Books: On to Phrenology

A CHILD’S GUIDE TO FREUD by Louise Armstrong. Drawings by Whitney Darrow Jr. 60 pages. Simon & Schuster. $2.95. –

Freudian expertise has long since reached down through the cocktail party into the children’s playroom, but there are still enough happy, balanced, unsavvy five-year-olds around to justify this narrative lexicon of Freudian terms.

It gives kids a working familiarity with the Grandma Moses of the modern mind. For adults, it’s a hundred laughs, the sort of cartoon book to read while you’re coming back from insulin shock.

“This is Daddy. He sleeps in the same room as Mommy. Call this a Meaningful Relationship,” says Author Armstrong to the little boy that she and Cartoonist Whitney Darrow feature as the book’s whiz id. “If you beat your Daddy at Chinese Checkers, call this Healthy Aggression. If he decides to get mad about this, call him Insecure. If he changes his mind and smiles, call him Unstable.

“If you paint a picture of a dragon and title it Daddy, this is called Sublimation. If you don’t paint a picture of a dragon and title it Daddy, this is called Repression. The picture itself is called a Symbol. This means Daddy is not really a dragon. If you insist he is, this is called a Delusion.” Altogether, the book is enough to make Karl Menninger nostalgic for phrenology.