Children's writing – facilitating one’s internal and external communication through writing*

ABSTRACT

Popular conceptions notwithstanding, children are using the medium of writing in their different life spheres at present more than at any other time in human history. Therefore, examining this course of action will shed light on a central practice utilized by children in an attempt to better understand it. For this purpose, I analyzed the character of Momik, from the novel See Under: Love as a child who writes. In addition, I conducted critical readings of psychoanalytic, feminist, and literary theories. The results of this study indicate that children’s writing is distinguished by two types of communication. The first, intrapersonal communication, centers on the individual’s ability to talk to oneself and to analyze oneself through one’s writing. The second type is interpersonal communication, which takes place between the individual and the environment; within this framework writing expresses subversion.

KEYWORDS:

• Creative writing
• children
• subversion
• intra-personal communication
• inter-personal communication
• hegemony
• psychoanalysis
• Holocaust

Introduction

Barthes (2004), the French theorist and semiotician, answers the question “What is writing?” thus:

The meaning of the word “writing” (écriture) is ambiguous: Sometimes … it indicates the material act, the physical movement … on the other hand … it indicates a tangled complex of aesthetic, linguistic, social, metaphysical values: and then it is at one and the same time in a medium of communication and of preservation that contrasts with speech … in a meaning-making practice of enunciation, where the subject “positions himself” in a defined manner … . (Barthes, 2004, p. 115)

The phrase “the subject positions himself” raises questions and queries. For what purpose does the subject position himself and in what way? Barthes contrasts two mediums, speech versus writing. Moreover, he defines writing broadly – writing is a practice, a set of signs, a medium – all intended to serve one thing – the subject’s knowledge of himself. Namely, writing means getting to know yourself, engaging in a practice that investigates your essence (Barthes, 2004; Sartre, 1979).

Children’s creative writing

Using language arts for therapeutic and educational purposes with children has received a significant place in the professional literature (Bettelheim, 1987; Cohen, 1990; Koboby, 2008; Mazza, 2017). Researchers contend that stories are an important form of communication for children, both as storytellers and as listeners (Dwivedi & Gardner, 1999; Gardner, 1970; Spitz, 2021; Sunderland, 2017).

Writing reveals children’s themes and fields of interests, helps process contents, and embodies a deep and particular emotional truth (Sunderland, 2017; Suvilehto, 2016). Moreover, it reflects a personal language and ways of contending with difficulty (Lahad & Eilon, 1990; Segev-Shoham, 1998; Sela & Raz, 2019). Writing also constitutes a mechanism that produces psychological insights (Bolton, 2003; Hunt & Sampson, 2002; Ruini & Mortara, 2022) and helps improve health indices and psychological wellbeing (Bolton, 2003; Mazza, 2017, 1999; Pennebaker, 1997; Pennebaker & Francis, 1996). Sometimes a child’s writing is linked to the belief that he is capable of writing, creating, and expressing himself freely (Cohen, 1990). A study from 2019 explored how creative writing helps understand the life experience of children with chronic renal failure (Currier & Zimmerman, 2019). This is associated, among other things, with the writer’s cognitive processes. Writing about life-changing events compels the writer to think differently about these events and reframe them (Bolton, 2003; Mazza, 2017; Pennebaker, 1997; Pennebaker & Francis, 1996).

Nonetheless, writing can at times also be ineffective and might even have harmful side effects. When writing about a traumatic event, if the client experiences high levels of stress this might trigger ruminations, a symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder (Ruini & Mortara, 2022).

Tools and methods

The research methodology utilized for examining the qualities embodied by creative writing belongs to the tradition of qualitative research, which emphasizes an interpretive course aimed at learning about the topic studied through meanings that people ascribe to their own experiences (Levitzky, 2009). This activity depends on various contexts, wherein the researcher observes the world with its phenomena and practices and interprets them to render them comprehensible (Sabar Ben-Yehoshua, 2016). Hence, the interpretive course I am suggesting is based on, communicates, and corresponds with theories from the fields of literary research, feminism, and psychoanalysis. In addition, I have used an interpretive methodology based on analysis of the language and linguistic organization in David Grossman’s literary work See Under: Love (2002).

See under: children’s writing

David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love is an ars poetic work that raises questions related to the art of writing. It was first published in 1986 and had an impact on the literature world. This work encompasses diverse literary modes and genres that combine fantasy and realism and is divided into four parts: The first part relates the story of Momik, the son of Holocaust survivors, living in Jerusalem in the 1950s. “Bruno”, the second part, relates the story of Momik the adult, who became a well-known author in an imaginary meeting with Bruno Schulz, a Jewish-Polish author and illustrator. The third part brings the story of Anshel Wasserman, a children’s author and the brother of Momik’s grandmother, with a connection to Neigel, the commandant of the death camp. The fourth part is “The complete encyclopedia of Kazik’s life”, written in an encyclopedic format, with entries directly or indirectly linked to the Holocaust. I shall focus on the qualities of the creative medium, writing, as embodied in the novel and as expressed in its first part – “Momik”.

Momik – a literary character writes himself

Momik, the main character in the first part of the book See Under: Love, is the son of Holocaust survivors, who is living in Israel in the 1950s. This period, several years after the end of the Second World War and the founding of Israel (1948), is unique. As a young country, Israel focused on absorbing new immigrants from all over the world, primarily Holocaust survivors. The survivors who had arrived in the country tried to build themselves a life; they and their children continued to suffer from post-traumatic symptoms. The phrase “second generation Holocaust survivors” was coined in the late 1960s to describe the children of Holocaust survivors, in the understanding that “ … the Holocaust remained present in the life of the survivors and their family not as a historical event but as a traumatic experience, whose destructive effects are evident despite the passing years and the geographical distance” (Milner, 2003, p. 19).

The first part of the book opens with the arrival of the “new grandfather” who had spent a decade at a psychiatric hospital. With his arrival, Momik finds in his grandmother’s suitcase an old magazine containing a chapter from a children’s story written by his grandfather, who was a children’s author as a young man. This is the inciting incident in the novel, which causes Momik to embark on a journey through the paths of memory and of the past and which will later affect his becoming a writer. Momik’s inquiry has one purpose – to uncover his parents’ past. Momik becomes a detective trying to solve a mystery. His sleuthing includes following the neighbors, writing in a spy notebook, and eavesdropping on his parents. These proved unsuccessful and “then Momik used his systematic approach, the kind he’s really good at” (See Under: Love, p. 30). So, the inquiry intensifies and takes new directions.

Freud (cited in Bion, 1959), who compared the therapist to an archeologist, claimed that in analysis the therapist must strive for the historical truth. Schafer (1980) and Spence (1982) objected to this conception and claimed that there is another truth, one that is no less important, which is the narrative truth. This idea came from the narrative tradition that strongly affected psychoanalysts, centering on the understanding that stories have the capacity to organize and to establish order. Narrative continuity, coherence, and how one structures his experiences, are important. Momik has no access to the historical truth; it is conveyed and assembled at random from the stories of neighbors, from books, and from fragmented testimonies. Therefore, and in accordance with the new routes of inquiry, he instigates a course where a narrative is created from the fragmented and split testimonies, one that becomes comprehensible for him.

Concerning Freud, who compared the psychoanalyst to an archeologist, Bion (1959) reasoned: “Freud’s analogy of an archeological investigation with a psychoanalysis was helpful if it were considered that we were exposing evidence not so much of a primitive civilization as of a primitive disaster” (Bion, 1959, p. 310). In the case of Momik, the restructuring of the narrative indeed proves to be a primitive catastrophe, both in how he perceives reality and in how the discovery of the Holocaust and its horrors leaves him at a lack for words. In this state, he utilizes his power of imagination and gives his own meaning to words and sentences he has heard. Mendelson-Maoz (2010) sees this inquiry as a scientific inquiry that includes rational methods such as use of encyclopedias, listening to a radio program that locates relatives, writing a dictionary of the Holocaust, and copying parts of stories. She says that all these constitute use of a scientific course, which helps him survive but also helps him keep sentimentality at a distance. Thus, Momik investigates his parents’ world using empirical methods (Mendelson-Maoz, 2010) on one hand, while also conducting a literary-narrative inquiry on the other.

The hero’s journey through writing

Further to the portrayal of writing as a space for experiencing language, as posited by Sartre (1979) and Barthes (2004), Momik’s inquiry leads to writing experiences that encompass, in my view, several practical modes: The first mode is copying texts, both as a source of inspiration and as a way of preserving and perpetuating. Momik copies sections from two major texts: the first is The Diary of Anne Frank, an autobiographical text, and the second is Grandpa Anshel’s “The Children of the Heart Gang”, a fictional text:

This was the story Momik found in the magazine, and as soon as he started copying it down in his spy notebook he knew it was the most exciting story ever written … Momik knew he would never understand no matter how many thousands of times he read the page over … though even without understanding every word in it you could tell this story was the origin of every book and work of literature ever written. (See Under: Love, p. 16)

The need to preserve and perpetuate valuable texts that might otherwise be lost, stresses the uniqueness of the writing medium through which fictional literary texts, as well as autobiographical literary texts, can be preserved. These are added to a wide social and historical corpus and contribute to understanding people’s life patterns throughout history. Moreover, when copying from The Diary of Anne Frank, Momik touches on the connection between writing children, which is linked to the past via history, identity, and culture.

The second mode is expanding vocabulary, implemented by Momik through writing a dictionary and correcting the spelling mistakes he finds in newspapers and books. In the dictionary he includes eighty-five words he calls “words from the land of Over There”. These are words used by his family and neighbors and he gives them his own personal interpretation. For instance, he writes in his dictionary words emitted unknowingly by Grandpa Wasserman, such as “Herr Neigel” (Mr. Neigel) and “Scheherazade”, although he does not understand their meaning. He writes the words “Herr Neigel” as one long word – “Herrneigel”. he asks Bella the neighbor what “Scheherazade” means, and she explains that Scheherazade was an Arab princess who lived in Baghdad. Wasserman says these two words one after the other and Momik looks for a connection between them. In this way, he expands his vocabulary, the author’s tool used to weave the story and shape its characters. Moreover, this act also expands his psychological vocabulary, which signifies the object of his research and helps him grant personal and specific meaning to the hidden language of the soul.

The third mode is writing and rewriting. Momik follows his grandfather Anshel around and notes in a special notebook the words and utterances he produces.

Whenever he and Grandfather were left alone in the house together, Momik would start following him around with a notebook and pen, recording Grandfather’s gibberish in Hebrew letters. … and it only took a couple of days for Momik to notice that what Grandfather was saying wasn’t all gibberish, in fact he was telling somebody a story, just as Momik had thought all along. (pp. 30–31)

Through this detective writing, Momik reaches the understanding that this is not merely meaningless prattling, rather there is a connection between the syllables and fragmented words. He understands that Grandpa Anshel is telling a story. From the story, he slowly gathers the names of unrealistic characters such as Scheherazade, Kazik, and Herr Neigel. A skilled reader can link the story’s elements and understand them, but only in the third part of the novel. There Momik, by that time a well-known author, finds himself in an imaginary scenario; he is in a death camp, witnessing the twisted relationship between Grandpa Anshel and Herr Neigel.

Momik’s detective work as a child outlines the story subsequently formed in his mind as an adult. His investigation begins with questions he attempts to resolve, as well as experimenting with language and with processing the story that will develop further on. The imaginary encounter with his grandfather occurs when Shlomo Neuman, Momik’s adult character, reaches an impasse as a writer. An ars poetic statement is made when he manages to extract himself from this impasse by fearlessly investigating the characters and events.

In addition, Momik writes a speech addressed to the Nazi beast (a customary designation for Nazi war criminals). The speech is a writing practice intended for specific ceremonial events and a unique genre. In the speech, he seeks to eliminate the beast’s “hatred and loneliness” (p. 94).

Writing the speech requires acts of editing, proofreading, erasing, and correcting, and finally applying his judgment, ultimately resulting in disposing of the speech. This reinforces his aesthetic judgement of his work. He perceives writing as a craft, an art that requires skill as well as exercise and experiencing and involves writing and erasing. In this way, we become aware of the Sisyphean nature of writing, which encompasses correcting, proofreading, drafts, and finally criticism and judgement. Another element is the discrepancy between the contents of the speech, which entails mostly emotional beseeching of the Nazi beast to eliminate its “hatred and loneliness” – and its form, i.e. the genre of the speech. The former reflects his need to reach a reconciliation with the tough and dark parts represented by the beast. The latter, in contrast, requires the author’s intellectual components, which necessitate accuracy, perfectionism, and formality.

The fourth mode is autobiographical writing. Momik experiences this when he writes a personal journal as well as when writing his parents’ story in his geography notebook. This shows how writing can encourage self-discovery and establish a self-identity, both moving events for the writer.

… his pen would tremble a little, and then he would have to add a few words of his own about a boy called Momik Neuman. (pp. 111–112)

This is immediately followed by writing his parents’ story, once they manage to breach the bond of silence regarding their life before the Holocaust, triggered by a work of literature. Momik shares with his parents the works of author Scholem Aleichem, which he learned at school. This encourages his parents to speak about their former life in a Jewish town (similar to those described by Scholem Aleichem) and to start establishing the initial point of their story, which is strongly connected to his own story. He discovers that before the war his parents had a full life, which the trauma of the Holocaust attempted to erase. Through their stories of the town, which revive for them lost parts of themselves, his own autobiographic story gradually evolves.

A fifth practice utilized by Momik is drawing as a linguistic medium. On stamps commemorating the first decade of Israel, featuring historical figures, Momik draws instead the figures of his relatives and neighbors. He also draws on old photographs:

Momik went over the pictures he’d copied in pencil once out of those books, and he remembered that each time he’d copied a picture he felt he had to draw it a little differently, like the one with the child they forced to scrub the street with a toothbrush, well Momik drew the toothbrush bigger than it was in the photograph … . (p. 133)

According to Adivi-Shushan (2020), in this way he corrects and reconstructs history to facilitate healing, granting the characters the power and control they originally lacked. Namely, writing (drawing as writing) has the ability to change history and to grant writers the omnipotent capacity to shape the past by granting them control. Unlike historians who are required to be historically accurate, based on testimonies and documents that strive to reflect the truth, writers can play with the materials of life and use them differently. When Momik draws his neighbor Bella, a Holocaust survivor, on a stamp instead of the President, he grants her control and abilities that were taken from her originally, during the Holocaust.

The sixth practice is writing fiction. Momik writes a fictional adventure story where the characters are heroes and villains. In an action-laden plot, the good characters pursue and attack the evil characters who are threatening them. Momik’s writing is influenced by stories of bravery and adventure that he read and that embody archetypes of good and evil. Based on this modus, he writes an adventure story that contains a struggle between the main character and the villains. When he finishes writing the story:

Momik paused to read what he had written so far. This was definitely an improvement over what usually came out. But it still wasn’t good enough. So much was missing. The main thing was missing, he felt sometimes. But what was this main thing? No, the writing should have more power, more biblical splendor, like Grandfather Anshel’s writing. Only how? He would have to be bolder. Because whatever it was that happened Over There must have really been something for everyone to try so hard not to talk about it. (pp. 45–46)

Momik’s fictional writing is affected by stories he has heard about the Holocaust, even when these are only partial, and by his attempt to fill in the missing information. It is also affected by texts he reads, which include stories of suspense and adventure. He understands that in order to investigate himself he must be brave and use his imagination in a free and boundless manner. In this way, fictional writing signifies for Momik another route for studying his life and world.

In summary, the writing practices described here – writing, rewriting, expanding the vocabulary, autobiographical and fictional writing, and drawing – signify his directions of inquiry. Momik seeks to “know himself”, following the Socratic injunction “Know yourself”, and he does so through the modus of writing. His attempts at writing are forms of self-writing, where the self is an object of inquiry (Foucault, 1994) and expresses interpersonal communication and deep knowledge of his inner world. Momik upgrades his ability to relate additional parts of himself, to conduct a dialogue with his silent parents and with literary characters that reflect himself. This process leads to integration between the overwhelming parts within his soul, which find a channel for expression, relieve the anxiety that festers in him constantly, and are laid out on the page.

Writing as a breach of silence

Writing as a breach of silence is a central theme within Momik’s writing. Silence as a psychological phenomenon is typical of his relations with his parents in the context of their experiences in the Holocaust. It also reflects the mood in 1950s’ Israel with regard to the Holocaust survivors (Hazan, 2014; Milner, 2003). As stated, the phrase “Second generation Holocaust survivors” designates the children of Holocaust survivors who were exposed to the trauma of the Holocaust on a daily basis by living with their parents, establishing complex and charged relationships (Milner, 2003). One of the themes typical of these relationships is associated with the inability of Holocaust survivor parents to speak about what happened in the Holocaust, which extended to any mention of their past and countries of origin. In the novel See Under: Love, the Hebrew root s-t-k (the root of the Hebrew word “silence”) recurs in different versions and in different places. This recurrence echoes one aspect of this psychological phenomenon in the connection between the first and second generation of Holocaust survivors. Hazan (2014), an Israeli psychoanalyst who studied the intergenerational relationship, saw it as the focal point of the intergenerational tension. In his opinion, this tension made it difficult to maintain an emotional dialogue between the parent generation who experienced the Holocaust and the children’s generation who did not, resulting in silence and silencing (Hazan, 2014).

Momik is burdened by his parents’ silence, and this motivates him to express their distress. For instance, when his father screams in his sleep, voicing nightmares related to memories of the Holocaust, Momik’s mother silences him and says: “Nu, tuvia, sha, be still, the child can hear you, over there is gone, it’s the middle of the night … you’ll wake the boy, tuvia!” (p. 44). Two explanations are offered for the mother’s silencing of the father who cries out his Holocaust nightmares: “Over there is gone … ”; namely, the war and its terrors have ended, and “the child can hear you … ”, Momik might hear the shouts and be exposed to the terror and the horrors. Hence, silence becomes second nature and is generalized beyond the critical period of the war.

Kazin (2015) summarizes her motivation for writing and includes self-spaces for articulation, self-expression, and breaching the silence. She writes:

I write to build myself a home … to create a space for myself … to express the parts of myself that have no full and whole life in the world outside writing, including melancholy, anger, perhaps also reason … I write to touch upon my deviations, my whims, my violence, my aesthetics and ethics. I write to be present in my entirety. And to observe in my entirety. I write to breach the silence. (Kazin, 2015, p. 20)

Kazin understands the association between writing and breaching the silence as one that is at the very heart of self-inquiry. On another level, we are aware of the silence of adults versus the strong yearning of a child to speak. The story exposes two interacting and corresponding perspectives: that of the child versus that of the adult. Momik seeks to breach a wider silence related to the relations between children and adults. Where adults have access to information and knowledge, which they seek to spare the child, the child seeks to act against this silence, experienced as silencing, and does so through writing. The adults in the novel constantly speak to each other, whether in code or directly, while the child subverts the medium of speech and prioritizes that of writing. When Barthes (2004) defined writing, he situated it as a medium that contradicts speech, as he saw in it a different communicative quality that articulates other values. Unlike Shlomo Neuman, who is the adult Momik, for whom writing entails suffering and a writing impasse, Momik the child uses the medium of writing to be present in his entirety. Everything that is not contained by the medium of speech finds a safe space in the medium of writing. This is why his experiences with writing are significant, transforming the spoken words into a magical and fantastic story, an attempt to change something in the external world, embodied by writing a letter to Wiesenthal or writing a speech that addresses the Nazi beast. All these utilize the creative option embodied by writing, in the understanding that this is Momik’s only available option of being present, understanding, and communicating.

Feminist literature as a subversive act against the patriarchy

In a wider context, writing is also a breach of the minority’s silence versus the dominant hegemony. Feminist theoreticians (Cixous et al., 1976; Irigaray, 2004; Showalter, 2006) describe writing as a challenge against the dominant, hegemonic discourse.

Lacan (2015), who writes about the symbolic order, offers a new interpretation of the Oedipal complex. He posits that the child who experiences a state of merging and union with his mother, begins to recognize his separateness from her. When pained, he continues to yearn for the mother and for union with her, a craving that Lacan calls desire, because desire is a yearning for something that can never be fully satisfied – a desire for the experience of union with the mother. As the child sees it, this is the desire to be everything for the mother, to be the phallus for the mother, to be her object of desire (Lacan, 2015). But he can’t be, because the father, the mother’s partner, is the one who has the phallus. Hence, the child who lacks the father’s phallus is emasculated, arrives in the world in a missing form. Therefore, the child’s relinquishing of the dyad and of merging with the mother is obtained by the father’s presence, who represents the regulating and organizing functions of language and of law. Lacan means not only a realistic father but rather “the law of the father”, namely, the laws and conventions customary in society and in language (Lacan in Mitchell & Black, 2006). The child is inducted into the secrets of the language and of the law through the qualities of the language that are regulated by the father, and thus recognizes the symbolism of the relations and how they can be realized in practice only through language (Lacan in Miller, 2006; Mitchell & Black, 2006). Namely, the child’s access to language occurs at the oedipal stage by understanding that he lacks the phallus, i.e. the capacity to signify.

Cora Kaplan (1998/1977), a feminist theoretician, formulates the problematics of Lacan’s theory thus:

The phallus as a signifier has a central, crucial position in language, for if language embodies the patriarchal law of the culture, its basic meanings refer to the recurring process by which sexual difference and subjectivity are acquired … Thus the little girl’s access to the Symbolic, i.e. to language and its laws, is always negative and/or mediated by intro-subjective relation to a third term, for it is characterized by an identification with lack. (Kaplan, cited by Showalter, 2006, p. 194)

When a woman is marginalized due to the lack of a phallus, as indicated by feminist theory, she enters the symbolic order, language, in a missing form (Cixous, 2006; Showalter, 2006). Her ability to signify her desires, to articulate and express herself, passes through a mediator, the man, or patriarchy, since she begins her encounter with the world in a state of lack (Cixous, 2006). This exclusion from the patriarchal linguistic order requires her to be active concerning her representation rather than relying on the mediating element (Irigaray, 2004). This activity is manifested in women’s writing and, according to Cixous, it is extremely significant. She says:

I shall speak about women’s writing: about what it will do. Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies – for the same reasons, by the same law, with the same fatal goal. Woman must put herself into the text – as into the world and into history – by her own movement. (Cixous, 2006, p. 135)

According to the researchers (Cixous, 2006; Irigaray, 2004; Showalter, 2006), it does not matter what women write about. They should write about personal things as well as about the most overt. There is no high or low in their writing, because writing is the law in light of which subjectivity is formulated. The purpose of this powerful medium is to outline the female experience with all its complexity and to fill it with the contents of this experience. Irigaray (2004) contends that, as a woman, her writing is important because this is the way to disseminate her ideas in the world and to establish a scientific corpus on women (Irigaray, 2004). Hence, for a minority, one purpose of writing is to describe this minority’s experience and its otherness.

Children’s writing as subverting the power structure

Hence, feminist literature relates to the practice of writing as a meaningful act, within which the woman attests to her subjective experiences. In this context, writing by women as a minority group is a subversion of the patriarchal authority and it establishes ways that a woman can be present in the social, political, and cultural discourse (Cixous, 2006; Cixous & Clement, 2006; Irigaray, 2004; Showalter, 2006). Children are a distinct group within society, with unique features (James & Prout, 2015). Women too belong to a distinct group in society. These two groups have similar features; therefore, it is possible to derive conclusions from one group, women, about another, children. Thus, the theories underlying feminist thought can help understand the uniqueness of children as a group.

Similar to women’s writing, which seeks to undermine the patriarchal linguistic order, in my opinion children’s writing too subverts the authority of adults. The law of the father is the law of the adult, whether man or woman, which requires the child to adapt in order to enter the symbolic order. These adaptations are based on the understanding that the child lacks the ability to influence and to formulate his subjectivity. This understanding stems from the attitude to the child as a process, something that is emerging, a potential that will only be realized in adulthood (Qvortrup, 2002). Hence, the child’s ability to enter the symbolic order through writing is, as I see it, a distinct and active manner of subversion. A writing child seeks to undermine the hegemony of the adult to formulate, speak, and investigate him and to suggest additional ways and possibilities of being the researcher and the object of research. The child, following Cixous, must write himself in different ways, choose the topics that interest him, formulate his subjectivity.

Hence Momik, who is excluded from entire areas of life and encounter, longs for knowledge. Therefore, he creates new knowledge, writes himself, and fills the gaps. This structuring challenges the authority of the adult who is in charge of knowledge and its conveyance. This adult prevents the child from accessing the past and thus leads him to a barren and lacking present. Therefore, the child’s writing is a way utilized by the individual to learn about himself, to try and understand something about the world and about the trauma at the heart of this world. Momik seeks to resist the silence enforced upon him, and what is not said by adults is filled by imagination and writing, as these are places that are not required to remain bound to historical truth and they can contain paradoxes, contradictions, and tensions simultaneously. In this way, breaching an existing order through writing means breaching the order of adulthood and consequently, formulating the subjectivity of the individual, the child, as part of the minority group to which he belongs.

Discussion

This study examined the benefit of writing for children and found that a main benefit is communication, which is divided into two types: intrapersonal communication and interpersonal communication.

Intra-personal communication is the individual’s ability to be in contact with his inner world and it helps him process contents. I examined the character of Momik in the novel See Under: Love, where he investigates the historical and family story, with the aim of putting together the jigsaw puzzle called the Holocaust. He does this through different writing practices: maintains a journal, writes a dictionary, corrects spelling mistakes, writes a speech. So, this can be seen as a historical inquiry using empirical tools. At the same time, he conducts a narrative inquiry by attempting to construct the story of his parents’ life and to fill the familiar concepts with private meanings. These lead to self-inquiry, where the subject – Momik – is the object of the inquiry. He investigates himself through the wide story of belonging to a larger group and being part of it. In this manner, self-inquiry through writing serves as the ability to establish beneficial intra-personal communication.

Inter-personal communication occurs between the individual and his or her environment. In this medium the individual expresses, articulates, and represents his life. As I see it, however, children’s writing is first and foremost subversive. This is a subversion against the adult’s undisputed control of the child.

Through writing the child acts against the adult. If, according to the symbolic order proposed by Lacan (2015), the father (or another adult) is responsible for inducting the child into language, then the child can subvert this operation, namely, enter language through an adult – precisely by using language through writing. In this way, the child expresses his subversion of the name of the father, i.e. of the adult world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).