What Is a Child?: Childhood, Psychoanalysis, and Discourse

ISBN-13: 9781780490557 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 250 str.

Tine Norregaard Arroyo;Michael Plastow

Opis

What is a child? For Freud, the child was never a category or concept of any theoretical value. Instead he proposed the notion of the infantile as a time outside of history. Thus there are different notions of time and history at play in the psychoanalysis of a child, as well as in the history of the field itself. In clinical practice, in society, and in law, however, childhood is defined in reference to age and development.

Within psychoanalysis there has been a confusion of childhood as construed through the retrospective memories of adults, with the child who is observed and educated. This conflation marked the early history of psychoanalysis of the child, a field which began as a family affair. It was Hermine Hug-Hellmuth who first declared that it was impossible for anyone to analyze his own child. This foundational statement also enabled her to theorize the place of the parents in the analysis of the child.

Our modern notion of the child emerged historically since the decline of the Middle Ages and through the Enlightenment. The child became a subject of Church and State, coinciding with a new repression of sexuality and death in childhood. This produced an idealized notion of the child to which Freud referred as -His Majesty the baby-. Despite this, the emergence of the modern notion of the child made possible Freud's discovery of infantile sexuality and of the unconscious.

Each child must also uncover his or her own sexuality and find a means to appropriate it in order to come to the place of subject, in the necessary detachment from parental authority. To do so is not, as is usually asserted, a process of continuous development. Rather, it is an act of destruction in which the subject must break the mold in which he or she has been conceived.

Spis treści

Appreciation -- Introduction -- The Child and the Infantile: History and Time -- The child: between history and structure -- A change of discourse: Freud’s abandonment of the seduction hypothesis -- The fantasm: a transformational formula -- Psychoanalysis As a Child and Its Protagonists -- The illegitimate beginnings of the field of psychoanalysis of the child -- The place of the parents: “the child does not come of his own accord” -- The leaking tap: the symptom of the child -- Discourses on Childhood -- The ages of the child -- The upbringing of the child: between nature and culture -- Condillac’s statue: from the sentiment of childhood to the sensuality of the child -- A new discourse: the child as sexual subject -- The Child and the Subject -- From the razing of the child to the advent of the subject -- Epilogue

O autorze

Gerard Plastow, Michael