One of the best avenues to the unguarded minds of children, as of adults, is the study of their dreams. Investigation of children's dreams, especially in relation to various maladjustments and delinquencies, has been greatly neglected. From many years of study one definite statement can be made in connection with the eye motif. In children's dreams eyes often play a role, just as with adults.
But injuries to the eye and gouging out of eyes in dreams used to be of extreme rarity. Even where it existed in nightmare dreams, it occurred in disguised form. Nowadays after years of comic-book indoctrination, such dreams in children or young people are not so rare.
Strange World of Your Dreams #1 (Prize, 1952). Art by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby
There is an interplay between the stimuli from comic books and from life. A twelve-year-old girl was referred to the Clinic. She told us: "Me and some girls and boys were playing. A boy said he was going to hit me in the eye. He did it with an umbrella-spoke."
Her mother confirmed this. One might expect - if one did not know the comic-book atmosphere in which American children grow up - that such a child might shy away from violence. But she told me she liked to look at killing, especially "how men kill ladies."
In such a case it is hard to say where the tendency to female sado-masochism comes from - from the violent play in the streets or from crime comic books or from the temper of the times which breeds both and affects individual lives so deeply and so early.
In children who read a lot of comic books there is a typical comic-book syndrome. It has these features:
1) The child feels spontaneously guilty about reading the violent, sadistic and criminal stories, and about fantasies stimulated by them.
2) He is made to feel guilty about them by others.
3) He reads them surreptitiously.
4) He lies and says he does not read crime comics, but only "Walt Disney comics, Looney Tunes and Merry Melody [sic] comics."
Eh…You want bacon with that, doc?
Typical is the remark of an eight-year-old child at the end of our interview: "Please don't tell my mother that I read Crime Does Not Pay and Superman! I keep them always on the bottom of the heap."
5) He buys comic books with money which he is supposed to use for something else, or he steals to get comic-book money.
This comic-book syndrome occurs in children in all walks of life who are in no way psychologically predisposed. Of course, in children in bad social circumstances it is apt to occur more frequently. Child psychologists who do not know that these children read crime comic books secretly and who do not gain a child's confidence fully cannot diagnose it.
Fred’s Video Collection
Here’s the second part of my rendition of Superman’s Song.