Imagination · “Feel It Real”
Honoring the Child's Inner World
To meet a child’s (or your own remembered childhood’s) imaginary companions, play-figures, and spontaneous fantasy with ‘love and understanding’ as meaningful inner reality — neither correcting them away nor over-literalizing them — so the imaginative life is honored rather than shamed.
Honoring the child’s inner world in 5 lines: When an imaginary companion, invented world, or vivid fantasy appears, meet it with “love and understanding,” not correction. Let it be real on its own (inner) terms; ask who it is and what it wants. Read it as showing what the child’s psyche is working on. Don’t shame it and don’t over-literalize it. Let it run its course; get professional help only if it turns frightening, compulsive, or covers real harm.
What it is
This is Frances Wickes’s founding practical stance from The Inner World of Childhood (1927): the imaginative life of a child — imaginary companions, invented worlds, dramatic play, vivid fears, dreams — is not noise to be outgrown or corrected, but a real inner world through which the unconscious does genuine developmental work.
Wickes’s instruction to the adult (parent, teacher, or the grown person turning back toward their own childhood) is captured in her preface: enter that inner world carrying “two things. love, and an understanding.” The practice is an attitude more than a procedure: when a child’s imaginary companion, fantasy, or play-figure appears, you meet it as meaningful — receive it, take it seriously, let it tell you something about the child’s inner state — instead of dismissing it (“that’s not real, stop being silly”) or seizing it for adult ends.
It operationalises imagination as a real faculty (The Inner Creates the Outer), the symbolic life of the psyche (Life Is a Dream), and the formative power of early inner impressions (The Inner Creates the Outer).
It is distinct from the active-imagination and dream-work practices in this library: those are techniques the practitioner performs on their own psyche; this is a relational, receptive stance toward spontaneous imaginative material, especially a child’s.
The Method
Faithfully drawn from Wickes’s exposition and case material in The Inner World of Childhood (described, not reproduced):
- Approach with love and understanding, not correction. Wickes’s first move is the adult’s own attitude: drop the impulse to rationalise, tidy, or shame the fantasy away. The imaginary companion or invented story is treated as a true expression of the child’s inner life, worth attention.
- Let the figure or fantasy be real on its own terms. When a child speaks of an imaginary companion or a play-world, enter it rather than puncture it. Ask about it as you would about a real relationship — who is it, what does it do, what does it want — and listen.
- Read it as compensation and communication. Wickes treats fantasy figures as showing what the child’s conscious situation lacks or struggles with — a fierce companion may carry a timid child’s needed courage; a punishing figure may mirror a felt judgment. The figure points to the inner balance the psyche is working toward.
- Hold the tension — do not over-literalize either way. Neither “it’s just nonsense” nor “it is literally a spirit.” Wickes keeps it psychologically real: the figure is a real inner fact with meaning, not necessarily an outer one.
- Let it run its course; intervene only when it harms. Honored and understood, most such figures and fantasies do their developmental work and naturally recede. Wickes steps in (or refers) only when fantasy becomes a frightened retreat from a real situation that needs addressing.
- (For your own childhood.) Turn the same love-and-understanding toward a remembered childhood companion, recurring childhood fantasy, or invented world of your own — receive what it carried for you then, and what it still says now. (Sourcing note: this synthesises Wickes’s attitude and her chapters on imaginary companions, fantasy, and dreams; faithfully described, with only the short “love, and an understanding” phrase quoted.)
Source & Lineage
Frances G. Wickes (1875–1967) was an American Jungian analyst and educator and a close associate of C.G. Jung, who wrote the introduction to The Inner World of Childhood (1927). The book applied Jung’s analytical psychology to childhood, devoting whole chapters to imaginary companions, fear, dreams, and fantasy.
Wickes’s distinctive contribution was to grant the child’s inner world its own legitimate psychological reality rather than treating it as merely preparatory to adulthood.
The Traditions' versions
The same recognition — that spontaneous imaginative figures are meaningful and deserve honoring rather than suppression — recurs, but Wickes’s version is uniquely focused on the child’s inner world and the adult’s relational attitude toward it: - Jung’s active imagination (the adult, self-directed form) — deliberately engaging autonomous inner images.
- Working with the inner figures (Jung) — relating to autonomous figures as distinct others.
- Sticking to the image (Hillman) — honoring the figure as image without explaining it away.
- Receiving fantasy without pathologizing it (Wickes, Inner World of Man) — her adult companion to this stance.
- Parts work / IFS — meeting personified inner parts with curiosity rather than judgment.
Common refinements
Correcting the fantasy away. “That’s not real” shames the inner life Wickes is asking you to honor. Receive it first.
- Over-literalizing it. Treating an imaginary companion as a literal spirit or omen swings to the opposite error; keep it a real inner fact.
- Hijacking it for adult agendas. Using the companion to extract confessions or enforce behaviour breaks the trust the stance depends on.
- Forcing interpretation. You needn’t “decode” it; understanding can stay implicit. Let the child lead.
- Refinement: keep a light note of recurring figures and fantasies and the situations around them — over time the pattern, not any single image, is the message.