Citation

Miller IS. Am. J. Psychoanal. 2018; 78(2): 113-125.

Affiliation

Kilmainham Congregational Church, Inchicore Rd., Dublin 8, Ireland. driansmiller@gmail.com.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, Publisher Holtzbrinck Springer Nature Publishing Group)

DOI

10.1057/s11231-018-9139-4

PMID

29643373

Abstract

Whether encountered as a movie or novel, Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a childhood staple of postwar Anglophone culture. Originally published in 1964, Dahl's story of "Willie Wonka" is a morality tale for our times addressed by the present essay in relation to the precariousness, violence, intergenerational faith, and materialist fantasies reflective of contemporary life in the early twenty-first century. Compensating for the precarity of contemporary life's impoverishment as assumptions of societal stability are overthrown, this chronicle of the Bucket family details: envious desire validated by large group chosen trauma; authoritarian enslavement of inferior, colonized peoples with murderous, industrial-level human experimentation; toward gratification of the greedy fantasy of unlimited sweetness under the sway of lethal identification with the aggressor.

Language: en

Keywords

Willy Wonka; chosen trauma; fantasy; identification; intergenerational; precarity