Inside All of Us Where the Wild Things are in Literature, Film, and Psychoanalysis

Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak, 1963) is a beloved picture book for children. It tells the story of a boy named Max, who made mischief, was called “wild thing” by his mother, and was sent to bed without supper, where he imagined sailing to where the wild things are. There, Max tamed the wild things, was made their king, and sent them to bed without supper until he became lonely and sailed back to his room, where he found his supper waiting for him still hot. This story was viewed by Spufford (2002) as “one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger” (p. 60). Thus, it has been used to demonstrate psychoanalytic theories on childhood mastery of feelings (Bodmer, 1986), the need for regressive fantasy in adaptive, integrative function (Spitz, 1988), potential space with depressive and paranoid-schizoid positions (Stronach-Buschel, 1991), self-regulation (Cooper, 2007), resiliency (Gottlieb, 2008), and alpha-function (Altman, 2008).

Alpha-function was defined by Bion (1962/1984) as the way in which emotional experience is transformed for use in dream thoughts, unconscious waking thinking, dreams, and memory. Specifically, Bion viewed emotional experience in sleep as no different from that during waking life. Because Freud theorized that dreaming preserves sleep, “failure of alpha-function means the patient cannot dream and therefore cannot sleep…and cannot wake up” (Bion, 1962/1984, p. 7). Hence, Bion attributed failure of alpha-function to “the serious disturbances ordinarily associated with excessive obtrusion of the psychotic elements of the personality” (p. 54). Alpha-function first occurs through reverie, a maternal state of mind that is open to receiving any projective identifications from an infant, and can contain the infant's intolerable frustrations so that they become tolerable. This is demonstrated in Where the Wild Things Are when “Max tames his monsters while his mother outside th