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Ellen Handler Spitz, known for her many books exploring pathography and art, continues her psychoanalytic understanding in a realm that is not usually discussed—children's picture books. This book goes in a different direction than her work in Art and Psyche (1985), Image and Insight (1991), and Museum of the Mind (1994), books that entrance the reader with a profound understanding of the artist's life, works, and the paintings, books that create a “corrective emotional experience.” What is so surprising about her work, which appears somewhat removed from everyday analytic practice, is how her creativity can embellish clinical work. Spitz has done it again.
Her book detailing the classical American and English children's picture books establishes an emotional tie with the reader and weaves memory and nostalgia of the reader's childhood for those who had the stories read to them, and of young parenthood for those who read the stories to their own children. Retelling the stories of Babar the elephant, Goodnight Moon, Wait Till the Moon is Full, Bedtime for Frances, Where the Wild Things Are, and many others, Spitz blends the stories with analytic concepts that are everyday material in our clinical work. Each children's book has its unique quality. There are stories and pictures that depict separation and individuation; grief; loss; gender identity; social character and roles; political correctness; negativism; counterphobia; the “good” and the “bad” mother; conditional and unconditional love; and oral, anal, and phallic conflicts. Added to all these human conditions are books that fit the child into the procrustean bed of cultural stereotypes of being male and female.
Dr. Spitz argues that several of the children's books can confuse a child and contribute to anxiety. She takes issue, for example, with Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree, a story of a tree that gives everything to a growing boy; the tree which is female, gives up her fruit, her branches, and her trunk dur