‘Make this adult mess make sense again’: the psychic lives of gentrification’s children

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper advocates for increased scholarly curiosity about the painful and hopeful psychic agency of children and youth in critiquing neoliberal urban gentrification and imagining alternative forms of city life. It performs a geographically and theoretically informed reading of American director Ira Sachs’ 2016 film Little Men, a story about a brief but intense childhood friendship that is ended by an eviction. Drawing on the gentrification and psychoanalytic geography literatures, I turn to psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s key clinical observations regarding ‘antisocial’ children and youth. Bringing these tools into dialogue with Little Men, I consider the revealing differences between the film’s shooting script and the final cut, as well as the film’s reception. Little Men and its child protagonists, I argue, should inspire more fine-grained attention to gentrification’s psychic dimensions, which both animate the process and open it to contestation.