The Children, the Children!: An Editorial

Abstract

The Children, the Children!:An Editorial James Hillman (bio) In an earlier volume of Children's Literature (1974) I explained why I believe that those who have had a connection with story in childhood are in better shape as adults and have a better prognosis than those to whom story must be introduced. I said, "Story awareness is per se psychologically therapeutic. It is good for soul." I now see that claim related to a contemporary group of syndromes: childhood autism and mutism, hyperactive children, childhood eating disorders (obesity and anorexia), childhood drug addiction, child-suicide, and especially child-abuse. Cruelty toward children is nothing new, of course. What does seem new is the self-destruction among children themselves, amounting to a psychic epidemic. I believe such epidemics arise from the collective soul and are expressions of its "disease," and I seek to know what the psyche is trying to show by means of the children-syndromes and whether the children-syndromes are leading toward a shift in consciousness. Maturing has come to mean a process that loses the child in us, leaving us strong—and high and dry. Essential to the mutation of child into adult is the education of fantasy speech into conceptual discourse. This education (and it is rightly called so because it conducts the mind away from its first home in the imagination) goes on daily when we answer questions of speculative wondering with simplified causal explanation or moral reasons. If our adult trouble is loss of imagination and the displacement of it onto the child and childhood, then the kind of education that seems called for is offered by children's literature. This proposition suggests that children's literature belongs first of all to adults, for it is the generic term for imaginational language and fantasy thinking which can reach into lost childhood and find us there. It is we adults who need remedial reading, that renewal of our imaginational powers through myths and romances, legends of heroes and [End Page 3] Click for larger view View full resolution Smiling Child, from Veracruz, Mexico, about A.D. 700. Courtesy of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Gift of Mr. David Y. Hodgson. fables of animals. It is we who need to sit still with wide eyes, to tell tales and mythologize, to listen to old men's tall stories and old wives' wisdom. Then the disordered child within may talk with the disorderly child out there, the one running wild or eating under the trees of Schlaraffenland, or mute, thin, and unborn. Children's literature presents these conditions, too, just as it describes so many of the contents of the psyche—our complexes, our inscapes and spiritual aspirations—as concretely vivid images. And it is these [End Page 4] vivid images that address the imaginationally impoverished child in the adult who at present has nowhere better to turn than to Tolkien, Castaneda, and science fiction. Here we need to say a word about television. Let's distinguish between the direct speaking of the text to the imagination through reading and the performance of a text on television. Despite attempts to improve its content for children, TV remains "media"; that is, it places itself as intermediary between the reader and the text; it induces imagining passivity. Representation on TV—glassed, foreshortened, two-dimensional—reduces the text to a packaged product (unlike live theater). Having already been imaged by the producer, the text no longer stimulates the productive imagination of the viewer as it does when it is read. In fact, the viewer usually has to inhibit his or her own fantasy in order to "catch the show." Our imagination needs to be engaged in a manner beyond the potential of television and neglected by school-learning. The universal of reason (grammar, mathematics, geography) are basic to education. Why not as well the universals of imagination and emotion—the archetypal patterns of love, of revenge and jealousy, of neglect and rejection, of encounters with bluebeard charmers, nymphs of the rivers, and scalyslick dragons, of dying nobly and tricking deceitfully, of serving, fearing, and being lost? These conditions walk regularly into the consulting room. Despite higher education, heart...