Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature Lucy Rollin (bio) Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature. By Kenneth B. Kidd. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. When I heard the title of this book, and its author, I figured I'd like it. When I saw its cover, I laughed out loud and knew I'd like it. (Like the author, someone at the University of Minnesota Press has a delicious sense of humor.) Now I not only like it; I admire, respect, and honor it as it takes its place among the essential works for those of us interested in children's literature. Kenneth Kidd explores those junctures, crossovers, and shared spaces where psychoanalysis and children's literature feed, and feed on, each other. Instead of identifying himself with any particular approach, he says, he has "settled for a more modest and cheerful story of entanglement and exchange" (xxvii). His "modest and cheerful story" allows him to explore, sample, recreate, observe, describe, and critique a host of approaches both scholarly and popular, without dogma or dire predictions of intellectual ferment. He performs a deft, clear-eyed tap dance among deep crevasses of theory, without ever falling in. Although Kidd admits his subject is "dynamic, fuzzy, and enmeshed" (xx), resulting in greater fluidity than usual in cultural history, Freud in Oz is organized somewhat chronologically with regard both to psychoanalytic theory and children's literature. Kidd's first chapter treats the fairy tale, which fascinated Freud, Jung, Klein, librarians, and children's literature specialists in the early twentieth century who prescribed the fairy tale for a child's first encounter with literature. Enter Bruno Bettelheim. His 1976 work, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tale, further "sanctified" the folk fairy tale as the perfect intersection of children's literature and psychoanalysis; any subsequent treatment of the subject must deal with Bettelheim's book. Of course, it has been attacked on a number of issues, including plagiarism. Kidd handles these issues thoughtfully, fairly, gracefully. He refuses to take sides, instead emphasizing the complexity of Bettelheim's vision and its fundamental importance: The fairy tale has brought analysis into popular thought and writing "better than all the psychoanalytic institutes combined. Moreover, the fairy tale has helped maintain childhood at the center of psychoanalysis" (33). There is no better iteration of Kidd's thesis. Chapter two treats "Poohology," which Kidd defines as a "form of popular psychology and child analysis [End Page 500] and literary criticism and theory" (37), associated especially in the academic mind with Frederick Crews's The Pooh Perplex. Here we have not only Pooh, but also the theories of Hug-Hellmuth, Klein, and Winnicott (whom Kidd briefly and endearingly dubs "Winnicott-the-Pooh"), the child analysts who emphasized play as the window to the unconscious. Children's books depict, encourage, and become play; thus has child analysis "affirmed the cause of children's literature" (63). The charm of this chapter, indeed of the whole book, is Kidd's own perfectly tuned playfulness—a hallmark of his work generally and especially delightful here. Kidd next treats three major ("hypercanonical") texts: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, works attracting more psychological and literary critique than do any other so-called classic works for children. Kidd rightly adds that one reason for this attention is their intense appeal to adult readers as well. These works have inspired case studies: critiques using a single work to formulate an argument that has broader implications. (Jacqueline Rose on Peter Pan is the prime example.) Kidd lingers on Oz and the applications of queer theory that it has attracted of late. Queer theory is one of Kidd's areas of expertise, so his discussion of the Oz phenomenon is generous and enlightening. He notes that all three works are overdetermined: they manage to represent all sorts of unconscious drives and desires which may be present in readers at various times in their lives. If, for some ghastly reason, you can read only one chapter of Freud in Oz, let it be chapter...