Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction

(review)

Michelle A. Massé

L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 37, Number 3, Fall 1997, p. 100 (Review)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.0.0130

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/264040/summary

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 L'Esprit Créateur

Virginia L. Blum. Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psychoanalysis and Fiction.
Champaign: The University of Illinois Press, 1995. Pp. χ + 299. $39.95 (cloth); $17.95
(paper).

The central premise of Virginia Blum's Hide and Seek: The Child Between Psycho-
analysis and Fiction is that the children that populate psychoanalysis and fiction are phan-
tasmagoric figures, puppets constructed to enact the imperatives of their adult creators.
The "stories" told about and through these figures are, inevitably, the adults' own.
Blum argues against any "distinction between historical and narrative truths" and
"resists an encounter with a material child that.. . remains inaccessible" (14). She accord-
ingly punctuates portrayals of the child in psychoanalysis and fiction with "intervals" and
a final chapter that address representations in the "real" world, such as the "Baby Jessica"
case, recovered memories of child abuse, and mandated Norplant usage. In each register,
Blum sees the child as a "go-between," "mirror," or "blind spot" (36, 200, 89). "It," as
Blum insists the child must be called, has no material existence; we adults create our own
chimerical reality and "interpret ourselves through the child" (fh9, 14; 5).
Blum's analyses of The Go-Between, Oliver Twist, Bleak House, What Maisie Knew,
and Lolita are detailed and thoughtful. For example, her explication of Leo Colston as a
Lacanian "phallic child" (97) illuminates both the novel's and Lacan's refusal to consider
the Oedipus complex as the "fantasy of a triad camouflaging a dyad" (85). Her interweav-
ing of psychoanalytic and fictional accounts of the family romance in "The Dickensian
Child" is particularly fine, as she explores how the child functions both as "the past of
omnipotent narcissism and the future of unfulfilled potential" (143). According to Blum's
line of reasoning, both the Dickensian child and psychoanalysis use repetition to achieve "a
permanent ascension into a perfected family" (159). Although I would argue that success-
ful therapy—or a novel such as Great Expectations—requires not the perfection of defenses
and "stasis" (161) but recognition that the family wasn't/won't be perfect, Blum makes a
strong case in relation to the novels she discusses.
In scrutinizing those "self-sustaining and self-confirming repetitions" (267) and the
child's function as "an emblem of time itself" (112), Blum insightfully emphasizes the tem-
poral quandaries of analysis and fiction. Does a reader or an analyst identify with the
"adult or child position" (45), "the chronological [or] psychological ages of the subject"
(47), and to what end? Blum's discussion of temporal complexities highlights a major struc-
tural dimension in both realms.
Perhaps because of my own willful reconstructions, there sometimes seems to be a ten-
sion between Blum's insistence upon the post-modern child and the glimpses of the "real
thing" that the title itself suggests. If I'm a bit chilled by her having "invited these two
disciplines to meet over the body of the child on which their self-representation depends"
(248), I'm comforted that there is a body. Similarly, although she denies that "female fan-
tasies of the child are more accurate, more in touch with actual children, than male fan-
tasies" (270), according to her own rationale the child seems once more a pawn as she urges
the need to find "strategies whereby women can take back the child wrested from them by
male narrative fantasies of all kinds" (270).
Blum's study consistently raises astute, provocative, and arguable propositions that will
encourage all critical seekers to pause before declaring that we have "found" a child hiding
in a text.
Michelle A. Massé
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge

100 Fall 1997