He also described his mother as disturbed, chronically sad and emotionally unavailable. "I grew up in a house that was in a constant state of mourning," he told Marcus. In the interview, he told Marcus that his father's family was "destroyed" in the Holocaust. Sendak was born in Brooklyn in 1928 to parents of Polish descent. In "Where the Wild Things Are," the reconciliation is represented through the warm food that Max finds from his mother has left for him.Īnd it likely could have been the author's own childhood from which he was pulling. Ultimately, that fury and conflict is reconciled and signified through an otherwise innocuous even. That rage then manifests in an altered state of consciousness, like a dream or fantasy, Gottlieb wrote. Sendak's other children's books, including "In the Night Kitchen" and "Outside Over There," focus on child rage and emotional unavailability of a mother. "It is this capacity, I believe, that contributes to the appeal of his work to children who are unable or unwilling to articulate these states, and to adults who have forgotten them or do not wish to know about them," Gottlieb continued. "Sendak's work in 'Where the Wild Things Are' is of particular interest to psychologists due to his strikingly unusual abilities to gain access to, and to represent in words and pictures, fantasies that accompany childish rage states," Gottlieb wrote in the paper. In a 2009 article published in The Psychologist, Richard Gottlieb, a psychoanalyst based in Phoenix, analyzed the influences and motivations behind Sendak's illustrations and writing. They play, but soon, Max commands them to stop and go to bed without supper, and he finds himself lonely as the king of the wild things, and wants to be where someone loves him "best of all." He returns to his room, where supper is waiting for him, and, with an added reassurance and charm that maybe only Sendak could pointedly portray, Max finds that the food is still hot. Max becomes the "most wild thing of all." He takes a private boat to where the wild things are, and, despite their terrible roars and ghoulish features, manages to become their ruler through a magic trick.
But his rage is apparent, and soon his room morphs into a strange forest. In just 10 sentences, Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," illuminated not only the protagonist Max's imagination, but also rage, a reaction to a mother's emotional absence and the overall darker, and neglected, parts of a child's psyche.Ĭlearly, Max, a young and unruly boy who is punished by his mother and sent to his room without dinner, depends on his mom.
The question I am obsessed with is: How do children survive?" Maurice Sendak told Leonard Marcus, a children's book historian, in a 2002 interview.
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