If, however, despite your best efforts, your child does develop jealous characteristics in marked degree, the safest and wisest thing you can do is to take him at once to a good specialist in the treatment of mental and nervous troubles. It may be that the jealousy is only the resultant of some unsuspected error of his upbringing, but it may also be symptomatic of some serious disorder requiring careful medical treatment.
[Footnote 7: In my "Psychology and Parenthood" pp. 223-227, will be found the details of a typical poltergeist performance.]
[Footnote 8: "Educational Problems," vol. i, p. 363.]
"Jealousy," I stated a few pages back, "has its roots in selfishness, in an over-development of what may be called the ego-centric instinct." Aside from its role as a developer of jealousy, selfishness is indeed one of the major handicaps of childhood. Moralists have long urged on parents the importance of early training to prevent their children from becoming selfish. They have rightly pictured selfishness as among the greatest of human blemishes, giving character an ugly twist and making impossible that harmonious adjustment with other people which is indispensable to individual happiness and social progress. But it is not merely to be condemned from the moralist's point of view: it also is to be condemned from the physician's. Selfishness does much more than injure character: it may even ruin the health of those afflicted with it. To put the matter briefly, training against selfishness is imperative in early life, if only as a safeguard against the functional nervous and mental maladies so common to-day.
When parents fail to teach their children to control their emotions; when they foster in them exaggerated notions of their importance by giving way to the children in everything, being over-solicitous about them, performing duties for them which the children should early be taught to perform for themselves, selfishness is an almost inevitable outgrowth. The children, in addition, may become quite unfitted to cope with the stresses of existence. And they may further become so psychically disorganised that, if after a time they no longer find themselves always having their own way, there may develop nervous symptoms which not merely are the product of an inner emotional storm, but are strangely designed to fulfil the nervous one's latent wish to remain the centre of interest and influence. Or, more bluntly stated, nervous attacks frequently are sheer manifestations of selfishness. It is selfishness that gives rise to them, and, though the victim may not be at all conscious of the fact, they represent an abnormal effort of the personality to attain selfish ends.