Conclusion
The widespread phenomenon of the runaway child includes, as we have seen, many variants, many reasons, and many possible prognoses. It also, as we have inferred from our examination of the five cases, lends itself to varying interpretations.
One of these involved interpretation of the loss of the parent-whether physical loss or the loss of the parent's confidence and esteem-as a kind of rejection by the parent of the child. This is accompanied, usually, by an intense hostility. About this, Hollo May has this to say in his study of runaway girls:
The key to the problem is to be found by inquiring into the psychological meaning of the rejection. We shall therefore ask, with reference first to the cases of the girls in whom rejection was found with neurotic anxiety and then to the cases in which it was not: How did the girl subjectively interpret the rejection? The chief characteristic of the girls who fit the hypothesis is that they always interpreted the rejection against the background of high expectations of their parents. They exhibited what we have termed a contradiction between expectations and reality in their attitudes toward their parents. They were never able to accept the rejection as realistic, objective facts.
Complicating the problem of prognosis-and, indeed, of any treatment whatsoever of the mass-runaway syndrome is this: the children left home as individuals, acting alone; and for the first time in modern history they found a functioning-if largely reactionary-"counter-culture" movement to accept them, explain them to the world with vast accusatory apologies, teach them new values to replace the old, and force upon them a permanently antisocial point of view that largely precludes any return to even a reformed home environment in which the original areas of disagreement have been changed to fit new patterns.
One of the things they have learned is the joy of breaking other people's taboos, as much for the shock value (with its implied hostility and aggression) as anything. To be sure, they have their own taboos, and they are as restrictive as anything their parents forced upon them-but they do not recognize them as taboos, any more than the parents had.
J. C. Flugel comments on taboos in Man, Morals and Society:
Freud in his Totem and Taboo was the first to throw any really satisfactory light upon the psychological processes involved, but in doing so he built upon a distinction that had been made by earlier observers, notably Wundt, i.e., that there is a sort of double attitude toward many objects of taboo. These objects are at once holy and sacred on the one hand, and unclean and polluted on the other, though these two strangely contradictory qualities combine in making the object dangerous and a source of fear. Freud, by a characteristic stroke of genius, saw a resemblance between this double attitude involved in taboo and the double attitude or compromise that from the start of psychoanalytic work had become apparent in so many products of the mind; in dreams, in wit, and above all in neurotic symptoms.
All of the children reviewed in this study can be viewed as in some way "deprived." Everyone has been deprived of something in the course of growing up. Thus it is not altogether irrelevant to the general discussion to return to the specific comments of John Bowlby in his discussion of the orphan as "deprived" child:
The proper care of children deprived of a normal home life can now be seen to be not only an act of common humanity, but to be essential for the mental and social welfare of a community ... Deprived children, whether in their own homes or out of them, are a source of social infection as real and serious as are carriers of diphtheria and typhoid ... Determined action can greatly reduce the number of deprived children in our midst and the number of adults liable to produce more of them.
It is, of course, impossible to separate these social statements from the psychosexual, given the sexual adventures of the particular group of runaways under discussion in the present study. And, besides the infantile challenge to taboo cited earlier, there is at work here a definite challenge to conventional morality and ethical standards, and it must be considered in any discussion of the subject. C. G. Jung saw the matter this way:
The conflict between ethics and sex today is not just a collision between instinctuality and morality, but a struggle to give an instinct its rightful place in our lives, and to recognize in this instinct a power which seeks expression and evidently may not be trifled with, and therefore cannot be made to fit in with our well-meaning moral laws. Sexuality is not mere instinctuality; it is an indisputably creative force that is not only the basic cause of our individual lives, but a very serious factor in our psychic life as well. Today we know only too well the grave consequences that sexual disturbances can bring in their train.
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