Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology
Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology
This chapter discusses the characteristic of picturebook psychology, which represents and textualizes child play, focusing on author-illustrator Maurice Sendak. Picturebook psychology began with child study, child analysis, and progressive educational work and has since been revised by humanistic ego psychology and bibliotherapy. In Where the Wild Things Are (1963), Sendak updates Freud’s famous dream of the Wolf Man, giving picturebook psychology a neo-Freudian makeover and establishing psychological wildness as the very stuff of child life. The chapter concludes with some discussion of the 2009 film version by Spike Jonze, as well as Dave Eggers’s novelization, published the same year.
Keywords: picturebook psychology, child play, Maurice Sendak, humanistic ego psychology, bibliotherapy, Where the Wild Things Are, Wolf Man, neo-Freudian, psychological wildness
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