Illuminating Childhood ─ Portraits in Fiction, Film, and Drama

While literature and the arts are rarely considered primary sources for knowledge about human motivation and behavior, people read novels, attend movies, watch television, and go to the theater not solely to be entertained but also to learn about one another and about themselves. Illuminating Childhood formalizes this quest for psychological knowledge in the domain of the arts.

Starting with the premise that a gifted writer, artist, or filmmaker has the ability to teach us as much in one scene as a theorist can in a treatise or a therapist in a session, the author shares her intimate experience of eight thematically linked works in film and literature from the second half of the twentieth century, touching on issues central to parent-child relations, including toxic intrafamilial secrets, the disjunction between love and understanding, and the lasting impact of deceased parents on their children. While the canon of literature about children and parent-child relations includes books that identify problems, propose solutions, and present statistical data, Illuminating Childhood offers a living out of experience via the arts, written for a general audience—parents, teachers, mental health professionals, those who engage with their students via the arts of literature and film, and others.

Ellen Handler Spitz holds the Visual Arts at the University of Maryland. She is the author of a number of books on art, psychology, and imagery. Her abiding research interests are the cultural lives of young people; the relations between aesthetics and psychology; and the interconnections among literature, music, dance, and the visual arts.