Imaginary Companions and the Children Who Create them

  • Marjorie Taylor
Oxford University Press: 1999. 215 pp. £18.95, $25
Would you like sugar? More than one child in four invents an invisible being. Credit: BUBBLES/ANGELA HAMPTON

Books on cosmology and biology are popular among non-specialists, but psychology — especially child psychology — has rarely translated laboratory science into material that would interest the general reader. The lay reader of child psychology is typically a parent looking for advice or reassurance, not a disinterested adult seeking food for thought. Marjorie Taylor's book about children's imaginary companions is an unusual attempt to reach both audiences. For the parent seeking reassurance, she provides a judicious review of a wide range of findings showing that children who create and sustain an imaginary companion are not suffering from any obvious clinical disorder. At the same time, for the disinterested reader, she describes many vivid specimens of the phenomenon and engages in enough conceptual analysis to show that this intriguing aspect of children's early fantasy raises fundamental questions about human imagination.

In defining imaginary companions, she excludes ‘transitional’ objects — the stuffed toys and blankets that children trail after them — on the grounds that they are not attributed any human qualities. She concentrates instead on those acts of pretence where, for a sustained period, children either conjure up or impersonate a human being or animal. This latter type of companion is not without its domestic complications. The child may remain on all fours, reply to all requests with “woof, woof”, lap up food from a dish and even urinate by raising one leg. More typical, and a bit less trying, is the child who invents a somewhat demanding invisible friend — who has to be assigned a place at the dining table or have the television left on if the family goes out.

By interviewing three- and four-year-olds and their parents, and focusing primarily on those cases where the two sources agree, Taylor concludes that the phenomenon is widespread: more than one child in four invents an invisible being and one in ten engages in impersonation.

Why do children create such companions? Taylor's answer is not unsympathetic to over a century's worth of clinical interpretations. Almost all of these assume that it is emotion that drives the child's imagination. The child who creates an imaginary companion is said to be staving off loneliness, seeking out a powerful ally, nurturing a weaker dependent, displacing criticism away from the self or mastering various fears.

Yet there are several problems with this line of thought. It is post hoc — it is always possible to think of some emotional need that a relatively human-like companion might meet. It cannot explain the find- ing that children who have lived through an emotionally charged experience, such as abuse or abduction, are less inclined to engage in pretend play than their normal peers. Finally, it does not account for the sheer perversity of some children's companions. Take the three-year-old who had an imaginary pony: when she was taken to an actual horse show, the child was upset that the pony was ‘not there’. Apparently, the child could not — or would not — simply pretend that the pony was there. It requires a heavy dose of theoretical credulity to suppose that some hidden need for separation or absence was at the root of this self-denying ordinance.

Nonetheless, Taylor is surely right to emphasize that imaginary companions engage the child's emotions. What emerges forcibly from her intriguing descriptions is that, even if the emotions do not drive the imagination, the imagination definitely drives the emotions. Indeed, one of the most interesting issues raised by children's imaginary companions is why their emotions are so readily activated by what is, after all, a mere fantasy — why is the three-year-old moved by the pretend absence of a pretend pony?

Taylor rightly insists that the answer is almost certainly not that children are confused about the distinction between fantasy and reality. A large body of findings shows that they grasp this early on. In any case, a similar activation of emotion by mere fantasy can be observed every night in our theatres and cinemas. Presumably, adult audiences who are moved by such fictions are not confused about their status. The phenomenon of imaginary companions raises important, but neglected, questions about adult as well as child psychology. Taylor successfully combines a balanced review of a century of research on the phenomenon with a sensitivity to some of those wider issues.