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JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES
from its nineteenth-century reaction to religious ideas. Nowhere is this psychoanalyzing tendency more clearly evident today than in social and literary explanations of death and loss in children's stories, as for example in the writings of Bruno Bettelheim (1978) and Margaret and Michael Rustin (1987). My goal in this essay is to provide an alternative reading to a children's story that celebrates images of death and incorporate ideas of renewal. I have chosen The Velveteen Rabbit (Williams, 1922) as my case example for two reasons. First, this story contains a famous por- trayal of these themes of death and renewal, and interestingly, the actual images described are strikingly similar to the near-death expe- rience. Second, the academic story of The Velveteen Rabbit a recent development that includes attempts by some critics to substitute psy- choanalysis for narrative analysis, raises certain implications for near- death studies that are worth closer scrutiny. The purpose behind this goal is to demonstrate that ideas about death which encompass per- sonal survival are not better understood when analyzed in terms of psychoanalytic defense theory. Indeed, the habitual application of this framework to all manner of death imagery becomes a reductionist practice that restricts rather than enhances our understanding of dif- ferent cultural meanings of death. The Velveteen Rabbit has attracted its share of psychoanalysis for its refusal to acknowledge "the finality of death": the rabbit's death scene fails to result in the obliteration of the rabbit's life. The fact that the rabbit's death does not conform to the materialist view of death led critic Steven Daniels (1990) to complain the The Velveteen Rabbit's image of death is "phoney," and prompted him to channel the analysis into a study of the psychodynamics of defense, motive, and symbol. I argue that this approach is both unnecessary and decontextualizing. The theme of renewal and survival in the face of death is a necessary narrative device for the support it gives to more important themes, at least for young readers. These broader themes speak to the mutual in- terdependence of relationships and the triumph of love in the face of change and transformation in life, particularly in the context of growing up. In support of this argument I organize the paper along the following lines. First I will provide a brief summary of the story of The Velveteen Rabbit This will be followed by a discussion of the recent critical con- cern over its images of death and renewal. I will then provide an alterna- tive reading of the images and will argue that this interpretation is consistent and more in keeping with the spirit and values of the narra-
Quarterly journal publishing papers related to near-death experiences, including research reports; theoretical or conceptual statements; expressions of a scientific, philosophic, religious, or historical perspective on the study of near-death experiences; cross-cultural studies; individual case histories; and personal accounts of experiences or related phenomena.
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