| Volume 30 Spring-Summer 2004 |
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PUBLICATIONS | VOICES | BACK ISSUES | FOLKLORE IN ARCHIVES | FOLK ARTISTS SELF-MGT | ORDER PUBLICATIONS | SEARCH  Analyses have shown that developed forms of play typically include representations of attack, escape, accident, uncleanness, and alienation. Those five contexted perils and their associated emotions—anger, fear, shock, disgust, and sadness, respectively—appear even in the stories of very young children. After studying the stories of six two- and three-year-olds in New York City, we hypothesize that children revel in these stories because of the pervasiveness of distress and peril in their culture and families. In so doing, they create situations of pleasurable mild stress, which they can master through play. Children’s early stories are thus an early effort to achieve mental health. In 1972-74 my students at Teachers College, Columbia University, and I considered whether the stories children make up are like folk stories. When we first asked children of the Lower East Side (P.S. 3 and a nearby preschool) for their own stories, at first they offered us Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood. But about the second or third time around, they told stories they had made up by themselves.... Our collections and findings are in our book The Folkstories of Children (University of Pennsylvania, 1981).
There were many potential analyses (e.g., Propp 1958), but perhaps the most useful for showing that these stories could parallel folktales was the four plot stages used for folktale analyses by Maranda and Maranda (1970): Stage 1. Usually the story features a subject threatened by a monster or other peril, but there is no response (as in an imaginary game of monsters, typical for five-year-olds). Stage 2. The subject seeks to escape or be rescued but is not successful (as in a game of chasing, with seven-year-olds). Stage 3. The central character successfully renders the threat void (comparable to a game of "Mother, May I?" with nine-year-olds). Stage 4. The danger is removed and there is a complete transformation—there can be no recurrence (as for the victor in any competitive sport, for eleven-year-olds). But the challenge was to understand why all the folktales and most of the children’s stories began with some kind of disequilibrium or "breach element," as Bruner (1996) would come to call it....Furthermore, studies of preschool children’s spontaneous play show that these breaches are central to their own play. In fact, adults are upset by such kinds of play. Good examples come from psychoanalyst Rosalind Gould (1972), whose Child Studies through Fantasy is a source of descriptions of what children do when freely at play. The observations were taken in a New York City preschool where the teachers were asked to record play they did not understand. The teachers recorded many examples of death, destruction, and other perils—all "breach" forms—which the teachers selected because they found them shocking. The children were perhaps even encouraged in this when they discovered their teachers’ reactions, and thus the examples may not be representative of the total range of play... Themes of physical attack and vulnerability are common, but such breaches are not limited to New York City children of the early 1970s: Somewhat similar catastrophes are found in the free play and free story collections in many other research centers in various states (Sawyer 1996; Fein and Kinney 1994; Corsaro 1985; Bronner 1988; Sutton-Smith et al. 1995) and from Israel (Ariel 2002). And there is no evidence that a few heinous parents are inculcating their children with violent ideas: The same phenomena can be found practiced by children in many parts of the world where children’s play and stories have been recorded. In this study we deal only with the stories of the youngest children in our study—six two- to three-year-olds, three boys and three girls. All told, they produced eighty-five stories in two years. We chose this group because they are generally the very youngest children who can tell stories. The Hypothesis We suggest that these stories have their origins in the pervasiveness of various forms of distress or peril in the macrosociety (the culture) or microsociety (the family) of which the children are members. Like folk and fairy tales, many children’s stories feature animals, monsters, or media characters (such as Batman) who are the agents of the breach. We believe that each form of peril has at its center a motivating ancient emotion as well as a specific cultural context. The most pervasive peril in the modern world (and in ancient and tribal worlds as well) is attack, as in war, hunting, and other forms of combat and competition seen in media or in reality. The emotion that motivates these varied cultural forms of attack in play is anger, which children witness in families as well as in the culture at large. After attack, and often associated with it, are apprehension and escape from dangerous, frightening people or monsters, which is represented in play by fear. Next are accidents and disasters, represented in play by shock. Then comes bodily uncleanness, which is represented by disgust. And finally there are the decontextual alienations and loneliness of the modern world, represented by sadness. Those five contexted perils and their associated emotions appeared in the stories of our six young children. Anger is noticeably the largest category, but it is not always easily separable from shock or fear, and in fact, the story categorizations sometimes overlap. We identified breaches in seventy-two of these children’s eighty-five stories, with no obvious differences between boys and girls in this admittedly small sample... We can surmise, along with Freud, that these singular catharses, or "abreactions" in Freud’s terminology, are a kind of self-therapy, or put more positively, a form of courage. Maladjusted individuals can seldom make this kind of self-representation and expression for their own curative or life-enlarging purposes...Cultivating and mastering mild forms of stress through play may be a means for achieving appropriate excitation without the depression or anxiety that comes with either extreme. Analysis of play has shown that all developed forms of play typically include representations of the ancient emotions of anger, shock, fear, disgust, and sadness (Sutton-Smith 2001, 2002, 2003). In fact, these emotions usually provide the major scenarios for the play. Thus anger is represented through attack in all play contests, fear is represented through physical risk taking, shock is represented in teasing and hazing play forms, disgust manifests itself in gross humor and profanity, and sadness by the inebriation inherent in many festivals.... The duality within the play or the stories—of good and evil, success and failure, emotionally positive and negative—is very similar in its mildly stressful but positive character to many of the classic dualistic techniques ... to maximize positive over negative emotions, [including those] used centuries ago by Stoics and Buddhists (Hall 2003). It might seem reasonable to suppose that stories with breaches and provocations, which are pursued so early here, even by our two-year-olds, are a primary and even elemental form of early positive emotional health maintenance. ...For several hundred years, play has been considered unreal and essentially a waste of time. Some modern research now suggests that play is an alternative form—not an inferior form—of reality. Other alternative realities that make our lives more bearable, or at least healthier, are found in the arts and in religion, which are no more real (or illusory) than play.... Children’s early stories are thus an early effort to achieve mental health and to join with some luster in the world as they experience it. To ban play recesses, depriving children of opportunities to play together and work out their group stories (as is advocated in some work ethic circles), is to sap the mental health that the young need as they struggle to make their world more credible to themselves. Each breach is not only fun, it is an assertion of courage in the face of fantasied disaster. These excerpts are from "Cultivating Courage Through Play" by Brian Sutton-Smith which was published in Voices Vol. 30, Spring-Summer 2004. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now. HOME | ABOUT NYFS | PROGRAMS & SERVICES | PUBLICATIONS | RESOURCES | CALENDAR | WHAT’S FOLKLORE? | MEMBERSHIP | GALLERY | SHOP |
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