ABSTRACT
Because the child and childhood hold a privileged position in most psychoanalytical theories, the elective affinity between children's literature and psychological criticism seems even more natural than the affinity between psychology and literature in general. Psychoanalytic theory adds to the literary text a ‘second dimension—unfolding what might be called the unconscious content of the work’ (Holland 1970:131), but the condensations and displacements at work in the author—text—reader relation are problematised in children's literature because of the double reader: adult/child.
