Children's Imaginings and Narratives: Inhabiting Complexity

Children's Complex Lives

In an evocative essay ‘Why Oedipus’, Christopher Bollas (1993) explores how children are engaged in understanding and knowing the complexity of living. Bollas argues that during the phase of the Oedipus complex the child discovers that s/he has a mind and that others have one too. Prior to this, the child imagines that her/his thoughts, feelings or perceptions have come to herself/himself from outside of the self, brought by the dream, as opposed to recognizing that s/he produces the feelings and perceptions, the dream itself. The child's pain and difficulty at this stage therefore centres on the recognition that life is complex and more uncomfortable than had previously been thought. For Bollas, the Oedipus complex is thus a complex of feelings, thoughts and experiences that are specific to childhood. Crucially, the child moves from being in a dilemma (a two-person relationship) to being in a complex (engaged in and inhabiting many relationships).

The children in the studies that I have embarked on moved across and between thinking about their relationships both within and outside of the family, and elaborating their own sense of self. The narratives told by them, and their atmosphere that is more difficult to locate but nonetheless pertinent, illustrates how the children engaged with commitment in working out their connections and understandings. The knowledges they developed were of the social, familial and emotional realms of living. By way of introducing this I will draw upon an example from Anne, a nine-year-old girl. Anne acted out a story in which she goes to the wizard and asks him to make her childminder a nice person. The wizard does so and the childminder allows Anne to eat as much ice cream, cake and sweets as she likes. Anne is then sick in the night and does not want a repeat of the situation, so she returns to the wizard and asks him to make the childminder a little bit nice and a little bit horrid. He refuses, saying he can only do magic that makes people one or the other and so Anne has to choose. She declares, ‘I will have her as she is, then’. There are many ways of interpreting this vignette but one aspect that I wish to draw out, is that Anne, recognizing her powerlessness to change things, reconciles herself to not being able to change her childminder. She had spoken previously about finding her childminder trying and that she did not enjoy her time with her, but through the process of acting out the alternative, accepts the situation in humorous and gentle fashion.

Drawing on some work that I undertook with children, this essay explores some narratives articulated by children aged between seven and 10. Through this essay I am exploring the push-pull dynamics implicit in children's narratives; their stories contain contradictory fantasies and psychic processes. These centre on moves towards knowledge as well as disavowal of reality about the family and material conditions, and the wishes for something better alongside the knowledge that ‘this is it’. This article focuses on theorizing children's understandings of and relationships to social and material life and in the process also documents some aspects of children's autobiographies. Emphasis is placed on family life in order to edge towards an understanding of how meanings matter and meanings have matter. I am working with a neglected age group: thus far, emphasis has been given to these seven- to 10-year-old children's relationships to family but their relationships to the social and cultural spheres is marginalized, except for the well-worn arguments that centre on how social and cultural life is destroying childhood. ¹

My aim is to work towards holding together the social elements and influences upon children and, simultaneously to think through the emotional complexity of children's narratives. This article is predicated on the view that narrative is just one aspect of identity and is inextricably tied in with fantasy and memory. Within this analysis, fantasy, the emotions and memories involve complex psychic processes, through narratives memory and fantasy work concurrently to deal with loss, absence and frustration. I contend that narrative, memory and fantasy together constitute subjectivity (for a more extended discussion of these issues see Treacher, 2000). Narratives are the stories we tell ourselves and others, the placing into words of that which we can communicate, know about and understand. They are the attempt, partial and inadequate, to make sense of that which is otherwise incomprehensible and overwhelming. Moreover, narratives and emotions combine to produce these fantasies we hold most dear. ²

Within this framework, self and other, temporal and spatial relationships, and cultural and social processes are inexorably linked to form the shape and content of the available narratives (Freeman, 1993). Narratives are shaped so that culturally significant moments and events are portrayed and highlighted for self and other. A narrative is never held in isolation from others or the cultural context. Narratives are, therefore, social in two critical ways: they involve reaching out and connecting with others and our (adults and children) narratives are constructed within and through the social. A contemporary trend in the social sciences, as is well known, is the turn to narrative as an organizing theoretical framework. It has become commonplace to declare that we are the narratives we tell and that we understand the world that we inhabit through the narratives told – it is not according to this particular theoretical perspective, that we use stories to express ourselves but rather the stories speak through us.

While there has been little work on children's autobiographies and narratives of self and family life, there is a growing tradition of thought concerning stories produced for children. For example, Carolyn Steedman (1982) and Marina Warner (1994) argue in different ways that the stories produced for children give them ways they can learn about and come to terms with the adult world and its relationships. Steedman and Warner pay attention to the social and historical contexts of stories and relegate to the sidelines the emotional impact and effect of the narrative, while writers influenced by psychoanalysis prioritize psychological process in the stories.

In The Case for Peter Pan (1984) Jacqueline Rose argues that fiction for children is impossible as it always involves the adult writing for, speaking to, children and critically drawing the child into an adult world. For Rose children's fiction tells us about adults desires as ‘[C]hildren's fiction draws in the child, it secures, places and frames the child’ (Rose, 1984: 2). Rose argues throughout her important and evocative analysis (mainly drawing upon a Lacanian framework) that children's fiction categorizes and fixes children's identities according to adult understandings and definitions of social and emotional spheres. From a different psychoanalytic understanding (Kleinian and post-Kleinian) Margaret and Michael Rustin (2001) explore some emotional and psychic dynamics embedded in children's stories. Through a careful analysis of a range of children's stories, for example Tom's Midnight Garden, Five Children and It, the Rustins explicate both children's emotional states and the way that authors do connect with and reach out to children's emotional dilemmas thereby allowing children to work through their feelings to reach a state of integration and understanding of themselves and others.

I understand childhood subjectivity as socially formed and involving emotional process which, include unconscious phantasy, conscious fantasies, and recognition of complex social and personal factors. Following Rose, I do argue that social narratives constrain and fix and simultaneously children (like adults) find ways through these social strictures. Lives are made out of social deprivations, lives that are filed with love, affection, bonds, magical stories that conceal and reveal. The children's narratives in my research (and I did not work with children who were particularly deprived) illustrate how relationships and relatedness is crucial for a sense of self, for as Paul Ricoeur suggests ‘self hood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one can not be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other’ (Ricoeur, 1994: 3).

Current Understandings of Children

It is worth outlining some aspects of the contemporary debates on children and childhood. It has become commonplace to theorize childhood and children as sites of social construction. Within this view, the social and cultural spheres constitute children and childhood; there is nothing inevitable or natural about these two redolent terms. The social field both includes and forms profoundly theoretical and personal understandings, responses to and representations of children and childhood. Childhood innocence is thus a cultural myth that has no substance. Children have more agency, understanding and knowledge of their social and personal worlds than is usually assumed. Although as David Buckingham points out:

I would agree with the social constructionist framework on children and childhood, which has gained firm hold in theoretical disciplines such as social psychology and sociology, and has contributed much to our understandings of children and childhood. It leaves aside, however, the question of how the impact of the various social, familial and emotional dynamics bear upon and form children's subjectivity.

These challenges to commonsense understandings of childhood and children are situated within a contemporary theoretical framework that insists on locating subjectivity within cultural and historical contexts. As Ludmilla Jordonova argues ‘it is only ever possible to write the most partial history of childhood partly because children are temporary social subjects – they grow up’ and ‘because ideas of children and childhood are ever shifting’ (in Steedman, 1995: 6). My aim in undertaking work on childhood subjectivity is not to move the point of origin of fantasy and narratives back and therefore nearer the ‘truth’, nor to compare adults with children, but rather to produce a thorough engagement with children's subjectivity and its specific complexity. This is alongside the recognition that childhood and adulthood are categories that leak in both directions.

A shared point of identity between children and adults is a complex relationship to time and temporality – both adults and children look backwards and forward in order to locate themselves and to make sense of their identity in the present. This issue of time marks a central difference between psychoanalytic and developmental theory. For psychoanalysis time is not linear as such but rather the past and the present constitute an intertwined web, to reduce the distinction between childhood and adulthood. Children are both engaged in their own daily lives and look forward to adulthood. As Buckingham states children though are acutely conscious of what constitutes adulthood and childhood and are frequently complicit in sustaining these differences, children ‘will routinely put other children ‘in their place’ by mocking them or condemning them for their ‘babyish’ tastes or behaviour; and they will often strenuously attempt to distance themselves from such accusations’ (Buckingham, 2000: 13). Being engaged in the present and looking forward to adulthood influence their fantasies and feelings about the future. For developmental psychology, on the other hand, there is a clear boundary between childhood and adulthood. With its emphasis on the mechanisms of how we become human, developmental psychology conceptualizes children as growing through stages and maturing into adulthood with greater capacities and increased awareness of the social spheres.

The issue of temporality and childhood is also significant from a different angle. For, adults researching children from the perspective of adulthood, with its particular pressures and social and emotional challenges, childhood experiences and thinking can easily be misunderstood, disavowed or idealized. As an adult thinking about children's experiences, one can become involved in the search for one's own lost childhood or indeed, a childhood that has never been. A researcher's fantasies can lead to a search not for the ‘place of real children in real-life families, but a representation of a societally endorsed fantasized place of the child’ (Caldwell, 1997). For Jenks the child is the site of much nostalgic longing and he argues that it is for this reason that postmodern society has re-adopted the child (Jenks, 1996). In a postmodern age in which there is dislocation and uncertainty at material and personal levels the child is now fantasized as one point of certainty. To quote Jenks more fully:

To set the scene – developmentally, the age group (7–10 years) is conceptualized as struggling emotionally with questions of independence alongside gaining and consolidating a stronger awareness of the outside world with its inequalities and differences, adult vulnerabilities and failings (Waddell, 1998). The children's emotional energies tend to centre on peer relationships and issues of belonging: where and whether s/he and others have a place or not. One of the main emotional processes of this period is coming to terms with the necessity of relatedness and relationships with others. Since this entails understanding another's personal, separate existence, it may only be reluctantly worked towards. This age group can often be concerned with their place in the social sphere and how to maintain that place with confidence. At this age, children's vulnerability in this area can be poignant, as is illustrated by an example from my study: Mark centred a play on the mantra, ‘have faith in yourself, Mark, have faith’. Their mental skills and capacity for verbal expression are increasing rapidly, along with their powers of concentration. An increasing expansiveness, in terms of thinking and grasping the social world enables the child to deal with more elaborate and differentiated relationships. The psychoanalyst Donald Meltzer (1973) describes latency as a time of balance and a space dominated by a quest for ‘joined-up writing’, where ‘joined-up writing’ can be interpreted both as an actual wish for adult writing, and as a metaphor for an internal self that is coherent. ³

Working with Children

Material for this article is drawn from two different studies (Treacher, 2000, 2002) that concentrated on documenting children's narratives of themselves and their families. Both studies took place in the school setting in Brixton (South London) and Crouch End (North London). In one study, 12 children aged nine years participated and this was conducted with Phil Cohen and in the other study eight children, aged seven, eight and nine years took part – and I conducted this study alone. In both studies, an equal number of boys and girls participated and the children represented a range of ethnicities, while their class is unknown and impossible to judge. In both studies various activities were used as a means of collecting and discovering children's narratives – drawing, telling stories as a springboard to enable the children to elaborate their own accounts, constructing a play using puppets that they had made, using clay to make figures (either adults or children).

One study was conducted with all 12 children present (not a good idea – 12 children is simply too much!); the group work involved structured activities and it was usually chaotic. Questions of discipline frequently intervened as the sessions were extremely noisy. The children engaged with energy and commitment. There was a crucial difference in the way the boys and girls interacted and took up space and place. In the group study the boys dominated the sessions, leading me to note ‘boys, boys, always the boys – where are the girls?’ The dynamic seemed to be that the boys could leap in and take up the space while the girls were slower and required more of a build-up. In the individual sessions, however, the boys were quieter and required more care in order for them to respond, while the girls moved in to take up the space with confidence and verve.

The use of technology was problematic – all the sessions were tape-recorded and some videoed. Increasingly, it became apparent that the technology was intrusive and unhelpful; in retrospect there was a fantasy that the video could capture it all – the image, the event, all the children. Moreover, the aesthetics of the image dominated. I also realized much too late that with a large group of children it is impossible to differentiate between the voices on tape, and as gendered differences in relationships and narratives was a crucial aspect of the study, not being able to differentiate girls and boys voices was a real blow.

Wiser, in the next project I interviewed children individually, taped the sessions but did not use video. I used a freer approach – crayons, paper, paints and clay were on the table throughout the sessions. As I am concerned with the narratives that the children produce and not with ‘truth’ or ‘objectivity’ I deliberately used story stems (speaking two lines or so as a lift off for the children to elaborate their own accounts), I also asked them to draw family maps and to tell family stories and also asked them to tell a story of a family day out.

Research does not happen in a neutral zone, however, and problems occurred even though I had (or so I thought) meticulously set up the research. I spent a couple of days at the school getting to know the children and this seemed to go well. On my first day of interviewing the children, they seemed very nervous and kept their distance and I was bewildered by their anxious responses to me. I discovered when speaking with one child that their teacher had told them that I was a dentist who had come to pull out all their teeth. I spent much of that day reassuring them that I was not a dentist, had absolutely no interest in pulling out their teeth, and I had to re-invest much energy in building up relations with them anew. In both studies it is unclear quite how the physical and emotional environment of school, or the relationship between school and home, impacted on what the children said and how they related to one another and to me. One boy seemed very reticent, withdrawn and reluctant to speak. I became quite concerned about him. It then transpired that his mother had discovered that he had been in the toilet measuring his penis against that of another boy. His mother went to the school, furious and upset; apparently her shouts could be heard reverberating across the building. This child learnt fast that you need to be careful what you express to adults and that sometimes ‘nothing’ is all there is to say (Frosh, 2002: 137).

Children: Relationships and Relatedness

The narratives the children told frequently expressed their connections to their peer groups and their families. They told family stories with engagement and warmth but they did not re-tell family narratives of distress and shame. The children told narratives that may have been told to them by an adult member of the family, or indeed may have been a personal construction and the narrative culled from memory, other family stories, or the media. Whatever their source, the narratives had become internalized and functioned to give a sense of coherence to the child, and moreover a sense of self. The pleasure they took in the narratives appeared to come from knowing their histories, that they had pasts and a point of connection to other members of their peer group.

In the studies there were many examples of children recounting stories of themselves that they had been told by another member of the family. For example, one child told of being lost in an art gallery aged two years and this story seemed, at least consciously, to function as proof of her competence at a young age. At times narratives about other family members were firmly integrated into the child's emotional life. One boy (Kareem aged 8 years), told of the journey his grandfather would have taken to arrive in Britain. He told it as if he had taken the journey himself, using the present tense, with all the energy of first-hand experience. He had so internalized and lived this story that he had no sense that he could not have been there; even when the other children pointed this out, with some derision, it has to be said, he held firm – he had been there. This was probably a family story that has been told, retold, remembered and recollected over and over again; for this boy, his grandfather's story had actually become his own. This boy's narrative arises from his family's history of migration and he embodied his family history so profoundly that I physically ached as I listened to him. This boy was the only one in the studies who had so embodied his family history – others also with family histories of exile spoke about their parent or parent's lives elsewhere but more as a way of thinking through different places and different emotional locations. ⁴

This boy's narrative resisted time, space and place and in this way coincides closely with Freud's concept of unconscious life. For Freud the unconscious does have its own system of thought, one that bears little or no relationship to time or reality. Freud also argues that the unconscious is always in operation producing fantasy, and further that there are different modes of fantasizing – daydreams, conscious fantasies and unconscious phantasies. Laplanche and Pontalis suggest that there is an inextricable and complex relationship between desire and phantasy. For these authors, phantasies are scenarios in which the subject ‘is inevitably present’ as a participant, an observer or both (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985: 318). Further, phantasy places our unconscious wishes in a mise-en-scene; the unconscious is inescapable as conscious narratives always have unconscious desires, wishes, and processes embedded within them.

Without exception, all the children placed themselves as the central protagonists of their narratives and, if Laplanche and Pontalis are right, as I suspect they are, these narratives expressed both conscious, and I would hazard a guess, unconscious phantasies. To illustrate this, one young eight-year-old girl spoke a narrative of murder, suicide, neglect and abandonment when telling a story of a family day out. This narrative spoken with energy and verve was an eloquent expression of family life in disarray – this was not a cosy expression of a fun family day out but as indicated above it expressed fantasies with quite aggressive content. It needs to be stated, however, that she told the narrative with relish and unusually with many physical actions to illustrate the points of action. As Clare Hemmings pointed out, through this narrative this girl could be expressing her dismay at family life, her resistance to feeling trapped and her wish to find a way through and out (personal communication).

Children expressed their disappointments with their parents – one girl spoke about her absent father and her anger as he had forgotten to buy her a birthday present. A boy aged eight years, expressed his annoyance with his father's rough play and spoke about his heartfelt wish not to treat his own children in the same way. The children re-told family stories of fun and cosiness but when they elaborated their own narratives, in their own time and space, anxieties and concerns were also expressed. Knowing about and accepting their disappointments and frustrations with parents and adults was a strong theme in their narratives. They wished both to remain connected and to separate completely.

Their narratives reminded me of Freud's essay ‘Family Romance’ (1909), in which he describes children's fantasies of having been adopted, or kidnapped or of being a foundling, due to extreme circumstances and through no fault of the ‘original parents’. One day, these superior and original parents will return and restore the child to their rightful position as a prince or princess who is destined to rule, be handsome or beautiful, and possess riches and untold happiness. These individual narratives coincide with socially available narratives, such as the publishing phenomenon Harry Potter, an orphan whose parents were the finest wizard and witch of all time. The first novel in the series The Philosopher's Stone traces his miserable and deprived existence with his aunt and uncle through to his discovery of his true heritage and material wealth. He also learns to his astonishment that it was his own immense powers that enabled him, as an infant, to be responsible for the downfall of the most powerful wizard of black magic (Rowling, 1997). The children's narratives derived some of their content from an extremely popular story at this particular historical moment. The social and the individual are inextricably linked as unconscious fantasies about parents and family life take on shape and form through socially available representations and stories. As Kristeva argues there are three axes to a text, the axis of the symbolic, the historical axis ‘and the axis of subjectivity (from the body, through the drives, and the primary processes of the unconscious’ (Pajaczkowska, 1985: 96).

The Family Romance expresses a wish to be the prince or princess who is found and restored to their rightful place, and perhaps also to be the adult who does the rescuing and the abandoning. I still do not know quite which characters the children identified with and consciously or unconsciously became. They joined in with great energy and produced stories of travel and nail-biting adventures of abandonment that always included a rescue. Their versions of the Family Romance were highly imaginative. One centred on a baby being kidnapped and left alone in a country mansion. The parents arrive but do not recognize their own child. When they finally do so, the child is now able to do anything it wants, and goes to San Francisco. Another story centred on a baby who is left outside of a shop and after a complex narrative involving car chases, kind but rather daft grandparents, the baby is left at an airport. It goes to Scotland by mistake but is rescued. The stories while rich did indicate emotional confusion around identity and abandonment, and included depictions of adult's misrecognition of children. The stories always ended with the child arriving in a better place altogether but the exhausting journey to get there suggests children's knowledge of adult's failings, the wish to be somewhere else entirely and the knowledge that adults do recognize them albeit partially and inadequately. Tellingly, not one child chose for their ‘baby’ to live in England, whatever their family history of diaspora, the children expressed contradictory wishes and impulses: they longed at times to be both elsewhere and at home.

Freud interprets the child's longings to be born to different parents not as the expression of a wish to have different parents, but rather as a way of retaining an idealized fantasy of previous perceptions and an earlier time in their own lives. Freud argues that this phantasy underpins much of the way children imagine their parents, their lives and their real status, and stresses its nostalgia. The ‘Family Romance’ is thus preservation in phantasy of ‘ideal’ parents who do not disappoint, frustrate or cause separation. In phantasy these are split off from the actual parents as the child gains more knowledge of parental failings and vulnerabilities. By splitting the parents into the ideal and the real, the child preserves their special position and enables a coming to terms with the reality. Crucially, it is when phantasy and memory come together that the child can create a narrative – one that is over-determined for it is both a protection against and an acknowledgement of parental failures.

Another common feature of the narratives is that all the children (whatever their gender, class or ethnicity) provided adult-free narratives. Parents, teachers and adults were relegated to the margins and in many of the narratives absent altogether. There was a difference in the way that parents were spoken of – fathers were represented as fun, encouraging and initiators of action even if they were not present in the rest of the narrative itself. Mothers, alas, were relegated to making sandwiches for lunch, dismissed as ineffectual or totally absent. It was their peers that were central to the scenarios and who acted bravely, intelligently and basically sorted situations out. Even when the lack of adults was pointed out, narratives returned quickly to their child-centred action. For example, Rachael, a nine-year-old girl, was telling a story of high danger and peril, when I intervened with much anxiety to ask ‘where are the adults?’ Rachael aware of my fretting responded with a half-hearted, part sentence that included an adult and then proceeded with her own peer-centred narrative.

It remains unknown how feelings of superiority and disappointment and the fantasy of being rescued or rescuing shift and attach themselves to different protagonists in the scenario; but the fact that they do function in this way is crucial for narrative facility. Identifications are never total; they can be ambiguous and can range across male/female, mother/father, hero/heroine, rescuer/rescued, abandoned parent/abandoning parent, or as illustrated in these particular narratives – animals. By means of multiple identifications, unconsciously the child can gain control and mastery over their situation and, in phantasy, different reparations and solutions can take place. If children can imagine that they themselves have carried out the abandonment, the rejection or, indeed, put themselves in their particular material circumstances, at least in phantasy they are in control, and thereby can stave off any present or future vulnerabilities and disappointments.

The children were concerned to speak of scenarios in which they, their peer group or siblings were the central protagonists. For example, all the children interviewed were primarily concerned with relationships with their peers. In the group work the children spoke narratives with their peers clearly as their audience, while in the individual sessions the children spoke stories about their friends and siblings. They spoke about their friendships with warmth and were clearly concerned with ways of sustaining them. Emma spoke about how annoyed she can get with her friends and in an emotional muddle in her interactions with them, ‘I have learnt’, she declared, ‘to move away and take myself out’. Alex, a nine-year-old boy was very caught up in his tight friendship network. Like many of the children interviewed he used popular culture as a way of maintaining friendships and connecting with his friends. The Bond films were his primary narrative resource, and he spoke about the importance of re-telling the plot to his friends so that they could all ‘keep up’ with the Bond films and computer games.

The children frequently started their family maps with their thoughts and feelings about their siblings. Siblings and friends dominated the interviews. These feelings ranged from affection to irritation – the sibling can ‘be so annoying’ was a frequent phrase. Siblings generated energy in their stories. When Sam first drew his younger sister in his family map, she appeared as a large figure dominating the page. When he began to draw his father he was much smaller. Sam commented on this and started again, yet again his father remained the much smaller figure. Sam, who was skilled at drawing, commented that he could not get the perspective right. At another level he was quite accurate about his relation and feelings towards his sister. Much of his talk centred on working through his feelings about her and the amount of space that she could take up.

The children did express profound sibling rivalry in narratives and their feelings that they did not get the same amount of attention, presents and good feelings from their parents. Alongside these feelings of unfairness, they could also be quite competitive and their sibling/s were represented as ordinary, dull and never destined to be anything else. The boys spoke about winning out over older brothers, and the girls were more patronizing in their accounts and spoke about how they knew what to do and how to behave. For example, Jenny spoke about her sister's rudeness, while of course her behaviour was always impeccable. The attention to siblings and peer group relationships in these interviews bears out Juliet Mitchell's account of the importance of horizontal relations (Mitchell, 2000).

For children, horizontal relationships with peers and siblings do not replace vertical relationships with parents and other adults, but rather both intertwine as important aspects of lived experience and identity. The importance of family and peer relationships may be different across ethnicity. When I asked the children to pick their own pseudonym, the ‘English/White’ children picked the name of their best friend; children from backgrounds that are other chose the name of a favourite family member. I do not quite know what to make of this, if anything, and yet I cannot let it go. Mary Chamberlain's research on families who live in Britain and have ‘roots’ in Barbados is pertinent here, as she explores their shifting identifications, cultural transmission and fluid expectations. Chamberlain argues, and this is borne out in my research on children, that ‘[S]ubjectivity and identity, like memory, are never static and are always in a process of creation and transformation’ (Chamberlain, 1998: 50).

Knowledge, Acceptance and Refusal

The children were able to draw upon inner and outer resources in order to come to terms with the world as it is. They brought their capacities as thinking, perceptive and social beings to bear upon their cultural and emotional worlds. They simultaneously fantasized about something other and had solid knowledge about the real conditions of the lives that they inhabited. A contention of this article is that fantasy and the real are inextricably intertwined at both conscious and unconscious levels in the lives of children, producing a spider's web of imagining, perceiving and thinking. In some ways, as Lagache has pointed out previous uses of ‘fantaisie’ should be revived to ‘denote both a creative activity and the products of this activity’ (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1985: 314).

Marina Warner suggests that the verb to wonder ‘communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire and as such it defines very well at least two characteristics of the traditional fairy tale: pleasure in the fantastic, curiosity about the real’ (Warner, 1994: xvi). This marvelling and wanting to know applies equally to children's fantasies. Warner goes on to contend that it is through the unreality of the stories (and, I would add, children's fantasies) that glimpses of other possibilities can occur. As Wallace Stevens states, it helps us to see the actual world if we can visualize a fantastic one (quoted in Warner, 1994: xvi). For Warner it is in exploring what is fantastical and what is real that fairy tales, or fantasies, can teach precisely where the boundaries lie. Warner opens up the potential that ‘dreaming gives pleasure in its own right, but it also represents a practical dimension of the imagination, an aspect of the faculty of thought, and can unlock social and public possibilities’ (Warner, 1994: xvi). Seven-year old Jenny told a narrative about how her mother had immense material wealth and that this enabled her to have many pets – cats, dogs, ponies and numerous horses. Moreover, they lived in a grand house with huge grounds in which they could comfortably keep their animals. After telling this narrative she very quickly spoke about her grandparents who own a shop and struggle to make ends met. She was very knowing about this and clearly concerned and this disquiet lay alongside her fantasy of material wealth. Her fantasy and emotional life was contradictory; for alongside her fantastical narrative of, and possible wish for, material wealth she also knew the limits of her family's riches.

The Family Romance and many children's narratives explore and express issues of identity centring on heritage, self-esteem, class and material realities. The Family Romance is a phantasy of upward class mobility – children believe that untold riches, power and status rightly belong to them. ‘In a previous life – were you a King or were you a Queen?’ runs a card in a newsagent advertising the services of a healer specializing in past lives. Life may be tough, relentless and ordinary in current circumstances but in a previous era it was something else altogether. These class-based fantasies do not focus on being born into a life of drudgery and relentless work but rather on transforming it. This narrative expresses disappointment in, and resentment of, class structures and the resultant lack of power and status.

It is impossible to judge how class and material conditions would have worked themselves into these children's narratives. The children though were acutely conscious of who was well off and who was not. They spoke about this spontaneously when talking about their friendships and expressed a wish to give poorer friends money to help them out with buying something they wanted. Looking forward was a consistent plot technique employed, and when the children expressed ambition it always centred on how they would become rich, famous and adored. Alex was sure that he would become Q when he was older. Q – a character in the Bond films who makes the gadgets that rescue Bond and allow him to perform his amazing feats. Alex, was utterly absorbed in, and identified completely, with Q in order to identify with a serious character and to form his future ambitions.

These rags-to-riches stories, narratives of shifting ordinary achievement to become perfection, are gained from a vast cultural stock and given social validity and credence (through, e.g., Pop Idol, Big Brother, X Factor). The West is saturated with images and social myths that class can and should be overcome. These personal and social phantasies are part of the cultural fabric and are sustained by representations of stars (Posh [!] and Becks), fame and their riches. The work on stars and the audience's relationship to celebrities has thus far concentrated on adults (see e.g., Marshall, 1997; Richard Dyer, 1998; Rose, 2003). ⁵ As far as I know there is an absence of work that theorizes children's relationships to celebrities. The children that I worked with, however, especially the girls spoke about their favourite pop group (e.g., disdaining the Spice Girls while simultaneously speaking about them); their favourite pop singer (frequently female) and TV programmes were woven through their narratives. Boys and girls spoke about watching TV with their families, and one spoke about Friday night as a special evening as his family settled down to relax and watch the television together. Shameless eavesdropping on conversations in the playground illustrated how conversations about what happened and what will happen was a strong theme in the children's conversations with one another. A current absence in my work is the untheorized relationship between representation of celebrities and children's identification to and phantasies of popular icons; in addition it is unclear how these possible identifications are woven through their narratives and understandings of the social world they inhabit.

Phantasy escapes the confines of the social as well as emotional limitations. It edges towards something else altogether and provides possible other ways of being-in-culture (Rose, 1998). Thus importantly, in the work that I have been undertaking there is a gendered difference in the narratives produced. Boys (across class and ethnicity) told stories that were safe and tended towards relaying actual events in detail. The girls and boys approached fantasy and imagination differently and the former were more able to incorporate aggression into their accounts. Their narratives were wild, full of danger and threat. They told stories of benign dolphins transforming into malevolent sharks, bodies pulled apart, suicide and murder. They relished telling these narratives and gained much pleasure from the activity. The girl's stories were full of adventure, crucially they or a peer were at the centre of the narrative – propelling the narrative forward, discovering the way out of peril and thereby becoming the heroic rescuer. Destruction and aggression did not enter the boys’ narratives whatsoever, unless they were telling me about a film. They tended to provide accounts that were very close to actual events and did not elaborate imaginatively; similarly if they spoke about a film they gave blow-by-blow (literally) account of what occurred.

Perhaps this difference has some relation to socially endorsed values of boys’ and girls’ behaviour. For girls, the aggression in a narrative could be seen as an expression of something felt but not allowed expression elsewhere, and this is a longed-for assertion. Brown and Gilligan's longitudinal study documents and explores how young girls become ‘nicer’, more socially compliant as they reach adolescents and more intent on sustaining their relationships whatever the cost to themselves (Brown and Gilligan, 1992). With this latency aged group, the girls were fantastic in their narratives and were intent on imagining something quite other as a way of exploring their personal and social relations.

The school had recently had an outing to Southend and all the girls used this day at the seaside to develop their stories. They transformed an ordinary school outing, and themselves, into something extraordinary, something quite other. In this way, their imaginings enabled them to conceive of themselves as special and different. It is significant that the girls expressed their aggression, and frankly violence, through animals as it is perhaps much too dangerous to edge towards knowledge of confrontation and human beings. This is not to take away from female aggression for as Warner points out monsters and I would add animals ‘have become children's best friends, alter egos, inner selves. While the monster mania of the last few years has obviously been fostered by commercial interests, it has also diagnosed an identification that children themselves willingly and enthusiastically accept’ (Warner, 1998: 15).

It is worth mentioning that three boys declared themselves to be special, as they had been chosen either by God or a teacher. Perhaps in this sense they did not need a narrative of specialness – they had it already. The girls’ narratives were located in wide interior and exterior vistas, their range of emotions extensive and their external landscapes changing rapidly from something recognizable to a space that could be anywhere, anytime. The boys did not express their fantasies in the same way at all; through observing them in the playground however, it seemed as if it were through action rather than words, that they asserted themselves through activity in the playground.

While the girl's stories were wild, this does not mean that they are unruly or that they should be taken to reflect the situation that they want to inhabit. There are a number of interpretations of these narratives. Perhaps through watching TV – especially soap operas and the girls spoke a lot about watching soaps and the latest plots and one girl seamlessly spun two soaps together so that I was at a loss as to what was happening – and observing family processes, the girls know that women can be under threat. These narratives become a means of avoiding threat, and rescuing themselves from the same fate. Or, the narratives might represent the girl's last chance to be wild before they have to enter the confines of more socially acceptable femininity and they are stretching the bounds of possibilities for themselves. The narratives can also be a means for the girls to assert their autonomy. For Nielson and Rudberg (1994), girls know about and experience their lack of autonomy as a loss. They were the central protagonists and the providers of the solutions, and their wild and exciting narratives expressed situations that can never be. Through their phantasy life they could inhabit something else altogether based on a knowledge that these situations could never be. For girls it is clearly preferable to have expressed their wildness, wish to be unruly and rule the world than not at all!

Inhabiting Complexity

Bollas (1993) argues that children move from dilemma to being in a complex typified by the knowledge that life and relations with others can be tough, relentless, joyful, pleasurable – others are essential to who we are and they cause pain and hurt alongside providing love and nurture. The children in these studies knew this profoundly and acted from a knowledge of the complexity of their lives with others. They spoke about their families in contradictory ways – they both wished to remain connected, and they wished to leave. Leaving, however, was not an abandonment but rather the wish for something different alongside the knowledge that this was it. The children either the reluctant and controlling boys or the wild and thoughtful girls, moved between fear and hope. They were beginning to know about, and be conversant of, their own emotional complexity and the thinking and feeling minds of others. Joined up handwriting is a poignant metaphor for the emotional and social lives of these children and these children knew about and wanted relatedness and relationships with others. Their acts of the imagination allowed them to move across time, space and place towards knowledge of the reality of social life. Winnicott (1996) argues that fantasy serves a twofold purpose: it is a way of imagining a different past or present and it is a way of coming to terms with ‘reality’ in all its complexity. The narratives are in short – protests and expressions of hope both of material and emotional possibilities, for “[T]hey lived happily ever after’ consoles us, but gives scant help compared to ‘Listen, this is how it was before, but things could change – and they might” (Warner, 1994: pxvii).