Freud in Oz – Method

Since Chelsie gave us a great summary of Freud in Oz’s major highlights, I’m going to avoid repeating those points, and instead focus on some of the questions Kidd’s text raises for me. I’m especially interested in how we can read Freud in Oz alongside our last two texts: Bernstein’s Racial Innocence and Gubar’s Artful Dodgers.

One of the most interesting trends McKidd documents is the movement from psychoanalysis – the classical tradition, with its commitment to Freud – towards a more American style psychology, which McKidd defines as a combination of psychoanalysis with “pragmatism and homegrown psychology [that] prefer[s] the perfectible ego to the intractable unconscious” (xxi). McKidd shows how various forms of children’s literature (or, in the case of fairy tales, narratives that were appropriated *into* children’s literature) fit into a pattern of the perfectibility of the ego, often through trauma. The fairy tale is a particularly telling case, since it was initially seen as appropriate for children because it reflected the child’s unconscious (which was merged with the “primitive man’s” ego) – a more psychoanalytical, Freudian frame – and it was later seen as good for children because fairytales were “proto-therapeutic” (12). In this latter view, fairy tales help children negotiate the experience of trauma and eventually meet psychological challenges( (11): they do not just reflect the child’s unconscious, but they help the child progress to a healthy adult selfhood (32). While the fairy tale was refashioned as children’s literature because it was proto-therapeutic, other forms of children’s writing was, for McKidd, therapeutic from the start. Picture books like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are put a distinctly American twist on psychoanalysis: the child has a safe place to play out his anger (represented by the Wild Things) and returns home, having learned a lesson. As McKidd points out “lovers of Where the Wild Things Are probably do see it not as a child’s version of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness but, rather, as a self-help book for children and their parents. It is, in other words, part of the culture of self-help” (130). Young Adult novels, meanwhile, often perform psychological work in which the protagonists experience, witness, or recall some form of trauma, and this trauma is eventually rendered therapeutic (168, 172). Sometimes the trauma is nothing more than the stereotypical “adolescent crisis”; nevertheless, the narrative usually portrays the protagonist “working through” the problem and emerging with a stronger selfhood at the end. 

While I find McKidd’s reading of many of these picturebooks and YA novels persuasive, I wonder how we can apply Marah Gubar’s idea of the “artful dodger” to these psychological novels. In other words, if these texts have a psychological aim – the improvement of selfhood through a form of trauma and proto-therapy – do children (and adolescents) always go along with it? Do we see, as in Robin Bernstein’s reading of Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s doll test, a possible resistance to these psychological aims? Therapy (usually) involves a relationship between two people, the therapist and the patient – and as anyone who has read Freud knows, the patient often resists the  therapists’ treatment. Here, I’m thinking specifically of the case of Dora, Freud’s fourteen year-old patient who eventually refused psychological treatment when Freud kept insisting that Dora’s trauma came from the fact that she enjoyed the sexual advances of her father’s friend (I find this case particularly striking to think about in relation to Freud in Oz, since Dora is an adolescent). Dora’s case led Freud to consider issues of transference and countertransference (pardon my massive oversimplification of the history of psychoanalysis), and I wonder to what extent YA authors who practice a kind of therapeutic writing are also aware of possible resistance from their patient-readers, and weave that awareness into their texts. Gubar argues that 19th century children’s authors are ambivalent about their subjects, and about their own ability to influence their subjects, and that they incorporate possibilities for resistance into their own narratives; I wonder to what extent that might also be true for the psychological YA and children’s text.

Another trend Kidd identifies is the extent to which the construction of adolescence, especially in the 20th century, is racialized. G.K. Stanley Hall, who theorized the psychology of adolescence and influenced its subsequent 20th century construction, “drew upon racial and racist developmental logic,” particularly the notion of recapitulation, whereupon white children and POC were at the same developmental level (142). White children needed to move beyond the “primitive” development of POC and towards the “civilized” selfhood of whiteness through their adolescence and eventual adulthood; the white child thus “repeats or re-enacts the developmental history of the species” (143). That this theory explicitly excludes adolescents of color from “growth” towards “civilized” adulthood is an unspoken, if obvious, consequence of this construction of adolescence. Moreover, early psychoanalysis draws upon similar racial logic: psychoanalysts saw the fairy tale as revealing the unconscious of both the child and the “primitive” man; the two were made equivalent. Psychoanalysis is racialized in other ways not mentioned by Kidd: for example, Freud and his contemporaries practiced primarily on white patients (and their analysis and theories arose primarily from that work with white patients).

Given Kidd’s contention that YA practices a kind of adolescent psychology, and Kidd’s observation that both psychoanalysis and the construction of adolescence are fundamentally racialized, what does this mean for young adult readers of color, and for children and young adult novels that are aimed towards audiences of color? It seems to me that YA writers of color might have a very different relationship to the idea of YA novels as therapy-through-trauma, or to the idea of adolescence as a growth period, than white writers. Do they write in the same mode as the YA psychological novel? Do young readers of color tend to receive canonical texts in the same way white readers do? After reading Bernstein, these questions loom particularly large in my mind. It’s striking to me that most of Bernstein’s examples of children’s literature with a psychoanalytic bent are by white writers, and have white protagonists (Where the Wild Things Are, Winnie the Pooh, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Judy Bloom, Speak).

I think these questions are why I fixated so much on Kidd’s (very brief) mention of Octavia Butler’s 1979 novel, Kindred. Kindred is one of the only examples Kidd supplies of a novel that deals with race. Kidd brings it up in the context of YA books that have their protagonists “experience first hand the horrors of history” (191). Kidd is primarily interested in holocaust narratives, but he also mentions time-travel and trading-places narratives like Kindred that deal with American slavery.

For me, Kindred was a strange text for Kidd to bring up as an illustration of the phenomenon of protagonists witnessing the horrors of history, in part because it seems like an exception to the rule Kidd identifies – the trend where time travel narratives allow the protagonist to *experience* the horrors of historical trauma, but as a relatively safe witness who can eventually escape. In Kindred, the protagonist Dana is no mere witness. She finds herself on the plantation inhabited by her ancestors – including her enslaved many-times great-grandmother, and her great-grandmother’s owner, Dana’s many-times-great-grandfather Rufus. In order to survive – to literally continue existing – Dana must not just “witness” the horrors of slavery but actively enable and participate in them. She must make sure that her slave-owning ancestor rapes her enslaved ancestor (or she will not come into existence). It would be as though one of the protagonists of a holocaust time-travel novel had to actively participate in the holocaust (rather than just witness it) in order to survive. Part of Kindred‘s project, I would argue, is to show the extent to which contemporary americans are indebted to, and continue to re-perpetuate, race-based slavery and violence. And Dana emerges from the novel more traumatized than when she began.

Kindred, a novel written by a black woman, also serves as an example of my earlier point – that YA novels that deal with race, that are written by or for people of color, may have a very different relationship to the therapy-through-trauma mode of writing than the conventional YA novel. Although here, my argument is rather shaky, since Kindred was not written as a YA novel (and I find it rather bizarre that Kidd includes it, even as an aside). Kidd is correct that high schoolers often read Kindred (it has been incorporated into many curriculums), but I’ve never seen anyone else argue that Butler wrote it with young readers in mind (and Butler did write young adult novels later in her career). In fact, most of the main characters are adults in their mid-to-late twenties, not adolescents or children. Despite the generic strangeness of Kindred, I do think it brings up interesting questions about the ways in which authors and readers may resist the therapy-through-trauma mode of writing and reading.