Routledge Recovering Boarding School Trauma Narratives: Christopher Robin Milne as a Psychological Companion on the Journey to Healing

Recovering Boarding School Trauma Narratives: Christopher Robin Milne as a Psychological Companion on the Journey to Healing is a unique, emotive and theorised narrative of a young girl’s experience of boarding school in Australia. Christine Jack traces its impact on the emerging identity of the child, including sexual development and emotional capacity, the transmission of trauma into adulthood and the long process of recovery. Interweaving her story with the experiences of Christopher Robin Milne, she presents her memoir as an exemplar of how narrative writing can be employed in remembering and recovering from traumatic experiences. Unique and powerfully written, Jack takes the reader on a journey into her childhood in Australian boarding school convents in the 1950s and 1960s. Comparing her experience with Christopher Robin Milne’s, she interrogates his memoirs, illustrating that boarding school trauma knows no boundaries of time and place. She investigates their emerging individuality before being sent to live an institutional life and traces their feelings of longing and loneliness as well as the impact of the abuse each endured there. As an educational historian, Jack writes in a ground-breaking way from the perspective of an insider and outsider, revealing how trauma remains in the unconscious, wielding power over the life of the adult, until the traumatic memories are recovered, emotions released and associated dysfunctional behaviour changed, restoring well-being. Engaging the lenses of history, life-span and Jungian psychology, feminist and trauma theory and boarding school trauma research, this book positions narrative writing as a way of reducing the power of trauma over the lives of survivors. Personal and accessible, this book will be essential reading for psychologists and educational historians, as well as students and academics of psychology, sociology, trauma studies, ex-boarders and those interested in the life of Christopher Robin Milne. Review ‘Richly engrossing, this is a multidimensional, multidisciplinary, integrative memoir that reveals life-long, even intergenerational, impacts of traumatic elements embedded in the boarding schools’ systems, leading the reader to easily surmise the author’s preventive recommendations. Not only courageous in the revelations along its personal journey, but in challenging what has been considered culturally desirable standard for the societal elites.’ -Yael Danieli, PhD, Director, Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and their Children; founder, International Center for the Study, Prevention and Treatment of MultiGenerational legacies of Trauma . ‘In this brave and engaging book, Christine Jack offers a witness account of the life-long psychological consequences of sending children to boarding school. In a rare combination of academic research and personal testimony, Jack chooses Christopher Robin Milne as a travelling companion. The compelling narrative offers a searing indictment of the boarding school system. This book is a significant contribution to the history of education, as well as the literature on the hazards of leaving children in boarding schools. It will interest a wide range of readers including educational theorists, ex-boarders and psychotherapists.’ - Professor Joy Schaverien, PhD, Jungian psychoanalyst and author of Boarding School Syndrome: the Psychological Trauma of the "Privileged" Child (Routledge) ‘This is a remarkable book that crosses the genres of memoir and historical and other forms of exposition. It needed to do so because its ambition was to describe and analyse the experience of children abandoned by their families to school boarding houses, from their point of view, and to understand the possible and probable impacts that the traumas involved might have on later lives. The range of theoretical reference the author brings to the work is astounding. This work marks a highly significant addition to the