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Silent Snow, Secret Snow by is a widely read short story which describes a psychotic breakdown in a twelve year old boy. It appears in many anthologies; it is included in high school curricula and a film version has been produced. The story spans only one day and portrays a rapidly progressing psychotic process. While the reader is fascinated with the description of the subjective experience of young Paul Haselton, he is left with a sense of puzzlement. He is given no explanation for the breakdown. Paul lives in an intact family; his parents seem intelligent, decent, and concerned. He has a kindly teacher. He is without apparent physical defect. Yet, a psychoanalytic approach to the story suggests the nature of the conflict giving rise to this psychotic episode.
Conrad Aiken, poet, novelist, and short story writer, was born in Savannah in 1889, educated in New England, and died in 1973. Contemporary Authors refers to his relation to psychoanalysis:
Aiken has been called a psychoanalytic poet, and some speak of his indebtedness to Freud. He did believe that one's mental past determines one's mental life, but he was never a psychological determinist…. In the words of Henry A. Murray, psychoanalyst and friend, Aiken was almost alone among the moderns who “allowed the Freudian dragon to swallow, and then, after a sufficient sojourn in the maw, cut his way out to a new freedom. When he emerged he was stocked with the lore of psychoanalysis but neither subjugated nor impeded by it….’
It is unlikely that Aiken constructed this story with awareness of the theme which, as I shall try to show, lies at the root of the psychotic breakdown. My thesis is that Paul Haselton's