Symposium on Children’s Literature and Illustration Introduction

• Published in: American imago Vol. 71; no. 2; pp. 131 - 132
• Main Author: ZICKLER, ELAINE P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.07.2014; The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subjects: Children & youth; Childrens literature; Negotiation; Patients; Potter, Beatrix (1866-1943); Psychoanalysis; Sendak, Maurice
• ISSN: 0065-860X; 1085-7931; 1085-7931
• DOI: 10.1353/aim.2014.0012

The following essays on their literar y and visual art give psychoanalytic and phenomenological atten- tion to the poignancy of "big" and "little" and of "reality" and "make-believe" in the life of children, helping us to see the world through the eyes of little ones as they negotiate the tasks of sorting out and mastering a world that often over whelms and befuddles them, spatially, cognitively, and emotionally. as psychoanalysts, we are called upon every day to envision both the childhoods and the present-day lives of our patients and to be willing to enter imaginatively with them into fantasy and dreamland, with all of the perspectival and temporal shifts that might entail. all of the essays in this symposium on chil- dren's literature and illustration model ways of reading and obser ving that take seriously-in the ways that psychoanalysis has always taken seriously-this essential task of picturing childhood.