suspected a greater simultaneity in the dynamics of the psyche. The revised triad places
the embattled ego between the deterministic forces of the id and the internalised
strictures of society. It is here where we find the cause of the pessimism in Freudian
psychoanalytic theory: the ego’s inevitable discontent.
Crucial for Freudian critics of children’s literature is the importance Freud gave to the
child in the psychoanalytic process. Though the Oedipus complex has been accepted as
part of child development, Freud’s insistence on the polymorphous sexuality of the infant
(1962/1975:39–72) is somewhat more troubling for most critics of children’s literature,
for if such sexuality is displaced in the text but communicates itself sub-textually to the
child-reader, then the author has transferred his infantile sexuality and communicates
it to the child. Texts such as Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (see Bosmajian
1985), Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen might fall into this category.
Freud’s profound appreciation of the psychological importance of language was bound
to lead him not only to interpretations of everyday language phenomena in the processes
of repression and substitution, but also to interpretations of major authors of European
literature. In ‘The occurrence in dreams of materials from fairy tales’, Freud notes that
fairy tales have such an impact on the mental life of the child that the adult will use
them later as screen memories for the experiences of childhood (1913/1963:59).
‘The serious study of children’s literature may be said to have begun with Freud’,
acknowledges Egan in his discussion of Peter Pan (1982:37). Psychoanalysts have indeed
been the precursors of the study of children’s literature, which explains the powerful
but dubious influence of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment (1975), a
discussion of familiar tales along infantile and adolescent psychosexual development.
Bettelheim sees the child’s libido as a threat to both a meaningful life and the social
order; therefore, the child needs fairy tales to order his inner house by acquiring a moral
education through the tales (5), for, as the stories unfold, they ‘give conscious credence
and body to the id pressures and show ways to satisfy these that are in line with ego
and superego’ (6). Literary critics have strongly critiqued Bettelheim not only for his a-
historicality and reductionism of Freud’s theories (Zipes 1979), but also for his punitive
pedagogy, for being ‘oddly accusatory towards children’ (Tatar 1992: xxii) and for
displacing his ‘own real life fantasies, particularly of the dutiful daughter who takes care
of her father’s needs’ (xxv) into his interpretative work.
Jungian CriticismJungian criticism discovers archetypes that are the basis for the images in a text. Pre-
consciously, or consciously, the author connects with archetypal patterns of which the
narrative becomes a variable whose content will somehow relate to the issue of the ego’s
integration with the self. Jung’s concept of the therapeutic process begins with the
recognition of the loss of an original wholeness, possessed by every infant, a wholeness
lost through self-inflation and/or alienation of the ego. On a mythic level, the ego would
experience a dark night of the soul followed by a breakthrough that establishes, not an
integration with the self, but a connection with the transpersonal self. The end of
Jungian analysis is not a complete individuation of the ego, but rather the analysand’s
88 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES