Notes
Notes Introduction 1. The example of child’s play Freud offers in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is what has come to be known as the fort-da game, a ritual he notices his grandson enacting whenever his mother leaves the child. I return to this example in the Coda. 2. Burkert writes in Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth that ritual sacrifice “creates and affirms social interaction” (23). He sees it as an opportunity for collective aggression to give rise to a sense of community (35). In Human Sacrifice: In History and Today, Nigel Davies paraphrases the argument by W. Robertson Smith that “sacrifice was aimed at cementing the bonds between man and god” (23). See also Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’s Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. 3. Of course, given Freud’s interests in archeology and anthropology, he is likely to have himself been influenced by this long tradition of understanding sacrifice as possessing transformative effects, which means that rather than simply explaining a phenomenon , psychoanalysis offers yet another version of the same story of love, loss, and maturation. Following Kenneth Kidd, who cautions against privileging psychoanalysis as a method for treating the material of children’s literature, I understand psychoanalysis less as a tool to be applied to literary texts and more as itself yet another text that can be placed alongside the first. This act of juxtaposition clarifies both discourses— children’s literature and psychoanalysis—as invested in representing, understanding, and deploying sacrifice or renunciation as a disciplinary mechanism for promoting or inducing maturation (“‘A’ Is for Auschwitz” 123). See also Kidd’s “Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature: The Case for Complementarity,” in which he argues that “it’s time to leave behind the ‘psychoanalytic approaches’ or ‘responses to’ model of scholarship” in favor of treating “psychoanalysis and children’s literature as discourses that revolve around similar concerns and themes” (110) 4. Other critics have made use of the concept of melancholia to explain works of art and literature, most notably Julia Kristeva in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989) and David Aberbach in Surviving Trauma: Loss, Literature and Psychoanalysis (1989). 5. I want to stress that masculinity can be performed either by men or women. The elements of responsibility, for instance, start to sound remarkably close to the performance of certain qualities of masculinity, which can be associated with the care of self x Notes to Pages xxiv–1 136 and others, particularly the protection of others who are dependent and less responsible. Although responsible mothers are expected to protect their young, the act of doing so might be more akin to the qualities associated with masculinity. 6. This is not the complete list of symptoms provided by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV-TR (Text Revision). Others include weight loss or weight gain, insomnia or hypersomnia, psychomotor agitation, fatigue, difficulty concentrating , and suicidal ideation. Some of these symptoms clearly move melancholia away from the mass condition that characterizes mature adulthood into the realm of debilitating illness. 7. The use of terms like “adolescent,” “teenager,” and young adult” are not always synonymous, and scholars disagree about the emergence and widespread recognition of each of them. Frank Musgrove dates the invention of the adolescent to Rousseau in the early 1760s (Musgrove 33). French historian Philippe Ariès writes, “Until the eighteenth century adolescence was confused with childhood. In school Latin the word puer and the word adolescens were used indiscriminately” (25). Alleen Pace Nilsen and Kenneth L. Donelson suggest that in practice adolescence emerges as a separate period of life in the United States after the Civil War as the nation became increasingly industrialized (Cart 4). G. Stanley Hall’s Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, first published in 1904, stands as the first landmark psychological study of adolescence, but substantial further research was not conducted until the 1940s (Cart 5). The word “teenager,” of U.S. origin, was not coined until 1941, although terms like “teen” and “teen age” (occurring with or without the hyphen and as one or two words) had been in use since the 1920s and 1930s, by which time a shift to compulsory education and the legal restrictions on child labor had redefined the period between childhood and adulthood (see Dalzell and Ayto). While in 1930 the number of teenagers graduating from high school was equal to 29 percent of seventeen-year-olds in...
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