Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/668

652 attack. A child of four, on being crossed, would bang bis chair and then proceed to vent his displeasure on his unoffending toylion, banging him, jumping on him, and threatening him with the loss of his dinner. Hitting is in some cases improved upon bybiting. The boy C was for some time vigorously mordant in his angry fits. Another little boy would under similar circumstances bite the carpet.

Here we have expressive movements which are plainly brutal, which assimilate the aspect of an angry child to that of an angry savage and angry animal. The whole outward attitude is one of fierce, ruthless assault. The insane, I am told, manifest a like wildness of attack in fits of anger, smashing windows, etc., and striking anybody who happens to be at hand.

Yet these are not all the manifestations. Childish anger has its wretched aspect. There is keen suffering in these early experiences of thwarted will and purpose. A little boy rather more than a year old used, when crossed, to throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his head; and his brother, when fourteen months old, would similarly throw himself on the floor and bang the back of his head, biting the carpet as before mentioned. This act of throwing one's self on the floor, which is common during this early period, and is apparently quite instinctive, is the expression of the utter dejection of misery. C's attitude when crossed, gathered into a heap on the floor, was eloquent of this infantile despair. Such suffering is the immediate outcome of thwarted purpose, and must be distinguished from the moral feeling of shame which often accompanies it.

Such stormy outbursts vary, no doubt, from child to child. Thus, C's sister in her angry moments did not bite or roll on the floor, but would dance about and stamp. Some children show little if anything of this savage furiousness. Among those that do show it, it is often a temporary phenomenon only.

This anger, it is to be noted, is due to mere check of will by will, and would show itself to some extent even if there were no intervention of authority. Thus a child will show himself angry, resentful, and despairingly miserable if another child gets effective hold of something which he wants to have. Yet it is undoubtedly true, as we shall see, that these little storms are most frequently called up by the imposition of authority, and are a manifestation of what we call a defiant attitude.

This slight examination may suffice to show that with the child self—its appetites, its satisfactions—is the center of its existence, the pivot on which its action turns. I do not forget the real and striking differences here, the specially brutal form of boys' anger as compared with that of girls, the partial atrophy of some of these impulses—e. g., jealousy—in the more gentle and affectionate type