ABSTRACT
The children are grown-ups and one wonders what residue of their nursery school experience informs their consciousness or unconsciousness after all these years. The teacher was at all times sensitive to the feelings the children were struggling to express, as the following example illustrates. The teacher had such conversations with the children in small groups, allowing them to express their feelings about the old pet and helping them to understand their reactions to the new one. The children’s initial reactions were denial and displacement, which can be seen in part as a refusal to accept reality, a refusal to “mourn” the loss of their pet. The literature has almost exclusively focused on children’s reactions to the loss of primary objects. Some of the children took food from home for the new guinea pig, but lost it on the way to school. Other children pinched the new guinea pig.
