The cooties of kidlore in couples counseling

The Wayno / Piraro Bizarro of 5/26: A Wayno Psychiatrist cartoon, this time with couples therapy in which the couples’s conflicts are referred to the attitudes of their inner children, one of whom is said to be infected with the dreaded cooties of childlore (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page) It’s likely that some of my readers will find this one-sentence summary of the cartoon’s content to be simply incomprehensible — because the two central terms in all of this belong to specialized vocabularies — cooties from American childlore; and inner child from pop-psychological therapy-talk. The short versions, from NOAD: — noun cootie: … 2 (usually cooties) US a children’s term for an imaginary germ said to have infected a person of the opposite sex or someone considered socially undesirable: he would run around the playground and chase me around and I thought he had cooties | [as modifier]: every grade level had a…