Approaching Child and Youth Geographies Through Darwin 8 Stuart C. Aitken Contents 1 Introduction .................................................................................. 172 2 Darwin’ s Legacy, and Piaget’ s Distorted Understanding of a Child’ s Spatial and Environmental Development ........................................................... 174 3 Thinking Child Development Through Post-Enlightenment Critiques .................... 183 3.1 Psychoanalytic Mappings ............................................................. 184 3.2 Potential Spaces ....................................................................... 186 3.3 The Politics of Potential Spaces ...................................................... 189 4 Re-Reading Darwin Through Reproduction and Revolutionary Play ..................... 193 5 Conclusion ................................................................................... 197 References ....................................................................................... 199 Abstract This chapter offers theoretical and philosophical reflection on development and post-development approaches to the study of children and young people. It begins with Charles Darwin and then follows neo-Darwinian influences and Enlightenment-based thinking through Jean Piaget, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Jaques Lacan as their work applies to child development. The continued importance of these psychoanalytic theorists’ think- ing is considered with its post-structural reinvigoration through work by feminists Some of the ideas in this chapter on Darwin began in Aitken (2001), and developed in more recent work that coalesces with the ideas about Winnicott and post-Development presented in Aitken and Herman (1997). Some of Elizabeth Grosz’ s ideas about Darwin are discussed in Aitken and An (2012) and Aitken (2014). In addition, the ideas on the reinvigoration of Freud and Lacan, prior to this publication, are only available in Portuguese (Aitken 2015). S. C. Aitken (*) Department of Geography, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA, USA e-mail: saitken@sdsu.edu © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 T. Skelton, S. C. Aitken (eds.), Establishing Geographies of Children and Young People, Geographies of Children and Young People 1, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-287-041-4_24 171