There are two children in the house. One of them keeps getting into trouble. The school rings. The stories stop matching. Money goes out of your bag and nobody took it.
The other one is quiet. Does what is asked. Stays in her room with the door shut. Says she is fine, the same way every time.
Which of them looks more serious to you?
We rank them by what they cost us
Parents bring a child to me, and it is nearly always the same child. The one there was an incident about.
The quiet one does not come. There is no reason to bring her. The school does not ring, nothing goes missing, she is home at night. Nothing about her needs seeing to.
Here is the thing I want to point at. When we decide which child is more serious, the measure we actually use is not how much pain is this child in. It is how much is this child costing me.
Most of the time those two questions give the same answer, which is why nobody notices the substitution. In adolescence they come apart.
In adolescence, what went in early comes back up
A child accumulates frustration, deprivation, and disappointment before having words or support to process them. The feelings do not disappear; they remain available to shape later behavior.
During adolescence, increased aggression and the need for separation give those earlier feelings more force. One child directs the force outward through defiance, lying, stealing, or fighting. Another directs it inward by becoming numb, passive, and unreachable.
What that same rising looks like in an office, with a manager who has said nothing wrong, is a separate piece — Why Taking Orders Feels Like an Insult. I will not go over that ground again here.
This is where the two children separate.
Where is the battery?
Think of a walking doll that takes steps and makes a noise. Turn it over and there is a hatch — under the foot, in the back, on top of the head — and behind it the space where the batteries go.
So what is a battery? It is energy.
The battery represents aggression and destructiveness as energy. When that energy is connected to action, the child can protest, pursue, refuse, and move. When it is disconnected, the child may stop wanting, objecting, or initiating anything.
The child who keeps getting into trouble has the battery working. The direction is wrong, and I will not be soft about that — lying and stealing break the order everybody else lives in, and somebody is harmed by it. That has to be stopped as a separate matter. But the act happening at all means the force moved.
The quiet child has turned the force against its own expression. She does not argue, ask, or cause trouble because wanting itself has been shut down. The absence of outward behavior can therefore mean not health but that vitality has gone into hiding; at the extreme, it has psychologically died.
Why that force is not the ugly thing you were taught it was — why it is a force and not a fault — I have already gone through in Nobody Calls the Lion Evil. I will not repeat that explanation here.
How Winnicott saw these two children
Winnicott looked at the children everybody else had written off as problems and said something nobody else was saying. These ones have hope in them.
That is not me inflating a mood into a doctrine. It is in his 1956 paper: the antisocial act as an expression of hope.
It is worth being exact, because the sentence is easy to misuse. His subject was not delinquency — not the offence itself — but the movement underneath it, the antisocial tendency, which turns up in ordinary children in perfectly decent houses.
He said the other half in the same breath. Most children who are being troublesome are ill to some degree. Hope is not a clean bill of health. It means something is still switched on to work with.
Winnicott also described compliance that hardens into a false-self shell. Ordinary cooperation is a healthy capacity. But when the child must always agree and adapt, the compliant presentation begins to conceal the child’s own wishes and feelings. Socially she causes no trouble, while psychologically she may be collapsing. The distress did not disappear; it stopped becoming visible to other people.
The Child Who Was No Trouble at All follows that child into adulthood, still being told how easy she is. This piece is about the year she reaches adolescence with the shell still on.
No symptom, no appointment
Here is what I am actually trying to say.
The child who went outward has symptoms. The school rings, the money is gone, the adults are furious. It is loud and exhausting. And it is precisely the noise that makes an adult put a coat on and take that child somewhere. Help arrives.
The child who directs distress inward produces no disruptive symptom for adults to manage. Because nobody is inconvenienced, nobody asks whether the child has stopped feeling, wanting, or connecting. She may not receive help until adulthood, when emptiness, depression, or inability to form relationships finally becomes unbearable.
So the child who gets help late is not the child who caused the trouble.
Force moving and a person getting hurt are not the same event
Let me close the obvious hole before somebody falls in. This is not a piece saying that lying or stealing or hitting is fine. Behaviour that harms another person has to be stopped, and I have no softer version on offer.
Expressing something and doing damage with it are two different acts, which is the whole argument of You Never Say No and the Child Is More Anxious. A child is allowed to be angry, allowed to argue, allowed to say out loud that the thing is unfair. Putting a hand on somebody is a different question with a different answer.
What I want to turn over is not the behaviour. It is the measure — the one you reach for when you decide which of your children is the serious case.
If there is a quiet child in your house, ask what the quiet contains. A well child can disagree, ask for help, show preference, and become angry while also spending time alone. A child who has gone out of view says “fine” to everything, asks for nothing, and shows little desire even where desire would be expected. The same quiet appearance can therefore come from two very different inner states.
References
- Winnicott, D. W. (1956). The Antisocial Tendency. In Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis (pp. 306–315). London: Tavistock Publications, 1958. — the antisocial act as an expression of hope.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (pp. 140–152). London: Hogarth Press, 1965. — compliance hardened into a shell.
- Winnicott, D. W. (1984). Deprivation and Delinquency. C. Winnicott, R. Shepherd & M. Davis (Eds.). London: Tavistock Publications.
Related
- The Child Who Was No Trouble at All
- The Good Enough Mother: Winnicott on Perfect Parenting
- I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board
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