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It bears repeating that adults write about children; children do not write about themselves. As Lisa Farley suggests in her new book, Childhood beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis (2018), how we write about children tells us a great deal about what we, as adults, believe “it means to be human and what we ought to strive for in humanity’s name” (p. 2). Writing from our position as adults with our own conflicts and concerns transferred into the present from individual and shared histories, we can lose sight of the particularities – whether historical, social or psychological – of actual children and their experiences of childhood. Acknowledging her own partial perspective, Farley begins her book with the premise that “childhood is neither a natural stage of development, nor a neutral category, but rather a placeholder for political struggles, philosophical ideals, and social anxieties that reflect the preoccupation of adults” (pp. 1–2). The book goes on to unpack the contested terrain of childhood through the exploration of five child figures drawn from clinical and literary case studies, each of which points to the limitations of the developmental and diagnostic parameters used by adults to define the ideal child.
Farley’s scholarship emerges from her own work as a teacher-educator and theorist interested in how psychoanalysis can illuminate the contexts of teaching, learning, and education, and brings needed attention to the emotional worlds and the social and cultural contexts of childhood. In this book, Farley proposes that “childhood is a relational concept that makes the very thought of adulthood possible,” while also troubling the distinctions between these two ideas (p. 2). Farley challenges those of us who “theorize, work with, and/or teach children to continually examine the meaning of childhood in relationship to history, to social context, and to ourselves” (p. 3). For those who are “children-no-longer,” the biggest challen