and something to make her forget increases.

What one would do, if it were possible, is to hold Alice long enough to see her through the learning of some skill or technique in which she could be really superior and by which she could earn a decent living. The difficulty is that owing to the amount of instability that has been developed it requires almost constant supervision just to keep her in one place physically, as well as to hold her to the daily effort of mastering a hard task. It also takes a great deal of money for which no guarantee of success can be held out.

We have been following the development of the play and work interests of the individual and trying to show how a subjective, regressive development or call it a lack of development, if you wish—leads to greatly heightened conflict at adolescence because of the increased pressure of internal as well as external forces.

Now, on the side of the love interests, the development of social relationships which can be separated from the work side only arbitrarily, we find a similar situation. The individual whose love life and social interests have broadened progressively and have taken on a more and more objective character meets the effort required of adolescence to face adult sex and social responsibility with courage and positive striving. The individual who because of some inferiority, real or imagined, physical or mental, has tended to depend upon mother love or family tolerance and has avoided the possible criticism of an outside world by shutting himself away from others and comparison with them will easily find in adult love and hetero-sexual relationships something too difficult to be faced. When one contemplates all the influences that are at work to prevent the courageous objective development of love and sex, one wonders why adolescence ever follows a normal biological course.

What can we do practically to meet the complicated problems of adolescence? How can we lessen the struggle or lend strength to the forward-looking interests and impulses? If we wait until adolescence has begun, we shall have a difficult task. But granting that most of the adjustments should have been made earlier and taking adolescence as we actually find it, what is possible?

We can surround youth with encouragement. There need be no sneering superiority, no ridicule, no tyrannical authority, no dogmatic over-ruling, nothing to undermine the confidence and assertion that are necessary to approach work and love on an adult basis.

We can leave young people as free as possible to develop the to discover for themselves, to experiment, even to make mistakes. freedom to experiment in the ordering and control of their own their individual interests.

We can recognize and supply the need of youth for interpretati religions, philosophy, scientific and social theory, something genera

free

mastered verbally and used to reduce the chaos of a new world to a known and familiar thing, something to make life a safer, more manageable affair. Adolescence craves a unifying theory to use as a stepping-stone from the safe limits of childhood to a boundless universe otherwise too strange to be faced.

Parents and schools can see to it that youth is supplied with definite skills and techniques, that potential interests go over into action. They can show young people how to gain an objective happiness in creative work. They can so equip adolescence that it will not be left defenseless in the face of an adult world with only dreams to offer.

The family can reduce the pull-back of childhood by encouraging economic independence, breaking away from home, going away to college, widening the social interests to extend beyond the family circle. The parents can keep their love for the child objective and unselfish and welcome his growing independence and hetero-sexual interests.

Last and most important, if we are wise enough and grown up enough ourselves, we can give the adolescent an interpretation of sex and human behavior which will enable him to face frankly his own cravings and inferiorities real or imagined and adjust himself to them in a positive, constructive spirit.

Sex instruction as now provided in the public school is not equivalent to assisting youth to a happy emotional adjustment. Like Alice, one may know the facts of sex and hate them. Can we provide parents and teachers so well adjusted and so understanding that they can take the adolescent at the critical moment and through their own courageous and positive attitudes show him the way? For he needs not only to face sex and learn to look forward to love and marriage; he needs even more to accept himself, honestly and frankly, to recognize inferiorities and abilities and learn the lesson of compensation.

C. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MENTAL HYGIENE FOR THE TEACHER AND THE NORMAL CHILD

Frankwood E. Williams, M.D., Associate Medical Director, National Committee for Mental Hygiene, New York City

Assuming that intellectual training is not an end in itself, but merely a means to an end, and that the end that justifies all our work-yours as teacher, mine as physicianis the increase of human happiness and efficiency, not narrowly industrial efficiency, but skill in meeting personal problems of whatever nature, then I would assert that the narrowness of our present eff within my power, I would gra physical and intellectual train instant, let us assume that all is

in many directions. And yet the world is no whit happier, and individual efficiency, in the larger sense, is no whit greater; for happiness and efficiency are not essentially dependent either upon physical health or intellectual development. The most perfect physical specimen of manhood or womanhood, who at the same time is an intellectual giant, has no greater assurance of happiness, except in a very narrow sense, than you or I.

These are largely truisms, and yet we seem so frequently to forget them. In the world's struggle out of darkness, it has been the ladder of intellect that has been used, and so concentrated has been our attention on this means of escape and so zealous and energy-consuming have been our efforts to repair old rungs and to add new ones that the very thing for which we started building is forgot.

We pride ourselves that our lives are controlled by our intellects—thus as humans do we differ from the animals. Unlike the animals, when faced with a difficult problem, we gather together our bits of information and apply cold reason to the formation of our judgment. Although each of us occasionally may wish he had a little more "brains" to apply in making a judgment, we are quite sure that it is the "brains" (intellect) we have that is applied. But we often fool ourselves. If we will ground our pride, I think we will find that all too often our decisions are quite largely made before our intellects come very fully into play, and that our intellectual processes perform the function largely of finding reasons to justify the already made decision. In other words, our decision has been made upon an emotional basis rather than upon an intellectual one. Educational systems have not taken much note of this, for they have not outgrown the early slogan-train the intellect and school the will that they may rule over the "baser animal parts." Emotional problens are not unimportant; they are fundamental. They are not to be solved by intellect, in the narrow sense; will, whatever that is, if it is a thing apart, is a bulwark of straw.

We are inclined, in dealing with the emotional life of children, to feel that conduct lies within their conscious control; that, having taught them left from right and right from wrong, they are at liberty to choose the right and deny the wrong; that if they choose the wrong, they are perverse and the result be upon their own heads. We wash our hands of responsibility. Such an attitude on the part of our own teachers could not be wholly condemned—it was in keeping with the knowledge of the day; such an attitude today is a reflection upon the intelligence or the professional knowledge of the man who holds it.

The mind of a child is vastly more than an intellect. And what he does eventually with his intellect will depend largely upon how he learns to use the rest of himself. In this learning process we may help him or we may merely set him adrift to sink or swim. This vast part about him that is not intellect is knowable, so that we may not much longer ignore it and keep a comfortable feeling.

Emotions of whatever kind-moods, temperaments, idiosyncrasies, peculiarities— have their cause. They are not made either of dragon's breath or fairies' wings. Even a child's personality cannot stand naked before the forces that play against it any more than can its body. And no sooner does it learn to protect its body from environmental forces than it begins to learn to protect its personality. In the former undertaking it has much guidance; in the latter, although the problem is much more difficult-for not only must it protect itself against the forces themselves, but also against the vague fears that still reside in the forces-it has but little help. We may not be surprised,

Lerefore, that it builds badly and that some of its false structures begin to show early. here is time here to enter but briefly into a discussion of some of this false building.

In any group there will be found those who are beginning to edge away from the rowd. This edging away should not be confused with a later adult desire to simplify >ne's life, to get away from the distractions of manifold duties, the "continuousness of liscontinuities," where one can think and plan in peace and quiet. The adolescent group of which I speak withdraws not deliberately in order to think and to solve problems, but instinctively, perhaps, we may say, in order to avoid pain. It is the beginning of a withering-up process, as of a plant too long in the direct heat of the sun, and leads to various degrees of incapacity, from the dementia praecox patient in the hospital,, content with his own autistic thinking, to the ineffectual day-dreamer on the outside. Up to now, the child has healthfully been putting forth pseudopods, as it were, feeling out and absorbing from his environment; but he begins to find his environment too complex. In whatever direction he pours out a pseudopod, he finds not food but nettles; reality has become too painful; pseudopods become less frequent; he begins to roll up in a ball and to find contentment in a world of his own construction. The less that world is checked with reality, the greater the contentment.

Others, to the same general situation, react a bit differently. Day-dreaming and fantasy-building fill up their lives. Not the day-dreams that are inspirational means to ends more real than reality, the dreams that make the world go round, but dreams that are an end in themselves, for they are hitched to no dynamo. These students glow with fine emotions and are frequently the joy of instructors, because of their quick appreciation of the finer sentiments and ideals they are trying to express. Later he records these students as "disappointments," but with no sense, probably, of personal or school responsibility, or of opportunity neglected, of succor withheld because the need was unrecognized. To him, in all likelihood, the matter is an unfathomable matter of fate, much as he may still consider infant mortality-"The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord."

If a keen sense of reality and the habit of constantly correcting one's thinking by reference to reality is necessary in the development of steadfastness and clearness essential to mental health, so, too, is intellectual honesty; yet, in any student group may be seen the development of contrary habits. An easy expedient in meeting a disagreeable situation-for example, an unattainable desire-is to deny the desire and to minimize the value of the thing wished for. The wish is genuine, nevertheless, and assuming a false attitude merely makes it much harder to meet any later situation in which the wish could and should be realized.

Emotional difficulties may be met by rationalizing them, a process whereby one succeeds (only partially) in deceiving one's self, although quite frequently others, by assigning for a course of action a reason that is not the real reason, which would be disagreeable and painful, but a reason that is plausible and much more satisfying to one's self-esteem. "I did not apply for a commission during the war because I could not be spared from my own community." A true reason in many cases; a rationalization in others. Not meeting the situation does not resolve the mental conflict involved in the situation and this lives to assert itself in many undesirable ways.

There is probably no snare of greater importance to the child than that involved in the development of feeling of inferiority, for the injuries received here will likely remain with him for the rest of his life. The sources of this feeling are many and cannot