Term 5, Myth and Creativity
Freud’s psychoanalysis of child’s play was arguably a prominent source within the field of children studies, yet the work was in dire need of improvement. The neurologist satisfied his claim through a categorical dichotomy; the ‘phantasies’ that the adult engaged with, which would have transpired from the imaginative play of the child, would be identified as ambitious wishes or erotic phantasies. Eventually, the hands-on, intimate, motor-oriented movement of the child was forgotten in lieu of archetypal characters in the “less pretentious authors of novels1”. Yet, an idea was peeking from Freud’s interpretive piece – the inability for the human mind to relinquish memory. The individual ingests the linear timeline of past, present, or future precedents that are capable of retention insofar that, “[the mind] can never give anything up; [it can] only exchange one thing for another. […] In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of playing, he now phantasies2”.
So, Freud’s conditions of ‘phantasies’ produce enough substance to tread the psychoanalytic inquiry of imagination to adult literary creation, yet I am to expand upon Freud’s categories of ambition / eroticism to encompass sensation. Furthermore, a three-dimensional approach on attention, emotions, and delayed closure will be utilized to illustrate the modern tradition in childhood studies presently.
Key words: Freud, phantasies, sensation, memory
Introduction
D.B Elkonin within his publication, ‘Theories of Play’ examines K. Groos and D.A Colozza attempts to outline the psychological processes of child’s play, as the two theorist’s varying modes of thought contradict accepted beliefs in childhood studies. D. A. Colozza argues:
For higher animals, including humans, the struggle for existence is initially not that different and cruel. Newborn babies get assistance, protection, and care from their mothers, or, in the majority of cases, from both their mothers and fathers. Their lives are, to a significant extent, maintained by the labour and actions of those who brought them into the world; their energies, which they do not yet have to use for obtaining food, are spent freely, in way that can hardly be considered
Colozza’s statement re-introduces the parents within the sphere of child’s play – the child is not merely maintained by their mind alone, but also the body, intellect, and orality of the parent, as the child is introduced to varying environments. A stark contrast to Freud, the surroundings of the child are not merely societal interventions like eroticism or wish fulfilment, but rather the maintenance of labour and the significant extent to protect, assist and care for the child. It is then, the adaptation of qualities (empathy, communication skills, problem-solving, etc) will work alongside the feedback of the parents to formulate a present and future response Freud considers to become ‘phantasies.’
Sustained Attention
Robert Strom in his psychoanalytic piece, ‘Observing Parent-Child Fantasy Play’, provides ten categories of play observation between child and parent to analyse their mimetic behaviour. While milestones such as crawling, rolling over, walking or their first word are substantial in preliminary observations of child development, touch and verbal sensations amongst progressive cognition arouse a psychoanalytic inquiry notably interpreted amongst Sigmund Freud, K. Groos, and Maria Montessori. Initially, Strom’s proposition of categories is introduced by the child’s ability to ‘sustain attention’; a query the theorist regarded as, “The readiness of pre-schoolers to sustain attention while at play can be timed. This ability to pay attention is for the process of play rather than any among the discontinuous events or plots on which process may focus3”. The study concluded that the child’s attention was substantially longer when partaking in activities they personally enjoyed, as opposed to window-shopping with their mothers the day prior, or engaging in adult-like activities such as grocery shopping, card games, or going to restaurants. Plainly, adult action was not stimulating enough, nor was it digestible for the child who wished to touch, smell, or speak freely.
The consistent engagement satisfies a broad acceptance of attention to detail, memory recall, and critical thinking found in gradual literacy or creative writing. Therefore, if the child is to receive an education focused on literacy, the maturation of toys from blocks to dolls, or eventually sports, will inform a growing imagination through the senses. Executive Function will then proceed as a goal-directed behaviour alongside the foundation of inhibition, which largely suppress the distractions commonly associated within developing children. So, if Strom’s assertion of ‘Sustained Attention’ is an acting agent into a relationship of child’s play and literary creation, then research into cognitive maturation or sensory play are far more sustainable than inquiries into ‘phantasies’.
Part I: Sensation of Touch
At Freud’s insistence, his piece, ‘Creative Writers and Daydreaming’, assumes three moments in the individual where the ideation of a ‘phantasy’ develops: the present provokes the occasion to daydream, the past is utilized as a basin for memory (often in a younger stage of life), and a future which would represent the fulfilled fantasy. Yet, what if the implied linearity, which must rely on the memory of the individual, was replaced by the relationship of internal comprehension to external recognition brought by sensation?
English paediatrician and psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott delivered the ‘transitional phenomena’ present in childhood over half a century ago. The infant utilizes an object, often with little significance or reason, to hold, chew, or throw as means of representing present emotions they are otherwise unable to verbalise. Winnicott proposes:
[…] perhaps a bundles of wool or the corner of a blanket or eiderdown, or a word or tune, or a mannerism – that becomes vitally important to the infant for use at the time of going to sleep, and is a defence against anxiety, especially anxiety of depressive type4.
The sensation of touch connects the infant to a world outside of them – an experience Jacques Lacan labels as the ‘mirror stage’. Gathered by the eighth month in infancy, the child’s state of helplessness, spurred by ‘motor impotence and nursling dependence5’ will illicit negative feelings akin to distress or anxiety.
To the young child, motivated by these negative affects, a crucial component of the enthralling lure exerted by the fascinating image of his/her body is this image’s promise that he/she can overcome his/her Hilflosigkeit6 and be a unified, pulled-together whole, an integrated, coordinated totality like the bigger, more mature others he/she sees around him/her-self7.
The embolden subjectivity the child experiences when the mirror stage is engaged is crucial to actualizing the sensation of touch outside the breast of their mother. The ego begins to form, alongside the presence of their body, as Winnicott’s theory of ‘Transitional Phenomena’ effectively replaces the intimacy and warmth of the parent. If we are to broaden our subject to the social environment around them, the sensation of touch will allows the child to self-soothe when encountering anxiety or distress but will also allow the mind to begin the process of touch by engaging in the object, toy, or person around them. It will then be inevitable, that the ‘phantasies’ Freud investigates are to be evident with the child’s play as they subscribe transitionary feeling to all that is around them.
Part II: Sensation of Hearing
After the touch of the mother, commences the prominence of her voice. The child will hear their name sung, muttered, yelled, or enunciated as they acknowledge the vibrations that carry past physical touch, to their ears. Amidst K. Groos’s work, The Play of Man, the sensation of hearing for the infant is visceral, and all-encompassing:
From the suckling’s delight in his own guttural gurgling’s to the most refined enjoyment of a concert-goer, from the uncouth efforts of the small child to produce all sorts of sounds, to the creative impulse which controls the musical genius, there is, in the light of history, a progressive and consistent development8
The ‘consistent development’ alluded by Groos, is a matter of maturation toward one’s senses. A child will begin with the voice of the mother to the representative noises of its own, until assertion of the self is simply expected. It is persistent, often unconscious, and is mainly impulsive in the early stages of development. The theorist’s observation of children was accompanied by external examination of family friend’s or other psychoanalysts since the child’s birth, and within his catalogue, K. Gross noted a common impulse:
I have often seen three- and four-year-old children skip about when they heard enlivening band music, as if they wish to catch the time of the rhythmic movement, an impulse which indeed affects adults as well9
Accompanied by the senses, the body corroborates with motor processes and the external environment with enough space to ‘skip about’, that a visual scene naturally aligns with verbal cues – this is how a child comes to learn distinction, delayed response, and expressed emotions. Attending to the fanatical world of creative writers, the scenic images or grotesque portrayals are stimulated by child-like experiences. The fear, anger, or sadness that we once clung to with that teddy bear in our mouth, is expanded to the rage-filled screaming of a character experiencing loss. Groos’s portrayal of sound follows similar cues as the psychologist examines its textual sensations:
I would instance the cherry crackling of flames in a fireplace, the frou-frou of silken garments, the singing of caged birds, the sound of wind howling of storms, rolling of thunder, rustling of leaves, splashing of brooks, seething of waves, etc. Most of these, it is true, contain elements of intellectual pleasure as well, and so through association link themselves to genuine aesthetic enjoyments10.
Delayed Closure
Strom’s second moment of classification emerged in the notion of ‘Delayed Closure’ which corresponds with attention span and emotion regulation by measuring, “[the child’s] ability to successively engage in play events without their serial completion, illustrates the delay of closure. Persons of this ability demonstrate a tolerance for incomplete events and the consequent tension of ambiguity11.” Yet, the relationship of children and delay often produce fits of rage or bouts of screaming as the child discerns, they cannot immediately obtain what it is presently desired. So, if adjustment of behaviour, alongside the progression of self-identity is persistently developed, then it is no longer just a practice of an internal, personal dilemma but rather the delayed closure response would interact with the child’s external space, i.e society, relationships, or individuals. Therefore, the child’s engagement with the surrounding environment will shape, “each moment under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete12.”
Correspondingly, Albert Camus in his piece, The Stranger, delivers the invisible, ambiguous suspense within his opening lines. He leans into a delayed atmosphere, pressing into the uncertainty of his own narrative capabilities, while also producing scepticism within the reader:
MOTHER died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure. The telegram from the Home says: YOUR MOTHER PASSED AWAY. FUNERAL TOMORROW. DEEP SYMPATHY. Which leaves the matter doubtful; it could have been yesterday13.”
So, how does delayed closure extend to exploitative tension? The child will grasp distinction as the writer makes a point to utilize it. Simply, the fanatical persona Freud attributed to child’s play was not entirely harmless, yet key moments in the child’s development, in which the toys are coddled or thrown away, are symbolic enough to fissure his pre-existing notions of just daydreams. Play becomes more. The creative writer will sensationalize their murder mystery, romance novel, or fanfic adaptation. Their childhood self has already corroborated on the experience of instability, loss, and unidentified anxiety to spur on their future works. Expressed Emotion
In fact, Strom’s category of ‘Expressed Emotion’, that accounts for the ‘relative absence of inhibition […] for the verbal and nonverbal intensity with which [the child] expresses emotion’, supports the intensity and depth the child holds to play or transitional objects. Children assume a position of authority over the object, the conversation, or the free movement to which role playing, fantasy play, or notable modes of entertainment, like dress up, invoke surges of confidence within speech and overall expression.
Alongside patience and regulation, the presence of affective empathy is integral to child’s play. A. E. Denham’s, Empathy and Literature, posits the review as a line of critical questioning read as, “What is it to read empathically?” or, “Does reading make us more empathic?” to investigate such phenomenon and its influential backbone of social relations. In her piece, Denham elucidates a modern rendition of empathy, or rather how we have developed literature to have such a visceral effect on the reader itself, in what is known as ‘affective empathy’, later defined as:
The first-personal experiences of affective states (including emotions, motivations, and visceral sensations) in response to observations (perceptual or otherwise, veridical or non-verdical) of natural manifestations or second-order representations of those states in another, while maintaining awareness of self and other as distinct subjects of experience14
Keenly, Denham’s relationship between experience and observation purposes an awareness that must be gathered within the child to replicate, assume or even deny through the practice of empathy, but more generally the expression of emotion. An awareness of the self is assumed by the ego, yet the child stepping out of the developing self (second-order manifestations) to help a friend who cut their knee or happens to ‘feel down’ because their parents were fighting the night prior, alludes to how relationships are formed and consistently upheld within a physical present (of tending to a sore knee or offering a hug) or a stimulating, literary future (lead by romance, passion or the growing popularity of tropes to pursue a level of care we offer to others).
Literacy and Creative Writing
Eventually, the correlation between child’s play and creative writing does not appear as bleak. The motor cognition developed in childhood often unconsciously transcends into the lyric, narrative, or poetical work created for the pleasure of the writer. It is then, the literary work acknowledges a form of play once entertained as children – an action Mielonen and Paterson describe as:
[…] they [the child] arouse their memories to assist to connect their play to pre-literacy skills such as naming and symbolic thought. Children recall their past play experiences and create new meanings each time they play15.
The feedback loop of internal eagerness brought forth by play and the external response of children/adults, is unavoidable as the child adopts the skills of listening, attention, and inhibition. It is then that ‘symbolic thought’ arouses the cyclical nature of action – evidence – consequence to a broader investigative technique explored by critics and writers years later. Correspondingly, Amanda Porter’s investigation into the translation of ancient myth into modern context presents a piece on a growing form of literary text, fanfiction. Laid out in, ‘Atalanta Just Married’: A Case Study in Greek Mythology-Based Fan Fiction’, the flexible, exploratory mode of writing, takes the Greek goddess, Atalanta, and handpicks certain skills, experience, or overall appearance to fit their narrative. Amongst her investigation, Porter notes: “Atalanta is usually the heroine of these stories, a ‘Mary Sue’ character who represents the author, often a schoolgirl coming to terms with her divine heritage, like the author herself coming to terms with teenage life16”. Crucially, Porter’s depiction of the fanfic writer ’coming to terms’ with their life suggests the adaptation, but even further, the implementation of the fanatical to either combat childhood stressors or become malleable enough to arouse myth as an exposition of modern times. The relation to a future the writer holds the character Atalanta to explore, hints at the creative effect of ’phanatsies’ Freud engrossed his psychoanalytic work into, and would later explain the day-dreaming, or maladaptive dreaming, presently researched by modern scientists and writers alike.
Conclusion
Alongside most investigations into children’s studies, the conclusions are often sparse and vying for additional research. My aim and further work here, was exploratory in nature and largely dependent on variables, gaps in research and arguments afforded by personal a priori. The utilization of Freud’s theoretical framework of daydreams and ‘phantasies’ posited a weak and inconclusive argument that overlooked the child’s development of sensation and motor skills. It is then, that we must investigate such unconscious practices or refined tools for learning, akin to growing attention spans, illusory endings, and boundless emotions to demonstrate the link between child’s play and creative writing as I have argued for within this paper.
Bibliography:
Camus, Albert. 1942. The Stranger (Vintage International)
Denham, A E. 2024. ‘Empathy & Literature’, Emotion Review, 16.2 (SAGE Publishing) <https://doi.org/10.1177/17540739241233601>
Elkonin, D. 2005. ‘Chapter 3 : Theories of Play’, Journal of Russian & East European Psychology, 43.2: 3–89 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10610405.2005.11059246>
Groos, K. 2018. ‘The Project Gutenberg: Play of Man’, Gutenberg.org <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58411/58411-h/58411-h.htm#Page_7>
Hejinian, Lyn. 2020. ‘The Rejection of Closure by Lyn Hejinian’, Poetry Foundation <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69401/the-rejection-of-closure>
Johnston, Adrian. 2024. ‘Jacques Lacan (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer 2024 Edition)’, Stanford.edu <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2024/entries/lacan/>
Maurice, Lisa, and Amanda Porter. 2017. Rewriting the Ancient World : Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in Modern Popular Fiction (Brill)
Mielonen, Alissa, and Wendy Paterson. 2009. ‘Developing Literacy through Play’, Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education, 3.1 <https://digitalcommons.buffalostate.edu/jiae/vol3/iss1/2>
Raver, C. Cybele, and Clancy Blair. 2016. ‘Neuroscientific Insights: Attention, Working Memory, and Inhibitory Control’, The Future of Children, 26.2: 95–118 <https://www.jstor.org/stable/43940583>
Strom, Robert D. 1974. ‘Observing Parent-Child Fantasy Play’, Theory into Practice, 13.4 (Taylor & Francis, Ltd.): 287–95 <https://doi.org/10.2307/1475889>
Winnicott, Donald. 1971. Playing and Reality: Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena <https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott1.pdf
Footnotes:
1 Freud 1908: 425.
2 Freud 1908: 422.
3 Strom 1974: 287.
4 Winnicott 1971.
5 Johnston 2018.
6 Freud established the term to be a ‘biologically dictated prematurational helplessness naturally predestines the human being to the predominance of social nurture over material nurture’ due to a predetrmined reliance on the person in regard to life or death.
7 Johnston 2018.
8 Groos 2018: 19.
9 Gross 2018: 21.
10 Groos 2018: 22.
11 Strom 1974: 288.
12 Hajinian 2009.
13 Camus 1942: 1.
14 Denham 2024: 86.
15 Mielonen & Paterson 2009: 17.
16 Porter 2017: 147.
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