Childhood beyond Pathology

A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis

Lisa Farley

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438470900, 9781438470917
• eBook ISBN: 9781438470924
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award presented by Division B (Curriculum Studies) of the American Educational Research Association
Winner of the 2019 Critics' Choice Book Award presented by the American Educational Studies Association Childhood beyond Pathology offers an account of the ways that psychoanalytic concepts can inform ongoing challenges of representing development, belonging, and relationality, with a focus on debates over how children should be treated, what they might know, and who they should become. Drawing from fiction, clinical studies, and courtroom and classroom contexts, Lisa Farley explores a series of five conceptual figures—the replacement child, the neurodiverse child, the counterfeit child, the child heir of historical trauma, and the gender divergent child—with a keen eye to discussions of social justice and human dignity. The book reveals the emotional situations, social tensions, and political issues that shape the meaning of childhood, and focuses on what happens when a child departs from normative scripts of development. Through thought-provoking analysis, Farley develops themes that include childhood loss, the myth of innocence, the problem of diagnosis, the subject of racial hatred, the meaning of a good fight, and gender embodiment. She draws extensively on psychoanalytic concepts to show how the fantasy of the child advancing through lockstep stages fails to account for the child as symbolic of the conflicts of entering into the social world. Childhood beyond Pathology suggests we reconsider developmental understandings of childhood by honoring the elusive qualities of inner life.

CHAPTER ONE

THE REPLACEMENT CHILD

An Allegory of Loss for Scholars and Students of Childhood

Haunting [is] precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and the rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings won’t go away, when easily living one day and then the next becomes impossible, when the present seamlessly becoming ‘the future’ gets entirely jammed up. Haunting refers to this socio-political-psychological state when something else, or something different from before, feels like it must be done, and prompts a something-to-be-done.

—Avery Gordon, 2011, Borderlands

HAUNTING “jams up” the familiar assumption of time moving in a seamless progression to the future. Under the condition of haunting, history returns to the scene of the present, stalks our dreams, and disturbs the everyday business of life without any sign of leaving. Sigmund Freud (1914) found this same sticky quality of history in his musings about the human tendency to repeat painful experiences “in the form of an action” (p. 397). Deeply affected by the First World War, Freud’s theorizing in this period marks a change of mind from his earlier thoughts on pleasure as the driving force of motivation. Now, Freud became interested in the problem of why disturbed feelings won’t go away. Peter Taubman (2017) frames Freud’s shift in perspective: “If, as he seemed to argue in most of his early work, we pursue pleasure—even our dreams, for example, fulfill a disguised wish—how then, he asked, can we account for our sabotaging of such pleasure?” Put more starkly, Taubman (2017) asks, “Why do we return to traumatic events even in our dreams” (p. 99)? Freud addresses these questions in his 1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he contemplates the puzzle of why the ego would so closely identify with staggering losses—of people, ideals, and beliefs—often at great personal cost. While initially framed in terms of pathology, Freud came to acknowledge the more quotidian qualities of melancholic attachments, linked to the death drive, which he understood to signal a kernel of negativity, or haunting, inside each one of us (Taubman, 2017).

Haunting begins in infancy. “[G]hosts,” writes Prophecy Coles (2011), “are there in every nursery” (p. xvii). Children are heirs of legacies that precede the time of their birth. They are melancholic objects—or, psychic replacements—carrying the shadows of historical losses. Clinically, the notion of the child as replacement refers to the condition of being born after the death of a sibling. This is a child “born to parents who have experienced the death of a child,” the pain of which often remains largely unspoken and is silently transmitted to the living sibling (Anisfeld & Richards, 2000, p. 303). The anguish of death often leads to the idealization of the lost child, endowing the surviving child with feelings of emptiness, inadequacy, resentment, and guilt (Silverman & Brenner, 2015). While a clinical concept, the figure of the replacement child has been used in literary and trauma studies to theorize the condition of entire generations who stand to inherit the traces of painful and violent histories (Schwab, 2010). As it signifies in this chapter, the replacement figure symbolizes the unconscious registration of history traveling not only in the child figure but also in the fields of childhood studies, education, and psychology. From the vantage of the replacement figure, the study of childhood is a haunted house.

In what follows, I examine the sticky qualities of history from the perspective of debates over Freud’s concepts of mourning and melancholia. These debates do not themselves address childhood, but rather underscore what it can mean to respond well to loss as our human condition. To these debates, I add the replacement child figure as a way to clarify Freud’s concepts, but also to soften the split that has emerged from the arguments over them. In particular, I highlight an ambiguity in Freud’s work that gives way to a reading of mourning and melancholia less as “mutually exclusive ways of seeing” and more as “a productive pair” (Stillwaggon, 2017a, p. 34). My aim is to show how history melancholically repeats in the figure of the child, even while this same figure sets the terms for mourning this inheritance in novel and meaningful ways. That is, the child figure who melancholically materializes unspeakable loss is also the child who may invite the work of mourning, bringing loss into the symbolic realm of language. I develop this idea through a reading of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s (2014) novel, Adult Onset, which tells the story of a replacement child born into a legacy of trauma. For scholars of childhood studies, education, and psychology, MacDonald’s novel offers an allegory of the emotional dynamics of melancholia and mourning as central to these fields. Precisely because children activate the return of memory, there is much to be learned from literary accounts of the analytic work that adults do with their own childhoods. Fiction is an invitation to notice the haunting past and to make from its surprising return novel readings of both childhood and history.

DEBATING “MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA”

In “Mourning and Melancholia,” Freud sought to theorize the two emotional responses to loss indicated in the title of his essay. This seminal work is concerned with the relationship of loss to disturbances in memory and mood that catapult unresolved conflicts into the scene of the present. The essay begins simply enough. In Freud’s words, both mourning and melancholia are “characterized by a profoundly painful depression” and “a loss of interest in the outside world” (p. 204). However, Freud also notes a distinguishing feature of melancholia that evacuates the ego’s capacity for love and for work. In his words, the melancholic suffers by “a great impoverishment of the ego” (p. 205). Freud describes the distinction thus: “In mourning, the world has become poor and empty, in melancholia it is the ego that has become so” (pp. 204‒205). Under the condition of melancholia, Freud’s (1917) writes, “the loss of object” is “transformed into a loss of ego” (p. 209). Freud (1917) further speculates that the melancholic bond is a protective defense that preserves the lost object in the unconscious. Writing one century after Freud, James Stillwaggon (2017a) describes melancholia as a way of “retaining the lost object, or keeping the past present” (p. 33). Melancholia is paradoxical, however, because it preserves loss while repressing the affects it produces. As Stephen Frosh (2013) writes, the loss is “not known about, not recognised, therefore not grieved, and consequently its loss acts as a ‘present absence’ with continuing impact” (p. 12). The sticking point is one of language, for, as Stillwaggon (2017b) argues, melancholia preserves the “unspeakable absence” of loss as an “ineffable presence” that resists representation in the symbolic realm (p. 60).

Perhaps because of such contradictions, Freud (1917) argues that the economy of melancholia is “not at all easy to explain” (p. 205). Even so, he describes the condition’s structure in terms of splitting love and hate. Whereas normally the ego can acknowledge the presence of both dynamics in relation to beloved objects—that is, having a range of complex feelings for the same person—in melancholia, the admission of hate for the lost other is too much to bear. In the face of loss, the ego splits the lost object from the fury of having been left behind. Instead, the loss becomes idealized and hatred turned inward and against the ego in the form of self-reproach. Murderous rage against the lost other manifests in feelings of self-destruction. As Maud Ellmann (2005) suggests, “the self-destructive feelings of the melancholic are disguised attacks against a lost love-object, so that suicide is murder by proxy” (p. xi). In Freud’s haunting words, “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego, which could now be condemned by a particular agency as an object, as the abandoned object” (1917, p. 209). The lost object takes up residence in the unconscious in such a way that it is all-consuming; the ego is possessed by its absent presence and is in this way, “so full of otherness we are barely subjects at all” (Frosh, 2013, p. 141).1 The fantasy underlying the melancholic position is death defying, with the ironic effect of reproducing “death-in-life” (Schwab, 2010, p. 19). Melancholia is “petrified” time that transports the ego out-of-time (O’Loughlin, 2010, p. 64).

There is a heated set of debates about the meaning of Freud’s terms, particularly in social and political contexts of disavowed losses. At stake in these debates is a question about the value of melancholia as a response to losses produced through the violent structures of society, in the words of Frosh (2013), “especially where colonialism has stolen cultural ‘treasures’ sometimes amounting to whole histories” (p. 12). Taking a postcolonial perspective, David Eng and David Kazanjian (2003) challenge Freud’s early reading of melancholia as the “pathological” other to “normal mourning” (p. 3). They argue that in colonial contexts of violence, melancholia is productive precisely because it characterizes “a continuous engagement with loss and its remains” (p. 4). “Unlike mourning, in which the past is declared resolved,” Eng and Kazanjian (2003) remind readers that, “in melancholia the past remains steadfastly alive in the present” (pp. 3‒4). Eng and Kazanjian (2003) therefore read the melancholic “refusal of closure” as a generative mode of resistance and a telling reminder of the unmourned losses of minoritized histories discarded from dominant social and cultural narratives (p. 3). For these scholars, melancholia shows us how and why people remain attached to historical losses in political contexts where they are not thought to matter enough to remember. Thus, while in Freud’s assessment melancholia is not at all easy to explain, Eng and Kazanjian (2003) suggest that the melancholic aim to retain the lost object is, in fact, a vital response to the repudiation of minoritized histories (see also, Ahmed 2010; Chang, 2001; Cvetkovich, 2012; Sarigianides, 2017).

Eng and Kazanjian’s critique can be read alongside a larger affective turn in social and political theory that seeks to “de-pathologize” historically denigrated affects such as “shame, failure, melancholy, and depression” (Cvetkovich, 2012, p. 5). In this context, negative affect, of which melancholia is one example, signifies both social critique and political possibility (Ahmed 2010; Cvetkovich, 2012; Eng and Kazanjian 2003). As critique, Sara Ahmed (2010) suggests that melancholia represents an active refusal to forget histories of violence otherwise hidden under the cloak of the nation. In this sense, melancholia is not an individual affliction, but rather registers the failure of social contexts and political structures to recognize the losses of minoritized people. As political possibility, Ahmed (2010) argues that insofar as melancholia registers something “missing,” it also instigates the search for something more (p. 153), or in the words of Avery Gordon (2011) “a something-to-be-done” (p. 2). As Ahmed (2010) writes, melancholic attachments to loss signify “a potential to find something, even if what you find will not be the same things that have been lost” (p. 153). Ann Cvetkovich (2012) further suggests how new political formations may be “entwined with and even enhanced by forms of negative feeling” (p. 5). The main thrust of her argument, much like Ahmed, underscores the value of melancholic feelings precisely because they hold open a continuous relation with the discarded contents of history.

Second thoughts on the critical potential of melancholia challenge these claims and take many forms. Gabriele Schwab (2010), for one, underscores the “danger of … using trauma as the foundation of identity,” which she argues fixes subjectivity in a deficit model of “victimization” (p. 19; see also Brown, 2001). While speaking a truth of suffering inherited and undergone, attachment to injury anchors the subject in a position that is, in Schwab’s (2010) words, “eminently exploitable” (p. 19). With Freud, Deborah Britzman (2000) emphasizes that melancholia is a defense against loss. In her words, melancholia aims to “restore as unchanged both the lost object and the ego,” and in so doing, turns away from the difference that loss makes for those left behind (Britzman 2000, p. 34). RM Kennedy (2010) further reminds readers that melancholia splits a central conflict of ambivalence needed to temper extremes of love and hate. Through splitting, melancholia upholds idealized versions of the self and community that are believed to have existed before the loss. Traveling under the rubric of “tradition” or “ethnic nationalism,” such idealizations seek to “reconstitute a lost ‘imagined community’ ” that dangerously excludes “outsideness” and “social difference” (Kennedy, 2010, p. 112). On a social scale, then, melancholia may be read as a condition that repeats the logic of trauma by reinstalling hardened splits that can be used, indeed exploited, to justify further oppression and violence.

Relatedly, Wendy Brown (1999) argues that melancholia works on “a certain logic of fetishism” oriented toward a “world of things” that aims to fill lack, staving off the more difficult encounter with the absence left behind by lost others (p. 21). It is on these terms that Roger I. Simon, Sharon Rosenberg, and Claudia Eppert (2000) highlight the ethical limits of melancholia as a position from which to respond to the losses of history. Britzman (2000) articulates the problem this way: “Melancholia is a form of narcissistic identification, where the ego confuses itself with the lost object, becomes split, and then attacks itself and the loss” (p. 34). Because melancholic identification collapses the distinction between the self and other, it also obstructs the capacity to witness the other who has been lost beyond what the ego wants, most notably, to not lose at all (Kristeva, 1989; Todd, 2003). What may appear to be an ethical effort to recuperate the lost other is an unconscious defense that aims to fill lack and restore mastery over runaway affects. While indeed a painful and continuous attachment, melancholia forecloses the more difficult encounter with the ego—and the world—as forever changed by the loss, for in melancholia, “the object becomes the ego,” and so there is no distance from which to pose this question (Britzman, 2000, p. 34).

Ann Anlin Chang (2001) adds that the split subject of melancholia also affects and organizes dominant social identities and formations. To this end, educational theorists examine how melancholia haunts constructions of curriculum and pedagogy that conserve the values of the state. Britzman (2009), for instance, theorizes how “melancholic education” is oriented by “what we imagine as a time before,” when the basics of curriculum could set us free from the discontents of thought and the indeterminacy of emotional life (p. 43). Taubman (2017), too, shows how neoliberal educational reform in the United States idealizes standards and skills based on the constant threat of their loss. His work analyzes reform discourse as a melancholic promise to restore lost order through increasingly dehumanizing practices, to the point of turning “others and ourselves into numbers, even into machines” (Taubman, 2017, p. 99). The backward glance of melancholic education extends also in the opposite direction to the figure of the child heralding a better time in the future that is yet to come. Madeleine Grumet (1986) describes this idealized “cherub” figure as a “child redeemer” marshaled to recuperate history’s losses in “sun-dappled commencements where we exhort him to make the world a better place” (p. 91). This is a child who is imagined to have, in Joanne Faulkner’s (2011) words, “healing power to remedy the tainted harvest of adults’ ineptitude” (p. 24). The child redeemer may be read as an ally of melancholic education insofar as this figure signals the promise of absolution marshalled to defend against the irrevocable traces that history leaves behind.

Of course, the idea that children can make the world a better place is difficult to dispute, particularly in light of the ongoing devastations that continue to pile up at the feet of history. Few educators, scholars, and clinicians would dispute their sense of obligation to engage in practices oriented to make the world a more hospitable place. I count myself among them. However, in the nostalgic construction of pedagogical certainties, in the idealization of educational reform, and in the promise of the child’s redemptive power resides the melancholic logic that splits the subject and defends against the myriad losses that do haunt the history of education: the loss of people to cultural genocide, the loss of places to human-made disaster and environmental degradation, the loss of unsupported students and colleagues cast out of the walls of the institution, and the loss of the ideal of reason to give us the answers it promises. Ironically, the melancholic aim to recuperate historical losses through the idealization of childhood risks turning away from education’s implication in these very losses. Because the idealization at work in melancholia relies “on a rhetoric of hiding that works to thwart, obstruct, and distort meaning,” melancholic education can work to defend against its entanglement in ongoing legacies that cast out child figures who disrupt and exceed its fantasied ideals (Salvio, 2007, p. 14).

In the context of these debates over mourning and melancholia, Schwab (2010) offers a useful reading of the replacement child figure to clarify and extend Freud’s concepts. Her reading highlights a productive ambiguity in Freud’s essay; that is, Freud is never clear about which objects work in the service of melancholic repetition and which objects constitute “a new and entirely different love” that is the hallmark of mourning (p. 143). Schwab utilizes this ambiguity to underscore the overlap between, on the one hand, the figure of the child as melancholic object and, on the other hand, the figure of the child as grounds for mourning loss. She therefore notes how this ambiguity may soften the view that “[p]ain … can only be [melancholically] repressed and displaced or lived and transformed [in mourning]” (p. 143, emphasis added). For Schwab, the question is how to allow for a third possibility that positions the replacement child as a “transformational object” (p. 127). In this third space, the replacement child may be read as a melancholic object that wards off the pain of loss and as a “substitute” that can facilitate the work of mourning (Schwab, 2010, p. 122). In Schwab’s (2010) words, the replacement figure “enacts a descent into the crypt that coincides with a rebirthing, that is, a (re)writing of the story” (p. 135, original emphasis). The replacement child symbolizes the potential for transformation, as Schwab (2010) writes, “to carry the task of mourning and integration beyond replacement,” insofar as the descent of melancholia can prompt a new relationship with the unspoken past (p. 145, emphasis added).2

With...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Why Study the Child after a “Century of the Child”?
• Chapter one The Replacement Child: An Allegory of Loss for Scholars and Students of Childhood
• Chapter two Psychoanalysis on the Spectrum: From Psycho sis to the Child’s Rightful Claim of Potency and Privacy
• Chapter three The Counterfeit Child: On Race, Gender, and Murder in Junior High
• Chapter four Debating Trauma Texts in the Wake of the Residential School: Beyond Damage and Innocence
• Chapter five Transitional Phenomena and (Trans)gender Childhood
• Postscript The Child in Mind: Four Affective Challenges to the Fields of Childhood Studies, Education, and Psychology
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover