By Kenneth B. Kidd
Children’s literature has spent many years at the psychiatrist’s sofa, filing to psychoanalysis by means of rankings of students and renowned writers alike. Freud in Oz turns the tables, suggesting that psychoanalysts owe an important and principally unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for kids. actually, Kenneth B. Kidd argues, children’s literature and psychoanalysis have prompted and interacted with one another in view that Freud released his first case studies.
In Freud in Oz, Kidd exhibits how psychoanalysis built partially via its engagement with children’s literature, which it used to articulate and dramatize its issues and strategies, turning first to folklore and fairy stories, then to fabrics from psychoanalysis of kids, and thence to children’s literary texts, in particular such vintage fantasies as Peter Pan and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. He lines how children’s literature, and significant reaction to it, aided the popularization of psychoanalytic conception. With expanding attractiveness of psychoanalysis got here new genres of children’s literature—known at the present time as photograph books and younger grownup novels—that have been often shaped as mental of their types and functions.
Freud in ounces offers a historical past of reigning theories within the research of children’s literature and psychoanalysis, delivering clean insights on a range of subject matters, together with the view that Maurice Sendak and Bruno Bettelheim will be regarded as opponents, that Sendak’s makeover of monstrosity helped result in the likes of the Muppets, and that “Poohology” is its personal form of literary criticism—serving up Winnie the Pooh because the poster undergo for theorists of greatly various stripes.
