How to Live. What to Do

from
Childhood Part 1: Play
“Let’s pretend”: Alice

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There’s nothing all that exceptional about Alice. Unlike a lot of Victorian child heroines, she’s no paragon of angelic wisdom and delicacy. She is stubborn, awkward, impatient, often daft; she is, in short, a kid. But then why is she the first stop on our literary life journey? What does a kid like Alice have to tell us about how to live and what to do?
 
Perhaps the most important insight into childhood we glean from psychoanalysis is that we forget most of it, particularly the parts that most matter. The years up to three or four tend especially to be shrouded in a fog of amnesia. Our childhood feelings become ever more inaccessible to us. The sheer intensity of our daily life experiences come to seem to us comical and alien. We laugh at the sobbing, screaming, tyrannical monster we once were, as though they had nothing to do with who we are now.
 
This chasm between adult and child is as much a problem for adults as it is for children. The Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi called it a “confusion of tongues”; adults and children seem to speak the same language but are separated by a cognitive and emotional chasm that mires them in permanent misunderstanding. The child’s world is too elastic and excitable, the adult’s too rule-bound and repressed. The child doesn’t yet know what an adult mind is like; the adult has forgotten what it is to inhabit a child’s mind. That teacher was right in a way: it doesn’t make any sense.
 
This might be one explanation for why we write and read stories. Stories, and especially the ones we come to love as children, loosen the grip of logic and law on our inner lives. They help us reach the child still lurking in us, whose playfulness hasn’t been entirely crushed by the demands of the adult world—don’t make up silly stories, don’t excite yourself, don’t be childish.
 
One of the most common ways this conflict between child and adult realities manifests itself is in our different experiences of time. “Not being childish” means conformity to a regimented clock-time, adapting oneself to rhythms, schedules and speeds imposed from the outside. When I recall my own childhood, it often comes back to me as a relentless montage of irritable adults telling me to hurry up, get on with it, stop dawdling.
 
When I talk to a friend about this, she relates an exchange with her daughter, then aged about six. Anxious to get to a scheduled appointment, my friend told her daughter to hurry up, they had to leave, that moment. Her daughter remained impassive, sitting on the carpet absorbed in the intrigues unfolding between the various toy farm animals she was playing with. “Come on, Rosie, we must go!” Still no answer. “Rosie!” she shouted. “Stop taking your sweet time! Stop being so childish!”
 
Rosie turned her clear blue gaze on her mother and said, “But, Mum, I am a child.”
 
Rosie’s gentle protest illustrates more lucidly than any theory could the value of a child’s right to inhabit the time and space of play. In Alice’s dreamworlds, time won’t be pressed into a single, uniform rhythm. It can pass with breathless speed or easy leisure, collapsing anarchically at one moment, expanding languidly the next. Every character, every region of these imaginary worlds, forges its own rules of time and space.
 
One of the most reliable ways to reconcile this conflict of perspectives is to read a story together. When bedtime rolls around, we may be itching to recover our own time and space. We will often have spent the entire day trying to impose adult rules and disciplines and agendas, to cajole our children into conforming to the world as we see it, into moving at our pace, only to be left reeling with exhaustion and defeat. Story times create a space in which we’re licensed for a while to suspend the conflict between our reality and theirs. Parent and child alike can forget all we’ve told them about the impassable laws of physics, morality and self-preservation, and enter a world—like Wonderland, or the Looking-Glass—where none of these apply.
 
At seven and a half, Alice is well past early childhood. Very much the older child forever protesting that she’s not a baby, she likes to assume an exaggeratedly sensible posture while remaining a child nonetheless. More than anything else, what separates her mind from an adult’s is her casual indifference to the boundary between reality and illusion.
 
Alice’s favourite phrase, we’re told, is “Let’s pretend.” It’s the one phrase I recall from first reading Alice. The world seemed to me at that time to be brimming with adults telling me to stop daydreaming. Schoolteachers warned my parents that if I didn’t drag my head out of the clouds soon, I’d continue to underachieve.
 
Twenty-two years later, I began psychoanalysis, which led in turn to my starting the long process of training to be an analyst. It strikes me that through all these years on either side of the couch, that daydreaming child has never been far away.
 
The people I see in analysis are adults rather than children. They come with all kinds of troubles and maladies. But it’s surprising how often the same inchoate feeling will be expressed by otherwise very different individuals—of being blocked or inhibited. “It feels like I no longer know how to be who I am. Almost like I don’t remember,” a patient says to me in a first meeting. When we’re in this state, the world seems rigid, a series of roadblocks in the face of every change or development we try to effect, so that we too end up feeling perpetually stuck and anxious.
 
What if this feeling has something to do with no longer being able to say, “Let’s pretend”? This is a question posed by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, whose thinking had a profound and immediate effect on me when I first came across it, around the time I began my analysis.
 
A paediatrician as well as a psychoanalyst, Winnicott was gifted with an almost eerie capacity to attune himself to the ways in which children think and feel. His most important insight is that play is the basic mode of a child’s existence. For a child, the imaginary world feels at least as real as the “real” world, and probably more so. We cannot feel properly alive in adulthood, he suggested, if in early childhood we’ve not known what it is to pretend, to experience the intimacy and permeability of real and imaginary worlds.
 
To say we’re blocked or unable to be our true selves is to realise we’ve lost contact with the impulse to play, that the dividing line in our own minds between what is real and what isn’t has become too stark. The effect of this line on imaginative and creative lives is debilitating. This is why Winnicott insists that a child’s adult carers should never dictate to them what is real and what isn’t.
 
Telling Alice that her kitten doesn’t know how to play chess won’t help her grow up. On the one hand, she knows that perfectly well. On the other, if she’s allowed to reserve a space in herself where her kitten can play chess, her imaginative range and curiosity will only be enriched.
 
This is how she’s able to move with such open curiosity and easy acceptance through the anarchic and disturbing dreamworlds of Wonderland and Looking- Glass. She simply has no use for the objection that this or that isn’t real. In Alice’s world, reality and illusion are intimate friends.
 
This isn’t to say she doesn’t protest against the anomalies and oddities of Wonderland and Looking-Glass. But it’s not their unreality she objects to. At tea with the Hatter and the March Hare, she takes in her stride the fact that time is stuck permanently at six o’clock; she is bothered only by their rude and inhospitable behaviour. “It’s the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!” she complains, reacting to a violation of the laws of the physical universe with the kind of off hand dismissiveness you might recognise if you’ve ever watched kids’ reactions to a poor birthday party entertainer.
 
When, without warning, the White Queen metamorphoses into a sheep, who happens to be a clerk in a shop, whose sale items float away the moment Alice looks at them, she says (“in a plaintive tone”), “Things flow about so here!,” sounding roughly as alarmed as someone who’s found a stray melon in the dairy section.
 
Alice doesn’t need the world around her to conform to the logic of ordinary reality. She just prefers it not to be annoying. In small, everyday matters, children demand consistency, reliability, regularity. Objects should be easy to pick up, people (and animals) should be nice; they will be upset by even minor aberrations from these norms. But in large matters, like reality itself, they are far more receptive, and more generous towards change and disruption, than we are—or perhaps just more unbothered by them. The Caterpillar smokes a hookah and talks? No big deal. He’s short-tempered and haughty? That won’t do.
 
But while expanding exponentially our sense of what’s possible, Alice also draws a vivid symbolic landscape of what we might call the ordinary madness of childhood. Lewis Carroll employs wild exaggeration and distortion to render childhood experience more precisely. Take physical growth: adults are prone to remember a sentimental and sanitised version of the whole thing, as though our massive, unpredictable gains in height and weight, the elongations of trunk and limbs, the fluctuations in tone and pitch of voice and bodily coordination, all occurred smoothly and evenly.
 
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland brings to life the experience of growth as a bewildering and disturbing shock to the system. Alice stretches to double her height after eating a small cake and weeps inconsolably, flooding the hall, at the thought of her feet feeling lonely, writing to them to assure them they’re not forgotten. As poignant as it is bonkers, Alice’s tearful letter to her feet is a reminder of growth as a kind of universal human trauma. Only yesterday, every growing child might want to say, my feet seemed so nearby, and now they’ve moved all the way down there. Wonderland gives us a wonderful image of how sad and frightening this might feel.

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