Why Are Americans Afraid Of Dragons Analysis
In her critical essay, “The Child and the Shadow,” Ursula K. LeGuin employs archetypal language and Jungian psychology to demonstrate how children can be taught deeper meanings of life through the genre of fantasy. This discussion of hers is continued in another of her essays, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” which describes how the best qualities of humans exist in children, but are often repressed and denied into adulthood. LeGuin argues that if the imagination is encouraged during a person’s childhood, then the person will act wisely as an adult, but if the imagination is ignored, their mind will be restricted through adulthood. Throughout “The Child and the Shadow,” she uses the psychologist Carl Jung’s ideas that a person’s unconscious mind is a source of creativity and imagination instead of only a place for desires to be restrained.
Another important part of LeGuin’s argument comes from Jung’s concept of archetypes: recurring images, symbols, and situations found to have universal meanings across cultures by way of society’s collective unconscious mind. One of these archetypes is the psyche element of the shadow, which
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She discusses how she believes that the best qualities of people exist in children, but quite often those qualities are repressed and denied. She describes how vital it is to hold onto one’s imagination during the transformation from childhood into adulthood, even going on to say that an adult who has ignored that quality will be lacking in personality. Ursula LeGuin’s essay, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons,” is comparable to another of her essays, “The Child and the Shadow,” as both essays discuss how people have repressed qualities that are present in their psychological shadows; the two essays also put a large emphasis on the importance of imagination and fantasy in a child’s
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