Richard Gottlieb analyses Maurice Sendak’s fascinating 1963 picture book
source: http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=22&editionID=180&Article...
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'I only have one subject. The question I am obsessed with is How do children survive?’ Maurice Sendak (Marcus, 2002, pp.170–171).
According to the writer Francis Spufford, Where the Wild Things Are is ‘one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger’ (Spufford, 2003, p.60). For me, this book and Maurice Sendak’s other works are fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity.
Maurice Sendak’s works have enormous popular appeal and have been purchased and read by tens of millions of adults to their children over the years. Published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are is the first and best-known part of what Sendak described as a trilogy. Although just 10 sentences long, it has become acknowledged as a masterpiece of children’s literature, inspiring operas, ballets, songs and film adaptations (the most recent of which is released this month). Barack Obama recently told a White House crowd that Where the Wild Things Are is one of his favourite books. It inspired some to suggest that ‘it is perhaps time to separate [Sendak] from the word ‘children’s’ and deal with his work as an explorative art, purely and only seemingly simple’ (Braun, 1970, p.52).
Sendak’s art addresses our deepest, frequently repressed, often unspeakable concerns about ourselves and our loved ones. Often it speaks to children and to the adults who read to them from a place of anguished inner struggle, struggle that had rarely been directly addressed in children’s literature prior to Sendak.
In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognise her child’s concerns or state of mind. He manages nonetheless to maintain the optimistic view that all of these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The ultimate magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and – ultimately – art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.
According to the writer Francis Spufford, Where the Wild Things Are is ‘one of the very few picture books to make an entirely deliberate, and beautiful, use of the psychoanalytic story of anger’ (Spufford, 2003, p.60). For me, this book and Maurice Sendak’s other works are fascinating studies of intense emotions – disappointment, fury, even cannibalistic rage – and their transformation through creative activity.
Maurice Sendak’s works have enormous popular appeal and have been purchased and read by tens of millions of adults to their children over the years. Published in 1963, Where the Wild Things Are is the first and best-known part of what Sendak described as a trilogy. Although just 10 sentences long, it has become acknowledged as a masterpiece of children’s literature, inspiring operas, ballets, songs and film adaptations (the most recent of which is released this month). Barack Obama recently told a White House crowd that Where the Wild Things Are is one of his favourite books. It inspired some to suggest that ‘it is perhaps time to separate [Sendak] from the word ‘children’s’ and deal with his work as an explorative art, purely and only seemingly simple’ (Braun, 1970, p.52).
Sendak’s art addresses our deepest, frequently repressed, often unspeakable concerns about ourselves and our loved ones. Often it speaks to children and to the adults who read to them from a place of anguished inner struggle, struggle that had rarely been directly addressed in children’s literature prior to Sendak.
In straightforward, undisguised fashion, Sendak’s work has addressed problems as monumental for children as being in a rage at mother, relating to a depressed or emotionally unavailable mother, or coming to terms with a mother who cannot or will not recognise her child’s concerns or state of mind. He manages nonetheless to maintain the optimistic view that all of these troubles can be tamed, even if not fully overcome, through imagination. The ultimate magic of his work resides in his presentations of imagination, dream, fantasy and – ultimately – art itself as sources of resilience, of the strength to soldier on.
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- Movies, books, Where The Wild Things Are
