COML1427 - Wild Things: Children’s Literature and the Psychoanalytic Study of the Child

When it comes to literature, this course takes “childish” things seriously. From the simplest picture-books (like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are) all the way to “grownup” books frequently read by children (like Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird), we’ll explore a wide range of modern children’s literature as a resource for people of all ages: for children themselves; for their parents and other family members and caregivers; for the adults those children become; and for the communities and societies in which they live.

The books we read (or have read to us) as children contribute to almost every aspect of our journey toward adulthood, including language acquisition; cognitive development; the assimilation of social norms and expectations: the ability to relate to others; the acquisition of knowledge; the management of difficult feelings; our capacities for play, imagination, and work; our appreciation of human diversity and the ability to empathize with others; and the formation of our own preferences, interests, and identities.

Childhood itself is studied in virtually every humanistic discipline, from anthropology to economics to history to philosophy; but nowhere is the study of childhood more vitally important than in the branch of psychology known as psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud launched the field of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century in large part by asking his adult patients to tell him about their memories of childhood. As they did so, Freud quickly realized that almost every aspect of adult experience (including many psychiatric illnesses) was connected, in some way, to the formative experiences of our earliest years. Psychoanalysis is a way of listening to the child inside all of us—the child whose memories, thoughts, and feelings we all carry with us (mostly unconsciously, but nonetheless consequentially) throughout our lives.

This is why studying children’s literature is also an excellent way to study psychoanalysis. Stories for and about children can teach us a great deal—and help us to remember a great deal more—about what childhood is like, and psychoanalysis gives us an unrivaled set of concepts and terms for understanding much more fully what we were like so long ago and why that still matters so much to our adult selves.