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

Introduction: Reopening the Case of Peter Pan

vii “ T he serious study of children’s literature ,” writes Michael Egan in a 1982 essay on Peter Pan, “may be said to have begun with Freud” (37). Freud was interested in a genre now firmly associated with childhood, the fairy tale, and thanks to his encouragement, “almost every single major psychoanalyst wrote at least one paper applying psychoanalytic theory to folklore” (Dundes 1987, 21). But though the serious study of children’s literature began with Freud, we may also say that psychoanalysis developed in part through its engagement with children’s literature. Psychoanalysis used children’s literature to articulate and dramatize its themes and methods, turning first to folklore and the fairy tale and then to materials developed during child analysis and to children’s literary texts, especially classic fantasies such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, and Peter Pan.1 While Freud and the first analysts did not think of themselves as engaging with “children’s literature,” their work helped advance as well as reshape that literature. Children’s literature has in turn appropriated and even influenced psychoanalysis. As psychoanalysis underwent dissemination and adaptation , two newer genres of children’s literature—the picturebook2 Introduction: Reopening the Case of Peter Pan viii introduction and the adolescent (now young adult, or YA) novel—were fashioned as psychological (perhaps also psychoanalytic) in form and function. Put another way, the picturebook and the adolescent novel were two narrative forms in and around which psychoanalysis underwent dissemination and adaptation. Children’s literature more broadly is now often understood as creative psychological work undertaken on behalf of the young subject. This is particularly true for these two genres. Authors and illustrators of these genres have accrued and asserted a kind of lay psychological expertise. Meanwhile, we can see in both classical and revisionist psychoanalysis the imprint of children’s literature and its professional study. Freud in Oz is about the historical and contemporary relationship between children’s literature and psychoanalysis. That relationship has been sometimes collaborative and sometimes antagonistic, at times favoring one project or discourse over the other. Even so, it is best understood as two-way, or mutually constitutive. While my title might call up dreams (or nightmares) of Sigmund Freud in Oz—with Freud, say, as the not-so-innocent abroad or as the Wizard himself—I use “Freud” and “Oz” as markers for psychoanalysis and children’s literature and for their intersections. Freud in Oz might also be titled Oz in Freud, in that children’s literature is shown to be as much a shaping presence within psychoanalysis as psychoanalysis is within children’s literature.3 Freud in Oz thus revises existing “case writing” on children’s literature and psychoanalysis, in particular Jacqueline Rose’s influential The Case of Peter Pan; or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction. Appropriating the psychoanalytic genre of the case history (more on this in chapter 3), The Case of Peter Pan ushered into children’s literature studies a timely and useful hermeneutics of suspicion. It did so, however , by pitting psychoanalysis against children’s literature, which Rose sees as equivalent to the classic Romantic view of childhood as a time of innocence and simplicity. According to Rose, children’s fiction claims an “impossible” relation of adult to child (1984, 1), one presuming the transparency of language alongside the retrievability of childhood.4 The fantasy of the child as emblematic of a “lost truth and/or moment in history” (43) is one we never leave behind but rather repeat endlessly , from John Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, all the way to Bruno Bettelheim and Maurice Sendak, in her view. For Rose, it is Freud (and Jacques Lacan) who tells more truthfully the story of childhood, expos- introduction ix ing it as a myth that gives coherence to otherwise alarming experiences of self and otherness. If we learn to read the real Freud, she says, and not the revisionist Freud of ego psychology, we will realize that Freud sought to dismantle the ideologies allegedly underwriting children’s literature , among them the idea that “childhood is part of a strict developmental sequence at the end of which stands the cohered and rational consciousness of the adult mind” (13).5 In her introduction to The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, Françoise Meltzer emphasizes the asymmetry of psychoanalysis and literature, looking back to Shoshana Felman’s...