Detours of Growth

Detours of Growth David Lewkowich (bio) Farley, Lisa. Childhood beyond Pathology: A Psychoanalytic Study of Development and Diagnosis. SUNY P, 2018. 196 pp. $20.95 pb. ISBN 9781438470900. Throughout this curious, thoughtful, and provocative text, Lisa Farley asks us to consider how notions of normalization in theories of human development effectively condemn the very children they purportedly seek to help. Through regulatory and repressive discourses of social control, children who fall outside of normalized categories are often interpreted as fundamentally deficient and defective, and in dire need of cure and correction. As the title of this book makes clear, Childhood beyond Pathology interrupts this straightforward line of reasoning that links “normalcy with wellness and difference with pathology” (Farley 119) and instead develops a psychoanalytically informed theory of childhood that understands internal conflict and difficulty not as a problem to be solved, but as foundational for human growth. Turning to a variety of child figures appearing in literature, censorship controversies, psychoanalytic theory, case studies, and court transcripts, Farley foregrounds the representation of childhood, and in doing so, challenges readers to notice how social constructions of childhood—and the question of who actually gets to be a child—often address the concerns of adults while bypassing those of actual children. In each of these cases, Farley implores her readers to imagine more creative ways of understanding the interpretive challenges of childhood, emphasizing that the narratives that adults tell about children and childhood, fictional or otherwise, always “impact the lived lives of children” (8). Especially in an era when children are often treated as political pawns, for example, migrant children trapped in detention facilities at the southern border of the United States, Farley’s analysis of adults’ conceptualizations of child development is persuasive, prescient, and certainly much needed. In this book, Farley offers five considerations of [End Page 199] childhood beyond pathology: a literary figure regarding the productive uses of melancholic inheritance and loss; a figure of autistic childhood that compels psychoanalysis to augment its own conceptual ground; an excluded figure of racialized youth born of the normative structures of white innocence; a figure of literary controversy that views mixed feelings as a way to stage a meaningful encounter with history; and a figure of transgender embodiment that encourages deliberation on the creative potential of gender identification. In the introductory chapter, entitled “Why Study the Child after a ‘Century of the Child’?,” Farley considers how adults’ uncertainties and anxieties, many of which date back to forgotten childhood, shape the interpretive categories they construct to understand the lives of younger people. Following the work of Erica Burman and Deborah P. Britzman, Farley describes how this overfamiliarity with childhood functions to blur the line between the child and adult self for those who are nonetheless “children-no-longer” (3). Throughout this chapter, Farley posits the status of childhood as a shifting cultural myth; despite being framed as a neutral and “natural stage of development,” it could be more appropriately viewed as “a placeholder” for the “political struggles, philosophical ideals, and social anxieties that reflect the preoccupations of adults” (1–2). Rather than placing her focus on the individual child, Farley explores the ways in which scholarly understandings of childhood are also products of history and how these histories—of conflicted and contested meaning—are themselves foundational to the interrelated fields in which she locates her study: education, psychology, and childhood studies. An Associate Professor of Education, Farley’s investigation operates between literary and educational fields of inquiry, reading literature for its emotional testimony of childhood, and reading the cases of actual children as “harboring symbolic meanings that are deeper than any curriculum or diagnosis can represent” (16). In the interdisciplinary tradition of childhood studies, Farley’s work engages with critical, queer, and reconceptualist notions regarding the ways in which idiosyncratic and non-normative childhood challenges that which is “otherwise repressed inside social norms” (9). The reconceptualist understanding, for example, posits that theories of seemingly universal child development lead to practices of social exclusion that reproduce unequal power relationships among children, between children and adults, and toward the [End Page 200] category of childhood itself (Bloch, Swadener, and Cannella; Boldt and Salvio; Castañeda; Pacini-Ketchabaw...

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