The Mailer Review/Volume 13, 2019/Attachment, Abandonment, and Reconciliation: A Psychoanalytic Review of Susan Mailer’s Memoir as Bildungsroman
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The first requisite for the use of a theory is proper conditions for observation.The most important of these is psycho-analysis ofthe observer to ensure that he [or she] has reduced to a minimum his [or her] own inner tensions and resistances which otherwise obstruct his [or her] view of facts by making correlationby conscious and unconscious impossible.
- —W. R. Bion, Learning from Experience
- The first line of Susan Mailer’s memoir In Another Place With and Without
My Father, Norman Mailer reads, “MY EARLIEST MEMORY IS IN MY BELLY” (). This concise, aptly capitalized, one-line paragraph brings together memory and belly. This association casts a psychosomatic light on the author’s entire memoir, in which the enigma of the psychosomatic phenomena prevails. The exceptional coherence and intelligibility of the line owes much to author’s eleven years of being in psychanalysis, psychoanalytic training at Psychanalytic Institute in Santiago,Chile, and finally her experiences as a practicing psychoanalyst.
- Accordingly, I would state this single one-line sentence gives birth to a
theoretically open-ended and probing ensemble of arrangements of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters as the author’s memoir. From my perspective, in due course this extraordinary initial sentence will make manifest the capacity of growing and intuitively recreating narrative of vestiges of remembrance of things past. Then at a certain point in the narrative, lo and behold, it offers the reader formidable dialectical syntheses of the emotional and intuitive on the one hand and the theoretical and conceptual on the other.
- Susan Mailer rightly foresees that her initial one-line paragraph’s brevity
and acuity compel the reader to respond to it by a sort of penetrating explication de text (textual clarification), as the French Formalist literary criticism refers to it. In this case, a textual clarification is even more germane because she has a psychoanalytic background. From her specialized viewpoint, the paragraph legitimately demands a psychoanalytic textual explication. Thus, in an understated, succinct, and yet plurisignificant line, the author produces her own concise textual clarification. She discloses the first essential element at the heart of her memoir and leaves the rest to interpretive reader response activities.All the same, after the reader absorbs the hidden import of the sparse first line, more pivotal, informative details burst forth. The author writes:
- While I was growing up, I loved to look at our family albums.Among the many photos was a small square, black and whiteimage of me, at not quite two years old, with my mother. Everytime I saw it, I got a fluttering, butterflies-in my-belly sensationwhich made me turn the page as fast as I could. Sometimes, I‘deven skip that page, anxiously trying to avoid the butterfly effect. (In Another Place )
The above paragraph makes available to the reader a particular diagnosis of various psychological, emotional, and intellectual aspects of the narrative of entire life. Without any undue drama, she deftly makes statements of foundational import of a specific picture, or better, a snapshot taken when she was an infant. This snapshot uncannily snatches,records, and integrates infantile experiences of attachment and abandonment, union and separation, and eventually unavoidable and dreadful anxiety.Yet, mysteriously, for me it consists of what one might call a psychological situation report.
- As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Perhaps in this case, one might say thousands of
words, because of its mnemonic overtones and connotations in a long memoir. This picture simultaneously evokes an early traumatic event and its attendant psychosomatic lived experiences as visceral emotional responses—persisting ones at that. The author chooses the noun“belly” and“memory” intentionally and adroitly. The reference anticipates and receives an immediate comprehension and empathetic reader responses.