“A Child Is Being Eaten:” Failure, Fear, Fantasy, and Repair in the Lives of Foster Children

Will you please tell me, if, on this island, there are places where one may eat without necessarily being eaten?

—(C. Collodi, The Adventures of Pinocchio)

NOW SUBSTITUTE “FOSTER CHILD” FOR PINOCCHIO AND THAT IS the story I am going to tell. Pinocchio is a wooden puppet who comes to life as a little boy under the tutelage of his fost-adopt father, Geppetto, but only after excruciating mishaps in an unfriendly world. In like fashion, foster children, expelled from their homes of origin, are left to wander through a land filled with losses, dangers, traumas, rejections, and social injustices, while clinging to the hope that someday they will find their way back to a home with a hearth. In his wanderings, Pinocchio starts out very hungry and laments his ravenous fate, “If I had not run away from home and if Father were here now I should not be dying of hunger. Oh, how horrible it is to be hungry!” Yet, in the end, it is not his own hunger that almost does him in, but rather the trauma of being swallowed alive: “Pinocchio at first tried to be brave, but as soon as he became convinced that he was really and truly in the Shark's stomach, he burst into sobs and tears. ‘Help! Help!’ he cried. ‘Oh, poor me! Won't someone come to save me!’” (Collodi, p. 68).

We psychoanalytic clinicians who work with children in the foster care system know Pinocchio's wails of hunger. We witness such cries repeatedly in our young patients all the time. Yet in our apt interpretations of the hunger pangs, I believe we have been partially blind to the other oral terror the foster child faces: the fear of being eaten. It is to that fear that I would like to turn our attention so that we can fully embrace and understand both the inner and outer lives of foster children as we strive to heal their wounds and fortify their resilience.

Many years ago, in the initial years of the Children's P