Although I emphathize with B. H. Taylor's painful odyssey through ''foster'' care (letter, Oct. 21), which amply illustrates the destruction of a child's life by uncaring adults, I disagree that orphanage care is a viable alternative.
What infants and children miss that causes arrested intrapsychic development is emotional nurturance - either by abuse as in B. H. Taylor's case or by neglect or abandonment without ''apparent'' abuse. Simple human nurturance costs nothing and is administered by touching, kissing, hugging, holding, listening to, smiling at, approval and consistent discipline of the child, and allowing a child to express his or her needs, talents and feelings. These normal human actions are as much the food for healthy emotional growth as the food the child is given for physical growth. Without these daily, emotional growth is stunted.
Long enough ago, the psychoanalyst Rene Spitz demonstrated that infants raised in hospitals or other institutions developed a serious depressive condition, marasmus, similar to adult grief, in the absence of their mothers. Many of these infants failed to thrive, and they died. They didn't eat because they were emotionally wounded. It was found that infants need to be held to feel that life is worth living (as if a study were needed to confirm this for the average feeling and thinking adult). These results can be extrapolated to the toddler and older child. Every child needs holding and kissing. Every child needs to be special to someone.
It is sad that such a simple, common-sense condition for happy, healthy living, which everyone realizes he or she needs as an adult and which every adult knows his or her own children need, is such a hard concept to grasp and apply to the care of infants and children unfortunate enough not to have their own parents to look after them.
These caring manifestations may be largely absent in the foster care system, but they are also sadly absent in orphanages. I know! I grew up in two orphanages between the ages of 2 and 17 1/2. And I don't remember one instance of being hugged, kissed, sat on someone's lap for a story or any other normal parental behavior toward a developing child. No one was cruel in the usual sense. But the abuse was massive in the effect it had on my emotional development, by virtue of what was absent, all the more insidious because a child who has known nothing else, or vaguely remembers warmer care, can't grasp what is wrong and can't articulate it. And even if she could, the compassionate human response wouldn't be there.
Some of the people who took care of us went home to their own families after their shifts. Did they hug or show appreciation to their own children for being alive? How come they couldn't give this natural, inexpensive gift to us orphans?
Institutions aren't the answer to anything. Social consciousness and individual concern and caring for one another as valuable human beings deserving of love is a start. Translating this into loving parental homes for children bereft of their own mothers and fathers is the goal for the individual child. The benefit to society will be psychologically mature adults able to love their own children and give back to the community out of their own talents. 
HELEN BOREL New York, Oct. 22, 1988.  The writer is a psychoanalyst.

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