A Doctor's Journal
Anger in the Family
By MILES HOWARD My first reaction to this would be that the turns might upset some adults, but are unlikely to upset a child, unless he were pretty disturbed to begin with and was nursing (say) fantasies of violence to a parent : the violence on stage is then a realisation of his forbidden wish and therefore frightening. The only way to find out whether these turns do in fact upset children would be to interview a random sample of the audience on several days (the children and their parents) directly after the show and perhaps a month later; then there would be some facts to go on. Any- thing else is opinion, and all opinions on a topic such as this are likely to be biased.
How does the depiction of violence, on TV and in comics, affect children in their later years? Wertham, in his book Seduction of the Innocent, tells some hair-raising stories about the young readers of American horror comics and how they may lapse into delinquency as they grow up. because violence is represented in their reading as the smart and bold line to take. Does this hold in Britain? Nobody knows,, since (as far as I can judge) there has been no systematic attempt to make studies of the young over a long enough time in order to appraise the influence on them of violence and sexual behaviour as shown on the TV and cinema screen. Children will often say that beating and shooting in a 'Western are what you expect, so they aren't surprised or upset, whereas a sudden assault in a domestic setting may be alarming. I imagine that exposure to movies and TV, even among the regular viewers, is, by and large, a minor factor in the determina- tion of future behaviour when it is compared with intra-psychic happenings in the child which have their origin in identification with a parent and exposure to parental disharmony. The regu- lation and expression of anger, in the family, is a fascinating theme for study. Is it better to have a furious scene, with shouting and slapping, and clear the air? or suppress it all to keep the peace, and leave everyone with a charge of undigested rage? At a party the other' night, I heard a traveller recount how Some of the natives of India handle their rage. When two bullock-carts, going opposite ways, meet on a narrow road, the drivers will get out, curse, scream and abuse one another; then the storm settles, the carts 'get by somehow and go qn their way, each driver having discharged his spleen and thus brought his mental voltage' down. A parallel, in this country, may be seen in the behaviour of enraged motorists: 'getting on' is very important to many of them, and they can't tolerate being held up —they wind down the car window and spit with rage at the other driver. I can't help feeling, though, that the release afforded by this spitting isn't full enough to get rid of all the venom; a lot of it must remain seething (if that's the word) inside, and thus prepare the ground for a coronary attack or a spell of tension pain.
It was Gregg who, in 1941, drew the attention of the medical world to the effects of rubella (German measles) in the mother upon the develop- ing fcetus. Last week the findings of another sur- vey were published, and these are disquieting indeed. A series of fifty-seven children whose mothers had been diagnosed as suffering from rubella in pregnancy were compared with fifty- seven controls. In the latter no major congenital defects were found, whereas in the former no fewer than fifteen children had cataract, or mental defect, or congenital deafness. Of these deafness was much the most common—fourteen of the fifteen.
One curious result of the inquiry was the dis- covery that in nine of these children the loss of hearing had been quite unsuspected until this special examination was made. None of the child- ren in the control group had a congenital deafness of this kind, but five of them had loss of hearing acquired at a later date, and in no case had this defect been brought to light. The authors com- ment that the four children with the most severe degree of bilateral deafness were abnormal in their behaviour—restless, destructive, spiteful, unable to concentrate.
The moral of this sad story is plain. Infection with rubella, mild and innocent though it may seem, can be a serious illness when the patient is pregnant; a close scrutiny should be kept on her and on her child; the child should be kept under observation until such time as audiometry can be carried out, in order to find whether hearing has been damaged. So rubella has something in com- ma' with the Virus of 'flu : a 'little illness'—two or three days' malaise, perhaps not even a fever— is followed by a black depression, a run of 'organic' ailments, deterioration of performance at work, and all manner of disabilities.
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