The Discovery of Death in Childhood and After
- Author:
Sylvia Anthony
Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, ?2.95
This is an enlarged and updated version of a book which, when it was first published in 1940, opened up a new and important field of inquiry. Since that time others have written about the way in which children talk and think about death but none with quite the same breadth of vision or the wide knowledge reflected in this book.
Sylvia Anthony draws her ideas from the full range of JudaeoChristian and Classical literature about death, from the writings of anthropologists and psychoanalysts, from the recent writings of Spitz and Bowlby on the child’s reactions to separation and loss, and from her own study of the ideas about death as expressed by 128 London children. Small wonder that the book sometimes loses in depth what it gains in breadth - no single investigator could be expected to be an authority in all these areas.
To my mind the best section in the book is the chapter on anxiety and stress in which, after a lucid exposition of the nature of anxiety, Mrs. Anthony explores the origins of fears of death and indicates how each child deals with such fears by both avoiding and approaching them. She also suggests that the success or failure of such methods may have influences which persist throughout life; she cites as examples a mathematician whose preoccupation with numbers is thought to have arisen between four and five years of age from his attempts to contain and control death by making predictions concerning the year of his own, his mother’s and his brother’s probable deaths, and a medical research worker whose interest in disease was already apparent at the age of five when she became aware of the relationship between disease and death.
Such conclusions are inevitably speculative and the book contains many assertions and conclusions which can only be regarded as tentative in the present state of ?ur knowledge. It is not always as closely researched as one would wish and contains much that is only peripherally relevant. But it also contains much that is challenging and it is a rich source of “ideas on a subject of importance to adults and children alike.
c- Murray Parkes
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