I believe that mental
specialists often make a careful study of the dreams of those whose
minds are afflicted, because it is held that dreams very often
continue to reproduce in later life the mental shocks of childhood.
Anger, intemperate punishment, any attempt to produce instant
submission and dismay in children, is very apt to hurt the nervous
organisation. Of course it is easy enough to be careful about these
things in sheltered environments, where there is some security and
refinement of life. And this opens up a vast problem which cannot
be touched on here, because it is practically certain that many
children in poor and unsatisfactory homes sustain shocks to their
mental organisation in early life which damage them irreparably,
and which could be avoided if they could be brought up on more
wholesome and tender lines.
VII
FEARS OF BOYHOOD
There is a tendency, I am sure, in books, to shirk the whole subject
of fear, as though it were a thing disgraceful, shameful, almost
unmentionable. The coward, the timid person, receives very little
sympathy; he is rather like one tainted with a shocking disease, of
which the less said the better.
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