STRANGE DISLOCATIONS : CHILDHOOD AND THE

In this study, the author takes as the starting point the idea of childhood and its history which, she argues, has much less to do with actual children than with adult concepts of the self and the way they have developed since the end of the 18th century.

Using the perspectives of social and cultural history, psychoanalysis and the history of psychology - and the history of a child who never actually existed, the strange, disturbed child Mignon from Goethe's "Wilhelmeister" - the book discusses a search for the self, for a past that is long and gone, and the ways in which, over the last 200 hundred years, the lost object/essence/vision has come to assume the shape and form of a child.