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Kenneth Kidd has made the scholarship of children's literature a specialty, with particular emphasis on psychoanalysis and on queer theory. In this volume, Freud in Oz, his project is to mark the intersections of psychoanalysis and children's literature by chronicling the history of both endeavors and indicating their mutual influences on each other and, more broadly, their interactions with other forms of popular culture, popular psychology and the culture of the therapeutic.
It is Kidd's contention that children's literature as a genre, at least since the late 19th century, has grown in parallel fashion with psychoanalysis and more particularly with child psychoanalysis, beginning with Freud's case of Little Hans. Furthermore, while both psychoanalysis and children's literature can be thought of in terms of mutually constitutive case studies, as commentaries on each other's genre, he makes the case that the multiplication of ‘after-texts,’ particularly of Golden Age classics like Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz, is also legitimately in the genre of the “case study.” This is a provocative and fruitful line of inquiry, one that begs questions as to the generic history of the psychoanalytic case study itself. Freud, of course, worried about this question in his write-up of the case of Dora (Freud, 1905), famously comparing it to a novella. From a more literary perspective, convincing work has been done on the roots of the modern novel in “cases of conscience,” the popular casuistical writings of the early Modern era (Starr, 1967). Thus, while it may not be news to be reminded of literary influence, generic instability (Derrida and Avital, 1980) and cross-disciplinary borrowings, still it comes as fresh knowledge to have Kidd observe and delineate these movements for us: the Freudian, Kleinian and Winnicottian child psychoanalytic case studies as after-texts of the fairy tale, and the post-Freudian efflorescence of children's literature as after-tex