Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature

Notes

211 Introduction 1. Lewis Carroll’s two Alice books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), are often conflated as Alice in Wonderland. Hereafter, I use Alice to refer to both Carroll texts unless otherwise noted. Peter Pan has its own complicated history of publication and condensation, which Rose (1984) reviews; for me, Peter Pan refers to the texts of Barrie. 2. In the field, “picturebook” is an accepted alternative to “picture book.” The former is sometimes used to underscore the interdependence of image and text. On terminology, see Nikolajeva and Scott 2001, 1–6. 3. Mary Galbraith nicely gives her review of Rollin and West’s Psychoanalytic Responses to Children’s Literature the title “Freud and Toad are Friends.” Galbraith alludes to Arnold Lobel’s 1979 picturebook Frog and Toad Are Friends. 4. In “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” Sigmund Freud calls psychoanalysis one of three “impossible” professions, the other two being government and education. “Impossibility” has since become something of a master trope in psychoanalytic discourse, a way of emphasizing the intractability of a subject but also of self-credentializing (I will solve this impossible problem!). Deborah Britzman (2003) has explained how this trope also functions in educational theory and practice. 5. In Hide and Seek, Virginia L. Blum reverses Rose’s hierarchy, finding Notes 212 notes to introduction psychoanalysis more suspect than literature or its criticism and arguing that psychoanalytic theories promising insight into childhood in fact mythologize it. The child, she suggests, is an “unknowable subject” and indeed the “ultimate blind spot” of psychoanalysis (1995, 23). The lack of critical attention to the place of the child in psychoanalytic discourse, she asserts, comes “from a general failure on the part of the psychoanalytic enterprise to account for its own unconscious” (23). Rose and Blum agree on the impossibility of the adult–child relationship, but they disagree over which discourse—psychoanalysis or literature —is the problem and which offers a solution to (or at least insight into) the problem. Whereas Rose finds in Freud the antidote to the “fiction[s]” of childhood , Blum sees in “go-between” literary narrative (in which a child functions as a go-between for two or more adults) an exposé of the kind of truth claims about childhood asserted by psychoanalysis. While Peter Pan is Rose’s poster boy, Blum concentrates on the “go-between” child figure in Charles Dickens, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. Blum does not disparage children’s literature , but she has little to say about it, despite its own preponderance of go-between figures. Neither Rose nor Blum identifies herself as a scholar of children’s literature. 6. See Freud 1907. Gay thinks Freud was drawn to The Jungle Books because of its theme of savagery and civilization and its emphasis on the superiority of animals who acknowledge their animality over humans who try (unsuccessfully) to repress their animality (1990, 104). 7. See M. Gubar 2009, 29–33; Nodelman 1985; Reynolds 2007, 3–9; Rudd 2010, 2004. The fall 2010 issue of Children’s Literature Association Quarterly , guest edited by Rudd and Anthony Pavlik, examines the negative as well as the positive legacy of Rose. In The Hidden Adult, Nodelman takes on not only Rose but also Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, who in Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child declares the impossibility of children’s literature criticism. Lesnik-Oberstein maintains that said criticism relies upon various constructions of the child that are impossible to maintain. Like Rose, Lesnik-Oberstein champions psychoanalysis, arguing in her final chapter that D. W. Winnicott should be our exemplary theorist, since he ostensibly avoids essentializing the child through attention to transference, interpersonal relation , and the analytic space. While children’s literature criticism, she claims, is “inextricably tied to a prescriptive role,” psychoanalysis and psychotherapy function “non-prescriptively” (1994, 176). Nodelman counters that “there are certainly as many bad prescriptive therapists with normative assumptions about desirable mental health as there are bad prescriptive critics with normative assumptions about children” (2008, 160). 8. Martha Stoddard Holmes makes much the same point with specific ref- notes to introduction 213 erence to Peter Pan: “Peter Pan as a classification problem is a powerful spur for the discipline of children’s literature to reformulate its project in broader terms, defining a genre in which adults and children have different engagements...