All About Mentoring Spring 2011 - SUNY Empire State College

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Imagination and Art: Children Cope with War
Judith Gerardi, Metropolitan Center and Center for International Programs
Childhood and warfare symbolize
opposing ends of life experience.
We cringe when the two occur
together, as they increasingly do. Bewildered
children make efforts to lead a child’s life as
they are faced with militia attacks, bombs,
deportations, and continuing loss and
change. Powerless adults make efforts to
protect children and to see them as having
a normal future, actively pursuing those
goals in the midst of war, deprivation, and
continued threat and likely death. While
children often weather armed conflict
remarkably well, it is not without worry,
terror, frightening thoughts, and uncertainty
about their future. Who are these children
and how can we understand their experience
and psychological reality How do they
psychologically cope with living in a war
zone Both surviving victims and those who
perished report to us through their diaries,
essays and drawings. This paper addresses
their drawings, a means for self expression
and, often, coping with extreme danger.
In their drawings, children express
themselves nonverbally in ways that often
are more natural for them than are words.
They enter their inner world as they draw
and can usually achieve a level of truth
that reflects their reality. Further, since the
communication does not rely on a particular
language, the child’s voice can speak to
any viewer. While individual and cultural
meanings cannot be interpreted from the
drawing alone, the child’s primary reality
as presented in the drawing is usually clear.
Freed from the limitations of language, we
can read children’s drawings to learn about
a shared experience of events that may be
separated by time and location. War is such
an event.
An important aspect of healthy
psychological development is free
exploration of the actual environment
and the one beyond it, the imagined or
hypothetical environment of fantasy.
Both exploration of day-to-day life and
of the imagined world of fantasy are
compromised during extreme threat,
including war. Danger restricts physical
exploration of the actual environment. It
also can restrict mental exploration of the
imagined environment. Imagination often
fails to contribute to healthy psychological
coping when the individual’s psychological
energy is focused on survival and cannot
offer an emotional release or a means of
creating mental solutions to the chaos of
bombardment, deprivation and loss. Instead,
fantasy becomes restricted, dominated by
efforts to psychologically tolerate extreme
physical and emotional upheaval. In
effect, imagination gets stuck, unable to
satisfactorily aid ego development.
Yet imagination also has the potential to
retain its role in healthy mental exploration,
the focus of this paper. The use of
imagination operates in two interrelated
ways in relation to compensating for
the restricted physical exploration of the
child’s environment that is associated
with life in a war zone. First, it allows self
expression. The child can create a world
that he controls, one in which he can find
emotional release, take on new and different
roles, and express his innermost reactions
and thoughts. Second, for some children,
imagination allows mental exploration that
begins to address psychological coping.
Self Expression
The first way in which imagination provides
an antidote to restrictions of place brings
the child beyond the miserable, limiting,
dangerous world of war so that he can
create the world that he needs. In that
world, he can freely engage in mental
exploration of his observations and
thoughts. The child finds that he can create
and occupy a visual representation of his
psychological reality. Against a background
of group suffering and powerlessness,
imagination provides affirmation in the form
of recognition of the child artist’s individual
being. This first way in which imagination
operates during war, then, is centered on self
expression. It facilitates emotional release
and the preservation of the child’s sense of
individuality.
Mental Exploration
The second way in which imagination
provides an antidote to restrictions of
place, psychological coping through mental
exploration, allows the child to entertain
solutions in fantasy that are not possible
to her in the real world. This possibility is
severely restricted by the physical danger
and emotional tension of war, which
threaten the typical ways that children’s
imaginations serve their psychological
well-being and mental life. However, when
imagination continues to operate more
freely, it can provide an alternative to the
reality of war. The child can continue to
explore possibilities in her imagination
that are unavailable in the danger of a war
zone. I will give examples of drawings that
illustrate these points.
Children’s Psychological Experience
of War: The Drawings
The drawings presented and discussed in this
paper were created by children aged 6 to 14
during four different wars spanning close
to 70 years, from the Spanish Civil War
(1936-1939) to Darfur (2003-2010), thus
representing different time periods, regions
and world cultures. They show disturbing
similarities, including portrayals of
explosions, destroyed structures, mutilated
and dead people, family, dislocation, and
monsters. They show the mayhem of
attempting to escape the assaults. This is
what children see, and it continues. I believe
that you will be struck by the common
experience visually reported by these
children. The drawings selected for this
paper were placed in five groups: transition
suny empire state college • all about mentoring • issue 39 • spring 2011