Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Paul Schilder

Critical Essay by Paul Schilder

SOURCE: "Psychoanalytic Remarks on Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll," in Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, Vol. 87, No. 2, February, 1938, pp. 159-68.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a speech in late 1936, psychiatry professor Paul Schilder uses the Alice books to psychoanalyze Charles Dodgson (Carroll), warning that the stories could have a detrimental influence on children.

Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There are classics of stories for children. As far as I know nobody has tried so far to find out what is offered to children by these stories.

One would expect that the men writing for children should have or should have had a rich life and that this richness of experience might transmit something valuable to the child. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (this is the real name of the author) lived a rather narrow and...
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