from pawn to queen in Through the Looking Glass, they forget that she is a linguistic
construct, a trope for the unresolved problems of her author (Greenacre 1955). It is
important that psychoanalytic critics are aware of the ambivalences inherent in their
method and do not seize one aspect of a psychoanalytical theory as a tool for
interpretation, thereby reducing the text to universals about human development
(compare Hogan 1990; Knoepflmacher 1990; Phillips and Wojcik-Andrews 1990; Steig
1990; Zipes 1990).
The following discussion will focus on defining those psychoanalytic theories that have
influenced the criticism of children’s literature. Frequently such criticism relies on the
informal developmental psychological knowledge of the interpreter without reference to
any specific theory. This is especially true of realistic narratives for young adults. The
strongest psychoanalytic tradition of criticism can be found in the interpretation of
folktales and märchen and, to a lesser extent in fantasy literature. While Freud, Jung and
their disciples have been important in interpretations of children’s literature, the
poststructuralist influence has not been as prevalent. Quite dominant, however, is the
influence of psychological criticism that relates the development of the child character to
the social context depicted in psychologically realistic narratives. Perhaps because of the
deep issues involved in psychoanalytic criticism, critics of children’s literature
occasionally seem to screen discussions of psychoanalytical issues with analyses of
social contexts, even where the topic is announced as being psychoanalytical (Smith and
Kerrigan 1985).
Freudian CriticismClassical Freudian criticism interprets the work as an expression of psychopathography,
as a symptom whose creation provided therapeutic release for the author. In ‘The
relation of the poet to daydreaming’ (1908), Freud saw the crucial relationship between
child-play/poet-language: ‘every child at play behaves like an imaginative writer, in that
he creates a world of his own or, more truly, he arranges the things of this world and
orders it in a new way that pleases him better ...Language has preserved this
relationship between children’s play and poetic creation’ (1908/1963 9:144), just as it
does between dream and text.
Freud assumed that all psychoneurotic symptoms are generated by psychic conflicts
between a person’s sexual desires and the strictures of society. The conflict is expressed
through substitutions and displacements, just as in literature a metaphor’s tenor and
vehicle condense two disparate ideas into one image that hides and reveals what is not
articulated. Similarly, displacement substitutes socially acceptable modes for desires
that are forbidden. Substitutions thus function as censors in dreams and daydreams, in
play and in texts. Freud’s first triad of unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious
defines the unconscious as a non-verbal, instinctual and infantile given and as
dominated by the pleasure principle. The desires and conflicts (oral, anal, oedipal) of
childhood persist throughout the adult’s life and can be made conscious only by being
first raised to the level of the pre-conscious which facilitates the dynamic of
consciousness and repression through condensation and displacement. Freud later
modified his first triad with the paradigm of id, ego and superego, in part because he
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