oaf@mit-vax.UUCP (Oded Feingold) (02/10/86)
> Children often feel guilt ....
[Suzanne Barnett-Scott, VERY severely edited]
When I was a lad I caught some butterflies and put them in a glass jar.
I returned to them an hour later, and they were very tired, their wings
barely flapping. I threw them back onto the flowers in consternation,
and they just lay there. Presumably, after a while they got back some
energy and flew off, but I wasn't around to see that. I considered
myself the butcher of the western world and had screaming nightmares for
months.
Of course, I also had dreams wherein the monsters were after me, but the
ones that bothered me most were always the ones where _I_ was the guilty
party. It's easy enough to avoid thinking about monsters, but harder to
exorcise the devil within. [These are just analogies, by the way: I'm
not religious.]
Perhaps children learn to internalize guilt, as taught to by their
parents, around the time they start having nightmares. Once they learn
to control it (by whatever defense mechanisms they develop) they get
over that phase. "Monsters" merely add noise to the signal or a DC
component to the number and type of nightmares. [Ain't tech-weenieism
wonderful?]
Disclaimer: I don't have kids, but I've seen some once or twice.
--
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Oded Feingold MIT AI Lab. 545 Tech Square Cambridge, Mass. 02139
OAF%OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA {harvard, ihnp4!mit-eddie}!mit-vax!oaf 617-253-8598