Recently, but not for the first time, Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen was banned. This time a Florida school district has drawn shorts on Mickey to cover his cute little toddler naked body. This book about a toddler, is about the anxieties of first separations from a parent, feeling the body as one’s own and the power and wonder of exploring feelings and the world. Telling and reading stories develops the brain by putting language to felt, but as yet unnamed experience. This makes these experiences not just manageable but brings agency and wonder.
In the Night Kitchen, Mickey has a bad dream after hearing “some racket in the night”. He tumbles out of bed and out of his clothes.
It starts as many fairy tales and dreams do, with the child making their way through danger. He falls into the kitchen and the jam jars which have turned into a terrifying city. The very scary looking bakers try to cook him in their cake batter and put him into the oven.
But Mickey defiantly turns things around by sitting up and ruining the cake. He seems to have felt some confusion with his name and the word milk, until he emphatically states, “I’M NOT THE MILK AND THE MILK’S NOT ME! I’M MICKEY!”
Sendak is telling the story of how scary and wonderful it is to make our way into the world, and as a toddler, the world is often the other side of the room. This is a story of these early attempts but the feelings are not mastered once and for all. We need to tell stories and practice over and over and over again.
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott wrote that if things go well enough, the infant first imagines their omnipotence and does not feel separate from the parent or the “world”. When hungry the milk magically appears, conjured by need and desire. However, development means dealing with the frustrations that the parent (milk) does not always come soon enough and the world will at times continue to frustrate their wishes as well.
After emphatically naming himself to the bakers, Mickey goes on a fabulous adventure. He is now off to get milk and flies in a plane of his own making from bread dough. From the top of a milk bottle he dives into the dough and his clothes dissolve as he dives deep into the milk as he begins to swim. He has succeeded in getting the milk he needs for the batter through this his initiative. He is so proud of himself that he shouts “Cock a Doodle Doo!” and falls safely back to bed.
Mickey uses the resources from the parent (milk) and makes something of his own. This is not an either/or image of staying or going, completely separate or together. Rather something new is made. Dreams and the imagination have no limits, but are jumping off places for the conscious mind. With Mickey there is also the palpable physicality of power in his body that we so often lose as we grow, or it becomes limited to organized activities and is no longer as spontaneous.
In a dream and the imagination, why not make a plane and fly, jump off milk bottle towers and go deep diving for resources. It can be very useful when we wake up and put our clothes back on.
—Featured image: Self made collage