Maria Osorina read for us Sylvia Anthony’s book The Discovery of Death in Childhood and Later.
“For her doctoral dissertation, Sylvia Anthony chose the terrifying theme of discovering death as a child. In the late 30s, this was a bold move that transcended scientific and cultural taboos. Anthony’s main task was to trace how ideas about the living and the dead are formed in children of different ages. What does the child consider the cause of death and how does he explain the cycle of life? What, in his opinion, are the obligations of the living to the dead, how does the child experience losses, and what does he think about his own mortality?
Her book was first published in 1940 in England. Anthony analyzed a large number of parental records of conversations and games of children from 2 to 12 years old related to the topic of death. In the book, we will also find amazing reasoning of young children, and descriptions of the cruel and usually secret acts of children’s companies, investigating in practice what it is to “kill” (a fly, a worm, a fish, a kitten), what is a “dead man”, how can one “ revive” or how to bury the dead with dignity.
Sylvia Anthony analyzes all this «childish» material, comparing it with «adult» ideas characteristic of different eras and cultures. For example, younger children often say “killed” about the dead, because they believe that the cause of death is the purposeful will of some culprit. Similarly, the so-called primitive peoples do not recognize death due to natural causes, believing that it always comes as a result of the intervention of an evil spirit. And this may seem like just curious information, if it were not for the unexpected discovery that children, it turns out, often consider themselves to be the culprits in the death of loved ones, because they once allowed themselves to think badly about them. Another common belief among children is that in order for someone to be born, the other must die. Therefore, the child expects that the stork will soon bring the deceased grandmother in the form of a little girl, that the person who is buried in the coffin will soon come out of there as a baby.
The strange world of phantasmagoria — the world of children’s ideas about death and life
In general, if you decide to immerse yourself in this book, you will first be transported to the strange, even phantasmagoric world of children’s ideas. Then you will feel the presence in it of a certain logic, which will soon seem not alien to you. And you will end up discovering principles that help you understand a lot about life, even though the book is about death.”