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

2. Child Analysis, Play, and the Golden Age of Pooh

35 You probably won’t see me again at the MLA, but remember: somewhere a Bear and his Best Critic will always be playing. —Frederick Crews, as “N. Mack Hobbs,” Postmodern Pooh I n a provocative essay about theory and psychoanalysis, Michael Payne likens scenes of child sexual curiosity in Freud’s 1908 The Sexual Theories of Children (1963d) to chapter 7 of A. A. Milne’s 1926 Winnie-the-Pooh, about the alarming arrival of Kanga and Baby Roo in the 100 Aker Wood. “The subsequent, charming conversation among Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit,” writes Payne, is a wonderfully zany exercise in theory construction arising out of such concerns as these: Who are these strange animals with their odd ways who have just intruded into our forest, especially having as they do a pocket in the mother’s body for the baby? If rabbits had pockets for babies, how many would they have to have? (Rabbit’s Answer: 18, including the one for a pocket handkerchief.) What are we going to do about this sudden intrusion of an unexpected baby, a mother with an unusual body, and other strange and disturbing uncertainties ? (2005, 2–3) Payne sees in Milne and Freud both a double-consciousness, “in which the reader is invited to identify simultaneously with the youthful 2. Child Analysis, Play, and the Golden Age of Pooh 36 child analysis, play, and POOH perspective of a more or less innocent fictional character and with the more critically reflexive persona of the narrator” (1). We theorize with the child, but also with the adult attending to the child. Payne underscores the commitment within psychoanalysis to the play of language and ideas in and around childhood, beginning with Freud and extending to the work of Adam Phillips, a writer and contemporary psychoanalyst (in fact, a child analyst). In so doing, however , Payne also underscores the resemblances of children’s literature to psychoanalysis and theory. Whereas Jacqueline Rose mobilizes psychoanalysis against children’s literature, Payne sees them as analogous, even parallel enterprises. Payne’s essay was one of the inspirations for my book, suggesting as it does that we might make a case very different from the one Rose makes, and also by way of a classic text. Payne’s use of Pooh, however, is no more accidental than is mine in this chapter, or than Rose’s use of Peter Pan. Just as Rose writes in the wake of broader case writing about Peter Pan, Payne and I write in the wake of Poohology, or Pooh-centric discourse. Poohology emerged from Milne’s books and from the material culture of Pooh, which had been expanding dramatically since the 1920s, spanning games, toys, tea sets, clothes, and all kinds of pop-culture items.1 The first Pooh songbook was published in 1926 and was dedicated to the recently born Princess Elizabeth of Great Britain (Sibley 2001, 96). Poohology proper began later, probably with Alexander Lenard’s Latin translation of Milne’s book, Winnie ille Pu (1958), produced as a teaching aid and the first foreign-language title on the New York Times bestseller list. Next up was Frederick Crews’s hilarious if vicious satire The Pooh Perplex (1963), ostensibly a “freshman casebook ” on literary criticism. Poohology mobilizes Pooh toward various ends, which might be generally called pedagogical. Much more so than the case writing I take up in the next chapter, Poohology imitates while extending Pooh stylistically or thematically. That is, while case writing about Peter Pan or Alice or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shows some fidelity to those source texts, Poohology often looks a great deal like Pooh, quoting extensively from Milne as well as adopting his playful, minimalist style. Poohology is the playful repetition and interpretation of source text. While Payne’s essay is not primarily about Pooh, it uses Pooh to child analysis, play, and POOH 37 draw suggestive comparisons among children’s literature, psychoanalysis , and critical theory and thus works somewhat like Poohology. My chapter, too, makes use of Pooh and might be called historicist Poohology . I show how this classic has long been bound up with psychoanalytic and pop-psychological discourse. Pooh began to accrue psychological interest in the 1920s, when child analysis was being developed. The books were then a subject not of psychoanalytic investigation but rather of an analogous investigation into play and the child–adult relationship . The child analysts did not...