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Children’s literature has spent decades on the psychiatrist’s couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers. Freud in Oz suggests that psychoanalysts owe a significant and largely unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for children. Kenneth B. Kidd argues that children’s literature and psychoanalysis have influenced and interacted with each other since Freud published his first case studies.

Making American Boys is a thorough review of boy culture in America since the late nineteenth century. From the “boy work” promoted by character-building organizations such as Scouting and 4-H to current therapeutic and pop psychological obsessions with children’s self-esteem, Kenneth B. Kidd presents the great variety of cultural influences on the changing notion of boyhood.

In a provocative essay about theory and psychoanalysis, Michael Payne likens scenes of child sexual curiosity in Freud’s 1908The Sexual Theories of Children(1963d) to chapter 7 of A.A. Milne’s 1926Winnie-the-Pooh,about the alarming arrival of Kanga and Baby Roo in the 100 Aker Wood. “The subsequent, charming conversation among Pooh, Piglet, and Rabbit,” writes Payne, is a wonderfully zany exercise in theory construction arising out of such concerns as these: Who are these strange animals with their odd ways who have just intruded into our forest, especially having as they do a pocket in the mother’s body

The idea that the fairy tale is an appropriate narrative genre for children predates psychoanalysis, but psychoanalysis nurtured that idea, building upon existing associations of childhood and primitive/folk culture. Psychoanalytic advocacy for the fairy tale began long before Bruno Bettelheim made the case inThe Uses of Enchantment(1976). Bettelheim mobilizes familiar psychoanalytic arguments about the fairy tale, while addressing the issue of children’s literature directly. Bettelheim disparages modern children’s books and insists that the fairy tale is therealchildren’s literature, exactly because it is so psychologically useful. Fairy tales, he thought, encourage children to work through various unconscious

It's not surprising that the Holocaust has functioned as a sort of primal scene of children's trauma literature, through which a children's literature of atrocity has been authorized within the last decade, asserted around both the power and limitations of narrative. The recent surge of Holocaust and trauma writing has many causes and vectors, among them the success of the progressive social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and the residual faith in literature as a form of identity, empathy, and community in a pluralist society.

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, children’s texts about trauma, and especially the traumas of the Holocaust, have proliferated. Despite the difficulties of representing the Holocaust, or perhaps because of them, there seems to be consensus now that children’s literature is the most rather than the least appropriate forum for trauma work. Thus in “A New Algorithm in Evil: Children’s Literature in a Post-Holocaust World,” Elizabeth R. Baer emphasizes the urgency of “a children’s literature of atrocity,” recommending “confrontational” texts and proposing “a set of [four] criteria by which to measure the usefulness and effectiveness of children’s texts in

In 1963, humorist Louise Armstrong and illustrator Whitney Darrow Jr. published a picturebook entitledA Child’s Guide to Freud.Dedicated to “Sigmund F., A Really Mature Person,”A Child’s Guide to Freudis a send-up of Freudian ideas, pitched to adults and specifically to upper-middle-class New Yorkers. Armstrong was a confirmed Manhattanite and Darrow a longtimeNew Yorkercartoonist and children’s book illustrator. “This is Mommy,” the book begins, showing a woman chasing a naughty little boy. When she won’t let you play doctor with Susie, call her OVERPROTECTIVE. This is Daddy. He sleeps in the same room as Mommy.

Jacqueline Rose’sThe Case of Peter Pan(1984) is not only the best-known theoretical statement on children’s literature; it is also the best-known example of what we might call literary-critical case writing: the building of an argument or analysis around a single text, usually literary, and in this instance a text for children. Rose was not the first to practice such case writing. We recall Crews’sThe Pooh Perplex,addressed in chapter 2, which satirizes not only schools of literary analysis but also the freshman pedagogical casebook on a literary text. To very different ends, Crews and Rose capitalize on

“The serious study of children’s literature,” writes Michael Egan in a 1982 essay onPeter Pan,“may be said to have begun with Freud” (37). Freud was interested in a genre now firmly associated with childhood, the fairy tale, and thanks to his encouragement, “almost every single major psychoanalyst wrote at least one paper applying psychoanalytic theory to folklore” (Dundes 1987, 21). But though the serious study of children’s literature began with Freud, we may also say that psychoanalysis developed in part through its engagement with children’s literature. Psychoanalysis used children’s literature to articulate and dramatize its themes and methods,

Using the John Newbery Medal as a case study, this essay examines the prizing of children's literature and its cultural discontents, focusing on the rise of \"edubrow\" culture and on the gradual shift away from traditional rhetorics of distinction and toward more pluralistic understandings of literary and cultural merit.