ABSTRACT
Writing almost 50 years after Anna Freud, Leonard Shengold, an American psychoanalyst, built on Anna Freud’s work to suggest that Kipling himself used The Jungle Book, along with other writings, to mourn and metabolize his childhood experiences of separation. According to Shengold, Kipling was mourning the sudden, violent, and deeply traumatic separation from his mother at age 5, when he and his sister were sent back to England, in the young Kipling’s words, “the dark land” to live. The notion that Kipling was in grief is not without logic. Psychoanalytic research, both in Anna Freud’s time and in the present, tells us that infants separated from their families are at high risk of trauma. The Jungle Book has emerged in adaptations as a certain kind of power narrative might have to do with the colonial context in which it was first read.
