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The Lolita Complex: - Scholarly Commons Home

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If you see… a doll… being made by a Japanese mother to reach out its hands, to<br />

move its little bare feet, and to turn its head, you would be almost afraid to venture<br />

a heavy wager that it was only a doll. 84<br />

Pate also refers to Hearn on the same topic, relaying that “in fact in the Meiji<br />

era it was not uncommon for unmarried and childless women… to keep an<br />

ichimatsu-ningyō as a substitute child… treated in all respects as an actual<br />

child”. 85<br />

In such situations I deem that the attachments between owners and<br />

dolls, or “mothers” and “children”, are so strong that the potential loss,<br />

damage or destruction of a doll, i.e. the substitute child, would result in<br />

trauma and a sense of grief almost equivalent to the loss of a real child that<br />

could very likely feel like a loss of part of one’s self.<br />

To support this argument it is shown that, even without this<br />

humanising aspect and, subsequently, the extreme case of bonding that can<br />

accompany this type of relationship, the eventual loss of a doll, even as a<br />

prized object, a possession, can have the same affect. William James, in<br />

discussing one’s connections to lost objects, claimed that:<br />

Although it is true that part of our depression at the loss of possessions is due to<br />

our feeling that we must now go without certain goods… in every case there<br />

remains over and above this a sense of the shrinkage of our personality, a partial<br />

conversion of ourselves to nothingness. 86<br />

Page | 153

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