Childrens literature has spent decades on the psychiatrists couch, submitting to psychoanalysis by scores of scholars and popular writers alike. Freud in Oz turns the tables, suggesting that psychoanalysts owe a significant and largely unacknowledged debt to books ostensibly written for children. In fact, Kenneth B. Kidd argues, childrens literature and psychoanalysis have influenced and interacted with each other since Freud published his first case studies.

In Freud in Oz, Kidd shows how psychoanalysis developed in part through its engagement with childrens literature, which it used to articulate and dramatize its themes and methods, turning first to folklore and fairy tales, then to materials from psychoanalysis of children, and thence to childrens literary texts, especially such classic fantasies as Peter Pan and Alices Adventures in Wonderland. He traces how childrens literature, and critical response to it, aided the popularization of psychoanalytic theory. With increasing acceptance of psychoanalysis came two new genres of childrens literatureknown today as picture books and young adult novelsthat were frequently fashioned as psychological in their forms and functions.

Freud in Oz offers a history of reigning theories in the study of childrens literature and psychoanalysis, providing fresh insights on a diversity of topics, including the view that Maurice Sendak and Bruno Bettelheim can be thought of as rivals, that Sendaks makeover of monstrosity helped lead to the likes of the Muppets, and that Poohology is its own kind of literary criticismserving up Winnie the Pooh as the poster bear for theorists of widely varying stripes.