From: Linda Zame <zame>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 1999 12:01:31 -0700

Maia wrote:
 

Maia,

Since my work as a children's librarian led in a way to my work as a child psychoanalyst I can say that I have been working towards creating healthy individuals for many, many years. I wish that I could say that healthy individuals could be created and nurtured in an arena of pure and good thougts, that it was enough to have good people and good books etc in a child's life. But that is simply not the case. The human mind is complex and wildly imaginative. We all have thoughts (especially children because they don't do such a great job of suppressing them) that are perverse and unappetizing. Our role isn't to hide these distasteful thoughts and fantasies from children but to show them a world where thoughts, wishes and fantasies are different from actions. All children, at one time or another have murderous fantasies towards siblings, parents, and peers. Most do not act on them because they have learned the difference between fantasy and action. We can't purge the books thinking that we will remove these fantasies, we will simply remove an avenue where children can explore and learn about the complexity of the human mind, and gain greater insight into their own soul.

Linda Goettina, D.M.H.
Received on Tue 19 Oct 1999 02:01:31 PM CDT