Ellen Handler Spitz | |
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Born | Ellen Handler Spitz New York City, US |
Occupation | author, lecturer, professor |
Subject | children, psychology and the arts |
Website | |
ellenhandlerspitz |
Ellen Handler Spitz is an American writer and academic noted for her expertise on children, [1] psychology, and the arts. She is an internationally acclaimed author and lecturer on children's cultural lives [2] and on children's literature. [3] [4] She is known for her numerous articles in The New Republic [5] examining how the arts and culture interweave and continuously transform daily life from explorations of Maurice Sendak and sexuality to the role of children's books in India. [6] She is an internationally noted authority on psychoanalysis and the arts. [7]
Spitz was born in New York City. She was educated at the Pax Hill School, Surrey, England, University of Chicago and Barnard College and took her master's degree and doctoral degrees at Harvard and Columbia Universities respectively, where she studied fine arts and aesthetics. She also studied four years in the 1980s as a special research candidate at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. [8]
Spitz served a brief stint as a reporter at Newsweek magazine, taught art history and studio art to children and adolescents in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York, where she was elected to membership in the Mamaroneck Artists Guild and exhibited woodcuts and drawings; she also performed with the Potpourri Dancers, a modern dance company based in Croton-on-Hudson.
Spitz was married on April 29, 2018, to R. Howard Bloch, Sterling Professor of French at Yale University. She divides her time between Manhattan and New Rochelle, NY. She is the mother of Jennifer Beulah Lew, Nathaniel Geoffrey Lew, and Rivi Handler-Spitz.[ citation needed ]
Spitz' academic work often concerns current events as well as books and subjects that appear in popular culture. For instance, following the death of famed children's author Maurice Sendak, National Public Radio interviewed Spitz [9] for her insights on his life and enduring influence. Another example is her 2011 interview about The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaption on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's The Book Show . [10]
Ellen Handler Spitz, as of April, 2020, has received the title of Professor Emerita in the Humanities from the University of Maryland (UMBC). Ongoing since 2019, she is a Senior Lecturer in the Directed Studies Program at Yale University. [11] In addition, Spitz has taught in programs for gifted youth and in university settings that include Barnard College, New York University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Drawing on her early experience as an artist, Ellen Handler Spitz then went on to establish her writing career by exploring the arts psychologically and by examining their relationship to childhood. Her work ranges topically from painting and sculpture to observations on ancient Greek drama and children's literature, but it always concerns the triumvirate of art, psychology, and childhood.
Spitz's closely argued book, Art and Psyche, explores the relations between art and mind by using psychoanalytic thought. It uniquely demonstrates how three major models follow the history of ideas --- in art and literary criticism, in philosophical aesthetics, and in the development of psychoanalytic theory. Spitz's models are: the relations between an artist's life and work, the work of art itself, and the relations between a work of art and its audience or beholders. To illustrate her theoretical discussion, Spitz draws on a wide variety of art forms, including painting, sculpture, literature, music, and dance. Art and Psyche is read on college campuses both in the US and abroad and has been translated into Italian, Chinese, and Serbian. [12]
Image and Insight examines the strenuous paradox of looking within and outward at the same time. Spitz's metaphor for this project is Teiresias, the blind seer of ancient Greece, and she works psychologically with a wide swath of subjects including 1970s NYC subway car graffiti, a 1987 exhibition of African sculpture, a composition of postmodern music, and paintings by a schizophrenic child, among others.
Museums of the Mind begins with a psychologically inflected, thematic study of selected paintings by the distinguished Belgian Surrealist René Magritte, in which Spitz traces the effects of the artist's mother's suicide by drowning when he was a boy. Noted art critic Donald Kuspit writes "This section on Magritte is perhaps the definitive analysis of his art." [13] Spitz's work on Magritte is the only extant book-length study of the artist from a psychoanalytic perspective, and it was reissued in 2014 as an eBook under the title Magritte's Labyrinth. [14]
Inside Picture Books poses the question as to why stories and images shown to us as children linger in our minds. How is it that some children's books survive while others fade? Using her psychological acumen, Spitz reveals how classic children's books transmit wisdom, shape tastes, implant subtle biases, and stimulate moral reflection. She advocates for conversational reading between adults and children and addresses powerful topics such as curiosity, identity and self-acceptance, separation and loss, as well as disobedience. Inside Picture Books exemplifies Dr. Spitz’ interdisciplinary academic approach, which can pose challenges to conventional researchers. For instance, in Children's Literature (journal), Philip Nel evaluates the book from the perspective of a narrowly-focused historian of children's literature. [15] On the other hand, Inside Picture Books has been acclaimed as a classic among scholars of its intended genre of interpretive psychology, being praised by such innovative and widely acclaimed notables as Quentin Blake, Marina Warner, Judith Wallerstein, Pat Schroeder, Maria Tatar, and Pamela Paul.
In The Brightening Glance, Spitz asks how the imagination emerges and develops in young children. She shows how a child's gaze magnifies the sensory and perceptual world and how children make no hard distinctions between art and nature, reality and make-believe. Aesthetic and psychological growth intersect, she reveals, and she shows how, by observing what holds a child's attention, we can promote growth and also rediscover our own worlds through freshly reawakened eyes.
Psychoanalysis is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques that deal in part with the unconscious mind, and which together form a method of treatment for mental disorders. The discipline was established in the early 1890s by Sigmund Freud, whose work stemmed partly from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others. Freud developed and refined the theory and practice of psychoanalysis until his death in 1939. In an encyclopedic article, he identified the cornerstones of psychoanalysis as "the assumption that there are unconscious mental processes, the recognition of the theory of repression and resistance, the appreciation of the importance of sexuality and of the Oedipus complex." Freud's colleagues Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav Jung developed offshoots of psychoanalysis which they called individual psychology (Adler) and analytical psychology (Jung), although Freud himself wrote a number of criticisms of them and emphatically denied that they were forms of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis was later developed in different directions by neo-Freudian thinkers, such as Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
René François Ghislain Magritte was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
Sigmund Freud was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.
Psychoanalytic literary criticism is literary criticism or literary theory that, in method, concept, or form, is influenced by the tradition of psychoanalysis begun by Sigmund Freud.
Transactional analysis is a psychoanalytic theory and method of therapy wherein social interactions are analyzed to determine the ego state of the communicator as a basis for understanding behavior. In transactional analysis, the communicator is taught to alter the ego state as a way to solve emotional problems. The method deviates from Freudian psychoanalysis, which focuses on increasing awareness of the contents of subconsciously held ideas. Eric Berne developed the concept and paradigm of transactional analysis in the late 1950s.
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development relating to the practice of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the psyche, and on treatment using free association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics. Starting with his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, his theories began to gain prominence.
Melanie Klein was an Austrian-British author and psychoanalyst known for her work in child analysis. She was the primary figure in the development of object relations theory. Klein suggested that pre-verbal existential anxiety in infancy catalyzed the formation of the unconscious, which resulted in the unconscious splitting of the world into good and bad idealizations. In her theory, how the child resolves that split depends on the constitution of the child and the character of nurturing the child experiences. The quality of resolution can inform the presence, absence, and/or type of distresses a person experiences later in life.
Maurice Bernard Sendak was an American author and illustrator of children's books. He became most widely known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, first published in 1963. Born to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood was affected by the death of many of his family members during the Holocaust. Sendak also wrote works such as In the Night Kitchen, Outside Over There, and illustrated many works by other authors including the Little Bear books by Else Holmelund Minarik.
Ruth Ida Krauss was an American writer of children's books, including The Carrot Seed, and of theatrical poems for adult readers. Many of her books are still in print.
Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children's picture book written and illustrated by American writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak, originally published in hardcover by Harper & Row. The book has been adapted into other media several times, including an animated short film in 1973 ; a 1980 opera; and a live-action 2009 feature-film adaptation. The book had sold over 19 million copies worldwide as of 2009, with 10 million of those being in the United States.
Nancy Julia Chodorow is an American sociologist and professor. She began her career as a professor of Women's studies at Wellesley College in 1973, and from 1974 on taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, until 1986. She then was a professor in the departments of sociology and clinical psychology at the University of California, Berkeley until she resigned in 1986, after which she taught psychiatry at Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance. Chodorow is often described as a leader in feminist thought, especially in the realms of psychoanalysis and psychology.
Margaret Schönberger Mahler was an Austrian-American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and pediatrician. She did pioneering work in the field of infant and young child research. On the basis of empirical studies, she developed a development model that became particularly influential in psychoanalysis and Object relations theory. Mahler developed the separation–individuation theory of child development.
René Árpád Spitz was an Austrian-American psychoanalyst. He is best known for his analysis of hospitalized infants in which he found links between marasmus and death with unmothered infants. Spitz also made significant contributions to the school of ego psychology.
In the Night Kitchen is a children's picture book written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, first published in hardcover in 1970 by Harper and Row. The book depicts a young boy's dream journey through a surreal baker's kitchen where he assists in the creation of a cake to be ready by the morning. In the Night Kitchen has been described by Sendak as part of a trilogy of books based on psychological development from In the Night Kitchen (toddler) to Where the Wild Things Are (pre-school) to Outside Over There (pre-adolescent). It was a Caldecott Honor recipient in 1971. It was adapted into a five-minute animated short film on January 1, 1987, directed by Gene Deitch and released by Weston Woods. The book drew controversy in the US due to depictions of nudity.
Marie Hall Ets was an American writer and illustrator who is best known for children's picture books.
Beatrice Schenk de Regniers was an American writer of children's picture books.
Ursula Nordstrom was publisher and editor-in-chief of juvenile books at Harper & Row from 1940 to 1973. She is credited with presiding over a transformation in children's literature in which morality tales written for adult approval gave way to works that instead appealed to children's imaginations and emotions.
In psychoanalytic theory, the term psychic apparatus refers to the mental structures and mechanisms of the psyche. In Freud's 'topographical' model of the psyche, it refers to three systems – the Unconscious, the Pre-conscious, and the Conscious. In his later 'structural model', Freud described the psychic apparatus in terms of the id, ego and super-ego.
Karen Horney was a German psychoanalyst who practiced in the United States during her later career. Her theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was particularly true of her theories of sexuality and of the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis. She is credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy. She disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women, and like Adler, she traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology.
Outside Over There is a picture book for children written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It concerns a young girl named Ida, who must rescue her baby sister after the child has been stolen by goblins. Outside Over There has been described by Sendak as part of a type of trilogy based on psychological development from In the Night Kitchen (toddler) to Where the Wild Things Are (pre-school) to Outside Over There (pre-adolescent).