ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the fictional representation of the child with an inappropriate or deprived home life or who undergoes state intervention or institutional care. It starts with Alfred Adler, whose work and ideas informed institutional care and child reform in Britain and who was a powerful influence on Phyllis Bottome and her husband. The chapter focuses on the analyst's concern with the damage that arises from disrupted childhoods and infancies where children behave with little regard for law, morality or social mores. It demonstrates the urgent need for change and reforms of the social care system, or of the treatment of children with difficult home lives. The chapter discusses the influence of family is key to the moral development of the child in the fiction. Legal and social care institutions dis-place and disenfranchise the child, irrespective of the contributions from psychoanalytic and psychological theory to the delivery of institutional care.
