A Psychoanalytical criticism of Children Literature: Reflections of the Unconscious in Children Literature.
A) Daryoosh Hayati, B) Sayed Ahmad Hashemy
.
Department of English language and Literature, Lamerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Lamerd Iran.
Department of Primary Teachers’ Education, Lamerd Branch, Islamic Azad University, Lamerd, Iran.
Abstract
Much of what is written about children's literature is implicitly or explicitly concerned with the psychology of the readers, the authors, and the characters in the books. However, as it is to be pointed out in this essay, such criticism very often relies upon the informal developmental psycho - logical knowledge of the interpreter without reference to any specific theory. This essay provides a clear guide to the key writers and thinkers in the field of psychology, from Freud and Jung to Lacan, and demonstrates how their work can be applied to the problems of elucidating children's literature. It is further discussed that the implied reader is the adult reader as psycho - analyt ic cr i t ic of chi ldr en' s l i ter atur e who expose s the gaps , sub s t i tut io ns and displacements of the author and appropriates the author's text as a symptom of individual or cultural neuroses that underlie and undermine values associated with growth and devel opment 2 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
of children.
© 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and peer-review under responsibility of ICCAP 2011.
Keywords: Type your keywords here, separated by semicolons ; Psychoanalytic criticism; unconscious; conscious; Id; Ego; children literature
Introduction:
Because the child and childhood hold a privileged position in most psychoanalytical theories, the elective affinity between children's literature and psychological criticism seems even more natural than the affinity between psychology and literature in general. Psychoanalytic theory adds to the literary text a 'second dimension-unfolding what might be called the unconscious content of the work' [1], but the condensations and displacements at work in the author–text–reader relation are problematical in children's literature because of the double reader: adult or child.
Children's fiction might be impossible because it rests on the assumption that there is a child who can be addressed when, in actuality, 'children's fiction sets up the child as an outsider to its own process, and that aims, unashamedly, to take the child in'[2]. The implied author, even in first-person narration by a child character, is a displacement of the contexts of personal and collective values and neuroses. Furthermore, while the analyst is supposedly the most reliable reader-interpreter of stories told in a psychoana1itic dialogue and author, the reader of adult literature maw or may not be a reliable interpreter of the text. In children's literature the implied reader is unreliable and, therefore, most easily 'taken in'. Thus, the authorial self is in a sense liberated, in that the textual strategies and gaps that constitute the subtext of the work escape the implied reader, the child. The author can experience therapeutic release without anxieties over the scrutiny of an adult's psychoanalytical critique.
The nemesis for the projection of the naive implied reader is the adult reader as psychoanalytic critic of children's literature who exposes the gaps, substitutions and displacements of the author and appropriates the author's text as a symptom of individual or cultural neuroses that underlie and undermine values associated with growth and development. While psychoanalytic critics of adult literature amplify the reader's 'appreciation of the text, those same critics will, in the case of children's literature, conceal their Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy/ Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 3
interpretation from the child and, therewith, both censor and protect the author. The child may be imaged as myth of origin – as father of the man and mother of the woman – but in children's literature the adult is in control.
The correspondences between author–text–reader and analyzed–psychoanalytic dialogue-analyst break down, for author–reader are not in a dialogical relation, no matter how intensely the reader responds, nor can the critic–interpreter make enquiries of a char-acter in a narrative, as an analyst can in the psychoanalytic situation. While critics act as if one could ask about Alice's relation with her parents as she develops from pawn to queen in Through the Looking Glass, they forget that she is a linguistic construct, a trope for the unresolved problems of her author [3]. It is important that psychoanalytic critics are aware of the ambivalences inherent in their method and do not seize one aspect of a psychoanalytical theory as a tool for interpretation, thereby reducing the text to universals about human development.
Discussion:
The following discussion will focus on defining those psychoanalytic theories that influenced the criticism of children's literature. Frequently such criticism relies on the informal developmental psychological knowledge of the interpreter without reference to any specific theory. This is especially true of realistic narratives for young adults. The strongest psychoanalytic tradition of criticism can be found in the interpretation of folk tales and marchen and, to a lesser extent, in fantasy literature. While Freud, Jung and their disciples have been important in interpretations of children's literature, the poststructuralist influence has not been as prevalent. Quite dominant, however, is the influence of psychological criticism that relates the development of the child character to the social context depicted in psychologically realistic narratives. Perhaps because of the deep issues involved in psychoanalytic criticism, critics of children's literature occasionally seem to screen discussions of psychoanalytical issues with analyses of social contexts, even where the topic is announced as being psychoanalytical [4].
1. Freudian criticism
Classical Freudian criticism interprets the work as an expression of psychopathography, as a symptom whose creation provided therapeutic release for the author. In 'The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming'[5], Freud saw the crucial relationship between child play or 4 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
poetic language:
Every child at play behaves like an imaginative writer, in that he creates a world of his own or, more truly, he arranges the things of this world and orders it in a new way that pleases him better ... Language has preserved this relationship between children's play and poetic creation. [6]
1.
Just as it does between dream and text Freud assumed that all psychoneurotic symptoms are generated by psychic conflicts between a person's sexual desires and the strictures of society. The conflict is expressed through substitutions and displacements, just as in literature a metaphor's tenor and vehicle condense two disparate ideas into one image that hides and reveals what is not articulated. Similarly, displacement substitutes socially acceptable modes for desires that are forbidden. Substitutions thus function as censors in dreams and daydreams, in play and in texts. Freud's first triad of unconscious, pre-conscious and conscious defines the unconscious as a non-verbal, instinctual and infantile given and as dominated by the pleasure principle. The desires and conflicts (oral, anal, oedipal) of childhood persist throughout the adult's life and can be made conscious only by being first raised to the level of the pre-conscious which facilitates the dynamic of consciousness and repression through condensation and displacement. Freud later modified his first triad with the paradigm of id, ego and superego, in part because he 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 internalized 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[7] 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 [8] and Sendak's In the Night Kitchen might fall into this category. Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy/ Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 5
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 [9] `The serious study of children's literature may be said to have begun with Freud', acknowledges Egan in his discussion of Peter Pan [10]. 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 [11], 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 [12], 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'[13]. Literary critics have strongly critiqued Bettelheim not only for his a historicism and reductionism of Freud's theories [14], but also for his punitive pedagogy, for being 'oddly accusatory towards children' [15] and for displacing his 'own real life fantasies, particularly of the dutiful daughter who takes care of her father's needs' into his interpretative work.
2. Jungian criticism
2.1 Jungian criticism discovers archetypes that are the basis for the images in a text.
Pre-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 analysis and recognition that growth is a life-long process, a quest, during which conscious and unconscious connect primarily through symbols and archetypes. 6 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
Jung assumed a personal unconscious consisting of memories and images gathered during a lifetime, for the archetypes, as experienced by the individual, are in and of the world. This personal unconscious is raised to consciousness as it connects the personal with the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is an a priori ori, existence of 'organising factors', the archetypes understood as inborn modes of functioning, rather like a grammar that generates and structures the infinite variables of symbol formations whose recurrence is to be understood again as archetypal[16]. Archetypes are 'without known origin; and they reproduce themselves in any time or any part of the world – even where transmission by direct descent or "cross-fertilisation" through migration must be ruled out'[17]. Jung, too, believed that dreams are meaningful and can be understood [18] as their specific images connect with archetypes whose force call suddenly overwhelm the dreamer. Such all experience contrasts with the conscious use of representing archetypes through culturally defined images and motifs. Jung's own metaphoric use of archetypal images, such as shadow, anima or animus and self, blurred the distinction between archetype as a grammar and archetype as symbol.
Jung, whose theory has been criticized for demanding a vast amount of knowledge of myth, did not perceive the unconscious as an instinctual and libidinal battleground, although he posited a 'primitive psyche' in the child which functions in dreams and fantasies comparable to the physical evolution of mankind in the embryo. In Jung's 'Psychic Conflicts in a Child'[19], the child-patient, obsessed with the origin of babies, fantasized that she would give birth if she swallowed an orange, similar to women in fairy tales whose eating of fruit leads to pregnancy. The child-patient was eventually enlightened by her father, but Jung concludes that, while false explanations are not advisable, no less inadvisable is the insistence on the right explanation, for that inhibits the freedom of the mind's development through concrete explanations which reduce the spontaneity of image making to a falsehood [20].
Because the essential nature of all art escapes our understanding, Jung did not perceive literature as psychopathography. We can interpret only 'that aspect of art which consists in the process of artistic creation'[21]. While lie admits that literary works can result from the intentionality of the author, they are also those that 'force themselves on the author', reveal his inner nature, and overwhelm the conscious mind with an image he intended to create: 'Here the artist is not identical in the process of creation; he is aware that he is subordinate to his work or stands outside it, as though lie were a second person'[22]. An author may, for a Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy/ Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 7
time, be out of fashion when, suddenly, readers rediscover his work, because they, perceive in it archetypes that speak to them with renewed immediacy [23]. We can, therefore, only discuss the psychological phenomenology in a work of literature.
It is evident how readily children's literature, especially when it has components of fantasy, connects with Jungian theories. Marie Louise Von Franz [24] has written comprehensive studies of fairy tales which the Jungian critic tends to see as 'allegories of the inner life' that meet 'the deep-seated psychic and spiritual needs of the individual'[25]. The problem with such criticism is that it reduces images in fairy tales to fixed allegorical meanings without regard for historical and social contexts, as the Jungian critic basically explains metaphor with metaphor. Northrop Frye's discussion of archetypes in terms of convention and genre is an attempt to avoid such reductionism. What makes the Jungian approach attractive to interpreters of children's literature is that the theory assumes all original wholeness that can be regained after alienation is overcome. This coincides with the comic resolution of so many narratives for children and young adults. In Jungian literary criticism children's literature is often seen as privileged, just as the `primitive psyche' of the child is in Jungian psychoanalysis:
Children's literature initiates us into psychic reality, by telling about the creatures and perils of the soul and the heart's possibilities of blessing in images of universal intelligibility. [26]
At its best Jungian criticism is able to integrate the author's and the reader's needs as exemplified in Lynn Rosenthal's interpretation of Lucy Boston's The Children of Green Knoivc [27].
2.2 Ego psychology and object relations theories
The generation of psychoanalysts that was influenced by, reacted against and revised Freud, distinguishes itself by overcoming Freud's pessimism regarding the ego's inevitable discontent. While the Id focus does not deny the existence of the unconscious, it emphasizes the possibility of healthy growth and development in the ego's self-realization in relation to its environment. Karen Hornet' and Abraham Maslow, Melanie Klein and 8 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
Donald Winnicott describe possibilities for growth through constructive management of the id's pressures. Each insists that the developing psyche of the child responds to envi-ronmental conditions with a positive urge to self- actualization that is thwarted only by hostile environments. From the perspective of ego psychology, author and reader participate in a shareable fantasy that constructively breaks down 'for a time the boundaries between self and other, inner and outer, past and future, and ... may neutralize the primal aggressions bound up in those separations' [28]. Psychoanalytic literary critics have, however, also been concerned that ego psychology tends to be in one direction only, `namely from the ego as a publicly adjusted identity'[29].
2.3 Karen Harney and Abraham Maslow
According to Hornet', the goal of psychoanalysis is the patient's discovery of the possibility of self-realization and the recognition that good human relations are all essential part of this, along with the faculty for creative work and the acceptance of personal responsibility[30]. Persistent denial of childhood conflicts and their screening with defensive self-delusions block self-realization. Irrational expectations or `neurotic claims' such as self idealization obscure not only self-hate, but also 'the unique alive forces' that each self possesses and that arc distorted by the self-illusions. The therapeutic process weakens the obstructive forces so that the constructive forces of the real self call emerge [31].The constructive forces in ego psychology become known as the 'Third Force'.
Bernard Paris has applied 'Third Force' psychology to several canonical novels whose self alienating characters fit Horney's descriptions of neurotic styles, while self-activating characters express their 'Third Force' as defined by Maslow [32]. For Maslow, the 'Third Force' is our 'essentially biologically based inner nature', unique to the person but also species-wide, whose needs, emotions and capacities are either neutral, pre-moral or positively good'[33]. Neuroses result when our hierarchically organized basic needs are not met [34]. When one level of needs is satisfied, the needs of another level emerge as persons define themselves existentially. During that process the person has 'peak experiences', moments of epiphany that afford glimpses into the state of being fully actualized and can have the effect of removing symptoms, of changing a person's view of himself and the world, of releasing creativity and generally conveying the idea that life is worth living in spite of its difficulties [35]. Maslow admits that not all peak experiences are moments of 'Being recognition' [36], but he insists that people are 'most their iden-tities in peak experiences' [37] where they feel most self-integrated. The development of the ego as self Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy/ Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 9
reliant and socially accepted is perhaps most evident in the young adult novel whose comic resolution integrates the young person with socially acceptable norms. Frequently such narratives include the figure of the social worker or therapist who aids the process or the young protagonist plans to become a therapist so as to 'help kids in trouble'. Such problem narratives are accessible to young readers through stories that occasionally seem like case studies. The young adult novel that projects the genuine misfit as a worthwhile subject is a rarity. The largely middle-class context of young adult novels generally furthers the optimism implied in ego psychology.
2.4 Melanie Klein and D. W Winnicott
According to Klein, because the ego is not fully integrated at birth, it is subject to splitting and fragmentation as it projects states of feeling and unconscious wishes on objects or absorbs qualities of the object through introjections where they become defined as belonging to the ego.
Like Freud, Klein saw the 'exploration of the unconscious [as] the main task of psycho-analytic procedure, and that the analysis of transference [was] the means of achieving this' [38]. Her analysands were primarily children whose inability to freely associate verbally led Klein to develop the psychoanalytic play technique already begun by Anna Freud [39].
The use of simple toys in a simply equipped room brought out 'a variety of symbolical meanings' bound up with the child's fantasies, wishes and experiences. By approaching the child's play in a manner similar to Freud's interpretation of dreams, but by always individualizing the child's use of symbols, Klein felt she could gain access to the child's unconscious [40]. She discovered that the primary origin of impulses, fantasies and anxieties could be traced back to the child's original object relation, the mother's breast, even when the child was not breastfed [41].
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 [42]. 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 10 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
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'[43].
In criticisms of children's literature, Klein's approach can reveal how the text enables the actualization 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' [44]. The Kleiman perspective also offers insight into the relation of fantasy to guilt and reparation as exemplified in White's Charlotte's Web [45].
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' [46]. 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' [47]. By transitional object and transi-tional 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 infants. The object is not a signifier for some hidden unconscious content, but a crucial partner in the game of inter-subjectivity as the playing infant tests out the 'me' or '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 Winnicottian book would be Margaret Wise Brown's Good Night Moon, which has been cited as an example of the child's having just Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy/ Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 11
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 [48] who does not yet accept the object 'bear' as inanimate. Good Night Moon is, for a certain age, a transitional object containing many transitional objects that assuage bedtime anxieties as the child connects with all of them, thus assuring itself of the `me' before the lights go out at bedtime.
3. Jacques Lacan: the return to Freud through language
For Freud the subconscious is the irreducible radical of the psyche, its universal, whose paradox it is that nothing raised from it remains unconscious: we can only be conscious of something. Thus the unconscious is replaced by the comprehensible mental acts of the ego, be they dreams, symbolizations or linguistic utterances. As Wright points out, for Jacques Lacan 'the dictum "the unconscious is structured like a language" ' is borne out in that:
Every word indicates the absence of what it stands for, a fact that intensifies the frustration of this child of language, the unconscious, since the absence of satisfaction has not to be accepted. Language imposes a chain of words along which the ego must move while the unconscious remains in search of the object it has lost. [49]
The unconscious as a language allows Lacan to revise Freud's self-sufficiency of the unconscious with social interaction. How this comes about through the development of the infant and how this relates to the perception of the text as psyche – a major shift away from the author's or reader's psyche – has special relevance to interpreters of children's literature.
Lacan distinguishes three stages in the infant's development: the imaginary, the symbolic and the real. In the imaginary or mirror stage, which can happen at the age of six months, the infant receives the imago of its own body [50]. Having seen itself only as fragmentary, the infant perceives in the mirror a symbolic 'mental permanence of the “I”, but this perception prefigures alienation, for the mirror stage is a spatial illusion of totality [51], an imaginary identification with reflection. The mirror stage, which is preverbal, conveys the illusion that the image will respond to the child's wishes, as did the mother–breast–infant identification. The symbolic stage is the stage of language, a stage that will form the subject henceforth only in and as dialogue. The implied assumption that language 12 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
may have definitive authority is undermined or deconstructed by Lacan's argument that every utterance is permeated by the unconscious in the sense that wholeness, meaning and gratification of wishes are perpetually deferred. The real, not to be confused with 'external reality', describes what is lacking in the symbolic – 'it is the residue of articulation or the umbilical cord of the symbolic' [52].
The literary text, then, is all image of the unconscious structured like a language. 'The lure of all texts,' comments Wright puts in a revelation, of things veiled coming to be unveiled, of characters who face shock at this unveiling'[53]. When this phenomenon is given utterance in the reader or interpreter's language, meaning is inevitably deferred. In contrast to Freudian interpretation, we have here no unearthing of authorial neuroses. The Lacanian consequence
for reader and text is the realization that the selves we see ourselves as being are as fictional [made up of language] as the stories of written fiction – limited images like those we see in mirrors when we first became conscious of our separateness – so fiction can be read in terms of the way it echoes our basic human activity of inventing ourselves and becoming conscious of the limitation of our invention. All we usually call reality is in fact fiction, and always less complete than the actual real world outside our consciousness. [54]
Perry Nodelman discusses how Cinderella becomes a fixed subject at the end of the stork, rather than the multifaceted one she was. As she completes her stage of becoming, she has actually lost wholeness in her state of being. An analysis of Charlotte's Web shows how Lacan's imaginary and symbolic stage work through the 'Miracle of the Web' in that Wilbur perceives himself and is perceived as transformed through the ability of words to reorient desire by demonstrating 'that things are desirable because they arc signified and, therefore, significant' in and through language [56]. Another Lacanian interpretation applies the concept of the subject being created by disjunction and discontinuity to Russell Hoban's The Mouse and His Child where the mouse child, submerged to the bottom of a pond, is jubilant when it sees itself reflected in the labellers Bonzo dog food can: 'He sees himself suddenly whole, apparently coordinated and in control'[57]. The directive 'be happy' is in Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy/ Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000 13
The Mouse and His Child as authoritative as Charlotte's five single-word texts in the web, in that it creates the illusion of desire fulfilled, even as desire is deferred.
4. Psychoanalytic theory and the feminist critique
The patrimony psychoanalytic criticism received from Freud has exerted a deep 'anxiety of influence' oil the feminist critic [58], primarily because of Freud's definition of female sexuality and his centering of the male myth of Oedipus, both of which reduce the female to all addendum. Revisionary readings of Freud, particularly those by French feminists influenced by Lacan, both appropriate and retain his powerful influence. Feminist readings of Jung underwent less radical revisions [59]. Even without specific reference to ego-relations and object psychology, the feminist critic, by delineating the struggle of the female in a patriarchially constructed world, finds in the concept of self actualization an ally in her attempt at social transformation.
While not denying the existence of the subconscious, feminist psychoanalytic criticism, including the feminist criticism of children's literature, privileges the concept of social construction in the development of the female. Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering has been especially influential in its synthesis of psychoanalysis and the sociology of gender where 'the reproduction of mothering occurs through social structurally induced psychological processes' and is 'neither a product of biology nor of intentional role training'[60]. Here the critic of children's literature finds a female focus, especially for the mother–daughter relation [61]. The focus oil the body–self relations allows the feminist critic to explore unique female experiences that have been neglected in the study of literature. The focus on the social construction of female and male children, especially since the nineteenth-century middle-class self-definition of gender roles and the family, has guided feminists to valuable Contextual insights into the history of children's literature and its readers.
A major issue in feminist criticism is the problematic of the female writer's precursors which has led Gilbert and Gubar to revise Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' [62] with `anxiety of authorship' by which the female writer questions her claim to be a writer [63]. It remains to be seen whether the important role of female writers in children's literature and the status of children's literature as a field of study might be understood as defenses against the pressures of the male-dominated literary and critical tradition.
Conclusion
The revisions and transformations by which psychoanalytical theories and criticisms continue to 14 Daryoosh Hayati and Sayed Ahmad Hashemy / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 00 (2011) 000–000
construct themselves have retained so far the concept of the unconscious and its powerful influence on the ego's development and struggle in the world. Children's literature, whose language signifies the substitutions and displacements necessitated in that struggle, intimates and makes acceptable the dream of desire. It is a great irony of our psychoanalytic age that the psychological conflicts that mark the narratives for young readers abandon consideration of the powers of the id in favor of the social adjustment of the young ego and that they do so, usually, in the language of low mimetic accessibility where the mode of romance and poetry is gone. That phenomenon is itself worthy of psychoanalytical interpretations of authors, texts and readers.
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