The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

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Growing Up Wild: Reflections on Early Middle

Childhood as Captured by Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean
at the End of the Lane

Jean Vogel & Mary Ayre

To cite this article: Jean Vogel & Mary Ayre (2022) Growing Up Wild: Reflections on Early Middle
Childhood as Captured by Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, The Psychoanalytic
Quarterly, 91:4, 741-760, DOI: 10.1080/00332828.2022.2151791

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2022.2151791

Published online: 28 Dec 2022.

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# The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2022
Volume XCI, Number 4
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00332828.2022.2151791

GROWING UP WILD: REFLECTIONS ON EARLY

MIDDLE CHILDHOOD AS CAPTURED BY NEIL
GAIMAN’S THE OCEAN AT THE END OF
THE LANE
BY JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE

A pattern of psychic fragmentation followed by consolida-

tion occurs throughout life and can be seen in all develop-
mental stages. Using Neil Gaiman’s novel, The Ocean at
the End of the Lane, the authors focus on the experience of
disorganization and re-organization in early middle child-
hood. The frequency with which young boys use fantasy to
contain affects and impulses makes the literary genre of magic
realism especially well-suited for the exploration of psycho-
logical states during early middle childhood.
Keywords: Early middle childhood, latency, growth, oedipal,
psychic fragmentation, reconsolidation, projection,
omnipotence, defenses, literary analysis.

INTRODUCTION
The Ocean at the End of the Lane (2013) dramatizes the psychic fragmenta-
tion of a young boy in early middle childhood who is adrift on an ocean
of loss. By externalizing the boy’s inner world and projecting it onto a
magical realm, Gaiman brings to fictional life the anxieties and defenses
of early latency. In this article, it is the authors’ contention that the

Jean Vogel, M.D., is a graduate of the Western New England Institute for
Psychoanalysis, Assistant Clinical Professor at the Wisconsin College of Medicine, and
Associate Director of the Wisconsin College of Medicine – Central Wisconsin Psychiatry
Residency in Wausau, WI.
Mary Ayre, M.D., is a graduate and faculty member at the Western New England
Institute for Psychoanalysis and is a consultant for Hartford Hospital and the Institute of
Living in Hartford, CT.

741
742 GROWING UP WILD

novel’s characters reveal the seven-year-old protagonist’s internal objects

and its settings represent his mind’s changing organization. Psycho-
analytic study of the story’s characters and landscapes brings to life the
boy’s psychological challenges, while also uniting Bornstein’s (1951)
observations published over sixty years ago regarding latency age chil-
dren with Knight’s more recent findings on early middle childhood
(2005, 2011).
Although in the most basic way, life proceeds with predictable direc-
tionality from birth to death, individual development evinces countless
variations (Knight 2005, 2011, 2017; Rizzolo 2017; Sander 2002; Mayes
2001; Galatzer-Levy 2004). By its very nature, growth stops and starts,
changes course and direction, leaps forward, and breaks down. Self-
cohesion fluctuates and psychic disintegration is accepted as an inherent
part of maturation. Sander (2002) identifies the important potential of
“the disorganizing and the destructive” (p. 161) along with “the new and
the creative” (p. 16) in any given system. Ogden (1988) highlights the
essential role splitting and projection play in development through the
creation of new building blocks for modified structures. Britton recog-
nizes these processes as preventing “yesterday’s depressive position
[from becoming] tomorrow’s defensive organization” (Garvey & Long
2019, p. 20). Bion (1963) suggests that the attainment of new under-
standing requires the capacity to bear states of disturbance and confu-
sion, including sensations of disintegration, and Loewald (1970)
observes the frequency with which disorganization precedes growth.
In this paper, we will review some psychoanalytic ideas pertaining to
early middle childhood with an emphasis on trauma and residual oedi-
pal struggles. A condensed synopsis of The Ocean at the End of the Lane will
then be presented, followed by an exploration of the story’s settings (in
the order in which they appear) as depictions of the protagonist’s mind
and the story’s characters as portrayals of his internal objects. Through
the study of these elements, the boy’s journey will be traced from frag-
mentation to integration, and early middle childhood’s enduring impact
on psychic structure will be considered.

1
Unless otherwise indicated, page numbers reference The Ocean at the End of the
Lane by Neil Gaiman.
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 743
EARLY MIDDLE CHILDHOOD
The latency child, according to Freud’s psychosexual stages, is the
rational child sandwiched between the polymorphously perverse infant
and the rebellious sexual adolescent (1905). Viewed as a quiescent time
following the resolution of oedipal conflicts and the formation of the
superego, latency has been associated with a focus on rules, mastery of
skills, and the establishment of peer relationships (Freud 1905). Writing
over sixty years apart, Bornstein (1951) and Knight (2005, 2014) inde-
pendently challenge the notion of an absence of sexual and aggressive
stirrings in early latency, noting significant turmoil in six- and seven-year-
old children. Knight (2005) refers to early middle childhood as the
“denouement of the oedipal period” (p. 186), and both authors identify
residual oedipal longings—along with wishes to merge, unconscious
fears of separation, and fears of bodily harm and death (one’s own and
one’s parents’)—in this population. These young children report feeling
rejected, disconnected, damaged, frightened, guilty, sad, and angry.
Knight’s (2005, 2014) psychological testing data indicate that “there is
nothing latent about latency” (p. 224), whereas Bornstein (1951)
observes that children in early middle childhood “may appear in an
emergency situation” (p. 281) “aware of their suffering” (p.281).
Having been pushed into the larger world ill-equipped or shaken by
major losses, children in early middle childhood must confront frighten-
ing new realities without parental backup. Intense affects can overwhelm
cognitive processes when these children “experience too much that is
too upsetting and too unexpected, too quickly” (Fernando 2018, p. 37).
Freud (1937) refers to the flooding of the mental apparatus with un-pro-
cessable and uncontainable stimuli as trauma. Sander (1960) suggests
that the experience of traumatic helplessness in the context of uncon-
trollable excitation is “the same no matter what the source of that excita-
tion may be” (p. 352). An individual child’s capacity to bear trauma—
conceptualized here in keeping with the notion of an overwhelming
intrapsychic event—depends on their ego strength and the supports
available to them; environment, psychology, and biology interact
throughout development to affect impact and outcome of intrapsychic
crises. Challenges in early middle childhood frequently arise around separ-
ation, attachment, autonomy, and identity. Resulting affects of humiliation,
744 GROWING UP WILD

longing, anger, and fear must be reconciled with newly prohibited aggres-
sive and sexual impulses. Previously held beliefs about mother, father, sib-
lings, and self are challenged, along with the mental representations
corresponding to each. Under pressure, integrated internal objects split
into part-objects, a state which further disrupts cognitive processes and dis-
torts experience. Neil Gaiman’s protagonist navigates his environment
through much of the novel in this fragmented state, his confusion, help-
lessness, longing, and terror, palpable.

PLOT SUMMARY
The Ocean at the End of the Lane begins with a number of disturbing events.
At the narrator’s seventh birthday party, which was attended by no one,
the mother offers no comfort. Forlorn and ridiculed by his younger
sister, the boy retreats to the safety of his room, where he is comforted
by his bed, a book, the warmth of his kitten. Shortly after, sudden
financial difficulties cause his parents to sublet his beloved bedroom.
School bullies populate his dreams and his mother returns to full-
time employment.
Like the children Bornstein and Knight describe, the boy in
Gaiman’s novel wrestles with intense feelings of abandonment and rejec-
tion. On his own and often on the verge of panic, he is unable to estab-
lish his place in his family or with peers. Furious over his parents’
thoughtless betrayals, he is shocked and grief-stricken in response to the
loss of them and the loss of his sense of himself as loved and enough.
The events that follow heighten the reader’s awareness of the fragility of
the boy’s world as it once was, and of life itself.
In the pages that follow, the boy’s kitten is run over by the man who
rents his bedroom and the man’s corpse is found in the boy’s father’s
car, “its lips were bluish, its skin was very red, it looked like a parody of
health” (p. 18). In a heroic effort to save what is good, the boy begins to
split good from bad, and he enters a fantastical world where badness
resides outside him in monsters.
Enter Lettie Hempstock, a girl from the neighborhood, who with
the boy’s father’s permission, rescues the boy from the gruesome scene,
taking him home with her to Hempstock Farm where her mother
(Ginny) and grandmother (Old Mrs. Hempstock) speak about the
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 745
unfolding events quietly and knowingly. Although they offer no explana-
tions, they clearly understand what is happening—unlike the boy’s
father and the police—and see to the boy’s needs. The safety of the farm-
house highlights the dangers of the world outside.
Behind the farmhouse is a pond that contains an ocean. This ocean-
pond is a time/space portal through which monsters have gained entry
into this world along with the immortal Hempstocks. Bound by
Hempstock magic to a forest on the edge of Hempstock property, the
monsters are kept away from people. One female monster, a shape-
shifter called Skarthach of the Keep, has escaped her binding however,
and has been using money in the form of coins and bills to hurt peo-
ple—the lodger’s suicide is one of her casualties. Eleven-year-old Lettie
journeys with the boy to the forest to rebind Skarthach. Although Lettie
uses the powerful “language of shaping” (p.43), Skarthach cannot be
contained. Instead, the monster tricks the boy into dropping Lettie’s
hand and then penetrates his body as a worm-like extension of herself.
The boy’s defensive effort to omnisciently control others (represented
by the language of shaping) and to find physical safety through merger
(symbolized by holding Lettie’s hand) fail, as does his effort to rid him-
self of badness through projection. Once home, he discovers the worm-
monster in his foot and while attempting to extract it, it breaks in two; a
piece remains attached to his heart. The boy washes the part he has
removed down the bathtub drain while trying to reassure himself he is
safe, but Skarthach reappears almost immediately, this time as an allur-
ing woman named Ursula Monkton whom his parents hire as a live-
in nanny.
Ursula moves into the boy’s old bedroom and quickly destroys the
previously indivisible bond between his parents. Unlike him, she is able
to capture his father’s attention and love. After taking sexual possession
of his father, she ramps up her efforts to control and destroy the boy. An
argument over dinner ends with his father attempting to drown the boy
in a freezing bath. Afterward, Ursula locks the boy in his room.
Drenched and shivering with no allies in the house (mother is absent, sis-
ter has joined father and Ursula), he makes a barefoot break for
Hempstock Farm and safety. Ursula flies after him. Huge, sexually
charged, and electrically illuminated against the dark sky, she catches
him in a field where he collapses, incontinent, resigned to die. At the
746 GROWING UP WILD

last minute, Lettie rescues him and brings him back to the farmhouse
where the Hempstock women patch him up while constructing a plan.
They decide to give Skarthach one last chance to voluntarily leave the
human world. If she refuses, they agree they will summon the scavengers
to destroy her. Frightening winged creatures, the scavengers’ sole pur-
pose is the cosmic annihilation of monsters.
Lettie and the boy find Ursula scantily dressed in bra and panties,
stretched out on the boy's treasured bed in his old bedroom. Echoes of
oedipal drama can be appreciated here. In the boy's bed, the seductive
and cruelly rejecting oedipal mother/monster lies oblivious to his needs
while gray strips from her cloth-monster form that are suspended from
the ceiling begin to float down and adhere to him. Unable to pull them
off without excorticating himself, he becomes quickly encased and falls
to the floor. Helpless, he only is able to breathe through a small hole
between the cloth strips. Completely wrapped, he is transformed into a
full-body phallus (Lewin 1933) that is finally large enough to win a
grown woman’s attention and love, but he is nearly killed in the process.
Lettie, unaware of the boy’s struggle, delivers the ultimatum to the
monster–-leave or face the scavengers, and Ursula runs from the house
terrified. Once she is gone, Lettie peels the strips off the boy without dif-
ficulty and the two rush after Ursula. Outside, the monster unfurls into
her huge, hollow-eyed, gray cloth form, grabbing the boy as she rises
into the sky and lifting him fifteen feet above ground. With no other
choice, Lettie calls the scavengers. Arriving en masse, they rip Skarthach
to shreds and completely devour her. Once the monster no longer exists,
the object that had received the boy’s projected badness is gone, and it
becomes impossible to ignore what is monstrous in himself. The scav-
engers turn their hungry attention to the piece of worm-monster in his
heart. Lettie ushers him to safety in a grassy fairy ring in his backyard
then goes for help. Day wanes and night falls. The scavengers ring the
circle. Specters appear—the lodger, the boy’s father, his sister, Ursula,
Lettie, intimidating and cajoling him to step outside the circle, but he
does not. At dawn, Lettie returns with a bucket containing the entire
ocean-pond. She instructs the boy to step into it, and when he does, he is
completely submerged in a blissful watery omniscience. Although ini-
tially tempted to remain in the ocean-pond forever, he decides to return
to the world—to Lettie, the farmhouse, and his family.
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 747
After regrouping in the farmhouse, Ginny, Lettie, and the boy face
the scavengers. Forbidden from harming Hempstock Farm or its crea-
tures, the scavengers cannot attack the boy while he is under Hempstock
protection, but neither will they leave. “In fury and hunger” (p. 193),
they lay waste to what surrounds the Farm, consuming trees and sky and
leaving behind a color that “reminds the boy of gray” (p. 214).
Imagining the end of everything and everyone he holds dear (what and
whom he left the ocean-pond for), he decides to “exchange my life for
the world” (p. 217). Dropping Lettie’s hand, he runs toward the scav-
engers, delivering himself to them but is knocked to the ground and
loses time. When he opens his eyes, he finds Lettie lying across his back
wet with blood. She is hurt and unresponsive. Ginny carries the girl’s
body to the ocean-pond. Although an immortal being, it is unclear
whether Lettie will ever recover. The boy is filled with profound sadness,
guilt, and anger, and turns to Ginny for comfort but finds none there.
Instead, she drives him home, wipes his, his mother’s, and his sister’s
memories clean of recent events, inserting screen memories in their
place. Neither Ginny nor Lettie appear again in the story.
Approximately forty years later, the narrator returns to the area.
Driven back to Hempstock Farm by instinct, he sits with Old Mrs.
Hempstock at the side of the ocean-pond. The reader learns that the boy
grew into a man, married, fathered two children, and divorced. An artist,
he paints what cannot be said in words. It is revealed that he has period-
ically returned to Hempstock Farm at critical periods in his life, and that
while there, gaps in his memory are filled. However, once he leaves the
property, what he has rediscovered is replaced again by vague, incom-
plete ideas.

SETTING AS LANDSCAPE OF THE MIND

Early middle childhood involves moving from the safety of home and an
egocentric environment to an unknown world outside that demands
greater and greater independence. Fragmentation of established psychic
structures associated with this separation–-necessary for it to occur and
also occurring as a result of it—releases previously contained forbidden,
aggressive, and sexual urges (Knight 2011) which need to be managed
(Bornstein 1951). The novel illustrates the boy’s defensive use of fantasy,
748 GROWING UP WILD

splitting, projection, reaction-formation, reversal, turning on the self,

displacement, regression, and denial (A. Freud 1946) in an effort to
organize himself and counter fragmentation. These efforts will be
explored further in the pages that follow.
In the story’s Prologue, the grown narrator winds through the streets
of his childhood neighborhood, having taken a detour en route to a
funeral reception at his sister’s house. Traversing roads like thoughts,
unsure of where they are leading him, he travels further and deeper
until he reaches Hempstock Farm and the ocean-pond at the end of the
lane. Although surrounded by new roads and modern housing develop-
ments, Hempstock Farm is unchanged in the same way that boyhood
yearnings and fears have remained sequestered. In keeping with
Bornstein’s (1951) observation that the management of incestuous wishes
in early middle childhood requires denial so powerful that partial
amnesia for the entire period continues into adulthood, the narrator’s
memories are incomplete. Moving from setting to setting, we will follow
his psychological experience from early middle childhood to adulthood.

CHANGING PSYCHIC CONFIGURATION

Three discrete components comprise Hempstock Farm—the farmhouse,
“the orange sky place” (p70), and the pond that is an ocean (i.e., the
ocean-pond). Two important sites are associated with the boy’s house:
the attic and a grassy circle in his backyard (i.e., the fairy ring). Serving
as backdrops for the story’s action, these five settings reflect the boy’s
psychological state and taken together, outline his growth. They track
movement from primary to secondary process thinking (Bornstein
1951); from the use of splitting, projection, and denial to the creation of
whole internal objects; and from psychic dissolution to the establishment
of a cohesive self (Knight 2005).
Primary process shapes the boy’s experience of blissful union in the
farmhouse and annihilating merger in the attic. Six- and seven-year-old
children yearn to merge amid fears of separation, mutilation, and death
(Knight 2014; Bornstein 1951).
In the farmhouse, all is good, all is one. The Hempstock women
anticipate the boy’s needs, read his thoughts, feed, wash, and tend to
him like attuned mothers do their infants, protecting them from what
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 749
cannot be borne—fears of annihilation, nameless dread, terrifying separ-
ateness. Their good ministrations are timeless, as represented by the per-
fectly preserved, centuries-old garments in which they clothe the boy.
Rolland’s oceanic feeling (Freud 1929; Chessick 2021) permeates the
farmhouse, self-boundaries dissolve. It is like being in love. For the boy,
bodily experience reigns. Oral and tactile pleasures eclipse self-con-
sciousness and shame, while murderous impulses, sexual longing, and
fear of retaliation simply do not exist.
Preparing to bathe in the farmhouse kitchen after his terrifying con-
frontation with Ursula in the field, the boy removes his torn, urine-soaked
pajamas hesitantly, concerned “that naked [is] wrong” (p. 92), but he finds
“the Hempstocks … indifferent to [his] nakednesss” (p. 92).
In stark contrast to the frigid bath at home where his father–-who
was sexually possessed by Ursula—had attempted to drown him, the boy
drinks fortifying hot soup in the Hempstock’s tub, rubbing warmth and
life back into his frozen body.
Lettie and the boy travel from the bountiful farmhouse to settings
that are progressively more frightening. Following a primary process trail
of color, they proceed from a singular blue flower in a field of yellow and
white spring blossoms to a torn strip of black fabric caught in a barbed
wire fence to a patch of moss stained red with the blood of a decapitated
vole. On the primitive edge, the sky is “the dull orange of a warning
light” (p. 54). There, the boy’s primal urges and fears are pictorialized.
Experienced bodily, they register sensorially.
Gruesome and predatory creatures, terrify, ambush, and obliterate.
Skarthach blocks the sun and invades the earth as long gray worms that
“writhe” and “churn” (p. 57) the ground. Although speaking to the mon-
ster in the language of shaping—an omnipotent language that makes
everything spoken become real—Lettie’s power is neither strong enough
to bind Skarthach nor shield the boy from the monster’s attack.
Skarthach-as-worm pierces the sole of his foot and travels to his heart, a
thing-representation of intolerable, monstrous urges that must be disav-
owed. Lettie’s inability to bind Skarthach with the all-powerful language
of shaping represents the boy’s failed efforts to omnipotently manage his
own monstrous feelings and impulses, including his sexual and aggres-
sive feelings toward his mother.
750 GROWING UP WILD

No longer the devoted and attentive figure from infancy, the boy’s
mother has become unrecognizable, and her motives are suspect. Early
in the novel, at his guestless birthday party—table set with party hats,
favors, and a birthday cake—his mother offers no consolation. Allied
with his father and focused on her own life, she leaves the boy to con-
tend with unbearable states alone throughout the story, and in her
absence, he is in real danger. Moments of loss of contact with Lettie
dramatize this experience of the potentially life-threatening loss of
mother in early childhood; the worm-monster invades the boy’s body in
the orange sky place, gray cloth strips enshroud him, and scavengers
nearly kill him.
Feeling abandoned and too small in the world is a common experi-
ence for boys in early middle childhood, one they often react to with
fear, sadness, and anger (Knight 2005). In The Ocean at the End of the
Lane, Skarthach holds the boy’s anger. She appears in the human realm,
abusing people with money after his parents announce their family’s
financial difficulties and take his bedroom sanctuary as part of their solu-
tion. Viciously giving people money, the monster enacts the boy’s wish
that his parents find the money they need, but also his wish that they be
severely punished for their careless handling of family finances and of
him. Skarthach embodies the boy’s conflict. Initially insisting she is only
trying to make people happy by giving them what they want (money),
she later acknowledges a more aggressive aim:

Everything here is so weak … . Everything breaks so easily.

They want such simple things. I will take all I want from this
world, like a child stuffing its fat little face with blackberries
from a bush. [p.120]

Housing his rage and destructiveness in Skarthach allows the boy to

disown unacceptable punitive wishes toward his parents and reverse his
feelings of weakness into unstoppable strength—a defense commonly
used in early latency (Borstein 1951). For the boy, feeling helpless
becomes an experience of complete power. Fear of damaging others is
transformed into enjoyment. Distressing battles with aggressive urges
give way to pleasure in destruction. And lastly, the boy turns the destruc-
tive force upon himself.
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 751
Skarthach, fueled by projected aggression, infiltrates the boy’s mind
and annihilates his thoughts. He attempts to shield himself from her as
he escapes his locked bedroom through the window by repeating one
phrase, “I am in my room, in my bed” (p. 109). As he runs toward
Hempstock Farm, his nightshirt “flaps in the wind” (p.113) just as
Ursula’s clothes flap in the wind as she chases him. Along with a shared
mind is a common bodily experience. The boy does not exist separately.
He may not. Ursula will not permit it. It is not he who struggles with a
wish for merger; it is she who demands it. But this merger will annihi-
late him.
Like the place under the orange sky, the attic is dominated by pri-
mary process experience. Opposites coexist—merger and fragmenta-
tion, terror and aggression, survival and annihilation. Representing the
boy’s mind suffused with fear, the attic is a horrifying place where the
shadows of nightmares reside, where spiders are as big as dogs, and there
are “things inside [your head] that tug at you and never let you go”
(p. 116).
Looming above the boy in a field—huge and intent on repossessing
him—Ursula, a terrifyingly powerful, sexual figure, threatens to lock him
in attic hell. She will allow him to leave the attic only to be tortured and
killed by his (oedipal rival) father.

[Your father will] plunge you into the cold, cold water. I’ll let
him do it every night until it bores me, and then I’ll tell him
not to bring you back, to simply push you under the water
until you stop moving and until there’s nothing but darkness
and water in your lungs. [p. 115]

It is only within the protected space (Britton 1989) of the fairy ring
that the boy can be safely separate. While there, he grapples with peril-
ous emotional tides, bombarded by waves of confusion and threatened
by images of feared and trusted adults alike who seduce, trick, and invite
him to his death. Nothing is as it seems.
Alone and quivering, with scavengers concealed in the darkness
around him, the boy sits inside the circle with his back against a large,
once-flourishing shade tree. Singing songs gives words to his experience.
Remembering them provides evidence to the boy that his mind can still
function even as specters appear and scavengers barrage him. They will
752 GROWING UP WILD

end his life quickly, they tell him, sparing him endless regret, grief, emp-
tiness. Because he is doomed, they say, to live forever “with a hole inside
[his heart], questing after something [he] cannot have … wailing and
cursing at a life ill-lived” (p. 192).
Although the boy has never spoken the language of shaping before,
he responds to the scavengers in the omnipotent tongue, Lettie’s lan-
guage. He answers the scavengers:

P’raps it will be like that … and p’raps it won’t. And p’raps if it

is, it would have been like that anyway. [p. 193]

Moving from omnipotence to reflection, this statement recognizes

possibilities. The boy accepts that he may die waiting for Lettie, that she
may not return for him in time, or that she may not return at all; and if
he survives, he may spend the rest of his days fruitlessly searching for an
elusive (oedipal) love. Still, despite these uncertainties and the press of
rising panic, he chooses to wait.
In the protected space of the fairy ring, thoughts rise. Things are
perceived and differentiated. The boy distinguishes specters from peo-
ple, sees mosquitoes draw red blood from his body, and notices that bats
resemble scavengers although they are very different creatures. Reality
emerges. Observations, ideas, and feelings become linked. Thinking
evolves. And so grounded, the boy’s terror dissipates. He reflects:

I thought over what I said and I knew that it was true. At that
moment, for once in my childhood, I was not scared of the
dark. [p. 193]

With the boy’s new capacity for thinking, a new day dawns and Lettie
returns to the fairy circle, lugging the entire ocean-pond in a bucket. It,
like the unconscious, is limitless. There is no beginning or end. It exists
outside the constraints of linear time. Stepping into the bucket, the boy
experiences a limitless oceanic feeling (Freud 1929), a blissful return to
fundamental undifferentiated unity, omniscience. He says:

I knew it all … the whole big, complicated world was simple

and graspable and easy to unlock. I would stay here for the
rest of time in the ocean which was the universe which was the
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 753
soul which was all that mattered. I would stay here forever.
[p. 200]

In the boundaryless fluidity, something coalesces. Although initially

tempted to remain suspended in the water forever—beyond longing and
terror, beyond human need and frailty—the boy realizes that fluid mer-
ger requires the loss of the self. As Lettie explains, there is no “I” in the
ocean-pond. He forfeits omniscience and returns to the flawed world
and the imperfect people he loves, now in greater contact with reality.
Newly able to discriminate feeling from fact, the boy understands
Ginnie’s comment regarding the scavengers’ hunt for him, “no one is
going to die” (p. 207) as a wish rather than a truth. He tolerates uncer-
tainty, ambivalence, and recognizes contradiction. He prepares to be
killed by the scavengers even as he hopes to live.
And he does live. Lettie saves him, but in the process, she suffers ter-
rible injuries, and her recovery is uncertain. The boy is distraught but
Ginny does not allay his fears. Instead, suddenly unrecognizable, cold
and unreachable, Ginny (as mother) tells the boy he must make enough
of himself to justify Lettie’s sacrifice. And she informs him that he is no
longer welcome at the farmhouse unless Lettie returns.
These are excruciating losses for the boy: Lettie, Ginny, Old Mrs.
Hempstock, and the farmhouse.
The simultaneous forfeiture of all that is safe and good recapitulates
the earth-shaking losses the boy suffered at the start of the novel when his
secure and loving world collapsed. This time however, he does not fall into
a fragmented universe inhabited by all-powerful monsters and defenseless
beings. Managing his sadness, fear, anger, and confusion, the boy returns
home and life goes on. But he is left with incomplete memories.

DISCUSSION
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a story told in first person narrative (i.e.,
“I”), represents any boy, every boy, but is not unique to boys. All sexes,
genders, and ages can recognize this internal territory—that period of
fragmentation in early middle childhood which threatens psychological
survival but also potentiates growth. During this period of psychic frag-
mentation, the boy labors to maintain a “persistent denial of the struggle
754 GROWING UP WILD

against the breakthrough of instinctual impulses” (Bornstein 1951, p.

282). Sexual and aggressive incestuous impulses are defended against
through denial so pervasive that it interferes with perception, reality,
and later, memory (Bornstein 1951; Weinstein 2011).
The novel spans two critical days. The boy, who just turned seven
and is shaken by the violence of accumulating traumas, faces the tasks of
early middle childhood. Having ventured into the world, his egocentric
primary process thinking is pressed toward logical secondary process,
Piaget’s sensory motor stage must give way to concrete operational
mode. Early idealized perceptions of himself and his parents are chal-
lenged by a growing awareness of and comparison to other people.
Despair rises in the boy in response to a sense of himself as separate and
inadequate—small in a wide world. Fresh oedipal losses fester, and the
superego’s prohibitions batter (Bornstein 1951; Knight 2005, 2011).
Having lost the safety of his completely attuned maternal dyad and his
perfectly suited eyrie bedroom, he is deposed and displaced, unsure of
his place inside and outside his family. He cannot match his charmed sis-
ter, stand up to peers, keep his mother’s love, or win his father’s. In add-
ition, he can neither compete nor identify with his father.
The narrator is small. His father, big and capable of killing him,
houses the boy’s projected aggression, but the boy displaces all of it—his
father’s and his own potential destructiveness—into the monster-as-Ursula.
She would make his daddy kill him. Sexual and dangerous, she can make
anyone do anything. Enacting the boy’s deepest wish to make people do as
he desires and give him what he longs for, she frees him from his fear that
he has hurt those he loves. It is she, the monster, who controls and tor-
ments people, not he. And it is she, the monster, who is seductive, not he.
The boy witnesses Ursula having sex with his father through a partially
closed curtain as he climbs out his bedroom window to freedom. Initially
relieved that the monster’s focus is on his father and not him, he later feels
excluded from the couple and inadequate. Too small and unable to com-
pete or satisfy, he perceives the adults in his life as rejecting and then
predatory. Like a mouse to a cat, he is a plaything. Like the mouse in The
Mouse’s Tale (Carroll 2012), the boy recognizes Skarthach’s expectation
(similar to the Fury’s) that he participate in his own destruction purely for
her entertainment. Towering above the boy in the field, Ursula appears as:
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 755
… power incarnate, standing in the crackling air. She
was … the adult world with all its power and all its secrets and
all its foolish casual cruelty … . I was a seven-year-old boy, and
my feet were scratched and bleeding. I had just wet myself.
And the thing that floated above me was huge and greedy,
and it wanted to take me to the attic, and, when it tired of me,
it would make my daddy kill me. [p. 86]

DENIAL, SPLITTING, THEN INTEGRATION

For the boy, expelling what is monstrous within him—incestuous sexual
urges, raging wishes to control, and terrifying impulses to destroy—
requires that he split off and evacuate aspects of himself, a psychic assault
concretely represented by the scavengers intention to rip out his heart.
Disavowing forbidden affects and impulses means splitting, projecting, and
seeking safety in merger with that which is all good. Not only does the
farmhouse hold what is good, but Old Mrs. Hempstock excises from the
boy’s mind what is bad by cutting cloth patches from his pajamas and sew-
ing new seams in the fabric. Later, the boy will have to restore broken con-
nections and repair the discontinuities in his self, but in the moment, the
removal of what cannot be borne makes it possible to go on.
Although emptied of his badness through projection, the amount of
splitting required to maintain the division warps perceptions and negates
what is real (O’Shaughnessy 1992). The scavengers’ furious consump-
tion of the world around Hempstock Farm represents the destructive
force of the boy’s massive denial:

Where (the scavengers) devoured the grass, nothing remained—a

perfect nothing, only a color that reminded me of gray, but a
formless, pulsing gray like the shifting static of our television
screen when you dislodged the aerial cord … This was the void.
Not blackness, not nothingness. This was what lay beneath the
thinly painted scrim of reality. [p. 155]

Major aspects of reality do not exist in the void or are not discern-
able one from another—the boy’s gentle kitten run over by the lodger
and the battle-scarred tomcat presented as an equivalent replacement
are both “cat,” for example. For this reason, the fairy ring is life-saving. It
756 GROWING UP WILD

distinguishes and holds separate what is safe from what is not. Bad
things—scavengers—are kept out. Instruments of death with mythical
insatiable appetites stand in great numbers around the circle’s perimeter
but are unable to enter. Poised to pounce like a merciless, unrelenting
superego, they remain single-mindedly focused on the destruction of the
boy and his forbidden impulses, impervious to time’s passage.
Inside the circle, the boy confronts his terror of physical dismember-
ment (Knight 2005) and psychological disruption. Remembering and
reciting The Mouse’s Tail and the Nightmare Song, give words to his experi-
ence and provide scaffolding for thought. While leaning against the
dead (oedipal parent) tree in the ring, he begins to see himself and
others with new clarity. His capacity to observe and think becomes prom-
inent. He moves from the terror of uncontained states into the arena of
thought, able to accept his imperfect father, his married mother, and
himself, a small boy with his own life to live. His mind consolidates, and
so unified, he is able to answer his father’s specter’s harsh accusations:

Does it make you feel big to make a little boy cry? … [Father’s]
face, what I could see of it in the reflected torchlight,
crumpled, and looked shocked … I could not remember [him]
ever at a loss for words, before or after. Only then. I felt
terrible. I thought, I will die here soon. [p. 189]

Fear of having disappointed his father is overshadowed for a

moment by the idea that he (the boy) cannot survive having silenced
and perhaps surpassed him (father), but the boy’s fear subsides. After
his father returns to the house and quietly closes the door behind him,
the boy remains in the fairy ring, separate and intact.
Later, as a man, memories surrounding this time are largely inaccess-
ible. They surface intermittently from behind a protective screen of not-
knowing. And it is at these times that further integration and growth
becomes possible.

MORE INTEGRATION
Throughout most of the novel, adults are characterized as lacking funda-
mental insight and the ability to take constructive action, effectively
repair, or acknowledge what needs attention. Unfolding events leave the
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 757
boy feeling disconnected from his distracted and unavailable parents
who seem unaware of events occurring around them and oblivious to
their own destructiveness.
Toward the end of the story, however, the boy recalls something that
challenges this characterization of adults. As he is dangling from
Skarthach’s grip before the scavengers consume her, he remembers his
parents telling him:

… that I would not really die, not the real me: that nobody
really died, when they died; that my kitten and [the lodger]
had just taken new bodies and would be back again, soon
enough. I did not know if this was true or not. [p. 173]

This memory suggests that the boy’s parents had previously

responded to his kitten’s death and the discovery of the lodger’s corpse,
speaking to him of death and dying, perhaps attempting to allay his anxi-
eties. It implies that the denial and negation attributed to them earlier
may have been a projection of the boy’s own need to deny external
events and disavow internal states. Were his mother and father more pre-
sent than was originally indicated? Was he less alone than we supposed?
Suddenly large gaps and discrepancies appear in the narrative. This new
information changes everything.
The grown narrator’s thoughts agitate the reader and raise questions.
More signs of mother’s active involvement come in the final pages of the
book when the narrator reveals that years later, his grown sister mentions
Ursula, a childhood nanny they’d had whom their parents fired due to
their mother’s suspicions that she was having an affair with their father.
Again, the reader must question what was real or what was imagined
or embellished—where reality ended and fantasy began. Unresolved,
confusing pieces do not fit together, like in early middle childhood.
According to Weinstein (2011), one of the functions of reading
books about early middle childhood as an adult is to connect, correct,
and process disorganized and incomplete memories of that time.

CONCLUSION
The use of literature to elucidate psychoanalytic principles is well estab-
lished (Houlding 2009; Dalsimer 1979; Macsimowitz 2019). Fictional
758 GROWING UP WILD

accounts of people and events provide rich case material without confi-
dentiality concerns. Neil Gaiman’s story The Ocean at the End of the Lane
pulls the reader into the mind of a newly turned seven-year-old boy.
Having experienced a loss of self-cohesion in response to both internal
and external stressors registered internally, the boy manages his psychic
turmoil around identity, rivalry, exclusion, bodily integrity, and death by
constructing an imaginary land consisting of part-objects from his
internal world.
Terrified, angry, sad, lost, unable to think, unable to act, and too
small to fight, he finds shelter in merger at the Hempstock farmhouse
and relies on the Hempstock women not only to feed, clothe, and protect
him, but also to comprehend what is happening and plan and implement
courses of action in response. Later, in the fairy ring, he develops the abil-
ity to think for himself, make decisions, and act independently. In the cir-
cle, he relinquishes denial (Cohen et al. 1987), projected childhood
fantasies of omnipotence, and projected wish to have his mother and
father separately as his own. In order to leave the fairy ring, he steps into
the ocean-pond. Despite the comfort he finds there, he surfaces to return
to his world, separate and vulnerable. The temptation to remain must
have been great. Loewald (1951) posits a lifelong search for the earliest
boundarilessness, the original unity. However, it requires the loss of the
self and the breakdown of psychic structures. For the boy, paradoxically
accepting that he is small allows him to grow beyond it, to move from pas-
sivity to activity, to become able to tolerate uncertainty, and to perform an
act of altruism (sacrificing himself to the scavengers to save the world).
Early middle childhood crises, including those around identity, auton-
omy, and attachment, must be navigated. Similar periods of fragmentation
and reconsolidation occur intermittently throughout life, often during
critical transitions, and the reworking of associated psychic structures is
integral to maturation (K. Dahl 2021). In The Ocean at the End of the Lane,
the narrator revisits the ancient psychic structures of early middle child-
hood represented by Hempstock Farm when he is an adult, confronting
the death of a family member, possibly a parent. As and adult, the narra-
tor has returned to the same territory at other crucial turning points in his
life (i.e., when he married and when he became a father).
The reader learns that as an adult, the narrator continues to struggle
with areas of inchoate understanding. Integration, then reintegration,
 JEAN VOGEL AND MARY AYRE 759
occurs across the lifetime. For the boy-grown-into-a-man, barely fleshed
memories—dark pools like the ocean within him—continue to hold the
poignant loss of illusion and the mourning therein. Remembering for
short periods is all he can bear. Without words, he paints his experience.
And like chiaroscuro, folds of darkness containing light shift into light
that contains darkness, deepening what can be viewed and understood.

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Jean Vogel
North Central Health Care
1100 Lake View Dr.
Wausau, WI 54403
jeanbavogel@gmail.com

Mary Ayre
682 Prospect Ave., Suite 200,
Hartford Ct 06105
mayremd@yahoo.com