ABSTRACT
142 Children do not read primarily in order to acquire knowledge. Psychoanalysis theory holds thats the only texts that interest children are those that help them to express their basic emotional conflicts and satisfy their unconscious desires and hopes, thus alleviating their unconscious fears. Through reading, the child achieves a symbolic identification with the characters in the story, who solve their problems in place of the reader and master outer (and inner) dangers. In early childhood, archaic conflicts and desires are satisfied symbolically through fairy tales; sadistic or cannibalistic impulses can be delegated through identification with a dangerous, evil stepmother or dragon, a monster or bad fairy. While role-playing in therapy, for instance, a child may decide to play the evil stepmother who kills Sleeping Beauty with the poisonous apple, and the therapist should play Sleeping Beauty—in this way, the child shows her jealousy and envy of a newborn sibling, whom she would rather have dead than alive. Children thus constantly want the same fairy tales to be read to them: they already know the end of the story and can repeatedly work through their fears without anyone being actually hurt (see Bettelheim, 1976). A major difference in latency is that children can now read themselves, and are not dependent on adults (parents) to read to them.
