Children Who Set Fires

Abstract

FIRESETTING in children is a serious symptom, and is considered by many to be a valid reason for emergency consultation. While there is uniformity of opinion about its consequences, there is less agreement about its causes and meaning. This study reviews the literature on firesetting in children, reports 20 cases in which firesetting was a symptom, and attempts to draw some conclusions from the cases presented regarding the circumstances, ego integration, and psychopathology involved in children who set fires. It will be demonstrated that firesetting occurs in many different situations and personality constellations, may have a variety of dynamic meanings, and that the consistent factors in firesetting have to do with ego integration and impulse control. Review of the Literature The literature on firesetting includes the classic psychoanalytic formulations by Freud1and Simmel,2the well-known study of firesetters by Lewis and Yarnell,3

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.