Illuminating Childhood: Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama by Ellen Handler-Spitz (review)

Toward the middle of her evocative, deeply personal new book, Ellen Handler-Spitz reflects, “What is the purpose of keeping secrets from children? What are the effects?” Parents, she continues, often seek to protect children from challenging pasts or fearful presents. We often, too, seek to shield children from our own mistakes. “Doubtless,” she avers, “we have performed acts of which we cannot feel proud.” Keeping silent is no good. But how, she asks again, “should we talk about the past?”

Professor Handler-Spitz’s provocations raise important, larger questions about how we rear our children. But this is not a handbook of upbringing. It is, instead, something of a guide to the imagination. In this book, and in her many other publications, Handler-Spitz has sought to find the psychic and imaginative lives of children emerging out of parental reading, shared experiences of art and music, and the exposure to drama, poetry, and film. Raising a child is as much about fostering creativity as it is about patterning behavior. In her previous book, The Brightening Glance, she argued for an understanding of the child as an aesthetically engaged, receptive human being. Children’s rooms, she suggested there, should be seen as “collaborative works in progress,” where walls and windows can become the screens on which the child and parent can project the artistry of early life and love. In Illuminating Childhood, she examines how the whole experience of child-rearing—from conception through birth, and even through the possible death of a parent—is potentially an aesthetic education. In language that verges on prose-poetry, she ventures, “Remind us of our own pregnancies or the pregnancies of those we love, it entwines us in gossamer threads of fantasy so that protracted daydreams appear to us along with half-remembered hopes and fears, forebodings, yearnings, and myths of our mutual existence. And we feel a pang of responsibility for all this beauty.”

The final sentence of this passage seems to me to be the fulcrum on which this book’s exposition balances. On the one hand, there is the appreciation of the beautiful, the education of the child as an appreciative being, sensitive to color, pattern, and expression. On the other hand, however, there is pain, a pang of responsibility for leading children into this world and exposing them to threat as well as thrill.

Illuminating Childhood moves through a series of personal narratives about teaching books, art, and films whose subject matter centers on development of children, parental life, and the social challenges to both. Each chapter centers on a particular work of verbal or cinematic expression that addresses large-scale questions about love and life: what does it mean to give birth; what does it mean to lose a parent in childhood; how do families from different cultures assimilate into societies; how do parents keep secrets from their children; how do children keep secrets from each other; what is friendship; what is love?

At the heart of this book, as at the heart of much of Handler-Spitz’s work, is a distinctive psychoanalytic understanding of human development, combined with a particular approach to art and archetypal expression. In The Brightening Glance, the anchor for this approach was the work of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, in particular his “celebrated identification of what he called the transitional object or the first not-me possession.” Working with the theory of the object, Winnicott developed ideas about holding (the importance of the parent holding the child and the ways in which physical embrace shapes senses of security) and, more broadly, about the importance of play. Play, for Winnicott, became the means through which authentic selfhood grew for both adult and child. Creative play could be the way in which the child and parent bonded. In psychoanalysis, it could serve as a means through which the patient came to understand a sense of true self in the course of therapeutic...