All My Children

Learning to read, so basic to all academic achievements, illustrates not only these parallels, but their importance if intellectual subjects are to be learned well and to attain deep personal meaning. The child who through playing games of progressively greater complexity has mastered the knack of controlling to some measure the largely chaotic tendencies of his unconscious and that of harnessing its energies for largely conscious and reality-oriented purposes will find it relatively easy to apply the same skills to the learning of reading. But unless he has learned and expanded this technique in playing, he will not be able to apply it to learning to read, and reading may then seem a dry and unsatisfying enterprise, if not downright impossible, or so unpleasant as to be avoided. Whether it is a question of play and games or of academic learning, success in mastering such ventures requires that the unconscious is ready, able, and willing to invest its energies in the activity. This is particularly important in the beginning and in the early stages of intellectual efforts, before they have proved their merits, but it is also true throughout their later development. No matter what the “real” merits of an intellectual activity are, to be fully enjoyed and appreciated it must offer in addition pleasurable or otherwise desirable satisfactions, very much including those of an imaginary, even seemingly magic nature which appeal to our unconscious and meet some of the needs originating in it.

Adults are usually unaware that learning to read, which they view as a rational undertaking and a typical ego achievement, can be mastered well only if the child intially, and for quite a while afterward, experiences reading both as fantasy satisfaction—as in his play—and as a very powerful magic. The child who greatly enjoys hearing stories that stimulate and satisfy his fantasies will also wish to know how to read these engrossing tales to himself when no one is available to read them to him. But if he did not experience the pleasure of being read to, he will not be easily interested in learning to read. Lacking this experience he will doubt that learning to read is something he wishes to do, and the hard labor involved in learning it will not seem worth the effort.

But even being read stories which they much enjoy will not be sufficient motivation for most children to engage freely and eagerly in the difficult task of becoming literate. For this the example of their parents‘ interest in reading will also be necessary, or at least very helpful. If his parents are interested in reading themselves and derive meaning and enjoyment from it, this will be a strong incentive for a child to emulate them. If reading is important to his parents, it will be to their children, notwithstanding rare exceptions such as those discussed earlier in which literacy became the battleground on which the child tries to defeat his parent. In most cases children wish to be able to understand what is an important aspect of their parents‘ lives, and to participate with them in it. Without a positive parental image of the merits of reading, the child may fail to develop an interest in it.

At first acquaintance, literacy appears as sheer magic, and not as beingof any practical use. This is as true for the young child as it was true for mankind. Originally, reading and writing served religious and magical ends. We know, for instance, that Homer had heard about writing, although at the time he composed his oral epic the Iliad, Greece was nonliterate. It simply did not occur to him that the writing about which he had heard some vague talk could be used for utilitarian purposes. He describes the processes of making meaningful signs on tablets and deciphering them as essentially magical acts. When Homer thought about writing, he thought about it as actually conveying secret power, not merely information. This was not just because the oral tradition of the Homeric era and the extensive reliance on memory which it required rendered literacy virtually unnecessary. It was also because this idea was common to preliterate societies, which ascribed to the written word the magical power which is implied and reflected in the Scriptural statement “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

For centuries, the power of the written word remained a secret conferring special privileges on the select few. Witness the long debate about whether the common man should be permitted to read Scriptures. Witness, too, the fact that when literacy became more prevalent, its primary exercise was in reading the Bible. The first primer printed on this continent began: “In Adam’s Fall/We sinned all./Thy life to mend/This book attend.” The real value of reading for our ancestors lay in its unique—near-magical—power to help those who mastered it gain salvation.

Fortunately for many children, the first books read to them—while they no longer deal with the greatest wonder of all, eternal life and salvation— contain enough magical events to convince them that by learning to read, they too will learn more about the supernatural. Stories that contain rich fantasy-stimulating material provide imaginary satisfactions which demonstrate the value and merit of reading.

The time is long gone when learning to read was directly related to learning about the supernatural and magic, about the dangers of sin and the hope of salvation. That is why many children, although they have all the requisite intelligence for learning to read well, fail to do so. Even if they do learn, reading remains emotionally empty and unappealing to them. This is the reason all too many children do not turn to reading out of their own desire. For them reading is not supported by its power to stimulate and satisfy their imagination in respect to what to them are pressing and urgent issues, nor has it created a strong id appeal through its magical meaning.

If it has not become attractive during the child’s formative years, it may never seem attractive, even when its practical value is recognized. On the other hand, after reading has been well learned on a potent and eminently attractive unconscious basis, it can slowly be divorced from this as the child, from his own experience, becomes convinced of the many real merits of literacy beyond the stimulation of the imagination and the provision of vicarious satisfaction through fantasy, which will always remain important elements. But if reading is too soon and too radically deprived—or never was imbued— with magical meaning, it will not be strongly invested.

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