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Lisa Farley, Associate Professor of Education at York University in Toronto, has written an engaging volume from a psychoanalytically infused reconceptualist perspective on child development and psychopathology. A nuanced reading of Childhood beyond Pathology offers much to the psychoanalytically minded reader, especially those unfamiliar with this field of contemporary childhood educational study.
Following a short, thoughtfully written introduction that defines childhood as “neither a natural stage of development, nor a neutral category, but rather a placeholder for political struggles, philosophical ideals, and social anxieties” (p. 1), Childhood beyond Pathology engages in its method: Five disempowered children from the areas of fiction, recent sociopolitical events, and the psychoanalytic literature are tapped chapter by chapter in order “to open new conceptualizations of the child who oversteps or is cast outside of dominant trajectories circumscribing growth, learning, language, and being itself ” (p. 4). In this manner Childhood beyond Pathology studies development through disenfranchised figures in order to subversively reinscribe conceptualizations of the normal, natural, and universal as fabricated constructs that serve primarily as containers of oppressive power relations.
Despite the author's tendency to uncritically champion this perspective, Childhood beyond Pathology inarguably advances our discourse on child development, as a consideration of its chapters will demonstrate.
Chapter 1 summons the “replacement child,” a child born to a parent after another child has died, through an analysis of Ann-Marie MacDonald's 2014 novel, Adult Onset. The analysis places Freud's “Morning and Melancholia” in the context of a “larger ‘affective turn’ in social and political theory that seeks to de-pathologize