Peter Pan and Freud Who is talking and to whom

1. Peter Pan and FreudWho is talking and to whom Presenter : Frederic 劉忠岳/ 9500106 December 20th, 2007

2. Wrong Reading of Freud • We do not realize that Freud was first brought up against the unconscious when asking how we remember ourselves as a child. • The unconscious is the term which Freud used to describe the complex ways in which our very idea of ourselves as children is produced.

3. Freud found adult recollection of V. and C. Henri very ‘innocence …mysterious’. • The most crucial aspect of psychoanalysis for discussing children’s fiction is its insistence that childhood is something in which we continue to be implicated and which is never simply left behind.

4. It persists as something which we endlessly rework in our attempt to build an image of our own history. • The very ambiguity of the term ‘children’s fiction’– fiction the child produces or fiction given to the child? - is striking for the way where it leaves the adult out of the picture.

5. Childhood is not an object. Childhood is part of a strict developmental sequence at the end of which stands the cohered and rational consciousness of the adult mind. • Children are no threat to our identity because they are, so to speak, ‘on their way’.

6. The Unconscious • Divisions and distortions which are characteristic of our psychic life. In relation to dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue. • What Freud had discovered in that first recollection was that there are aspects of our psychic life which escape our conscious control.

7. Two Questions that concerned : 1. the question of the unconscious 2. the question of childhood • Freud uncovered in the sexual life of children the same perverse sexuality that analysis revealed in the symptoms of his patients and which was expressed indirectly in their dreams.

8. Bettelhem’s • Discussing the fairy tale in terms of the function it can serve in ‘fortifying’ the child’s personality and resolving its Oedipal drama. • The unconscious does not challenge the human ego, its seeming coherence and identity.

9. The purpose of the fairy tale is to allow the child that early instability or instance of disruption in order to ensure that any such instability will, in the last analysis, be more effectively removed. • “The human personality is indivisible”, writes Bettelheim.

10. Subjectivity • How our subjectivity is divided in relation to itself. • It is the very meaning of the unconscious to undermine exactly this unity, and how it does so in relation to the interpretation of dreams.

11. Childhood Sexuality • Childhood sexuality could eventually become an object of curiosity and investigation, something to be mastered – the very meaning of sexual development as it’s commonly understood. • Freud’s own investigation of childhood was in many ways inconsistent and contradictory.

12. How infantile sexuality starts to turn on a number of questions which the child sets itself, questions about its origin (birth) and its sexuality identity (difference between the sexes) which the child will eventually have to resolve. • Freud moved it out of the realm of an biological sequence, and into that of fantasy and representation where things are not so clear.

13. Deception • Deception is, for Freud, in the very order of language. As we speak, we take up a position of identity and certainty in language. • Deception is what characteristics human utterances since language can be used to say the opposite of what is true.

14. Psychoanalysis directs its attention to what cannot be spoken in what is actually being said. • The problem of language is the dimension of psychoanalysis which has been most rigorously avoided in discussion of fiction for the child.

15. Language • Our relationship to language is no more fixed and stable than our relationship to childhood itself. We use language to identify ourselves and objects in the world. • But the pronoun ‘I’, which apparently gives us that identity, on has its meaning whoever happens to be using it at the time.

16. The meaning of one word can only be fixed with reference to another. • Freud located all these difficulties in his attempt to negotiate the complex, overdetermined and contradictory meanings of symptoms, dreams and jokes.

17. For Freud, neither childhood nor meaning can be pinned down – they shift, and our own identity with them.

18. Freud vs. Jung • Jung’s interest was in the history of the race, and he saw the unconscious as the repository of a set of myths and symbols which our culture has destroyed. “Mythical” • For Freud, meaning is not simply there – it is built up. “Sexual”

19. Symbolic interpretation is the way that it by-passes any problem of language, any question of how meaning is constructed, of how it builds up and shifts. • It is no coincidence that symbolism and biography are the two forms of ‘Freudian’ analysis which are most commonly associated with children’s fiction.

20. Concluding • We need to ask why interpreting children’s fiction – reading it for the child – seems to be untouched by the idea that language itself might be unstable, and that our relationship to it is never safe. • We need to ask why we appear to straddle our present division in language across the present of the book and its past.