In Freud in Oz, Kenneth Kidd’s “main goal has been to describe rather than analyze” the “historical encounter(s) of children’s literature and psychoanalysis,” as he states in his concluding paragraph. He explores how psychoanalysis used children’s literature in ways that made it seem vital and applicable, and also how children’s literature incorporated psychoanalytic methods and motifs in ways that made it seem authoritative and therapeutic. Kidd identifies an impressive number of connection points, concentrating broadly on fairy tales, child analysis and Winnie the Pooh, case writing as it relates to The Wizard of Oz, Lewis Carroll and Alice, and Barrie and Peter Pan, Maurice Sendak, YA literature as a genre, and trauma writing for children.

I found Kidd’s chapter on Sendak to be the strongest in the book, perhaps aided by its close focus on the work of one mind–playfully close to a case study, in fact. The chapter is in fact based mostly on just two books, Where the Wild Things Are and Kenny’s Window, a grounding which allows Kidd to boomerang out into the many touchpoints between psychoanalysis and children’s literature (developing his idea of picturebook psychology, child drawings, picture book history, queer theory, Sendak’s history with analysis, Freud’s famous cases, children’s author as therapist, etc.) without the chapter feeling scattershot.

Because there are already two excellent blog posts on this book, I think I’m going to concentrate on two ideas that stuck with me after I was finished reading. Neither is necessarily engaged with some of the fundamental questions of children’s literature and childhood itself that we’ve been exploring this semester, but both are broader questions or thoughts about Kidd’s style of work.

First, while I really liked this work, I found myself wondering what to make of it as a work of scholarship. And I mean this in the most respectful way, as I was pretty swayed by Kidd’s assertion that psychoanalysis and children’s literature were and to some degree are “mutually constitutive.” This is an excellent history — but what avenues does historicizing open for future scholarship? What do we do now that we’ve read Kidd?

Because I was curious how others answered this questions, I actually checked out some reviews of the book, which I’ve added to the course Dropbox in the Kidd folder. They were written by our good pals Karen Coats and Marah Gubar, who in fact both saw this book as opening up entirely different conversations. Coats focuses on Kidd’s neglect of trauma in children’s literature about the black experience in America, and suggests that further scholarship on other American identities is needed. Gubar, on the other hand, is most taken with Kidd’s YA chapter and sees his book as a critical new perspective on how she will teach and interpret responses to young adult literature.

(Side note: I’m super glad that Chelsie was writing on this book this week, because I think her expertise in psychology brings a totally different perspective to my question of what one does with this sort of history!)

My second thing, though this is somewhat tangential to the main concerns of our course, is that I found myself reflecting most often not on the content of Kidd’s book, but on its style, sensibility, and prose. Kidd was an antidote to some of the things I find most alienating about academic writing. Sometimes I feel as though I am reading excellent thinkers whose influences, or the scholars with whom they are in dialogue, are nearly coded within their text. Of course, I acknowledge that some of this feeling has to do with how early I am in my own academic career, but I found the directness with which Kidd interacted with other work to be refreshing. An example I particularly enjoyed comes at the end of the introductory sections of Chapter 3, where Kidd takes a detour to discuss Gubar’s Artful Dodgers:

“While Gubar makes a good case for rethinking Golden Age literature in its cultural and historical context, I am less concerned here with the original literature than with what has been done with and to it. I understand that source texts do not always authorize their aftertexts and that Golden Age authors enjoyed richer, more complex personalities than we might know from ventures in case writing.” [I think this is on page 73…but I have a Kindle version so who knows…]

Yes, asides like these help to demonstrate the breadth of Kidd’s reading, but these signposts for what his work is and isn’t, and what it aims to accomplish, and what work it speaks to were gestures I appreciated. The ruminative nature of this book and its careful qualifications and examinations were intensely appealing to me, and demonstrated a thoughtful curiosity I hope will inspire my own work.

I found Kidd’s clarity even more admirable given the jargon-y nature of psychoanalysis. I expected to be Googling terms all but constantly, but his tone was so inviting and so–is casual the right word?–that I felt neither lost nor lectured to as a reader. Likewise, I found his introduction to be one of the most helpful I’ve read in a while, a welcome contrast to something like the beginning of Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan, whose foreword about child abuse I found disorienting, like a footnote to a case not yet made.