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Published online: 18 January 2024
© The Author(s) under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2024
Childhood is full of precarities, and this collection explores the precarities of childhood across themes of time, place, and identity. All childhoods are precarious in their own right, and yet some precarities lead to the silencing of the child subject more than others. Vitally, this collection allows the experiences of children whose experiences are particularly precarious - the children whose voices have all too often been overlooked by psychoanalysis - to take center stage. The term ‘precarities’ also points to the child subject’s lack of control over one’s external situation. Precarities are not chosen or created by the child, but deeply dialogue with fantasy and all too often become the unarticulated Real. These are the contexts into which children simply find themselves born. It is the taking up of these precarities by the child subject that is, to my mind, where psychoanalysis offers a unique freedom. At a time of rising political tension throughout much of the psychoanalytic world, with various dogmatic views regarding the place of politics within the clinic, this collection serves as a reminder that psychoanalysts have and will always treat the precarities of childhood. Childhood precarities are that which resides in the Real until it can, through analysis, find its way into speech. Throughout the collection, the sophistication of vignettes (clinical and otherwise), speaking of the singularity of each child alongside discussions of that child’s precarities, makes an unimpeachable case that attention to these precarities is essential to analytic work with children.
The book begins with Annie Rogers and all three editors speaking to their own childhood precarities and the ways in which these shaped their lives and paths to (and through) psychoanalysis. The decision to speak of the precarities of the editors reminds us that each was born into a particular co