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 Psychoanalytic Review
- 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 plurisinificant 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 white image of me, at not quite two years old, with my mother. Everytime I saw it, I got a fluttering, butterflies-in my-belly sensation which made me turn the page as fast as I could. Sometimes, I‘d even 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.
To put it somewhat differently, this visceral retention of a psychic trauma becomes a stress-inducing psychosomatic problem for Susan Mailer. The ordeal affects her belly with distressing sensations. As we know, in demotic language, belly is a plurisinificant word. It implies guts, stomach, bowels, viscera, inner recesses, core, and depths—just to mention a few references. Viewed as a whole, that accumulation of significations has a claim on its own ontology, metaphysics and psychosomatics as the Ur seat of mind-body associations and sensations.
One can be certain that the author is acutely aware of the symbolic and metaphoric implications of “belly” as a substantive, which her father Norman Mailer also recognized as noteworthy and wrote about at some length in his essay “The Metaphysics of the Belly.” So belly incorporates a well-integrated corpus of intuitive, instinctual, and primal matters. Consequently, every time the author looks at this snapshot of herself with her mother, it induces anew the psychosomatic butterfly sensations in her belly.
Hence, the reader fully recognizes the seriousness of this specific picture, which serves as aides-mémoires (recollection aids) in the narrative of remembrances that ensue. This ordinary snapshot in plain black and white is a visually simple and plain photographic image.Just the same, it documents an event in its precise immediate fleeting spacetime dimensions. For the author, however, it would prove to be an intricate traumatic moment in her ultrasensitive infantile stage of life. This moment holds its own prominent psycho-ontological implications in and by extension her memoir. Only partially repressed and tangentially brushing against her unconscious, the harsh experience of abandonment registers itself in her psyche as an ineradicable separation as early sorrow.