Children's Books: And their function in Latency and Prepuberty

Books for children have, even in the early days of Psychoanalysis, aroused its interest. Up till now it has chiefly concerned itself with the Fairy-Tale, literature for older children only rarely playing a part in analytical research. Freud11 points out here, that dream-symbols have their parallel in fairy-tales and mythologies, and shows how the significance of these can become clearer to us by a knowledge of the child's sexual life and phantasies. The unconscious purport in fairy-tales reveals wishes and phantasies originating in the Œdipus-situation,24 whilst gratification of those wishes and the defence against them figure in a variety of ways during the drama of the narrative. We find repeatedly in analytical literature references to fairy-tale themes in connection with the dreams or memories of patients under analysis,8 whereby it is seen, that, just as an understanding of the patient's case is rendered easier through a perception of the fairy-tale's inner meaning, so the understanding of the latter is helped through realizing the nature of the patient's conflicts. In her work, Marie Briehl1 makes the attempt to co-ordinate various fairy-tale themes, each according to its unconscious significance, with the child's different stages of development. It's not only shown that each detail in the development of the Œdipus-conflict finds expression in this or that fairy-tale theme, but the writer also points out that children, left to themselves, will evolve fairy-story day-dreams, lasting often for years, and changing always according to the stage reached in the child's conflicts. Hotter15, too, relates in what ways and degrees the child's unconscious mind may correspond with the unconscious gist of the fairy-tale. One reason, therefore, for the child's love of the fairy-tale is that he finds in it his own instinctual situation and meets again his own phantasies which explains the pleasure in reading or listening to fairy-stories; moreover, the fairy-tales' particula