Universal fantasy in latency: Separation, attachment and sexuality in Julio Cortázar's Bestiary

This paper joins recent efforts to build a conceptual bridge between psychoanalysis and attachment theory. A psychoanalytic reading of Julio Cortázar's Bestiary, a story about a young girl sent away for a summer vacation, is used to conceptualize the relationship between attachment and sexuality during latency. Middle childhood is seen as a pivotal period when cognitive maturation, internalization of parental figures, increasing independence and importance of those outside the family make fantasy the central adaptive mode of functioning. As such, the literature on attachment, which focuses on observed events, has to be supplemented with investigations of the actively created fantasies of that age period.