Childhood Noir: Pedagogical and Psychoanalytic Alternations in Children’s Fairy Tale

Abstract

The presence of dual and ambivalent characters (good/ bad) has always constituted the aesthetic and educational content in children’s fairy tales. Since the Nineteenth century, fairy tales and children’s books have had as an essential reference increasingly complex images and illustrations with vivid colors. This, together with the narration, has allowed the flourishing of a genre of fairy tale noir, whose explicitly pedagogical content is grafted into the plots not always “to happy ending” of fairy tales. The book by Heinrich Hoffmann, Struwwelpeter, and that by Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, Der Sandmann, which are at the heart of this essay, constituted a first, important example of this new kind of narrative. They have revealed, from a pedagogical-psychoanalytic perspective, the value of what Freud in a 1919 paper, Das Unheimliche, analyzed as a necessary manifestation of presence/absence (conscious and unconscious) in the phases of human growth.

Keywords

• noir
• pictures
• struwwelpeter
• sandmann
• unheimliche