All My Children

The permanent underlying positive ties between parents and children were strengthened at Halloween—after all, adults made this outburst of naughtiness possible and encouraged it, with their merriment barely hidden behind their pretense of being scared. This holiday told children that deep down, despite adult demands to socialize the child, their parents did not totally reject the negative side of the child’s feelings toward them. They knew it existed and had to be given its due, at least symbolically, one night a year. Having freed themselves of their hostile feelings on Halloween, the children could then fully concentrate during the Christmas season, a few weeks later, on positive feelings toward their parents.

Halloween, like Christmas, was once a religious holiday, and like Christmas it was an ancient pagan tradition onto which Christian meanings were grafted. Like Christmas, the rites of Halloween are anchored in the deepest layers of the unconscious, where our emotions run strongest. Santa Claus, as mentioned, represents infantile fantasies of the benevolent parent of the golden age, when all our wishes were satisfied immediately; thus, to some extent, he is the reincarnation of the all-good mother who gave birth to the child. Halloween, on the other hand, represents the opposite aspect of our basic ambivalence. Christmas symbolizes the satisfaction of all our hopes, but Halloween symbolizes our persecutory anxieties. The witch on her broomstick, so central a symbol to Halloween, is the reincarnation of the bad mother, the hostile-destructive one. The devil, a figure which in every way symbolizes phallic aggression (the hoof, the tail, the horns), represents the bad father. Halloween used to present a unique, important opportunity for boys and girls aged three until adolescence to act out some of their aggressive wishes and in doing so not only to become acquainted with them, but to some degree to master them.

Before Halloween was bowdlerized, children were able to attain power for one night. To be able to dress and act like a witch, a devil, or a ghost means that one shares by proxy in the secret power of these figures. Haunting adults was not done entirely in play; it was not merely the acting out of a wish to turn the tables on the adult world. It reached much deeper into the unconscious and satisfied a primitive need to identify with these primordial powers. But in order to exorcise these extremely primitive layers of the personality, children had to be free to run wild for a few hours, and adults had to make sure that they could do so safely.

What even as recently as a generation ago was an orgiastic and therefore deeply cathartic experience has been turned from a haunting event into a fancy-dress party. The true function of Halloween has been denied and abandoned. What was formerly a symbolic acting out of man’s most anxious and destructive drives, breaking out of repression, has become totally demystified and civilized. Now among nice middle-class families, this ritual reappearance of devils and witches—all the dark forces in man—has been watered down to an ever-so-gentle extortion for the nicest of causes, such as collecting for UNICEF. If we thus try to civilize our children by denying everything strong and wild in them, it is little wonder that some of them grow up into young adults who hate civilization, which robbed them of even one night a year in which they could give free rein to an important aspect of their natures.

Recently, in some parts of the United States, such as in California and New York City, adults, too, have taken to dressing up as ghosts and witches on Halloween, thus depriving children of their exclusive holiday by making themselves part of it. No longer do children try to scare adults on this night; when adults act the same as they do, children are robbed of their one chance a year to assert their dominance. Children rightly interpret this as adults being jealous of their fun and thus changing its meaning. Adults who act in this way were probably deprived of fun when they were children, perhaps forced to collect for worthy causes instead of running wild and scaring adults, giving once-a-year expression to their asocial tendencies and getting rid of them through acting them out. So as adults, they try to make up for what they lost out on as children. But in doing so, they make it impossible for their own children to turn the tables on their parents and all other adults at least once a year.

The same process of destroying the deeper emotional meaning of a holiday has been at work in the changing nature of how we celebrate the Fourth of July. All along, it was a patriotic family event and not just a children’s holiday; since it celebrated a revolution, it used to be a chaotic, raucous occasion. On the preceding night of July 3, firecrackers were set off. Then on the day itself, the orators at community festivities could successfully concentrate on the American Revolution’s positive achievement—the creation of a new form of government. But now that the rougher aspects of the celebration have been done away with, there is little patriotic fervor left either. As always in life, when we do away with the negative aspect of human ambivalence, the positive loses its emotional strength as well.

Our effort to take the ambivalence—our recognition of both the light and dark sides of human beings—out of our celebrations by trying to make them pretty and civilized has divorced them from the deepest sources of our human existence and turned them into empty events. As Aristotle knew, we can free ourselves for our higher purposes only if we first purge ourselves of the dark forces within us. This catharsis has traditionally taken place through our participating emotionally in the performance of both: an elevating classic tragedy and a satyr play or raucous comedy; or a Dionysian holiday celebrating chaos. Having denied the dark forces their due at Halloween, we now make the redeeming forces seem unnecessary. By creating bland holidays for our children, we have created a vapid world for them, a world which does not recognize their and our deepest fears and most satisfying wishes. What is additionally unfortunate is that by making the world bland for them we also contribute to making their feelings for us bland, something from which we and they suffer alike. If, on the other hand, we could restore magic to their world, it would also be restored to our relations, which would become greatly enriched by it.

My purpose is to encourage parents to do their own thinking about some aspects of child-rearing in the hope that these examples will help them to find good solutions to whatever problems they may encounter in raising their child. Their struggles to do so will make them good enough parents, to their own and their children’s benefit. The good enough parent will always be aware that conceiving and bearing a child and bringing it into this world are the most wondrous events in the lives of parents. To be born is the most wondrous event in the life of a child. The more they can enjoy together, each in their own ways, what follows from it—the parents raising the child, the child being raised by his parents—the happier their lives will be.

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