In commenting on the influence of Klein on literary theory, Elizabeth Wright regrets
that Klein’s demonstration of fantasy as a precondition of any engagement with reality
has been neglected by literary critics who have instead focused on the aesthetic of ego
psychology (1984:83–84). It is through the structure of fantasy that the child acts out
not only real or imagined damage, but also the desire for reparation. Klein saw the
monsters and menacing figures of myths and fairy tales as parent displacements exerting
unconscious influences on the child by making it feel threatened and persecuted, but
such emotions ‘can clear our feelings to some extent towards our parents of grievances,
we can forgive them for the frustrations we had to bear, become at peace with ourselves’
so that ‘we are able to love others in the true sense of the word’ (1975b: 343).
In criticisms of children’s literature, Klein’s approach can reveal how the text enables
the actualisation of the ego intentionally or how it falls short of it. For example, an
interpretation of Bianco’s The Velveteen Rabbit reveals it as a fantasy of unresolved
ambivalence between the need to be loved and becoming independent, that is, real.
Because ‘the story never acknowledges the Rabbit’s desire to grow away from the object
of his attachment, and hence never acknowledges the basis for his entry into the
depressive position, it cannot credit him with working through it’ (Daniels 1990:26). The
Kleinian perspective also offers insight into the relation of fantasy to guilt and reparation
as exemplified in White’s Charlotte’s Web (Rustin 1987:161).
While Klein focused on play as a means to the end of the therapeutic process,
D.W.Winnicott saw play as intrinsically facilitating healthy development and group
relationships. Even psychoanalysis is an elaborate playing ‘in the service of
communication with oneself and others’ (1971:41). In his studies of babies and children,
Winnicott retained the psychoanalytic attention to inner reality along with an emphasis
on the child’s cultural and social context. Crucial in his discovery is the concept of the
‘transitional object’: ‘one must recognise the central position of Winnie-the-Pooh’ (xi). By
transitional object and transitional space Winnicott designates the intermediate area of
experience between the thumb and the teddy bear, between oral eroticism and true
object relationships. Identifying the mother’s breast as part of itself, the baby must
develop the ability of the ‘not me’ through substitutions which are transitions between
the illusion of identification and the acceptance of the ‘not me’. The baby’s relationship
with the transitional object has special qualities: the infant assumes right but not
omnipotence over the object which can be loved and changed, even mutilated by the
infant. Gradually, the infant will be able to detach itself from the object which becomes
consigned to a limbo, rather than being introjected by the infant (1–5). The object is not
a signifier for some hidden unconscious content, but a crucial partner in the game of
intersubjectivity as the playing infant tests out the me/not me.
Winnicott’s concept of the transitional object not only lends itself to the interpretation
of content images in narratives, but also to the text itself. Both author and reader can
claim the text as transitional object. Small children do indeed appropriate a book as
object—loving it, adding to it, mutilating it. An especially Winnecottian book would be
Margaret Wise Brown’s Good Night Moon, which has been cited as an example of child’s
having just learned the distinction between animate and inanimate objects. ‘Good night,
bears’ (toys) and ‘good night, kittens’ is acceptable, but saying good night to chairs and
mittens provokes shrieks of laughter in the child (Applebee 1978:41) who does not yet
92 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES