AustLit

Mills examines three of Rubinstein's children's books, Keep Me Company (1992), Jake and Pete (1995), and Jake and Pete and the Stray Dogs (1997), in the light of psychiatrist John Bowlby's writing on Attachment Theory and Separation Anxiety, arguing that despite offering a helpful context for reading the texts, 'aspects of the picture story books[s] remain outside his theoretical framework (7). Bowlby is notably silent regarding Freud's Oedipus complex, nor does he 'theorize the body' in any detail and Mills looks at the texts in relation to the gaps between the the two approaches (7). She extends the reading beyond the Bowlbian paradigm for mother-child separation anxiety revealing a much darker message regarding anxiety, loss and death, in the texts, stating that, 'In so far as the books explore a child's separation anxiety by way of animals' troubles, the happy endings are a fragile fiction' (9).