ABSTRACT
I’ve found the most valuable thing has been having to lecture to people who aren’t analysts … having to lecture to social workers and teachers and parents and all sorts of people is tremendously important. Somebody, perhaps a parent or social worker said “Look here, I understand this about reaching back over the gap for the object [i.e., mother or father], but you haven’t described why another kind of anti-social tendency is destructive”. And it took me three or four years to come round to the very simple thing, which is of course that there are two kinds of deprivation. One is in terms of loss of object and the other is in terms of loss of frames, loss of controls. In a sense you could say loss of mother and loss of father—the paternal father not the standing-in-for-mother father. The thing is the frame, the strength—the deprivation in terms of that. Then a very complicated thing happens when the child becomes all right and begins to feel confidence in a man or a structure or an institution. He begins to break things up to make quite sure that the framework can hold. This showed me that the antisocial tendency has two aspects to it.
