What is a child? : childhood, psychoanalysis, and discourse / Michael Gerard Plastow.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed September 23, 2014).

COVER; CONTENTS; ACKNOWLEDGEMENT; APPRECIATION; ABOUT THE AUTHOR; INTRODUCTION; PART I THE CHILD AND THE INFANTILE: HISTORY AND TIME; CHAPTER ONE The child: between history and structure; CHAPTER TWO A change of discourse: Freud's abandonment of the seduction hypothesis; CHAPTER THREE The fantasm: a transformational formula; PART II PSYCHOANALYSIS AS A CHILD AND ITS PROTAGONISTS; CHAPTER FOUR The illegitimate beginnings of the field of psychoanalysis of the child; CHAPTER FIVE The place of the parents: "the child does not come of his own accord."

CHAPTER SIX The leaking tap: the symptom of the childPART III DISCOURSES ON CHILDHOOD; CHAPTER SEVEN The ages of the child; CHAPTER EIGHT The upbringing of the child: between nature and culture; CHAPTER NINE Condillac's statue: from the sentiment of childhood to the sensuality of the child; CHAPTER TEN A new discourse: the child as sexual subject; PART IV THE CHILD AND THE SUBJECT; CHAPTER ELEVEN From the razing of the child to the advent of the subject; EPILOGUE; REFERENCES; INDEX.

Childhood is defined in different preconceived manners by different discourses. Thus the categories defined by age such as infant, child, adolescent and so on, are to some extent arbitrary divisions that are subject to the evolution in clinical, societal, ideological and political discourses. Within psychoanalysis there has been a conflation of childhood construed through the retrospective memories of adults, and childhood as seen through the perspective of infant observations. In What is a Child? Michael Gerard Plastow argues that the place of the child as subject in the fullest sense has bee.

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