ABSTRACT
In the days before accursed accreditation, I devised a team taught course on the child from a Jungian perspective. Our readings centered on Jung’s (1958) essay “The Psychology of the Child Archetype” and included accounts of the fictional child in myth, fairytale, and literature. My interest was to place the child inside a symbolic framework, seeing the child as an archetype and culturally rather than empirically and realistically. This was in accord with Jung’s (1958) distinction between symbol and fact: “The mythological idea of the child is emphatically not a copy of the empirical child, but a symbol clearly recognized as such; it is a wonder child, a divine child, begotten, born, and brought up in quite extraordinary circumstances, and not—this is the point—a human child” (p. 124n).
