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A Tuscan proverb invoked by the Italian writer Italo Calvino came to my mind as I was reviewing this book. Calvino, a modern Grimm brother who collected some 200 fables into one volume,1 rephrases this proverb
as follows: “‘The tale is not beautiful if nothing is added to it’—in other words, its value consists in what is woven and rewoven into it” (p. xxi). Calvino felt that folktales remain merely dumb until we realize that we are required to complete them ourselves, to fill them in with our own particulars.
The value of Kenneth B. Kidd's book Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature likewise emerges from the way in which Kidd weaves and reweaves his own particulars into this comprehensive review of the historical and contemporary relationship between children's literature and psychoanalysis. Kidd, an associate professor of English at the University of Florida, interlaces into his account an almost encyclopedic knowledge of 19th- and 20th-century American and European children's literature. He also addresses psychoanalytic studies of childhood, social constructivism, gender and queer contributions, the picture book genre, as well as adolescent literature and literature dealing with atrocities. The result of Kidd's zigzagging among his many interests is a scholarly work that is nevertheless engaging and easy to follow.
As I read Kidd's book, I developed an increasing appreciation for the long history of our psychoanalytic fascination with children's literature, as well as the complexity and sophistication of psychoanalytically inspired studies of this literary genre. I anticipate that psychoanalytically oriented clinicians will discover in Freud in Oz, as I did, the extraordinary diversity and richness both of children's books and of the intriguing critical commentaries on them.
Kidd correctly observes that most analysts are unaware of