ABSTRACT
The focus of the book is established including the serendipitous event that led the author (an educational historian) to write her memoir using Christopher Robin Milne as a “psychological companion”. Their stories are linked by the shared experience of boarding school trauma and the adult journey of recovery through involvement in education and memoir writing. The collapse of the separation of the genres of history and memoir is discussed as well as the use of reflexivity, defined as the examination of and integration into the text of the writer’s thoughts, feelings and unconscious including dreams. The various research lenses drawn upon to analyse the experiences are outlined, including boarding school trauma research, educational history, developmental and depth psychology, trauma recovery research and the use of narrative writing in knitting together the schism that trauma creates in autobiographical memory. The chapter concludes with discussion of the notion that every child who went to boarding school came as a unique individual, who had already lived some years of their lives, which in turn shaped their experiences and responses.
