The Inner World of Childhood by Frances G. Wickes

By Rapierpen

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In a perfect world, as I see it, every professional healer of children, every teacher, parent, and grownup who wanted to rightfully claim to be an adult through working hard to be more conscious of his or her choices would enter, and become illumined by The Inner World of Childhood by Frances G. Wickes, (Prentice-Hall) first published in 1927, republished in 1955 and again in 1966, when the author had reached the age of 90.

For me her book is a treasure, the Rosetta stone for understanding the parent-child relationship, especially her chapter entitled "The Influences of Parental Difficulties Upon the Unconscious of the Child."

Don't be misled by the formality of this title. Frances Wickes, who was mentored by Carl Jung, was a gifted writer as well as a child psychologist in schools and in private practice. Her book is replete with flesh-and-blood stories about the children she served, and, no doubt, liberated enough to become true adults.

As Jung writes in his introduction to this book,

Parental influence . . . becomes a moral problem in face of conditions which might have been changed by the parents, but were not, either from gross negligence, slothfulness, neurotic anxiety, or soulless conventionality. . . . And nature has no use for the plea that one 'did not know." Not knowing acts like guilt."

Let Frances Wickes take your inner child by the hand. Let her show you the ghostly forces and powerful images that shaped that child like a dream in the night and perhaps haunt and rule it now.

If you are a teacher, she will help you see why you clash with students whose psychological type is foreign to your own.

If you had an imaginary playmate, perhaps you will meet them again and understand why they came to you and helped you cope.

If there are objects or people in your world--even complete strangers--that seem ominous, perhaps you will understand why they put you in a trance, and break the spell, perhaps to find a prince or princess who's been waiting for your kiss.

Wickes opens a world that every adult should know about themselves. It is a world that responsible adults should feel duty-bound to respect in every child who will be shaped by our actions, whether we are acting from conscious wisdom or from unconscious cruelty.

In a world in which so many adults are still infantile because they were not raised in love, but were neglected or abused, Wickes challenges us to accept "The Challenge of Consciousness."

She will help you face and understand the awesome power of projected images--like Greek gods and goddess that rule humans not from Mount Olympus, but in our own homes--fear, sex, adolescence, dreams. These deep formative forces pervade and move us, like relentless currents, and sometimes terrifying tides, through the seas of childhood in which we are born and need to emerge, conscious, capable, and loving--able to stand on our own two feet on dry land.

Unless you understand this world, this matrix, that is your childhood, you may find yourself still captive there, parenting unconsciously, teaching hurtfully, and trying to grow to full adulthood unsuccessfully. Of equal importance is the challenge to enter the inner world of the children in your care in order to go beyond what Wickes calls “reasonable expectations.”

“. . . there are persons, even little children, who react in accordance with inner laws which differ greatly from our own.

“Our duty is understanding, in so far as this is humanely possible, and then acceptance of the fundamental differences which, in many instances, will inevitably make their approach to life different than our own. Easy judgment and complacent self-justification vanish before this new demand of the duty of psychological comprehension of the other person. Until we reach this attitude, the child is at the mercy of the psychology of the particular adult with whom he comes in contact. His actions are not interpreted in accordance with the laws of his own being but with the so-called reasonable expectations of the adult in whose charge he may find himself.

“Two children steal. One may greatly desire the object, the other may have no sense of the thing as valuable in itself but only that it may be used to work out some problem upon which his mind is fixed. Two children lie. One may wish to obtain some definite thing desired, the other may be presenting to us a fantasy which has to him a very definite value and a reality greater than one which is merely objective.

“As we pursue these motives we no longer feel pleasantly sure of our power ‘to make the punishment fit the crime.’ What, after all, is the crime? Does it consist in the manifestation which we see or does it lie in something deeper? Are we so sure after all that it is a crime?”

Unless we attempt to know how a particular child perceives the world, how he or she processes information, and the values that are central to their being, how can we truly reach and teach that child?

Teachers understand that there are some children who seem unable to comprehend what is being taught because of the way the teacher feels most natural teaching. An incomprehensive child may cause parents to feel secretly convinced that somehow a duck’s egg has gotten mixed into their swan family nest. Odd ducks need understanding and acceptance; they need to be taught in the way that they are able to learn; they need to be free to waddle when everyone else in the family is graceful; they need to be encouraged to follow their duck nature and not be marched down the road of “swanness.” If the teacher or the parent fails to grasp that “duck” is the child’s true nature, how can they honor and support that “diversity” in their classroom or in their home?

The Inner World of Childhood makes it clear that caregivers of children must consider the question: does this child react in accordance with inner laws which differ greatly from my own? Even if we struggle to learn and accept those inner laws, sometimes falling back into explanations based on what for us is the default inner law of our own nature, we owe it to our children to be aware of the question and try to answer it. Let’s revise an old aphorism: “To try to understand another person and err is human; to perceive their inner nature clearly is divine.”