Freud and Toad Are Friends

Volume 18 of Children's Literature (1990) was devoted to a discussion of the relation between psychoanalysis and children's literature. According to the back cover of that volume, the nine featured articles used "psychoanalytic master narratives, as found in the writings of Freud, Jung, Piaget[!], Bettelheim, and others" as interpretive keys to works of children's literature. Among the featured articles were a Kleinian interpretation of The Velveteen Rabbit (Daniels), a reading of William Steig's picture books based on Bettelheim and Piaget (Wilner), and "The Reproduction of Mothering in Charlotte's Web," by Lucy Rollin, based on Nancy Chodorow's work and reprinted in the book under review.

Following the featured articles in volume 18 was a section labeled "Comments," in which critics of children's literature with expertise in psychoanalysis offered several friendly but serious criticisms of the enterprise undertaken in the articles. These critics saw psychoanalytic interpretation of children's literature as often derivative, uncritical, and lagging in its use of psychoanalytic sources (Steig, Hogan, and Zipes), and as therefore perpetuating many of the faults of classical psychoanalytic practice, especially its divorce from a living context and its domineering stance toward its analysand (Knoepflmacher, Steig). Furthermore, it had not yet fully grasped its natural potential for exposing adult defects from the point of view of childhood interests (Phillips and Wojcik-Andrews). It also lacked a philosophical articulation of its own analytic project (Hogan, Knoepflmacher, Phillips and Wojcik-Andrews). Finally, by "denying the historical significance of the author's psychology and fantasizing" (Zipes 141), it missed its own deepest implications for the study of literary composition, creativity, and fantasy (Zipes, Knoepflmacher). My shorthand names for these criticisms: scholarly weakness, universalizing, normalizing adult defects, lacking philosophical vision, and missing the main chance.

My biggest disappointment with Lucy Rollin and Mark I. West's new book is that it does not substantively address any of these important criticisms. The introduction to Psychoanalytic Approaches to Children's Literature, a book that is avowedly aimed at introducing psychoanalysis to neophytes in the literature department, is primarily devoted to airing and revising popular perceptions about Freud as a person and as a thinker. In Rollin and West's knowledgeable but condescending portrait of Freud, the stern authority figure with burning eyes that most of us, I dare say, carry in our memory archives is replaced by a deferential fellow who can safely be invited into the literary salon and the nursery. Although they do mention several objections to classical Freudian theory, Rollin and West either remain silent or simply plead guilty to the charges raised by the Comments in volume 18 without showing how this admission has complicated their approach in the articles that follow: "The most serious, and most valid, complaint about psychoanalytic criticism is that it too often ignores historical and cultural context. It behaves, some say, as if human emotions exist in a vacuum, as if they are not affected by time or place" (Rollin and West 13). But what has been done with this insight in the articles? Here the problems of intellectual deference and vague grounding pop up—it seems that we children's literature people can't do much about this problem until some master narrative comes along to give us guidance. The introduction mentions Marxist criticism as a valid corrective to the "vacuum" problem without, however, saying how this corrective alters their own philosophy or their interpretation of children's literature. For all its avowed agreement with critics of psychoanalytic literary criticism, Psychoanalytic Responses to Children's Literature, like most of the articles in volume 18 of Children's Literature, "remains curiously unconcerned with the problematic nature of the relationship between the psychoanalytic enterprise and the interpretation of children's literature" (Phillips and Wojcik-Andrews 127).

It may be that the articles in Psychoanalytic Responses to Children's Literature, some dating from 1990 or earlier, predate the authors' awareness of some of the deficits of psychoanalytic literary criticism. These articles as originally published may thus be...