5 - The Pain of Separation

Summary

Chapter 5 examines the complex debates around the evacuation policies conducted in the United Kingdom before and during the Second World War. The discourses and figurations of children’s pain that were used to legitimise public policies are compared with the social results of those policies and contrasted with the ways in which different medical communities analysed the figure of the evacuated child: as a victim of air raids or as a victim of parental separation. The momentum of psychoanalysis as the predominant framework to understand psychological trauma is examined in this context, looking closely at the work and research of prominent figures such as Anna Freud and Melanie Klein.