From psychobabble to neuro-nonsense: cognitivism, neuroscience and children’s literature

Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan of the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992 [1984]), 1. For a discussion of the problems of assuming an opposition or hierarchy between “sociology” and the “literary” see: Stephen Thomson, “The Instance of the Veil: Bordieu’s Flaubert and the Textuality of Social Science,” Comparative Literature, 55: 4 (Autumn, 2003), 275-292. See for my extensive discussions on this kind of misunderstanding of Derrida’s textuality especially: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child (Oxford: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1994), although all my work engages with the problems of such misunderstandings in thinking about childhood, gender and disability, as referenced in note 7 below. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Limits of “Sex” (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), ix-x. Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 355. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008 [1989]), 3. See for my previous arguments about the misreading or ignoring of Rose: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Psychopathology of Everyday Children’s Literature Criticism,” Cultural Critique, 45, Autumn 2000, 222-42; Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Childhood, Queer Theory, and Feminism,” Feminist Theory, 11:3, December 2010, 309-21; Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child” in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture, Revisited: Further Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), 1-18; and for my further arguments around the ignoring of Haraway as well as wider critiques of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience: Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Motherhood, Evolutionary Psychology and Mirror Neurons or: ‘Grammar is Politics by Other Means,’” Feminist Theory, 16:2, May 2015, 171-187; Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Object of Neuroscience and Literary Studies,” Textual Practice, 31:7, 2017, 1315-1331, available at the following permanent link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1237989; Neil Cocks and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, “Back to Where We Came From: Evolutionary Psychology and Children’s Literature and Media,” in Elisabeth Wesseling (ed.), Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia: Books, Toys and Contemporary Media Culture (London: Routledge, 2017), 318-37. David Rudd and Anthony Pavlik, “The (Im)Possibility of Children’s Fiction: Rose Twenty-Five Years On,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35:3, Fall 2010, 223-229, 225. Gabrielle Owen, “Queer Theory Wrestles the ‘Real’ Child: Impossibility, Identity, and Language in Jacqueline Rose’s The Case of Peter Pan,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 35:3, Fall 2010, 255-73, 256-7. See for a thorough and wide-ranging analysis of the “neuro-turn” development and consequences: Jan De Vos, The Metamorphoses of the Brain: Neurologisation and its Discontents (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2016). Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose, “Introduction” in Hilary Rose and Stephen Rose (eds), Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Vintage, 2001), 1-14, 1. There have been heated debates about literary criticism that draws on evolutionary psychology (sometimes called “literary Darwinism”); see, for instance, Thomas Karshan, “Evolutionary Criticism,” Essays in Criticism, LIX:4 (October 2009), 287-301; Jonathan Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” Critical Inquiry, Winter 2011, 315-47; Lesnik-Oberstein, “Motherhood, Evolutionary Psychology and Mirror Neurons;” Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Object of Neuroscience and Literary Studies.” Kramnick, “Against Literary Darwinism,” 315. Raymond Tallis, “Think Brain Scans Can Reveal Our Innermost Thoughts? Think Again.” The Observer, “Comment Section,” 2013, 31. See for some further critiques of evolutionary psychology and neuroscience from different albeit related perspectives, for instance: Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld, Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2013); Suparna Choudhury and Jan Slaby (eds.), Critical Neuroscience: A Handbook of the Social and Cultural Contexts of Neuroscience (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012); Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham: Acumen Publishing Ltd, 2011); Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences (London: Icon Books, 2010); Deena S. Wiesberg, Frank C. Keil, Joshua Goodstein, Elizabeth Rawson and Jeremy R. Gray, “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 20:3 (March 2008), 470–7; Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (New York: Icon Books, 2007); Michael Posner (ed.), Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention (New York: The Guilford Press, 2004); Jenny Corrigall and Heward Wilkinson, Revolutionary Connections: Psychotherapy and Neuroscience (London: Karnac Books, 2003); Margaret Bullowa (ed.), Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). For another important tradition of critique see the edited collection by Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology (London: Vintage, 2001). Finally, for some scientific critiques, see: Katherine Button, John P.A. Ioannidis, Claire Mokrysz, Brian A. Nosek, Jonathan Flint, Emma S.J. Robinson and Marcus R. Munafò, “Power Failure: Why Small Sample Size Undermines the Reliability of Neuroscience,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 14 (May 2013), 365–76; Robyn Bluhm, “Self-fulfilling Prophecies: The Influence of Gender Stereotypes on Functional Neuroimaging Research on Emotion,” Hypatia, 28:4 (2013), 870–86. Ruth Leys, “‘Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula’: Mirror Neuron Theory and Emotional Empathy,” Nonsite.org, issue 5, March 18th 2012, 1-25, accessed on: 11/04/2013 20:51, at: http://nonsite.org/article/“both-of-us-disgusted-in-my-insula”-mirror-neuron-theory-and-emotional-empathy. Cocks, unpublished manuscript, February 2012 (quoted by kind permission); Cocks’s formulation here echoes Rose’s critique of the child and the unconscious as not “something separate which can be scrutinised and assessed” (The Case of Peter Pan, 13). For Cocks’s wider critique of cognitivism, neuroscience and evolutionary psychology see: Neil Cocks, Student-Centred: Education, Freedom and the Idea of Audience (Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 2009). Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 9. De Vos, The Metamorphoses of the Brain, 6-8. Sandra Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic: John Harding’s Florence & Giles as a Neo-Victorian Reworking of The Turn of the Screw,” Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, 5:1 (2012) 60-88. I would here like to thank Sandra Dinter for generously discussing her work with me. See for critiques of otherwise mostly taken-for-granted claims to (children’s) “voice” and “agency:” Lesnik-Oberstein, “Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child.” Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 63-4, referencing Marie-Luise Kohlke, “Neo-Victorian Childhoods: Re-Imagining the Worst of Times,” in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (eds.), Neo-Victorian Families: Gender, Sexual and Cultural Politics (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2011), 119-147, 144 (original emphasis) and 128. Sue Walsh, “Child/Animal: It’s the ‘Real’ Thing,” The Yearbook of English Studies, Special Issue on “Children in Literature,” 32, Children in Literature (Leeds: MHRA, 2002), 151-162, 162. See for reviews of how different disciplines engage with the child: “Childhood and Textuality: Culture, History, Literature” in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 1-28 and Lesnik-Oberstein, “Introduction: Voice, Agency and the Child.” Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 64. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 62. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 64. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 71. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 70; my italics. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 67. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 67. Walsh, “Child/Animal: It’s the ‘Real’ Thing,” 158, referring to: Marian Scholtmeijer, Animal Victims in Modern Fiction: From Sanctity to Sacrifice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993). In claiming that this applies to “all children’s literature” I mean that if this framework is not upheld, then whatever would be going on would necessarily be understood not to be “children’s literature” but something else. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 68, referencing Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 3. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 84. Shoshana Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation” in Shoshana Felman (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1982 [1977]), 94-208. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 64. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 66. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 77. Dinter, “The Mad Child in the Attic,” 82. Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” 106-7 (italics in original). Haraway’s position is different in this respect at least, for while I read Haraway as agreeing with Rose and Felman on the status of perspective and language, psychoanalysis is for Haraway not the explicit grounding that it is for Rose and Felman. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 12. Felman, “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” 110 (italics in original). Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 12-3. Jacqueline Rose, “The Return of Peter Pan,” in Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan of the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 1992 [1984]), ix-xviii, x. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 2012), xvii. I am quoting here the title of the article by the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, “Confusion of Tongues between Adults and Child” (in Michael Balint (ed.), Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis, trans. E. Mosbacher, London: Hogarth Press, 1955 [1933], 156-68) which is also referred to by Jacqueline Rose in the sub-title of her third chapter of The Case of Peter Pan (see pages 66 and 148, note 3). Jenny Bourne Taylor, “Between Atavism and Altruism; the Child on the Threshold in Victorian Psychology and Edwardian Children’s Fiction,” in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture: Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), 89-121, 91. Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, 90-1. See for a thorough critique of evolutionary psychology’s theories about autism: Helen Ainslie, “Perspectives and Community: Constructions of Autism and Childhood,” in Karín Lesnik-Oberstein (ed.), Children in Culture Revisited. Further Approaches to Childhood (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), 90-107. Vittorio Gallese, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi and Giacomo Rizzolatti, “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain, 119 (1996), 593-609. Yu-Kuan Chen, “Objects of Vision: Text, Colour, Gesture,” Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Reading, 2012, 270. Not coincidentally, Chen herself is inspired in turn by Jacqueline Rose’s Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005 [1986]). My thanks to Yu-Kuan Chen for helping me to develop my reading of the mirror-neuron claims. For a thorough discussion of the centrality of intentionality to ideas of “affect” as well as a thorough wider critique of affect, see Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry, 37 (Spring 2011), 434-72. John Cartwright, Evolution and Human Behaviour. Darwinian Perspectives on Human Nature (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008 (second edition)), 142. Carlo Salzani, “Review of Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice (New York, 2011),” Bryn Mawr Review of Comparative Literature, 9:2 (Fall 2011), accessed on 30th December 2012 at: http://www.brynmawr.edu/bmrcl/BMRCLFall2011/Reading%20Human%20Nature,%20Literature%20after%20Darwin.htm Rose and Rose, “Introduction,” 1. Rose and Rose, “Introduction,” 1. Rose and Rose, “Introduction,” 8. Dorothy Nelkin, “Less Selfish than Sacred? Genes and the Religious Impulse in Evolutionary Psychology,” in Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (eds), Alas Poor Darwin, 14-28. Salzani, “Review of Joseph Carroll, Reading Human Nature,” quoting from Carroll, Reading Human Nature, 78. Jonathan Kramnick, “Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My Critics,” Critical Inquiry, 38:2 (Winter 2012): 431-460, 432. Hugo Crago, Entranced by Story: Brain, Tale and Teller, from Infancy to Old Age (London: Routledge, 2014). Maria Nikolajeva, Reading for Learning: Cognitive Approaches to Children’s Literature, Series “Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition,” edited by Nina Christensen, Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer, vol. 3 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014). Evelyn Arizpe and Vivienne Smith (eds), Children as Readers in Children’s Literature: The Power of Texts and the Importance of Reading (London: Routledge, 2015). Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Bullen (eds), Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (London: Routledge, 2017). For a classic analysis of how developmental psychology itself can be read not to be organic and universal, but instead historical, cultural and social, see: Erica Burman, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (second edition) (London, Routledge, 2008 [1994]). For some of the very few critiques of “identification” in children’s literature studies besides Rose’s seminal The Case of Peter Pan see: Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989) and Karín Lesnik-Oberstein, Children’s Literature: Criticism and the Fictional Child. Elizabeth Bullen, Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith, “Children’s Literature and the Affective Turn: Affect, Emotion, Empathy” in Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Bullen (eds), Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (London: Routledge, 2017), 1-17, 1, 8 (my emphasis). Pierre Jacob and Marc Jeannerod, “The Motor Theory of Social Cognition: A Critique,” TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 9:1 (2005), 21–5, 21. See for further, extensive analyses of the problems with “mirror neuron” research: Lesnik-Oberstein, “Motherhood, Evolutionary Psychology and Mirror Neurons” and Lesnik-Oberstein, “The Object of Neuroscience and Literary Studies.” See for a key critique of “affect:” Daniela Caselli, “Kindergarten theory: Childhood, Affect, Critical Thought,” Feminist Theory, 11:3, December 2010, 241-54. Lydia Kokkola, “Simplified Minds: Empathy and Mind-Modelling in Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle” in Kristine Moruzi, Michelle J. Smith and Elizabeth Bullen (eds), Affect, Emotion, and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (London: Routledge, 2017), 96-113, 98.