The construction of a boundary between fantasy and reality underlies the child's transformation of symbolic play into narrative. It further suggests the developmental and constiuctive nature of fantasy in general

When It's Only Make-Believe: The Construction of a Boundary Between Fantasy and Reality in Storytelling W. George Scarlett Dennie Wolf

We have grown accustomed to thinking of fantasy as the stuff of wishes and dreams. Fantasy, whether it is dreaming or playing, is thought of as the oppo- site of reality-a realm in which the dreamer or player drops any obligation to plans, logic, or communication. To be sure, certain forms of fantasy, like dreams or make-believe, are less organized and socially tuned than logic or argument. However, other forms of fantasy, like stories, may be quite differ- ent. Here we will examine the development of storytelling as a way of demon- strating how at least this particular form of fantasy is an organized construc- tion. In particular, we will look at the gradual appearance of a boundary

The observations reported here derive from the work of a number of people who conduct research in early symbolic development at Harvard Project Zero, in par- ticular, Hope Kelly, Patricia McKernon, Jennifer Shotwell, Shelley Rubin, Genie Ware, and Howard Gardner. The storytellers and their families .also deserve many thanks. This research was supported by grants from the Spencer Foundation and the National Institute of Elducation (G-78-0031).

New Directions for Child Derr,dopmmt, 6, 1979 29

between what is taken to be real and what is regarded as pretense as evidence for the thoughtfulness and sociability that may be essential, rather than for- eign, to developed fantasy.

From the chapter in this volume by Rubin and Wolf, it is clear that, in play, children develop a capacity for pretense, becoming increasingly able to act out scenes and adopt roles other than those that are pragmatically dictated or literally appropriate. However, while a kind of elementary make-believe is a possibility at three, other, more articulate forms of pretense- in particular the deliberate construction of narrative worlds - is yet uncertain and vulner- able:

Child (C) (2: 11) sits on the floor while an examiner acts out a story for her using small toys. The examiner sets out a king and a princess as well as several blocks to stand for their castle. C watches with interest, handling the props and asking questions, until the examiner takes out a toy alligator and announces that this is “the mean old dragon.” At this, C backs off immediately, finding her mother’s lap. Turning to her mother she asks, “Can he bite me?” With reassurances from her mother, C consents to watch the story being acted out. When the dragon threatens the princess, C jumps off her mother’s lap, grabs the dragon, and throws him away. “I don’t want him. You take him back,” she says to the examiner.

Rather than being perceived as two distinct planes or fields, the events of the story and of everyday pragmatic experience shade or even intrude into one another. First the story events break into pragmatic reality; the dragon is not seen as a fictional character but as an actual danger. Second, what belongs within the story- the solution to the threat of the dragon-is yanked out of the narrative and solved in actual terms. The dragon is not killed or captured by one of the story characters; he is thrown back to the observer to be returned to a very literal home - an office shelf. Paradoxically, the child neither pulls back from the story nor fully enters into it. This suggests that, without the means to distinguish the world of the story from everyday or pragmatic events, it is hard for children to regard what they see as just a story. At the same time, it is equally diflicult to grant autonomy to story events, to resolve problems posed within the story (such as rescuing a princess from a dragon) using only story elements (motivations, character interactions, consequences, and so on). It is, in other words, still not possible to reach narrative ends using narrative means.

Telling stories using props also draws on a social dimension of the rec- ognition of a boundary between reality and fantasy. Consider a child who turns a small figure face to face with another figure while responding to the request to complete a story begun by the examiner. Without some clue from the teller, the audience cannot determine whether the movement of the prop is or is not intended symbolically. The action might be no more than the result of the child‘s attempt to securely position the figure on an uneven rug. If this is

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the case, the child’s action is pragmatic rather than symbolic, although the action could be intended symbolically to represent a character turning to face another. If the action is nonsymbolic, it occurs outside the story frame, but if the event is intended to fall within the narrative frame, the viewer must inter- pret the event symbolically. Learning how to provide messages about how actions are to be taken-as events within or outside of the narrative field-is the social face of acknowledging the boundary between the two realms. Dur- ing the first three years there is an absence of understanding of the process of marking events in this way. The child is unable to interpret and act on, much less produce, such markings when they are offered by others:

C (2: 10) is watching an adult play out a brief story for her. The story concerns a little girl who helps out an elephant. The big, fat elephant is trying to make it up a hill with no success. T o act this out, the adult pushes the elephant figure part way up an arch block that is standing for the hill, mlaking loud effort sound effects and struggling gestures all the while.

”Uh, uh, uh, I can’t get up there, it’s just too hard,” says the adult, speaking for the elephant.

”Yes, he can,” replies C , who then simply pushes the elephant prop from one side of the arch to the other with only the slightest effort.

The adult, taking back the elephant figure, says, “Let’s pretend that it was veiy high, and he couldn’t do it.” With this, the adult repeats the struggle and failure by the elephant.

C becomes confused and angry. She grabs back the elephant and very steadily and clearly moves it up the hill and over to the far side, looking back and forth between the prop and the adult all the while. “He can go up,” she announces with firmness.

The child in this example is confused and somewhat angered when her adult partner insists ithat what is clearly possible (the actual pushing of the ele- phant from one side to the other of the block) is not possible. This appears to her as a refusal to acknowledge the self-evident rules of the natural world. She has failed to read the messages from her partner that the individual props and gestures are to be construed symbolically- that for the moment, the elephant toy really is a fat, clumsy creature, the block is a steep mountain, and the action is the elephant’s (not the user’s) struggle to cross the mountain. Nor does she “pick up” a second implicit message: “For the purposes of this story, let’s pretend the elephant could not manage to climb the mountain.” She con- tinues to misread her partner’s actions, taking them literally rather than as narrative actions, in spite of the more explicit message in which the adult says, “Let’s pretend that we are doing one thing or another.”

Yet, pretense is typical of three-year-olds. At this age, children engage extensively in symbolic play. They pretend to drink from empty cups, munch on blocks as if they were cookies, act the role of parent to doll-children, and transform living rooms into highways or supermarket aisles. With equal ease,

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three-year-olds can treat small toys as animate agents, that is, as small charac- ters who can drink, eat, drive. Clearly, then, it is not that young children can- not pretend or even that their pretense is tightly restricted to enactive or dra- matic play. The unfinished nature of their grasp on pretense requires more careful articulation.

The lag between the three-year-old‘s ability to pretend in symbolic play and in narrative may be explained by two fundamental differences between the fictions of symbolic play and stories. First, as a form of pretense, sym- bolic play is quite fluid: Children move in and out of the stream of enacted events. At one moment, the child handles the props like a stage manager, moving the props from without; a moment later the child is within the events acting like a character. In stories such shifting of roles is prohibited due to the fixed role of the narrator, who must tell rather than participate in stories. The fluid nature of symbolic play is also evident in its lack of strictures about how episodes connect and how problems are to be solved. In stories, how- ever, each action must follow from the previous narrative events rather than from the impulses of the storyteller. Whereas in symbolic play anything that moves the drama is acceptable, in stories solutions must derive from the narra- tive matt5al itself. The world of stories must appear autonomous and self- sufficient.

Symbolic play also differs from stories by being unmarked. In symbolic play, one is not required to explain how make-believe events are to be con- strued; nor must a temporary exit from the symbolic sphere be marked. For example, the child may symbolically treat a block as a person driving a truck, then become absorbed in the pragmatic problem of fitting the block behind the steering wheel, and then resume moving the truck-all without narration of what is going on in the event and without explicit acknowledgement of the shifts between pragmatic and symbolic action. In storytelling, however, the teller must structure how his audience is to construe what is happening within the story (for example, “The driver is delivering food to a supermarket”) and mark shifts between planes of action (“This figure doesn’t fit; oh well, let’s pre- tend it does; now the driver is late,” and so on).

What follows is a discussion of the transition from the pretense of sym- bolic play to that of storytelling occurring between the ages of three and five. During this time the boundary between pretense and pragmatic action becomes sharp and prominent. It is not that there was no such border earlier; no two- year-old actually tries to bite off a piece of a pretend cookie. Rather, between three and five, consciousness of the boundary develops, making possible a new and precise understanding of pretense which permits both the internal organi- zation and social sharing of make-believe. The present discussion is focussed on these two aspects of development within fantasy. The first is exemplified in children’s growing ability to resolve story problems using narrative rather than pragmatic means. The second finds expression in children’s increasing capa- city, through the use of story language, to signal the transition from one way of construing action to another.

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The observations on which this discussion is based come from two sources- a longitudiinal study of symbolic development in which both sym- bolic play and storytelling have been intensively observed (Shotwell, Wolf, and Gardner, forthcoming) and a cross-sectional study of early symbolic behavior in which the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality has been examined (Ware, Scarlett, and Kelly, 1979).

The Resolution of Story Problems Within the Bounds of Narrative

In both the longitudinal and cross-sectional studies, children were pre- sented with a set of story tasks aimed at highlighting the distinctiveness and self-sufficiency of pretense action. In these tasks the opening events of a simple story were enacted bly an examiner using small toys as characters, moving and speaking for the props to simulate the actions and dialogue of the story. Chil- dren were asked to finish the stories using the props. Two of the story tasks will serve to illustrate how children develop an ability to resolve problems posed with stories.

In one task, a figure acting the part of an aggressor (a toy lion or dragon) roared at and began to chase a figure in the role of the victim (a child prop). In a second task, the child heard a story about a purple elephant who is teased by other jungle animals for his strange appearance. These tasks were used to assess the child’s ability not only to remain on the pretend side of the boundary between fact and fiction but also to construct a narrative solution to the problem posed, maintaining the illusion of an autonomous story world. In what follows, three phases in the emergence of the ability to resolve story prob- lems within the given narrative framework are described.

Stories with Permeable Boundaries. The initial observation reported earlier in this chapter reveals the virtual absence of a boundary around story events for three-year-olds. During the next half year, a fundamental change takes place: At 3:6, C is watching the story of the lion threatening the child. When given her turn to finish the story, C takes up the child figure and, speak- ing through it, says to the lion, uYou get out, you bad lion.” C then says, ‘‘We have to put him in a cage-so that he doesn’t bother us. Get in there, bad lion.” She tosses the lion figure under a nearby chair.

The change concerns a basic ability to translate literal actions into story terms. The locus of motivation and action has shifted from the child herself to the child prop, whilch is made to appear as the animate source of the story’s momentum. Until now there has not been an effective border protecting story events from immediate experience, but in the above example the child sustains this symbolic substitution in spite of strong feelings of excitement and fear. The ability to use the prop as a surrogate agent is, however, only one indica- tion of this process of translation. The action of getting rid of the lion is trans- lated into the story event of putting him in a cage. In this solution both the action and its spatial location are portrayed in terms that derive from the nar-

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rative itself. First, hiding the lion is justified in terms of what has happened so far in the story-“so that he doesn’t bother US.” Next, the lion is not simply hid- den but put in a cage, which suggests the type of capture appropriate to lions. Finally, the coexistence of two different imaginary terrains within the same story reveals the way in which story worlds become internally diversified dur- ing this period. Story worlds which contain both villains and victims, cages and free zones contain enough raw materials to provide at least a few narrative solutions to narrative problems.

However, there is some evidence that pragmatic activity and storytell- ing are still fused. Even though the child’s earlier direct expressions of fear have been encoded in story terms, she still speaks of the lion “not bothering US,” thus treating the child prop and herself as two parallel characters within the story frame. Although she is clearly the translator responsible for dubbing a chair a cage, it appears that the boundary around narrative is still permeable at this age.

In stories where psychological rather than simple physical solutions are called for, the story world’s lack of autonomy reappears: At 3:7, C is shown the story of the purple elephant. Even before she is asked to finish the narrative, she jumps into the play. She lies flat on her stomach, eye to eye with the ele- phant, and says, “I will be your friend, don’t be sad.” C then picks up the pur- ple elephant and hugs him saying, “NOW you have a friend.”

What appears here to be difficult for the child is to get the story to resolve itself. The narrative givens- the character of the elephant, the likely actions of the other jungle animals, the jungle setting-must come to replace the child’s own direct intervention into the story.

Stories Within Boundaries. C, at 4:2, is presented with the story of the dragon who threatens the child prop. Given a chance to finish the story, the child takes over the dragon, looking down its mouth, and says, “Let’s pre- tend he had very big teeth, and he roared loud to her [making the dragon rush toward the child prop]. And she runned away because she was very scared, and she cried and yelled, and then she went up into a tree [she makes the child prop shinny up the table leg]. And he was very hungry and mad, so he came after her, and he tried to get up, but he eated so many people that he was very fat, and he couldn’t get up” [she makes the dragon try several times to make it up the table leg, always falling back to the floor with a groan]. One of the major elements distinguishing this story from the earlier examples is the appearance of a new vocabulary of narrative likelihoods. Here, the storyteller elaborates on the clues in the story opening told by the observer-clues that the dragon is the aggressor, the child the victim. She describes the dragon as having sharp teeth and roaring and the child as frightened, adding the features that will mark these two specific figures with the traits of prototypical villains and victims. In a similar way, rather than simply repeating the chase as do younger children, this child knows what goes with chases and how these ele- ments can be ordered to form likely narrative sequences (that is, threats- chases-escapes), or “scripts.” Taken together, prototypes, or stock charac- ters, and scripts give the narrative world a new self-sufficiency. Perhaps

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because the texture of the story world has become relatively dense, the child no longer need resort to her own abilities but can now rely on the likely actions of the characters and the likely sequence of actions to tell the story.

In a reversal of the earlier refusal to bend what is literally true for the sake of the story, here the child construes the very same physical event in two quite distinct ways based on the requirements of the story at two different points. First, she makes the child shinny up the tree (table leg), then, to fash- ion a story resolution minutes later, she denies the dragon that same capacity. Whereas once the characters were little more than exponents of the child’s reactions, she is now acting in the capacity of a stage manager: She success- fully brings on special effects which make it possible to resolve the story within narrative bounds. The boundaries around narrative events are currently so firm that there is a kind of commitment to maintaining them, even when that maintenance requii-es and enforces a reconstruction of how things really are.

But there still remain some serious, if subtle, limits on the autonomy of narrative. Again, these limits reveal themselves most clearly in children’s han- dling of stories with psychological themes, such as the story of the purple ele- phant.

At 4:6, in completing the story of the purple elephant, C makes the elephant cry and wander away saying, “Nobody likes me, oohhhhh.” The other animal figures are made to taunt him. “You are so stupid. Who ever heard of a purple elephant?” The elephant figure is walked to a new spot on the floor; the child speaks to the observer: “Pretend this was a big lake and that he had just got purple paint on him, and he washed it off.” The child makes the elephant hop into the lake, where she scrubs at him then walks him over to the group of teasing animals. “Hey, look at me, now I look good so you don’t tease me.” She makes the tiger figure come over and walk around the elephant. “You are just like the other elephants, we don’t tease you anymore.”

It is hard to imagine an instance where the reconstruction of reality in line with story demands could be more pronounced. The still-purple elephant prop is now to be viewed as gray; the child insists on the story’s view of the elephant as now gray in place of the actual view of the elephant as still purple. How- ever, although the (child makes the props enact the drama, almost religiously keeping hold of a strictly defined narrator and stage manager role, the resolu- tion reflects what the child would do to resolve the problem posed. Thus, to some extent still, the story is being resolved externally. What remains to be constructed is the ililusion of the autonomy of the story world.

The Autonomy of Story Worlds.

At 5:2, C finishes the story of the purple elephant by making the ele- phant march over to the other animal figures, taunting back, (LYou are silly too. Look at that silly tiger with all that black stripes. And you, hippopotamus, are as fat as a house. And the giraffe looks like he has

six necks. You guys are silly, too.” She then orchestrates a sort of name-calling back and forth between the two sides. Then she moves the tiger forward to the elephant: “You are right; the elephant is right- everybody is a little bit silly. I think that it is mean to tease him. I am going to be his friend.” She moves other animals forward one by one making each say, “Me too.” And she ends the story with the elephant giving each animal a ride on his back.

In contrast to the previous example, where the solution is borrowed from the child’s repertoire and imposed on the characters, the storyteller here works through the possibilities already within the story - the number of differ- ent animals in the scene, the capacities of individual characters to change their role within the situation, the possibility that the problem of taunting might also contain the seeds of story resolution, The resolution of the story results from a recombination of existing elements rather than the imposition of addi- tional information or capacities from without. This capacity underlies the suc- cessful illusion concerning the self-sufficiency of the story realm. Once this illusion becomes a possibility, the story world becomes distinct from everyday reality, and story resolutions need not depend on action outside the narrative.

The Construction of a Story Boundary in the Emergence of Story Language

The development of an ability to resolve story problems within the framework provided by narrative information demonstrates how the construc- tion of a story boundary permits an internal organization and autonomy within story worlds. The resolving of story problems within a story boundary is not by itself sufficient to transform symbolic play into true stories, however. What is needed is a way of freeing the meaning of stories from the concrete manipulations of props, so that stories have a life distinct from the world of concrete objects and actions. Language supplies the means to accomplish this task. The meaning of the symbolic play of children younger than three is car- ried mostly by their actions By the end of the preschool years, the meaning of stories is conveyed by what children say about what is happening in stories (narrative), by what they say when speaking for story characters (dramatic speech), and by what children say to structure how an audience is to construe their stories (metanarrative). The transition from action-based to language- based storytelling rests on developments in the ability to construct and main- tain a story boundary.

There are at least three ways in which the emergence of story language reveals the child’s increasing control over the story boundary. First, story lan- guage begins to free the story from its dependence on concrete props and ges- tures. As previously indicated, the three-year-old can construct and maintain a world of make-believe only if it has ties to the world of tangible objects and the child‘s own actions. Without the constant reminder and support of a real world, young children find it impossible to construct an imaginary one. The emergence of story language when constructing stories with props reveals the

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incipient ability to maintain a story boundary in the absence of concrete ties to the everyday world.

Second, story language makes it possible to include new elements within the story, ones that would be impossible to convey through action alone, such as the thoughts of a character. The flexibility of language as com- pared to action offers the potential for creating much fuller stories, thereby stretching the story boundary.

And finally, because it functions in part as a means of directing the audi- ence to understand what is happening in the story, story language reveals an evolving social aspect of the ability to construct and maintain a story boundary. Concern for how an audience will construe a story places a special kind of strain on the ability to maintain the story boundary. Audiences are clearly outside the story. To address oneself to an audience while constructing a story means having to cross the boundary from fantasy to reality and to recross it when resuming the story, focusing thus both within the boundary and outside of it.

What fOll0w:j is a description of how story language develops during the latter preschool years as a function of the increasing ability to construct and maintain a story boundary.

Story Language Accompanying Action. The first appearance of lan- guage or speech in story events occurs in the form of synpraxic utterances- that is, speech which is fused with the action depicted (see Luria and Yudo- vich, 1972): C (2:lO) is enacting a story (begun by the examiner) about a dragon attacking a castle. The king and queen props are standing on top of the castle’s turret. Off to one side are toy trees representing a forest and character props representing the prince and his animal friends. C picks up the dragon prop and makes a hissing sound while having the dragon’s mouth touch the king’s crown. He has the dragon touch the queen and continues on to the forest, where he repeats the action of having the dragon touch, while hissing, first the prince and then the forest animals. C ends the story by having the dragon knock over the character props plus the trees and castle, all the while saying, “Bonk!”

The meaning of this story is carried almost entirely by what the child does with the props. The hissing sounds and bonks serve only to embellish what is being enacted: At least one of these synpraxic utterances is fused with action by sharing the same expressive qualities as its accompanying action; the sound of “bonk” is sharp, and it accompanies the dragon’s sharp action of hit- ting the story props.

Language begins to emerge as an important aspect of the story presen- tation when children use it to articulate the basic structure of what is being enacted, specifying the agent and the action: C (3:3) is enacting a story sequence with a lion prop, a man prop, and a replica of a house. While posi- tioning the man outside the house and facing him toward one of its windows, C says, “Him looks in window.” Next, while placing the lion in the house, he says, “This one’s in.” Finally, while putting the lion on its side, C says, “Him lay down.”

A slightly more advanced use of language in storytelling occurs when narration refers to past enactments or forecasts future events: C (3:8) takes the

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dragon in the fairy-tale story and says, “He’s gonna killed them.” C then has the dragon fly quickly up to the king and queen and knock them off the turret. He then says, “And the dragon killed them.” C then has the dragon knock over the other character props.

Here, narration still conveys little more than what is enacted. How- ever, the time split gives to the story a certain autonomy from the action.

Story Language Going Beyond Action. The freeing of story language from concrete action becomes evident when children’s language conveys essential information not conveyed by what is enacted. This freedom to expand through narrative is perhaps most critical for conveying the character‘s feelings and motives: For the fairy-tale story, C (3:ll) first moves the dragon toward the king and queen. C says, “He huffed and puffed, and he blew, then the king and queen runned [C moves the king and queen to the forest]. Then, he [the dragon] goes to the forest [C moves the dragon to the forest] and scares the prince so he [the prince] goes back home [C moves the prince to the castle].” Without the narrative, there would be no way of explicating the feel- ings of the royal family and their motives for moving between castle and forest.

In addition, when children begin to speak for character props and not just about them, their story language invariably conveys more than is con- tained in action: In continuing the story of the purple elephant, C (4:OO) has the purple elephant walk up to and stand outside the toy house containing a girl prop. Without moving the props, C says, “And he (the purple elephant) says there’s no one there. And he says, ‘Knock, knock, knock! Who’s there? ” Then C says for the girl prop, “No one.” “No one who? (speaking for the ele- phant).” ”There’s not a little girl who lives here (speaking for the girl).”

Here, the child’s narrative and especially her dramatic speech carry almost all the meaning of what is happening in the story event. Without any perceivable change in the props, the story moves forward, from the time when girl and elephant are not yet in contact through a period when the two estab- lish contact and interact by talking.

The Emergence of Metanarrative. As previously indicated, the emergence of story language in storytelling signals the storyteller’s awareness of how an audience should construe the story events. At first this concern is only implicit in the way narrative makes clear what may be unclear in action. The social function in story language becomes more evident when children interrupt the flow of the story to name or rename some object. For example, in a story about a mouse and some cheese, instead of simply going ahead and using a block to represent cheese, one older preschooler first pointed to the block and said, “This is cheese.” This statement can be taken as a signal to an audience as to how the object used in the story should be construed. Further- more, the statement is metanarrative because it makes reference to the narra- tive rather than being narrative.

The presence of metanarrative in children’s storytelling is most clear when accompanied by signalling terms such as “Let’s pretend . . . ” Such terms make explicit the storyteller’s concern with how an audience will con-

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strue her stories. It is probably because metanarrative places a particular strain on the child’s ability to maintain a story boundary (because it requires crossing and recrossing the boundary) that it appears only after narrative has gained some independence from concrete action and after story language has become differentiated into narrative and dramatic speech.

Metanarrative may also underlie children’s ability to resolve story problems within a story boundary. In the following example, the child’s meta- narrative clearly serves to indicate to her audience how her story is to be under- stood. It also reveals the child as momentarily stepping outside her story in order to solve a problem: When presented with a story beginning in which a child is lost in the woods with his animal friends, C (4:6) says, “Well, his friends are right next to him (referring to the animal props lined up near the child prop)-right? So why can’t they help him? Then, looking directly at the examiner, C asks, “What number is he? What address does he have?” When the examiner fails to provide an answer, C continues by saying, “Let’s make it 11. My only part I could think of. They (the animals) looked for a sign 11 ‘cause they knew his address, and they finally found one.” C has spoken these last words without moving the props.

The child in this example clearly has control over the story boundary: Not only does she give Ithe story problem a narrative solution, but she also acknowl- edges that story events are constructed. When she says, ”Let’s make it 11 ,” she indicates that the lost child’s house number has no reality status. The problem- solving function of this child’s metanarrative is revealed in her immediate survey of narrative givens (“His friends are right next to him - right?”). The function of structuring how an audience is to construe the story is made explicit in the child’s statement, “Let’s make it 11 .” It appears, therefore, that at least in some cases, the emergence of metanarrative coincides with, or is indistinguishable from, early efforts to solve story problems within the story boundary.

The emergence of the various types of story language and the resolu- tion of story problems within the story boundary are the central advances in storytelling during the preschool years. However, while the emergence of story language has to some extent freed stories from their dependence on the concrete, this freedom is not yet complete. Without at least some support of props and gesture, even older preschoolers find it extremely difficult to con- struct well-formed stories. What still lies ahead in the developmental trajectory is the total emancipation of storytelling from the use of props and gesture.

Fantasy Reconsidered

The acquisitions discussed above provide some insight into the nature of fantasy. Fantasy is sometimes seen as the antithesis of cognition-as what occurs when thought attuned to reality constraints is overwhelmed or insuff- cient. This notion appears in Freud’s (1908) contrast between fantasy (pri- mary process thought) and reality-oriented cognition (secondary process thought). It resurfaces in Piaget’s notion of make-believe as “no more than lack of coherence and still more, subjective assimilation” (1962, p. 131). Such a

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view has two consequences. First, fantasy is seen as a phenomenon that under- goes no development, a persistently primitive substrate to empirical thought. Second, fantasy as a mode of thought is seen as idiosyncratic, or, to use Piaget’s term, subjective.

The observations here present quite a different view of fantasy. Far from being adevelopmental, fantasy emerges as a mode of thought-akin to logic, one that is slowly constructed throughout early childhood. Not only does the distinction between pragmatic and pretense action sharpen but, if stories are any example, the inner logic of fantasy unfolds across time. In response to the notion that fantasy is characteristically subjective, the phenomenon of sig- nalling to others the moments of crossing over from narrative to pragmatic interpretations of actions demonstrates how profoundly intersubjective fantasy can be.

Underlying these negative characterizations of fantasy is a belief that, by distorting reality or inventing new worlds, fantasy puts us out of touch with the way the world “really is.” Fantasy does indeed distort and invent; however, the results may be the opposite of losing touch. The conscience of Hamlet’s king was captured not by reality but by a play. Shakespeare’s message is clear: it is sometimes the unreal that gives sense to the real, and “indirection” that finds “direction out.”

References

Freud, S. “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” The Complete Psychological Works ofS;S-

Luria, A., and Yudovich, F. Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child.

Piaget, J. Play, Dreams, and Imitation in Childhood. New York: Norton, 1962. Shotwell, J., Wolf, D., and Gardner, H. “Styles of Achievement in Early Symboliza-

tion.” In M. Foster and S. Brandes (Eds.), Fundamentals ofSymbolLzation. New York: Academic Press, forthcoming.

Ware, E., Scarlett, W. G., and Kelly, H. “The Emergence of Storytelling.“ Paper pre- sented at the annual Eastern Psychological Association Meetings, Philadelphia, April 1979.

Watson, M., and Fischer, K. “A Developmental Sequence of Agent Use in Late Infancy. Child Development, 1977, 48, 828-836.

mund Freud. Vol. 9. London: Hogarth Press, 1908.

Baltimore, Md.: Penguin Books, 1972.

W. George Scarlett is a research associate at Harvard Project Zero, a consultant to daycare centers for the Cambridge-Somerville Mental Health and Retardation Center, and a chaplain at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center in Boston.

Dennie Worf directs a longitudinal stud’ of early symbolic development at Project Zero. In addition, she is a coauthor of a book concerned with the intersection of parent and child l$eycles, Ourselves and Our Children, Random House, 1978.