Le famiglie nella letteratura per l’infanzia. Il potenziale trasformativo della vulnerabilità tra specchi e finestre

This paper presents an analysis of children’s literature as a ‘threshold of change’ that allows, at any age, to interpret the surrounding reality, to imagine other worlds, to understand other perspectives. Through the evocative potential of the ‘window’ and the ‘mirror’, some familiar contexts found in both classical and contemporary children’s literature are described. The symbolic complexity of ‘windows’ and ‘mirrors’ unfolds within a plurality of fairy-tale family models where situations of poverty, vulnerability and social disadvantage emerge, which, according to an embodied oriented perspective, cause the activation of different projective processes: opening, closing, crossing or mirroring, identification, distortion. In line with the phenomenological-hermeneutic approach towards some literary productions, this descriptive research aims at highlighting the potential of family vulnerability as a resource for the transformation of one’s condition into an opportunity for growth, flourishing and improvement.