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

3. Three Case Histories Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz

65 I want to tell you about a syndrome in our society that is causing a lot of problems. We all know it’s there, but until now nobody has labeled or explained it. —Dan Kiley, The Peter Pan Syndrome: Men Who Have Never Grown Up J acqueline Rose’s THE CASE OF PETER PAN (1984) is not only the best-known theoretical statement on children’s literature; it is also the best-known example of what we might call literary-critical case writing : the building of an argument or analysis around a single text, usually literary, and in this instance a text for children. Rose was not the first to practice such case writing. We recall Crews’s The Pooh Perplex, addressed in chapter 2, which satirizes not only schools of literary analysis but also the freshman pedagogical casebook on a literary text. To very different ends, Crews and Rose capitalize on and in turn extend the “hypercanonicity” (to use Jonathan Arac’s term for Twain’s Huck Finn) of a children’s classic. Because Pooh and Peter Pan are already so diffuse or overdetermined, Crews and Rose can range far afield of the text proper to address larger literary and cultural issues. A less well known but equally fascinating exercise in case writing is Jennifer Stone’s essay on “Pinocchiology.” Noting that virtually every major writer and cultural critic in Italy has written about Carlo Collodi’s 1881 book The Adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a Puppet, Jennifer Stone criticizes Pinocchiology for its obsession with native 3. Three Case Histories Alice, Peter Pan, and The Wizard of Oz 66 three case histories Italian culture and its evasion of Sigmund Freud’s insights into the psyche, an evasion she dubs the “Pinocchio Complex.” Pinocchiologists, she thinks, ignore or downplay Freud’s ideas about infantile sexuality, the unconscious, and the Oedipus complex. “The resistance to Freud in Italy,” she writes, “is such that even an acknowledged ‘phallic’ nose is subsumed by the innocence of childhood and by the immaculacy of the Virgin Madonna-Fairy-Godmother” (1994, 329). Stone promises us the true story of Pinocchio.1 Stone and Rose both assert that “we” fly away from the hard lessons of Freud into the Neverland of childhood and “children’s fiction.” Like Stone, Rose recognizes the complexities of her literary source text, using them alongside Freudian and Lacanian theory to emphasize the politics of misreading and denial. Unlike Crews, who is not particularly invested in the status of the Pooh books, Rose and Stone juxtapose the maturity of the source text with the screen dream of simple stories for simple folks (children). The problem is not Pinocchio or Peter Pan but “children’s fiction,” whether it takes the form of actual fiction or the governing fiction of childhood’s innocence. Such literary-critical case writing on the children’s classic is always already psychoanalytic in form as well as content. The Pooh Perplex may be a parody, but it is nonetheless still a casebook, one through which Crews rehearses his reservations about psychoanalysis and in which psychoanalytic discourse nonetheless enjoys favor. Unlike Crews, Rose and Stone enthusiastically embrace the discourse of psychoanalysis , adapting one of its principal genres, the case study or case history. Rose and Stone do not just want to set the literary record straight; they want to teach us the real lessons of psychoanalysis, continuing Freud’s project by using one of Freud’s preferred forms. Like Freud, they imagine a reader resistant to their lessons, a reader clinging to ignorance or innocence despite indications of trouble or complexity. “We have been reading the wrong Freud to children” (1984, 12), Rose intones, suggesting our resistance to or deliberate misunderstanding of Freud. Case writing on children’s literature undertakes not only the education of the reader but also a broader critique of innocence, ignorance, or immaturity. Built into the case history form is the assumption that people usually prefer simplicity to complexity, even if not also ignorance to knowledge. The critique of American male immaturity has special resonance and staying power. It dates back at least to Van Wyck three case histories 67 Brooks’s 1920 book The Ordeal of Mark Twain, a Freudian critique of the ostensible immaturity of Twain and his reading public of ostensibly boyish men, and extends to Dwight Macdonald’s 1953 analysis of mass culture as producing “adultized children and infantile...