Luk Thep Dolls and Child Angels

• In Event: 52.063 - The Child in Question: Exploring Social Constructions of Childhood

Abstract

This paper speculates on a facet of the adult-child relationship in which the child is positioned by the adult, unconsciously or not, as a doll/angel figure. In order to establish this line of thought, I turn to the luk thep phenomenon in Thailand, in which adults – often middle-class, middle-aged women – carry life-like plastic dolls and lavish attention on them, as they would a child (Tanakasempipat & Kittisilpa, 2016). Luk thep literally means “child angel”. It is claimed that monks bless the dolls so that they are animated with spirits to bring the owner good luck (BBC News, 2016).

A psychoanalytic framework is used, with particular focus on the ideas of poet and novelist Rainer Maria Rilke. Rilke once wrote, “I believe my mother played with me as with a big doll” (1969, p. 99). The poet’s subsequent terror toward dolls and his preoccupation with childhood led to segments of his work being designated a “peculiar kind of psychoanalysis through art” (Graff, 1956, p. 300). In Rilke’s view, the doll’s existence depended on the imagination of its owner, a one-sided relationship and one that Rilke described as fraudulent, yet also warm and intimate. Without this relationship, the doll is simply an impassive, unresponsive, rag-like object and – worse yet – its “utter unresponsiveness and silence caused man for the first time in his life to face empty space and to feel its horror” (see Graff, p. 297).

As a speculative and psychoanalytic inquiry, I analyze the text of the luk thep doll through the lens of Rilke’s writings (including theories of dolls, the short story “Mrs. Blaha’s Maid”, poems on childhood, and autobiographical writing), and Winnicott’s (1986) work on transitional objects. Evidential data includes news reports and documents on the luk thep doll phenomenon in Thailand. These news reports of the luk thep experience are colored by a cultural Othering, in which the luk thep experience is tacitly derided as part of a more primitive culture: superstitious people who worship objects and believe in animism and black magic (Bachor, 2016; Wilson, 2016). Indeed, sightings in Thailand of adults carrying these dolls have become rare, as media attention resulted in doll owners being associated with mental illness.

Interpreting reports on the luk thep doll experience through Rilke’s (1996) writings on dolls and childhood, I argue that, in our Western culture, an unwillingness to face one’s own unconscious fantasies as teachers and parents – to, rather, denounce such beliefs as primitive – may condemn the child to an existence constrained by the expectation that children, like dolls, “allo[w] themselves to be dreamed… to be lived unwearyingly with energies not their own” (Rilke, 1954, p. 44). In comparing the child to the doll figure, I aim to challenge teachers and parents – myself included – to question their symbolic constructions of children as amulets, angels, or dolls. At the same time, I hope to withhold judgment on the precarious position of the caring adult and to aim this inquiry toward constructive understanding.

Author

• Sandra Chang-Kredl, Concordia University