A child deprived of her parents draws a picture of her mother on the floor with chalk, then lies down inside the drawing and falls asleep. A photographer captures the touching scene; it’s as if the child carries her mother’s form within her.
In the same way, we carry a child within us whom we need just as much as the little child does her parents. Forty years ago, the concept of the “inner child” was developed in psychotherapy, and it proved fruitful in trauma therapy. In their 1990 book Healing Your Aloneness,1 psychotherapists Erika Chopich and Margaret Paul focused on the need to bring this inner child into contact with the loving inner adult.
What is the inner child? Chopich and Paul describe it as arising from a person’s spontaneous feelings, which are often thwarted early on in life. It experiences the full range of emotions—joy and pain, happiness and sorrow—without inhibition. It is connected with feeling, experiencing, and being, while adults are associated with thinking, acting, and doing and are dominated by inhibited feelings. The inner child is the source of a person’s genius. If it is let down, it withdraws into itself.
In her 2018 article,2 Mechtild Oltmann-Wendenburg wrote: “There is a nightly realm within every human being where a seed of innocence remains intact, even if their life story has been utterly disastrous and may even have landed them behind bars.” The forces of innocence concealed within every human being form, we might say, the inner child.
From Martin Kollewijn, “Das dreifache innere Kind” [The Threefold Inner Child]. In: Das Goetheanum German Edition 51–52/2019.
Translation Laura Liska
Drawing Yves Berger, Alphabet Drawings
Footnotes
- Erika Chopich and Margaret Paul, Healing Your Aloneness: Finding Love and Wholeness Through Your Inner Child, HarperOne 1990.
- Mechtild Oltmann-Wendenburg, “Weihnachten und das Mariengeheimnis der Gegenwart” [Christmas and the Marian Mystery of the Present]. In: Das Goetheanum German Edition 51–52/2018.
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