A Look at Pathways to Madness

By: Stephen Showalter

The book Pathways to Madness has given me a different look at the interactional view. The part of the book that I focused on was the section on the Rosenberg family. A particularly interesting part of this section dealt with the dialect of pain.

In discussing the issue of getting a child to obey you by hurting him physically Jules Henry says that a child has three choices. These choices are: to yield and endure; to endure and resist; and to endure, resist and fight back while appearing to yield [Henry,1971].

The first choice is yielding and enduring. In his book Henry refers to the one inflicting the pain as the enemy and the enemy is inflicting the pain upon a child. In the same paragraph he refers to the one inflicting the pain as the child's parents so one can only assume he views a child's parents as enemies when they inflict pain upon the child. Henry claims that an enemy will give up when the cost is deemed not worthy of continuing to inflict the pain due to the improbability of victory. The deciding factor in whether or not a child will yield or withstand the pain is his ability to tolerate pain and the importance to the child of whatever he is recieving pain for [Henry, 1971]. Henry also states that if time and time again the child has experienced withstanding as being rewarding then he will continue to withstand the punishment and never learn to obey.

The second choice is to endure and resist. An example given in the book is when a child laughs or takes the blows of his parent impassively inciting the parent into rage. Henry suggests that the child's perception of his parent's loss of control may compel him to do anything, no matter how hard his parent hits [Henry, 1971]. It is the parent's panic of ineffectiveness that entices the child to continue to disobey [Henry,1971]. Under the discussion of enduring and resisting Henry addresses the issue of the siblings of the child being punished. He states that the sibling would be prone to act in a manner which would please the parents. If the sibling were to misbehave and get punished then he or she would possibly cry before being struck, wriggle in pain as he or she is beaten, and may bawl that he or she will be good. What the sibling is doing is giving the parent complete satisfaction [Henry, 1971].

The third and final choice of the child is to yield while appearing to endure and resist. This choice deals with being careful not to yield too quickly for fear that a prolonged beating is in the near future. The victim as called by Henry will endure a beating until he feels he has satisfied the attacker even though he is suffering and is really terrified, but has learned that he will suffer even more if he were to yield too early.

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