Childhood, Fears, and Stories: Impressions of a Symposium on Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature

“I waaaant my Momm-my!” wails an elfin white-haired Irish bard from the Mountains of Mourne. It is none other than Martin Waddell, legendary author of dozens of children's books, honoree of the coveted Hans Christian Andersen award. Imitating the fearful cry of an apparently abandoned child, he is reading, at a fascinating psychoanalytic conference in New York, from his 1992 picture book, Owl Babies, winner of the 1993 Parents Prize. A few moments later, to the delight of his enchanted audience, he pirouettes across the stage while flapping his wings in imitation of an owl mother returning to her three wide-eyed owlets who, with trembling anxiety, await her arrival.

When I learned that psychoanalysts Linda Mayes of the Yale University Child Study Center and Mary Target of the Anna Freud Centre in London were planning a conference on children's literature that was to highlight the topic of fear, I responded with élan because, ever since my own first article appeared in 1988, this has been a recurrent theme in my teaching, lecturing, and writing. I even devoted a key chapter to it (“What Is Too Scary?”) in my latest book, The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood. My expectations were, therefore, somewhat Dickensian.

Organized as a day-long symposium at the Bank Street College of Education on October 21, 2006, the program featured prominent children's book authors, among them, besides Waddell, such luminaries as Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Robie Harris, the illustrator-designer Mo Willems, and others, who alternated at the lectern with practicing psychoanalysts. The analysts included Steven Marans, Alicia Lieberman, Judith Yanof, Karen Gilmore, Nicholas Midgley, Arietta Slade, and Jenny Stoker. Filling the hall to capacity was a cross-section of mental health professionals, early childhood educators, children's librarians, authors, and concerned citizens, some of whom had traveled long distances to attend. I noted that very few women of color were present and that the male sex was woefully underrepresented (the men in attendance were nearly all invited speakers); this skew, however, should be seen as a societal problem worthy of attention not a failing of the organizers. A colorful book exhibit accompanied the talks, and its displays garnered an eager crowd.

Lively and compelling as well as grave, exposing and exploring feelings as well as ideas, this conference struck me as a brilliant model for interdisciplinary colloquia involving psychoanalysis. My effort will be to convey its flavor, its vibrant dynamism for, unlike ordinary academic or psychoanalytic meetings, it crescendoed—as the day unfolded—and grew more and more emotionally riveting, inspiring, and, above all, personal. Here, in my rendition, are snippets of some of the highly charged stories that emerged, stories that show how both writers and analysts draw creatively on their own childhood experiences of fear. Each of these stories was core to the presentations that included them.

First, however, let me frame them by referring briefly to Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's 1987 musical masterpiece based on fairy tales, Into the Woods. This work, though germane to the conference theme, was never mentioned; yet, it was—at least for me and possibly for others—a tacitly hovering presence. Into the Woods is a drama that, from its outset, requires a narrator who appears to stand outside the action. Indeed, in fact, he does manage to remain safely beyond the vicissitudes of his story all the way through Part I. In Part II, however, a terrifying and vengeful giant appears; the world shifts. Ambushed and captured by the panicky characters whose story he has been telling, our hapless narrator is catapulted into the tale himself. By co-opting him, the characters render him hors de combat, and they must now take over their own story. They must master their anxiety; they must save themselves. All ethical complexities now become their responsibility. No longer reliant on an external narrator, they must script their own drama in addition to continuing to play their separate parts.

What is the relevance of this? Within the context of the show, its relevance is, of course, that, as children grow up and move out into the world beyond the “happily-ever-after” endings of childhood stories, they must take over the narration of their own life histories and assume the attendant responsibilities. Its relevance here, I submit, is as an analogue to what went on at this Bank Street conference. The organizers, of course, could hardly have predicted this in advance or plotted it. The narrators, namely, the invited children's book authors and analysts alike, simply refused to occupy a safe space outside their stories. Unlike the narrator in Part I of Into the Woods, they chose to enter and to become parts of their own frightening tales. Moreover, they shared these experiences with their audience, which was extraordinary. Almost every speaker at this symposium abjured an external vantage point, refused—that is—to retreat to some high moral or intellectual ground beyond the range of his or her own disturbing material. Shunning pretensions of objectivity, the speakers took us inside with them. They spoke with candor and courage about their own real lives, not just their work.

Rather than being reduced or trivialized by being “theorized,” therefore, children's lives and literature were, on the contrary, at this remarkable conference, honored, and the topic of fear was neither tamed nor distanced.

In addition to Waddell's dramatic reading of Owl Babies, Pam Munoz Ryan, a prize-winning writer of adolescent fiction, told us that as a child she was shy and timorous. Unremarkable to others, she insatiably observed everything around her. Tenderly, she reported that her literary career was inspired by a formidable heavyset eighth-grade English teacher who taught her how to diagram sentences and who routinely turned off the lights while reading great works of literature aloud to her students. Ryan said this teacher would never have remembered her, but she, quiet and apprehensive, is the one who, years later, remembers the teacher. When we consider children's literature, we often find that the best writing for young people engages on many levels with just such discrepancies.

Similar moments studded this mesmerizing conference, and its lessons were clear: Truth sings its own song—soft, wild, insistent, and inconsistent. We know it when we hear it, although we often turn away. It appears when we enter our own stories and take responsibility for them, frightening as they may be. My wish is for many more such conferences that stand bravely against the shallow, the quick, and the closed.

To illustrate other differences between the ways children and adults see the world and to point out hiatuses that may open up between what actually happens in childhood and what is remembered and to show how children not only shield themselves from what they fear but are passively guarded by their innocence and ignorance from what may be deeply disturbing to them, a story was told by Steven Marans about a man who remembered a cuddly raccoon caught in a tree when he was a little boy and was later rescued by a kindly Good Humor man. Years afterward, asking his parents if they could recall this incident, he was informed that they did indeed remember it but that it had occurred quite differently. The raccoon, they said, was a nuisance in their neighborhood and had been destroying property. No benign ice cream truck had come that day; it had been, instead, a fire truck. No nice fellow had intervened in the animal's fate; it had been, in fact, a fireman. And this person had not liberated the furry little creature. He had shot it dead. To hear a story like this is to tremble empathically and retreat into the museums of our own minds where we set about wondering how much of what we have so assiduously preserved there must be similarly distorted. I am reminded of the Elephant's Child full of “satiable curiosity” in Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories, who cannot fathom why his relatives all spank him when he asks what the Crocodile has for dinner. And of those small children who, watching Walt Disney's Bambi and failing to understand the meaning of percussive sounds heard in the distance, tug and pull and keep asking: “Where's Bambi's mommy? When is she coming back?”

Nicholas Midgley, an analyst from London, told of a man who, when he was six or seven years old, feeling in abject despair, was sitting on the kitchen counter with a bread knife in his hand. His older brother entered and sternly warned: “If you do anything with that, I'll hate you forever and never mention your name again.” Many years later, this child now fully grown, confronted his brother and asked whether he remembered the incident; whereupon, the brother replied “Yes! Of course. And when I saw you with that knife, I told you to do it, and I have had that on my conscience ever since.” Thus, the terrifying memories of two former children, both felt as true, both with profound psychic consequences, and yet in absolute contradiction with one another. One conjures Cain and Abel, and one finds here the kernel of a story that might expand into a spiraling account of disjunctions—fraternal, temperamental, chronological, and, withal, of the warding off of childhood fear as its theme.

Similar moments studded this mesmerizing conference, and its lessons were clear: Truth sings its own song—soft, wild, insistent, and inconsistent. We know it when we hear it, although we often turn away. It appears when we enter our own stories and take responsibility for them, frightening as they may be. My wish is for many more such conferences that stand bravely against the shallow, the quick, and the closed. For just one day at Bank Street, we glimpsed scenes that play behind facades of false certainty and security. We realized that, like it or not, we have all been abandoned children “alarmed into competence,” as Gregory Maguire (Wicked) put it in his brilliant lecture on this same occasion. No matter how much we theorize, it will never be proof against the iterative plaintive cry of the baby owl or the knowledge that life and creativity are wondrously unpredictable—on the couch, in the playroom, and between the covers of a children's book: There will always be another way to tell the scary story.