ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 reviews the conceptual basis on which psychoanalysis has been hailed as a critical, antidevelopmentalist interpretive resource. This critical engagement forms part of a consideration of the shifting and vexed relations between psychoanalytic accounts with (varieties of) developmental psychology. Doing this brings into focus the shifting relations between being the object and subject of development. Reflecting a Child as method frame, the chapter highlights cultural-political stakes in notions of development, including structuring individual subjectivities. Political projects of surveillance, regulation or oppression or, alternatively, liberation, mobilise models of social–individual relations that typically invoke stories of children and childhood. Second, the chapter takes further the distinction already identified between developmental and developmentalist accounts, where the latter resort to descriptions of individual and child development as a means of accounting for (problems) within current social arrangements.
