Situation:
A little poor boy in USA with his relatives.
Question1:
Shall the boy be sent back to a dictatorship?
Two possible answers: Yes or no (some people
love dictatorships)
Question2:
Shall the boy be sent to his relatives in a democracy?
Two posible answers: yes or no (some people
love democracies)
Ricardo, Brasil.
> A friend, knowing (or assuming!) my psychology
> "expertise," asked me recently what, as a
> psychologist, I thought of the Elian issue.
> Tempting as it was to issue some authoritative-
> sounding statement about developmental stages,
> influences on personality development, and the impact
> of trauma on a child, I bit my tongue, held my ego in
> rein, and said I didn't know, because I hadn't had
> any contact with this particular child. (And frankly,
> couldn't necessarily KNOW even if I had.)
>
> As psychologists, I think we should know step back from
> taking sides in this political hotbed. We should know better
> than to attempt to assess the psychological well-being of
> a child we have not personally had the opportunity to assess
> (unless you count Time Magazine, our local newspapers,
> television news, the person-in-the-street, and Michael
> Sylvester). To assume, as Michael Sylvester did, that
> >If he is resilient enough to survive in the ocean,he
> >should be able to survive the trip back to Cuba and
> >the lifestyle there<
> seems to me to be the most solipsistic analysis I have
> yet encountered in all the Elian-media reporting. I'm
> still struggling with my shock at Michael's slur on
> Elian's cousin (whose name, incidentally, is
> "Marisleysis," not "Marleysis") for her purported
> hospitalization for depression. Is this supposed to
> make her less credible as an loving person to Elian?
>
> It is tempting to use our Piagetian/Developmental
> background and assess Elian, as Joyce Pavao (an expert
> in adoption) did, declaring, "It is absurd, but this
> is a very young child...still in shock and in grief,
> and of course he would likely say that he wants things
> to stay as they are. Who wouldn't?" (Boston Globe,
> April 3, 2000) Yet she did not interview Elian, but
> is making judgments based on her instinct about Elian
> as a prototype for the children she has encountered.
>
> There are so many variables in a child's reactions to
> a life situation that it seems to me to be very rash
> to make a pronouncement here, unless it is offered as
> a political opinion. Or as David Cooper offered with
> his extreme examples of rescuing a child from East
> Berlin or slave conditions, as an extreme scenario
> offered for the sake of argument.
>
> Beth Benoit
> University of Massachusetts Lowell
>
>
>
