Freud_Burlingham_1943_War_and_Children_k_text

from danger and put them in surroundingswhere is no talk of air raids. They will slowlyrevert to their former forms of anxiety. Weshall know that peace has returned when nothingis left for the children to be afraid of excepttheir own former ghosts and bogeymen.This enumeration of the various types ofair raid anxiety in children, long as it mavseem, is still incomplete. Even superficialobservation will show that children do notonly undergo and develop the fears whichbelong totheir own age and stage of development,but that they also share the fear reactionsof their mothers, and, more generally, of thegrown-up world around them. No understandingof their own, no development of inhibitionsagainst primitive aggression and noguilty conscience is necessary for the developmentof this further type of anxiety. A childof school age, like the boy described above,may stick stubbornly to its own reactions. Achild in the infant stage of one, two, three,four years of age will shake and tremble withthe anxiety of its mother, and this anxietywill impart itself the more thoroughly to thechild the younger it is. The primitive animaltie between mother and baby which, in somerespects, still makes one being out of the twois the basis for the development of this typeof air raid anxiety in children. The quiet32