Young Children’s Existential Encounters

Book excerpt: This book is a psychoanalytic observation of five children’s existential encounters in their ordinary life at the nursery. It is among the first within psychosocial literature to go beyond adult experiences and explore the existential in young children’s lives as it plays out in their everydayness in symbolic and sensory articulations and in relationship with others; including with the author as someone who arrived looking for it. The author offers analysis in the form of a writing inquiry into meaning, by means of an on-going movement between the self and the other, the interior and the exterior, and psychoanalytic and existential-phenomenological ideas. This is illustrated through a kaleidoscopic account of May, Nadia, Edward, Baba and Eilidhs’ encounters with nothingness, strangeness, ontological insecurity, death and selfhood as these emerged in the time they spent with the author embodying different forms – from concrete objects to dreams – exemplifying an attunement to existential ubiquity. With its relational ground, this work suggests the potential for adults – including researchers, therapists, trainees, educators and parents – to attune to their own existential encounters as a path to understanding those of children.