ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors chosen three of Paula Fox’s stories for consideration in detail, and they illustrate the range of her intuitive grasp, and her capacity to find a tone for the younger reader say, aged between six and nine and the young adolescent. The first two stories belong to New York. A Likely Place concerns nine-year-old Lewis’s struggle to find a place in which to be himself. Paula Fox has fictionally constructed here a configuration which is familiar in psychoanalytic work with distressed deprived children: images of despairing parental helplessness or violence are mixed with devotion to idealized omnipotent parental figures who are all the time working for the child’s best interests. The moving quality of the stories, which are often quite simple in themselves, arises from this focus on the child’s fresh grasping of him- or herself, and the extraordinary concomitant flowering of hopefulness, when the inner and outer worlds of experience are in dynamic connection.
