Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction (review)

L'Esprit Créateur Virginia L. Blum. Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction. Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. χ + 299. $39.95 (cloth); $17.95 (paper). The central premise of Virginia Blum's Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction is that the children that populate psychoanalysis and fiction are phantasmagoric figures, puppets constructed to enact the imperatives of their adult creators. The "stories" told about and through these figures are, inevitably, the adults' own. Blum argues against any "distinction between historical and narrative truths" and "resists an encounter with a material child that.. . remains inaccessible" (14). She accordingly punctuates portrayals of the child in psychoanalysis and fiction with "intervals" and a final chapter that address representations in the "real" world, such as the "Baby Jessica" case, recovered memories of child abuse, and mandated Norplant usage. In each register, Blum sees the child as a "go-between," "mirror," or "blind spot" (36, 200, 89). "It," as Blum insists the child must be called, has no material existence; we adults create our own chimerical reality and "interpret ourselves through the child" (fh9, 14; 5). Blum's analyses of The Go-Between, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, What Maisie Knew, and Lolita are detailed and thoughtful. For example, her explication of Leo Colston as a Lacanian "phallic child" (97) illuminates both the novel's and Lacan's refusal to consider the Oedipus complex as the "fantasy of a triad camouflaging a dyad" (85). Her interweaving of psychoanalytic and fictional accounts of the family romance in "The Dickensian Child" is particularly fine, as she explores how the child functions both as "the past of omnipotent narcissism and the future of unfulfilled potential" (143). According to Blum's line of reasoning, both the Dickensian child and psychoanalysis use repetition to achieve "a permanent ascension into a perfected family" (159). Although I would argue that successful therapy—or a novel such as Great Expectations—requires not the perfection of defenses and "stasis" (161) but recognition that the family wasn't/won't be perfect, Blum makes a strong case in relation to the novels she discusses. In scrutinizing those "self-sustaining and self-confirming repetitions" (267) and the child's function as "an emblem of time itself" (112), Blum insightfully emphasizes the temporal quandaries of analysis and fiction. Does a reader or an analyst identify with the "adult or child position" (45), "the chronological [or] psychological ages of the subject" (47), and to what end? Blum's discussion of temporal complexities highlights a major structural dimension in both realms. Perhaps because of my own willful reconstructions, there sometimes seems to be a tension between Blum's insistence upon the post-modern child and the glimpses of the "real thing" that the title itself suggests. If I'm a bit chilled by her having "invited these two disciplines to meet over the body of the child on which their self-representation depends" (248), I'm comforted that there is a body. Similarly, although she denies that "female fantasies of the child are more accurate, more in touch with actual children, than male fantasies " (270), according to her own rationale the child seems once more a pawn as she urges the need to find "strategies whereby women can take back the child wrested from them by male narrative fantasies of all kinds" (270). Blum's study consistently raises astute, provocative, and arguable propositions that will encourage all critical seekers to pause before declaring that we have "found" a child hiding in a text. Michelle A. Massé Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 100 Fall 1997 ...