Honesty - A Study of the Causes and Treatment of Dishonesty Among Children #252661

Valuable to Get Appreciation of Mental Mech anisms. — To get appreciation of these funda mental motives and forces, which mean so much for the conduct of life, I have often thought that it would be worth the while of any intelligent per son to consider a Single individual, perhaps himself, and gather together all the possible items of early mental life, and to refer them to their sources, and to note their finished product in developed charac ter. Perhaps this procedure would be too difficult without instruction in the art of such character analysis. Perhaps, too, as we suggested above, the Older person can not remember early formative conditions. But at least it requires no technical or special knowledge to perceive the general fact that in the mental life of any ordinary child there are ideas and emotions and mechanisms that are usually not even regarded as existent.