The Mythic World of Childhood

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional 'unconscious identity' with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. Thunder is no longer the voice of an angry god, nor is lightening his avenging missile. No river contains a spirit, no tree is the life principle of a man, no snake the embodiment of wisdom, no mountain cave the home of a great demon. No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied.

(Jung 85)

While Carl Jung's description of our lost connection with a mythic world is powerful and accurate as regards most adults in our culture, that mythic world is quite real to young children. In spite of our efforts to teach children at an ever younger age the scientific explanations of natural phenomena, the ideas of myth and fantasy still prevail.

In the climate of scientific rationalism that has dominated the post-war era there has been a flowering of fantasy literature for children. In the nineteen-fifties and sixties there was the discovery of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. Then followed Alexander's Prydain Chronicles, LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, and Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, and after these have come many fantasy series in both adolescent and adult fiction, drawing on heroes and themes of Greek, Norse, Celtic and other mythologies. In addition, fairy tales, folk tales, and myths themselves have staged an impressive come-back. Enhanced by the art of distinguished illustrators, single stories and collected volumes have not only received awards but also been popular with children. We take it for granted now that our children will be interested in books that take them through the Chinese underworld (The Funny Little Woman), introduce them to African gods and tricksters (A Story, A Story; Why the Sun and Moon Live in the Sky), re-tell Greek and Norse myths (the D'Aulaires' books), and re-count classic fairy tales like the "Beauty and the Beast."

But we find few explanations of the place of this kind of interest in the intellectual or emotional development of the child. To explain the interest in myth and fairy tale we have depended often on a literary analysis that suggests that certain styles and forms such as stock characters and use of repetition create the appeal for children. What I want to demonstrate here is that the child's attraction to and need for these materials is more fundamental. Understanding the child's kinship to mythic thought will help us understand what children need from their reading and what drives their interests. By considering the work of several writers, I want to show that myth, fairy tale, and fantasies based on these traditional forms are not just entertaining but essential to the child's cognitive and emotional growth and to the development of the imagination.

I. Myth and Cognitive Development

The most thorough documentation of the connection between myth and the thought of the child comes from what may be an unexpected source, the early writings of Jean Piaget. Educators are most familiar with Piaget's research into the development of logical thinking and the stages and tasks that mark the progressive use of rational concepts. But in his early work Piaget was concerned with child egocentrism and its gradual replacement by socialized thought.

In The Child's Conception of the World, Piaget reports on research with children that led him to conclude that child egocentrism is manifested in forms of thinking very similar to those found among "primitive" or myth-oriented people. This is an egocentrism, he explains, that comes not from thinking about the self first or from self-consciousness but from a perception of events that does not distinguish the self from the world, that comes from children attributing their...