7
Psychoanalytical Criticism
Hamida Bosmajian
Because the child and childhood hold a privileged position in most psychoanalytical
theories, the elective affinity between children’s literature and psychological criticism
seems even more natural than the affinity between psychology and literature in general.
Psychoanalytic theory adds to the literary text a ‘second dimension—unfolding what
might be called the unconscious content of the work’ (Holland 1970:131), but the
condensations and displacements at work in the author—text—reader relation are
problematised in children’s literature because of the double reader: adult/child.
Children’s fiction might be impossible because it rests on the assumption that there is
a child who can be addressed when, in actuality, ‘children’s fiction sets up the child as
an outsider to its own process, and that aims, unashamedly, to take the child in’ (Rose
1984:2). The implied author, even in first-person narration by a child character, is a
displacement of the contexts of personal and collective values and neuroses.
Furthermore, while the analyst is supposedly the most reliable reader-interpreter of
stories told in a psychoanalytic dialogue by the analysand-author, the reader of adult
literature may or may not be a reliable interpreter of the text. In children’s literature the
implied reader is, moreover, highly unreliable and, therefore, most easily ‘taken in’.
Thus, the authorial self is in a sense liberated, in that the textual strategies and gaps
that constitute the subtext of the work escape the implied reader, the child. The author
can experience therapeutic release without anxieties over the scrutiny of an adult’s
psychoanalytical critique.
The nemesis for the projection of the naïve implied reader is the adult reader as
psychoanalytic critic of children’s literature who exposes the gaps, substitutions and
displacements of the author and appropriates the author’s text as a symptom of
individual or cultural neuroses that underlie and undermine values associated with
growth and development. While psychoanalytic critics of adult literature amplify the
reader’s appreciation of the text, those same critics will, in the case of children’s
literature, conceal their interpretation from the child and, therewith, both censor and
protect the author. The child may be imaged as myth of origin—as father of the man and
mother of the woman—but in children’s literature the adult is in control.
The correspondences between author—text—reader and analysand—psychoanalytic
dialogue-analyst break down, for author-reader are not in a dialogical relation, no
matter how intensely the reader responds, nor can the critic-interpreter make enquiries
of a character in a narrative, as an analyst can in the psychoanalytic situation. While
critics act as if one could ask about Alice’s relation with her parents as she develops