Ebook
This book locates internally focused, critical perspectives regarding the social, political, emotional, and mental growth of children. Through the radical openness afforded by psychoanalytic and related frameworks, this volume illuminates, promotes, and helps situate subjectivities that are often blotted out for both the child and society. The overall emphasis is on motifs of lostness and foundness, in terms of the geographies of the psycho-social, and how such motifs govern and regulate what have come to count as the normative indexes of childhood as well as how they exclude other real childhoods.
List of Figures
Foreword
Annie G. Rogers
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Meditations on Precarity in Childhood
Michael O’Loughlin, Carol Owens & Louis Rothschild
Part I: Times
Chapter 1. Found Objects Of/As Re-Membering Through the Lens of Child as Method
Erica Burman
Chapter 2. “School Is a Time-out in My Tough Life!” Use of Pause, Bridge and Intermittence as Resources for Student Development in School
Ana Archangelo, Fábio Camargo Bandeira Villela, & Rosiane Cristina dos Santos
Chapter 3. Making Space for the Unfathomable:Liminality in Inner City Schools
Aileen Schloerb
Chapter 4. Psychoanalyzing “From Both Sides Now”: At the Extremities of Adolescence – “The Tweenies” and “The Twenties” as New Geo-Psychical Positions
Carol Owens & Jamieson Webster
Chapter 5. Childhood and Adolescence: The Familiar Strangeness of Virtuality
Liora Stavchansky
Part II: Places
Chapter 6. “I Love You More”: Making Childing Visible. Children’s Emotional Labor in Affluent Libidinal Economies
Anne-Marie Cummins
Chapter 7. Uncertain, Shaky, Touch-And-Go? The Precarity of Children’s Mental Health in Aotearoa New Zealand
Kaye P. Cederman
Chapter 8. Storying: Re-Writing History of Children and Families in Migration
Elizabeth Quintero
Chapter 9. States of Nowhere-Ness in Children and Adolescents
Ionas Sapountzis
Chapter 10. Inconspicuous Precarity: The Impossibility of the Inherently Creative Child
Katherine Martin
Part III: Identities
Chapter 11. The Weaponization of Childhood in Mussolini’s Ethiopian Laboratory and Its Revenants in the Present Day Italy
Paula Salvio
Chapter 12. Necrophobia as a Nihilistic Preoccupation in Paternal Fantasies of Maturation Gone Awry
Louis Rothschild
Chapter 13. Re-Finding Lost Boys: Lessons from Literature and the Clinic
Chapter 14. Fractional Distillation: On Psychoanalysis’ (Mis)Formulation of Autistic Children
Ben Morsa
Chapter 15. Negotiating Agency in the Formation of Subjectivity: The Child, the Parental
Other, and the Sovereign Other
Michael O’Loughlin
About the Contributors
While the subject that emerges in particular moments of a treatment is marked by timelessness, the child or adolescent is a developmental being who is steeped in a particular time and place. For Freud the intrusion of the ‘accidents of history’—are moments of crisis that can be crushing, but which also offer the chance of a new foundation. This collection bring to life such times of crisis rooted in authors’ specific cultural, historical, and geographical contexts.
This is a beautiful book about the exigencies of childhood across the globe. I found myself captivated by tales that took me from discarded children’s clothing in the UK, through the complex investments of North American childhoods to border crossings, migrations, refugees, to comings and goings in different moments in history. Thus, any sense of theorizing ‘Childhood’ with a capital C for this reader at least, was utterly dispelled by the thoughtfulness of the ‘being with’ that comes from a psychoanalytic sensibility.
This welcome collection challenges long-held normative assumptions about the development of children. Taking us to locations as various as New Zealand, the El Paso border, ‘nowhereness’, the times of liminality, the ‘pause’ in the pandemic. This excellent book opens our eyes to diverse ways of investigating and perceiving the experiences, narratives, losses, transitions, and traumas of childhoods that have heretofore been marginalized.
Michael O’Loughlin is professor at Adelphi University, New York.
Carol Owens is a psychoanalyst and Lacanian scholar in Dublin, Ireland.
Louis Rothschild is a clinical psychologist in Baltimore County, Maryland.